1 The Deconstruction of Old Sexual Codes in Songs to Joannes By Mandy Nembs All rights reserved.

2 The Deconstruction of Old Sexual Codes in Songs to Joannes Mina Loys poem Songs to Joannes is a resistance to male enforced sexual codes and also works as a literary instrument that represents the creation of new sexual codes. These new sexual codes can be identified as being influenced by feminist and lesbian notions. The first three lines in part XXIX are directed at the deconstruction of the evolution of sexuality that was formed by the male gender. She says male created sexuality is miscalculated and falls foul of/ sexual equality. These lines are directed at the sexual inequalities that women have faced over the course of evolution. Loys poem acts as an instrument that fixes the miscalculation of sexuality (i.e. identifying men as the superior gender) and gives women power over their sexuality. Loy continues to speak on gender inequality in the next stanza by pointing out that gender/sex codes are unnatural. She says Unnatural selection Breed such sons and daughters As shall jibber at each other Uninterpretable cryptonyms Under the moon

Loy tells women Let us be very jealous of the superior status that men have been given by society and be very suspicious of men. Part XIII encourages women to resist patriarchic influence but instead be very conservative and very cruel when making life decisions. In writing this poem Loy wants to desorb inviolate egos.

3 In stanza XIII the speaker invites the reader to be open to new forms of sexuality that do not conform with old notions of sexuality. The Victorian model of sexual conduct is something Loy is trying to eradicate. The speaker says: Come to me There is something I have to go tell you and I cant tell Something is taking shape Something that has a new name A new dimension A new use A new illusion (XIII) The speaker is giving a description of the modernization of sexuality in the new world. Loy says this new type of sexuality will have a new use. The new sexuality will not be oppressed but spoken of openly. Loy begins this change by writing an explicitly overt sexual poem. Suzanne W. Churchill says this poem focuses on domestic architecture that prohibits people, especially women, from reali zing
their sexual selves.

In the first stanza of the poem Loy denounces patriarchal set ideas

such as fantasies and cupid. She gives the notion of how fantasies produce negative connotations and cupid is not described as the wonderful god/enabler of love but instead a pig. Pigs are often identified with being greedy and dirty. The Pig Cubid in the poem is one that evokes erotic garbage. The erotic garbage is something that is meaningless to the modern feminist who seeks a new kind of sexual eroticism. Alex Goody takes a different position in analyzing the first stanza. He says:

This poem immediately emphasizes the physical actuality of love, transforming the coy boy cupid into a rooting hog. The offspring of the fantasy

4 of love relies upon the detritus of his hackneyed origins for his existence: erotic garbage. The phallic and visceral imagery of the first poem is reexpressed in poem II: The skin-sack In which a wanton duality Packed All the completions of my infructuous impulses Something the shape of a man1 Goody points out how the phallic is expressed in part II, but he fails to point out that Loy treats male genitals as machinery. Loy dehumanizes a mans sexual organ as well as his ability to sexually please a woman. Par II insinuates that a mans sexual advances are vulgar. To the casual vulgarity of the merely observant/ More of a clock-work mechanism/Running down against time/ To which I am not paced. (II) How can a mechanized male organ expect to please a woman if its functionality is limited by time? Based on the premise of the poem, Loy insinuates that lesbian sex is not controlled by time or sexual endurance. Goody perceives this part of the poem as Loy parodying the stereotypical posturing of heroic, forceful, thrusting phallic activity, juxtaposing it to the basic animalism and pitiful, uninspiring physical reality behind such a metaphorrosy snout, skin-sack, Something the shape of a man. Indeed this phallus can provide no orgasmic satisfaction, just an incompatible mechanical-sexual impulse; he is little more than a derma-clad automaton, a clockwork mechanism/Running down against time/To which I am not paced.2 Based on Goodys analysis of Loys perception of men, it is safe to conclude that this poem was
1 Gender, Authority and the Speaking Subject, or: Who is Mina Loy? by Alex Goody

2 Gender, Authority and the Speaking Subject, or: Who is Mina Loy? by Alex Goody

5 written to lessen womens dependence on men. During her life Loy became less dependant on men for sexual pleasure and turned to women.

