Virgin Dolls, Ancient Tombs, and Modern Eyes: Hope Mirrlees and Mina Loy Writing Paris

Intertextual readings of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem have related it to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Zone,” and Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. Oliver Tearle’s recent study underscores the degree to which Paris anticipates The Waste Land, suggesting that “[i]f we did not know better, we would place Mirrlees’s poem later than Eliot’s, identifying it as one of a number of [its] imitations”; as he shows, Mirrlees came up with many similar motifs and techniques, “but independently of Eliot and before him.”[1] Although the common resonances are indeed striking, Tearle’s approach is emblematic of the critical tendency to emphasize the poem’s status of a “lost masterpiece” by comparing it to more canonical modernist texts.[2]

Less attention has been paid to the possible intertextual connections between Mirrlees and her female contemporaries, such as Mina Loy, another formerly marginalized female figure whose key role in developing an experimental modernist poetics is beginning to be more widely acknowledged. Although in her seminal introduction to Mirrlees’s poem Julia Briggs mentions Loy as a fellow female modernist interested in representing what Loy calls “the flux of life,” surprisingly she makes no mention of the fact that Loy herself also wrote a poem sequence representing the city of Paris.[3] In this essay, I read Mirrlees’s Paris alongside Loy’s earlier poetic triptych “Three Moments in Paris” (1914) and show that both Loy and Mirrlees use the figure of the flâneuse to capture urban simultaneity through the lens of an ironic feminist subjectivity. I also examine some connections between Paris and Loy’s 1923 poem “Lunar Baedeker,” exploring how the two poets transform the cityscape into a disorienting transhistorical palimpsest where modernity is in dialogue with tradition.

The lack of scholarly interest in the possible links between Mirrlees and Loy is perhaps related to the impossibility of proving any direct autobiographical influence; although the two British-born poets are both associated with a life of expatriation and an embrace of Paris’s urban and artistic modernity, there is no evidence that they ever met or read each other’s work. Loy lived in Paris between 1903 and 1907, and then from 1923 to 1936, while Mirrlees did so intermittently between 1913 and 1926, so even if they did cross paths in the early twenties, it could only have been after the composition of Paris. Loy’s “Three Moments in Paris” was first published in the New York–based little magazine Rogue in 1915, so it is unlikely that Mirrlees read it. Nonetheless, both were immersed in the intense visual and poetic experimentation of the increasingly cosmopolitan culture of Paris, which Briggs calls “the cradle of modernism,” and this perhaps accounts for some of the formal and thematic proximities between their poems: both poets used disjointed, elliptical syntax, radical experimentation with gaps and typography, multilingual wordplay, and collage techniques seeking to capture the complex simultaneity of modern experience (Briggs, “Hope Mirrlees,” 261). Furthermore, their poems are informed by an ironic feminist stance, conveying what Loy called “the altered observation of modern eyes.”[4]

Loy’s 1914 poetic triptych “Three Moments in Paris” is shorter and somewhat less formally experimental compared to Mirrlees’s Paris (as well as Loy’s own later poems). Yet it anticipates some of the motifs Mirrlees would develop in her 1919 poem and may be read as a prototype of this feminist poetics of urban observation. Both poems capture the multiplicity and simultaneity of the city, using some overlapping techniques and imagery, and both hinge on the detached, ironic subjectivity of a foreign female flâneuse recording her fragmented observations of the metropolis. Loy’s sequence is composed of three parts, each of which is a vignette capturing a different moment of urban experience. Loy also uses French in her poem: the second and third poems both have French titles, respectively “Café du Néant” and “Magasins du Louvre.” Like Mirrlees, Loy seeks to map the metropolis, following the logic of a journey through the city on a single day, even though her triptych inverts the chronology of the temporal sequence, with the first poem taking place at night, the second in the evening, and the third during the day. Although the two poems present different degrees of fragmentation, both are marked by the awareness that “the city cannot be contained in a single subjective viewpoint; the movement of the flâneur creates a city of multiple perspectives through embodied impressions rather than panoramic ones that assume total knowledge.”[5]

