Mina Loy as the Modern Woman Essay -- Biography Biographies Essays

Mina Loy as the Modern Woman Born on December 27, 1882, into an ordinary London family, Mina Lowy proved to be anything but common. After spending years as the recipient of her father’s encouragement, Loy moved from the artistic confinement that her mother tried to impose upon her to a life of literary acclaim. Developing her artistic crafts of painting, sculpture, and poetry, her most recognized talent, Mina Loy refused to be crowded into convenient societal definitions. Hailed as the quintessential â€Å"New Woman† in 1917, Loy embodied the changing definition of modern femininity. As an adolescent, Loy often clashed with her mother, Julia, as she strove to improve her craft. She yearned to fully express herself artistically, through her painting and her literature, yet her mother discouraged her, wishing for her daughter to conform to the tradition expectations for a girl in British society. Mina later said: In the sheltered homes of the nineties, daughters were bullied to maturity, subject to prohibitions unmodified since babyhood. Their only self expression: to watch and pray (Burke, 32). Loy was forced to fight for any chance to study her crafts, as her mother was not an advocate for female education. After winning the battle against her mother’s repression, with her father’s help and encouragement, Loy entered the Kunstlerrinen Verein Art Academy in Munich, where she excelled under the tutelage of Angelo Jank. Carolyn Burke wrote that, for Loy, leaving England at the turn of the century meant escaping from the repressive forces embodied by her mother: the complacency of British culture, its contradictory goals for daughters, and the constrain... ...friends enjoyed eluded her, Loy’s work continues to stand as an expression of changing female modernity. As the New Woman, Loy was independent, confident, and undaunted by those who claimed her work was merely scandalous and pornographic. Mina Loy's life story and the story of her work is a complicated one, as Loy seemed to epitomize her age at the same time that she eluded it (Weiner). Her work paved new literary paths and with her sexual and experimental style she altered what was accepted and expected from female writers. As the modern era faded, the definition of the New Woman continued to change, and like both Loy and her poetry, continued to escape classification. http://www.the-artists.org/ArtistView.cfm?id=8A01F8F4-BBCF-11D4-A93500D0B7069B40 http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=96 http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/loy/loy.htm