Loys sexual history as a lesbian is referenced in this poem. There are moments in the poem where she denounces the notion of heterosexual relationships in modern times. She says: Today Everlasting passing apparent imperceptible To you I bring the nascent virginity of -Myself for the moment Her words describe the characteristics of a new type of relationship that resists old sexual codes. Today refers to a new day that is everlasting just the way old sexual conventions seemed to be. The speaker is bringing a virgin form of herself to her new sexual situation. This new sexual situation resists the Victorian model of love. Alex Goody says: Loy does not replace the discarded mythical representation and expression of love with a notion of the spontaneous joy and creativity of sex. Instead she offers the Futurist alternative to Romance, a union of Marinettis ideal nonhuman types in whom moral suffering, goodness of heart, affection, and love, those sole corrosive poisons of inexhaustible vital energy, sole interrupters of our powerful bodily electricity, will be abolished. Loy presents a Futurist vision of unemotional, explosive union:3
3 Gender, Authority and the Speaking Subject, or: Who is Mina Loy? by Alex Goody

6 No love or the other thing Only the impact of lighted bodies Knocking sparks off each other In chaos The new sexual code created by the speaker promotes the physical action of sex without attaching emotions such as love. The other thing can be perceived as a penis, thus the speaker is insinuating that she can have great sexual pleasure without a patriarchal sexual object. Loy promotes only the impact of lighted bodies. The term lighted bodies reinforces the notion of two female bodies coming together and knocking sparks off each other. Sexual codes set by a patriarchal society stipulate that sexual intercourse should be done in a non chaotic manner. Loy resists that sexual custom by bringing to female bodies together that are performing a chaotic sexual scene.

Alex Goody says Songs to Joannes from the very beginning of the sequence show the falseness of Romantic love, reducing it to the unromantic reality of sex: Spawn of Fantasies

Silting the Appraisable Pig Cupid his rosy snout

Rooting erotic garbage Once upon a time Pulls a weed white star-topped sown in mucous-membrane

Among wild oats

7 I would an eye in a Bengal-light

Eternity in a sky-rocket Constellations in an ocean Whose rivers run no fresher Than a trickle of saliva These are suspect places. Loy is dismissing the idea of heterosexual romance. She is skeptical of those people who perceive heterosexual sex as being an eternity in a sky-rocket. Loy satirizes heterosexual sex by using an unrealistic analogy. Sky rockets do not ascend for eternity but instead they fall. The motif of the rocket is directed at male sexual performance. The rest of the stanza undermines male sexuality.

Loys poem addresses an audience that has been influenced by Victorian sexual codes. Lucia Pietroiusti adds that: As part of an attempt to develop new understandings of the body understandings which might function as feminist or modernist correctives to the patriarchal models proposed by Victorian discourses. Loys use of metonymy thus reveals her anticipatory engagement with issues that were fundamental to the work of French feminist scholars some sixty years later. Certainly, Loys writing can be usefully rethought alongside the theories of feminists such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Hlne Cixous, who have attempted to identify alternatives to traditional patriarchal modes of expression.4

4 and the Text/Body of the Text in Mina Loys Songs to Joannes By Lucia Pietroiusti

8 Loys most successful attempt in this poem is telling women lesbianism is an acceptable form of sexuality. I believe this poem was meant to be a response and resistance to sexual codes that were set by the male gender. Loy promotes the notion that is free to express and experiment with her sexuality. When considering Loys lesbian background it is safe to conclude that she is supporting the idea that women can attain fulfillment from a lesbian relationship. She wants women to shed their petty pruderies which they learned from Victorian women.