Parisian department stores and other aspects of the rise of commodity culture feature prominently in both poems, linking capitalist consumption and the objectification of women. Mirrlees’s poem incorporates advertising signs for commodities like “DUBONNET” and “CACAO BLOOKER,” as well as a publicity slogan for the Bon Marché:

Actual advertising posters for the Bon Marché often featured this slogan alongside pictures of women in fashionable spring outfits.[7] Mirrlees’s use of it ironically underscores the twofold role of women as consumers and objects of consumption, pointing to the pun inherent in the name of the department store to suggest that it is not only commodities but women as well that are sold cut-rate, be it on the marriage market or through prostitution. Loy also uses capital letters to render publicity signs in her early poems like “The Costa San Giorgio,” where an advertisement for oranges sold at a discount reads as an ironic sexual innuendo for women having lost their virginity: “Oranges half-rotten are sold at a reduction / Hoarsely advertised as broken heads / BROKEN HEADS.”[8] “Magasins du Louvre,” the last poem of Loy’s Paris triptych, focuses on the disturbing sight of female dolls on display in a department store, in an ironic vignette linking commodity culture and the objectification of women:

Long lines of boxes

Of dolls

Propped against banisters

Walls and pillars

Huddled on shelves

And composite babies with arms extended

Hang from the ceiling

Beckoning

Smiling (Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 17)

The poem creates a mirror effect between the dolls and the passing ostentatiously dressed “cocotte[s]” (tarts), whose eyes encounter the “virgin eyes” of the dolls:

One cocotte wears a bowler hat and a sham camellia

And one an iridescent boa

For there are two of them

Passing

And the solicitous mouth of one is straight

The other curved to a static smile

They see the dolls

And for a moment their eyes relax

To a flicker of elements unconditionally primeval

And now averted

Seek each other’s                  surreptitiously

To know if the other has seen (18)

The hypallage in the poem’s ironic refrain, “All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass,” foregrounds the idea of feminist vision by suggesting that virginity is part of a set of artificial conventions of femininity that only the dolls can actually embody (17, 18). This creates a contrast between the dolls’ empty eyes and the lucid gaze of the female speaker, who sees through the “sham” social construction of virginity: “While mine are inextricably entangled with the pattern of the carpet / As eyes are apt to be / In their shame” (18). The speaker’s averted gaze reinforces the obscene, disturbing aspect of the scene: the fashioning of women to conform to a “sham” ideal of virginity which becomes an asset in the economic transaction of marriage is clearly seen as a form of prostitution, together with the system of commodity capitalism itself.

In Mirrlees’s Paris we find a strikingly similar scene that creates problematic connections between social codes of femininity, religious morality, and capitalist consumption by blurring the virginal and the obscene. The flâneuse’s attention is arrested by the disturbing sight of some virgin dolls, “Waxen Pandoras in white veils,” exhibited as “holy bait” on the windows of all major department stores:

As Mirrlees explains in her notes to the poem, during the month of Lent, Parisian department stores used to exhibit “life-size wax dolls, dressed like candidates for Première Communion” (Mirrlees, Paris, 23n6). Like the dolls in Loy’s poem, these wax models are meant to entice young girls and subconsciously fashion them into “pigmy brides,” instilling at an early age the ideology that transforms them into objects for exchange and consumption on the marriage market. Although Mirrlees would later become a devout Catholic, refusing permission to reprint Paris until these “blasphemous” passages were excised, the poem is unabashed in its denunciation of religion. Before they can form their own critical judgement, the girls taking their First Communion are made to swallow the double “bait” of patriarchal society and capitalist economy, becoming bait themselves: as Nell Wasserstrom argues,

[t]he Pandoras themselves become seduced . . . because they “swallow the bait” dangled before their eyes in the form of commercial goods. They consume the silvery wares in much the same way they consume the Communion wafer at the end of the sequence, revealing a relation among consumption, sexuality, and religion.[9]

