Although forgotten for the most part of the latter 20th century, Mina Loy is a modernist poet who deserves to be much studied. Her writings display an awareness self that is both complex and acute, continuously dismantling and reconstructing itself. I ...
Although forgotten for the most part of the latter 20th century, Mina Loy is a modernist poet who deserves to be much studied. Her writings display an awareness self that is both complex and acute, continuously dismantling and reconstructing itself. In particular, “Parturition” (1914) is one of the earliest poems to investigate the physiological and psychological experience of labor and giving birth, questioning the singularity of the self. Against traditional representations of birth, Loy’s “Parturition” proclaims to redefine labor and birth, in connection to the notion of “I.” By closely examining “Parturition,” this study presents how Loy suggests a plural I in contrast to a singular I as the center of perception, redefining the contours of self during pregnancy and childbirth. With the Deleuzean idea of the fold, I wish to argue that Loy suggests a self that constantly differentiates itself, always in flux and endlessly folding and unfolding itself.
Throughout the poem, Loy closely analyzes her pain of labor and birth with medical, philosophical, and religious language, mirroring and contending with them at the same time. During labor, the painful experiences of the speaker forces her to redefine herself as an ambiguous and plural entity throughout the poem. The expansions and contractions of labor also conflate the inside and outside, bringing forth the idea of the uterus as the exterior folded in, rather than existing inside the body as can be explicated with Gilles Delueze’s idea of the fold. Loy’s “Parturition” conflates the inside and the outside, moving away from notions of a singular I, and instead places what I will call a “plural I” at the center.
With birth, however, the speaker experiences another shift from the centrality of the plural I, from the plurality of self and fetus to a momentary emptying of self and finally to the multiplicity of maternity. Following birth and a brief moment of negation, the speaker connects with a maternity which is defined with multiplicities rather than binary oppositions between self/other or subject/object. The plurality of I during pregnancy and childbirth now translates to her association with Maternity shared with many mothers, suggesting a different kind of plural I. By presenting the speaker united with the multiplicity of “infinite Maternity,” Loy places the recreated plural I as the foundation of cosmic truth, who welds together the self and other, being and nothingness, and death and life. This plural I is that knowing itself, the knowing of all the constant foldings and unfoldings which constitute the cosmic cycle. Through the very bodily act of labor and giving birth, the plural I experiences the cycle of being born, creating, dying, and being resurrected, partaking in its foldings and unfoldings.