In an article by Lucia Pietroiusti she says: The dashes of fragment XIII unite Me you you me to illustrate the significance of the terrific Nirvana mentioned in the previous line (57-58). It has been suggested that this stanza illustrates the speakers fear of the loss of subjectivity that occurs in the romantic/sexual encounter: DuPlessis, for example, states that [t]hese metaphors of chaos or annihilation in sexual bliss show the dangerous loss of identity, perhaps reversion to a femininity of dissolution or passivity, defined by stereotypical gender ideas which Loy has staked herself upon resisting5 Pietroiusti suggests that Loy wants women to be less passive when it comes to their sexuality. Loy uses Songs to Joannes as a resistance against the repression of womens sexuality.

5 Body and the Text/Body of the Text in Mina Loys Songs to Joannes By Lucia Pietroiusti

9 In wiritng this poem Loy wants women to have freedom of sexual expression
and enjoyment. Lisa Ress looks at how Loy took male identified Futurist ideas and reinvented them to suit the female gender. Ress says:

Characteristically undeterred by her status as pseudo Futurist, and heedless of what the phrase, scorn of woman, impliednamely that Futurist ideas were for men, not for women, to useLoy took seriously this call for free and open expression of sexual energy and appetite. Her marriage's disintegration during these years and her emotional and sexual involvement with Futurists two months with Marinetti, two years with Giovanni Papinipowerfully influenced her poetry's subject matter, and as powerfully provided the impetus for its expression. Love Songs to Joannes, Loy's exploration of her relationship with Papini, is radical not only in form but in its attack on romantic love and in its depiction of sexuality. She was made to suffer, however, for her Futurist-female frankness. 6 Both Ress and Pietroiusti conclude that Loys failed relationship with Papini (a man) resulted in the creation of Songs to Joannes. The poem is a modern replacement for the romantic model of heterosexual love rather than being an essential element that perpetuates the division between men and women.7 The poem can also be read as retaliation against societal conventions by a woman who has been hurt by heterosexual love/sexuality and romance. Loys way of escaping the pain is by writing a poem that is empowering and liberating to women are living under male oppression. Good says the poem is:

Ress, Lisa. "From Futurism to Feminism: The Poetry of Mina Loy."

7 Gender, Authority and the Speaking Subject, or: Who is Mina Loy? by Alex Goody

10 Such a mechanical and reductive interaction is inimical to creativity, the other thing. In its sterility this Futurist sexual union is ultimately as destructive to female identity as the tradition it usurps; in both cases feminine specificity and material reality are denied in the preservation of inviolate egos. Loy portrays Futurist unsuperstitious sex not only as depersonalized and abstract but barren and meaningless.8 This essay has shown the different ways in which Loy perceives, deconstructs and reinvents sexual codes. The poem functions as a tool that promotes an overt expression of sexuality by women, resists against patriarchal sexual codes and encourages lesbian sexuality. Loy evokes taboo sexual notions. Thus it is safe to conclude that the themes in Songs to Joannes are a good representation of modern feminist ideas.

8 Gender, Authority and the Speaking Subject, or: Who is Mina Loy? by Alex Goody

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Work Cited Gender, Authority and the Speaking Subject, or: Who is Mina Loy? by Alex Goody http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/v1_5_2001/cu rrent/in-conference/mina-loy/goody.html

The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry by Suzanne W. Churchill. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd http://books.google.co.uk/books? id=y_8bgLTrp0IC&printsec=frontcover#PPA201,M1 Ress, Lisa. "From Futurism to Feminism: The Poetry of Mina Loy." Gender, Culture, and the Arts: Women, the Arts, and Society. Ed. Ronald Dotterer and Susan Bowers Associated University Presses, 1993. 115-127. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Margaret Haerens and Christine Slovey. Vol. 16. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997. 115127. Literature Resource Center. Gale. CONCORDIA UNIV LIBRARIES. 5 Mar. 2008 <http://0-go.galegroup.com.mercury.concordia.ca:80/ps/start.do? p=LitRC&u=concordi_main>. Body and the Text/Body of the Text in Mina Loys Songs to Joannes By Lucia Pietroiusti . Journal of International Womens Studies Vol. 9 #2 March 2008 http://www.bridgew.edu/SoAS/jiws/Mar08/Pietroiusti.pdf