The reference to the Greek myth of Pandora is particularly far-reaching: modeled from clay, Pandora is sent to seduce Epimetheus, Prometheus’s brother, and thus punish the latter for having stolen fire from the gods. She carries a sealed jar, and when she opens it, all the evils of the world fly out, “except Hope ([Mirrlees]’s own name), left inside the jar.”[10] Thus, the poem creates an ironic opposition between the “Waxen Pandoras,” passive victims of society’s exploitation and demonization of women, and the critical gaze of the speaker, who is a figure of Hope, representing both Mirrlees herself and the faith in female emancipation. Like the speaker in Loy’s “Magasins du Louvre,” she denounces the scene as “Por-no-gra-phie,” insisting on every syllable as if speaking to children in order to reveal the obscenity lurking behind society’s obsession with purity (Mirrlees, Paris, 16). From these ironic, proto-Surrealist snapshots emerges a feminist poetics of urban observation, underscoring the idea of women’s transformation into objects for consumption in capitalist economy.

While Paris is considerably more fragmented compared to Loy’s early Paris sequence, Mirrlees’s work shares even more formal features with Loy’s long poem Songs to Joannes (1915–1917), such as the abrupt transitions between disparate images, elliptic syntax, and unprecedentedly daring use of typography. Although this is another text that Mirrlees is unlikely to have come across, as it appeared in the little magazine Others, also based in New York, it shows the two poets were working in similar directions, not only thematically but also formally. Meditating on “th[e] fragmentary / simultaneity / of ideas,” Loy would also use a vertical arrangement in her long semi-autobiographical poem Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923–1925), which strikingly resembles Mirrlees’s vertical alignment of the line “there is no lily of the valley” that prompted a reviewer to conclude that Paris “does not belong to the art of poetry.”[11] Like Mirrlees’s poem, Loy’s bears the imprint of her immersion in French avant-gardes like Simultanism, and implicitly opposes young Ova (Loy)’s avant-garde sensibility to the conservative Victorian values embodied by her mother.

Loy would return to the theme of the city in “Lunar Baedeker,” the leading poem of her first poetry collection published in Paris in 1923. Although considerably shorter, like both Paris and The Waste Land “Lunar Baedeker” revolves around the idea of a modern “Unreal City” strewn with the ruins of the past. All three poems transform the city into a transhistorical palimpsest, creating dialogic connections between modernity and the ruins of tradition.[12] In Between Worlds: Mina Loy’s Aesthetic Itineraries, I examine the poem’s oblique intertextual strategies, and show that the poem’s enigmatic moonscape—in which a modern metropolis is conflated with a lunar “Necropolis” strewn with the ruins of poetic tradition—is to some extent a response to The Waste Land.[13] The composite cityscape of “Lunar Baedeker” clearly reflects the atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Paris: its images of decadent intoxication are strikingly similar to those that appear in “Café du Néant,” the second poem of “Three Moments in Paris.” While it is unclear whether Loy was familiar with Paris, she makes use of motifs already present in Mirrlees’s work, like the idea of the poem as an ironic Baedeker guide, or the presence of the moon as a key symbol related to artistic tradition, particularly associated with the legacy of French Symbolism.

Although the setting of Mirrlees’s poem is more easily identifiable as the actual city of Paris rather than a fantastic moonscape like Loy’s, she also endows the cityscape with a decadent, otherworldly dimension, infusing it with the overarching spectral presence of the moon:

The spectral figure of Verlaine, who had been dead for more than twenty years at the time the poem is set, and the imagery of artistic intoxication and illumination typical of the French Symbolists, recall the spectral shades of intoxicated artists appearing in the opening lines of “Lunar Baedeker”:

A silver Lucifer

serves

cocaine in cornucopia

. . .

