Loy, Leading Lady with a Mystic Vision, Shattering Masculine Parameters of Sexual Identity

The following study intends to focus on Loy’s feminist voice, continually surfacing in most of her works—in the “Feminist Manifesto” published posthumously, where she vehemently asserted women’s right to selfhood rather than patriarchy subsuming their personalities and desires, in Insel as an autobiographical account of her own relationship with German surrealist artist Richard Oelze, where she voluntarily subverts the essential muse-patron dynamic, in The Lost Lunar Baedeker, where she makes use of vivid imagery, Biblical references, and allusions throughout “with the desire to ridicule, and surpass certain poetic laws.” In her works, both poetry and prose, we find a constant effort towards achieving female aesthetic autonomy—we aim to discuss few selected poems of Loy: namely, The Effectual Marriage, Human Cylinders, The Black Virginity, At the door of the House, Lunar Baedeker, among others, that bring together: Futurism and Feminism. Loy’s feminism was as uncompromising and resistant as her femininity, as she exemplified and lived the sexual, gender and maternal contradictions of the New Woman. Inspired by early debates of Futurism, she was attracted to two of its key men, Giovanni Papini and Filippo Marinetti, yet resisted misogyny and brilliantly satirized its sexual politics in her poetry and manifestos. In Loy, we find a need to politicize the feminine and the aesthetic.