Peris in livery

prepare

Lethe

for posthumous parvenues (Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 81)

The image of the moon is also explicitly gendered, ironically drawing on the commonplace associating it with the female muse in French symbolist poetry. Mirrlees’s poem ends with the climactic “ritual fight . . . / Between two virgins—Mary and the moon / The wicked April moon” (Mirrlees, Paris, 14). These lines bring to mind not only the opening line of The Waste Land (“April is the cruellest month”), but also the final stanza of “Lunar Baedeker”: “Pocked with personification / the fossil virgin of the skies / waxes and wanes — — — —” (Eliot, The Waste Land, 55; Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 82). The wicked, virginal aura of the moon may be read as an allusion to the figure of Salomé, a figure of triumphant femininity in an otherwise very masculine Decadent culture, which Loy also alludes to in “Songs to Joannes” (Bozhkova, Between Worlds, 63–69). The moon thus serves as an ironic image for both the critical eye of the female poet and the spectral presence of artistic tradition.

Both Mirrlees and Loy transform the city into a palimpsest, in which urban modernity coexists in often incongruous and jarring ways with the spectral legacy of the past: in the modern metropolis, “The ghost of Père Lachaise / Is walking the streets, / He is draped in a black curtain embroidered with the / letter H” (Mirrlees, Paris, 11). As Sandeep Parmar observes, the letter H stands for “‘Hope’ but also for ‘histoire.’”[14] In the opening lines of Paris, taking the metro at the Concorde station becomes synonymous with a descent into the underworld, and conjures up the incongruous vision of “Black-figured vases in Etruscan tombs” (Mirrlees, Paris, 3). Likewise, in Loy’s poem, the city’s “Delirious Avenues” are “lit / with the chandelier souls / of infusoria / from Pharoah’s [sic] tombstones” (Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 81). Both poems draw on the Etruscan and Egyptian sarcophagi exhibited in the Louvre in order to foreground the paradoxical ways in which tradition continues to inhabit modernity and even becomes a source of inspiration for it. While Mirrlees’s poem takes the reader on a guided tour of the Louvre as well as other Parisian museums and historical landmarks, Loy’s Baedeker takes us on a visit to the “museums of the moon,” whose “Stellectric signs” (a portmanteau word fusing the terms “stellar” and “electric”) also recall Mirrlees’s striking connections between history and modernity (82, 81):

Since electricity and technological modernity are often aligned with masculinity in avant-garde discourses like F. T. Marinetti’s Futurism, where they are opposed to the image of the moon, gendered as feminine, these images are also inscribed in the poems’ gender-oriented critique, representing the city in terms of the double polarities, Past / Future and Male / Female. The surreal, nightmarish apparition of Freud dredging the Seine provides a fitting climax to the omnipresent imagery of the speaker’s gradual drowning in the rising waters of dream: “The dreams have reached my waist” (Mirrlees, Paris, 19). Paris is among other things a feminist excavation of the repressed in the female psyche, which paradoxically also denounces Freud as yet another male figure of authority over women, as the pejorative alliterations (“grinning,” “garbage,” “glare”) suggest. “Lunar Baedeker,” on the other hand, was published the year after Loy met Freud in Vienna, and her lunar Necropolis is inhabited by a surreal “flock of dreams” (Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 82).

Loy’s and Mirrlees’s poems about Paris not only use groundbreaking poetic techniques to represent the multiplicity and simultaneity of the modern city but also bring to the fore an ironic, critical reflection about urban space as a key locus of tension between conflicting polarities, like femininity and patriarchal domination, history and modernity, art and capitalism. Rather than the conventional attitude often expected of women at the time, they confront the reader with a staggering lucidity and complexity of perception, underscoring the problematic relation between commodity capitalism and social codes of femininity, as well as engaging in a feminist dialogue with their male predecessors and contemporaries. Their representations of the city through a feminist lens foreground the need to see woman as a critical subject rather than a passive object of desire and consumption, and negotiate a place for the female poet in both modernity and artistic tradition.