From Idol to God: Feminine Apotheosis in Mina Loy’s “Parturition”

Rosette Simityan

On the eve of the Great War, Mina Loy published “Parturition,” a poem that exploded and imploded the child-birthing experience into not-so-simple English by painting its radical subject matter with an experimental writing style that manipulates space and rhythm. Childbirth is not, after all, a simple act. According to Loy’s cosmic vision, it is a self-affirming act of staggering energy through which women achieve apotheosis. Giving birth enables a mortal woman to actualize her creative potential and achieve divinity. In effect, Woman becomes God. She is a universe unto herself. She is a Self in the first place—a revolutionary notion in the face of the Victorian tradition that objectified white, middle-class women, even those who met its prescribed moral standards. Loy’s woman-as-god is not the passive goddess who endures the servile idol-worship of men— she has ultimate agency as she wields her creative, destructive, and transformative powers. 

The deification of the female sex was not unheard of in the patriarchal discourse of the nineteenth century. Indeed, New Woman texts like H.G. Wells’s Ann Veronica expose the widespread objectification of women inherited into the twentieth century from Victorian notions of divine feminine purity. At one point, one of the titular heroine’s numerous suitors professes to her, “You see I—I am a woman worshipper. I worshipped women long before I found any woman I might ever hope to worship” (84). Mr. Manning’s conversion to the cult of woman presents white, middle-class women as objects of worship. The male devotee acts out his piety, and the female sex passively bears his devotion. Ann Veronica’s own father believes that “Women are made like potter’s vessels—either for worship or contumely” (56). This analogy transfigures women into literal objects, votive figures created for the mutually exclusive purposes of either being worshipped as virgins or mocked as whores. By likening them to vessels, he highlights their inanimate acceptance of the worshipper’s active offerings, suggesting social and sexual passivity. 

In addition to objectification and passivity, the woman-as-goddess trope requires ignorance, a trait apparent when Mr. Ramage, Ann Veronica’s predatory benefactor, observes, “If you had been born twenty years ago…it would have been your chief duty in life not to know, never to have heard of, and never to understand” (103). Victorian social mores demonized knowledge in women, both worldly and intellectual, and idealized ignorance as a state of mental purity. Intelligence and understanding would only corrupt the religious vessel. She need only isolate herself and protect her ignorance in order to be worshipped as a feminine idol, unfamiliar with the world in which she exists. In this way, the masculine perception of women created an objectifying framework requiring immobility, passivity, isolation, and ignorance. 

All of these imposed expectations of patriarchal worship culminate in a moment akin to a nervous breakdown as Ann Veronica sits in prison and bemoans her failure at being “a good woman,” a figure she characterizes as the “white unaggressive woman who corrects and nurses and serves, and is worshipped and betrayed—the martyr-queen of men, the white mother” (228). A free-spirit, Ann Veronica cannot trap herself within the potter’s vessel. Her crisis and guilt reveal the stifling limitations under which women lived in a world that expected them to endure, to sacrifice, and to serve, a world that treated them like slaves and called them goddesses to boot. And though Wells effectively highlights the ways in which the Victorian deification of white women objectifies them, his heroine’s eventual settlement into domesticity undermines the novel’s potential to present empowering alternatives for the female identity. 

In “Parturition,” Mina Loy takes this man-made vessel of idolatry and shatters it, unleashing the feminine divine beyond the bounds imposed by patriarchal tradition, rendering women into active subjects in tune with the cosmos within and without. The poetic structure of “Parturition” itself creates dynamism. Loy separates verses irregularly, with some verses as short as one line and others that run for twenty-four lines. This unpredictable pacing keeps the reader visually alert, just as a woman in labor remains alert and painfully present during her Herculean ordeal. In addition to manipulating the poem’s overarching structure, Loy creates movement within the lines as well, for example, when she explains the mountains of pain building upon each other: 

The gap between “which” and “goaded” literally goads the reader forward, just as the pain goads the speaker toward the end of the child-birthing process. Loy generates further movement by using enjambment to bleed one line into another, rushing the reader unsteadily along the poem with abrupt enjambments and irregular punctuation. Thus, Loy presents an image of restless, unpredictable physicality in this account of childbirth. Not only does her experimental structure transgress traditional rules of verse, but these efforts to maintain constant, unpredictable motion also serve to experientially replicate a woman’s labor. Far from the static idol of masculine worship, women experience this gender-defining ordeal through unabating movements. A woman in childbirth does not have the luxury of passivity. By denying regularity in motion, Loy creates this impression of dynamism that requires incessant and energetic activity. In this way, she builds dynamic movement into the very structure of her poem. 

The intermittent progressive and halting motions of the lines complement Loy’s consistent references to alternating expansion and contraction. Loy regularly returns to images of inward and outward expansion, linking the microcosm of the human body to the macrocosm of the universe. She begins with expansion as the speaker calls herself “the center / of a circle of pain / exceeding its boundaries in every direction” (1-3). Then she returns again to the center when she explains that the sun, which the energy of her pain has turned “bland” (4) in comparison, has no relation to her “contraction / to the pinpoint nucleus of being” (9-10). Having dimmed the brilliance of the sun, her pain turns the speaker into a sun in her own right as she oversees her own solar system of agony as pain radiates outward into the cosmos and inwards into the smallest fragments of her existence. She explains: 

Locate an irritation            without 

It is                                         within

                                               Within

It is without 

The sensitized area 

 Is identical          with the extensity 

 Of intension (11-17) 

Loy uses gaps, repetition, and enjambment to manipulate both form and content to create movement through rhythm and conflate inner and outer spaces, extension and retraction. These undulations convey the speaker’s unity with life and legitimize her life-creating potentiality: the words “undulation” and “undulating” are used three times as descriptions of life in lines 93, 110, and 117. Just as an undulating heart pushes blood through the body or the undulating uterus pushes the baby along the birth canal, so too does a dynamic undulation move the poem toward birth and life, embodying the speaker’s creative powers. This undulation does not come from a masculine dynamo—it is made of organic matter to which only women have access, and this life-giving fluctuation counters the staticity of the traditional feminine idol and positions the speaker’s role as Creator.

Loy not only liberates her female speaker through physical movement, but also through the freedom of mental movement in the form of  dissociation, which allows her to transgress, and thereby unite, binary notions of the quotidian and the sacred. As her labor continues into the night, the speaker explains:

Something in the delirium of night hours

Confuses while intensifying sensibility

Blurring spatial contours

So aiding elusion of the circumscribed (51-54) 

Thus, the woman circumscribed at the center of a circle of pain can escape her severe physical agony because the borders between mind and body become blurred as she experiences exhaustion and sleep deprivation. After this dissociation from her bodily trauma, she remarks: 

 The pains of labor render her at once divine and banal, martyr and animal. As the distinctions between opposing states disintegrate, she observes herself objectively while also encompassing all facets of being.  Indeed, this “climax in sensibility” (59) leads to “lascivious revelation” (64) when “the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative poles of sensation / Uniting the opposing and resisting forces” (62-63). Unlike the pure martyr-goddess Ann Veronica regrets she cannot become, the speaker of “Parturition” undergoes a deification that is not remote from the world but present in worldly and sensual pleasures. Loy’s use of sexual innuendo in the previous lines roots the speaker’s experience in the physical world that begat her pregnancy in the first place while allowing her the freedom to move between physical and mental spaces through dissociation. The destabilization of dichotomous boundaries negates the separation between spirit and world. Childbirth does not lose its miraculous tint because of its earthly origins. These seemingly opposing forces unify in the totality of sensual and mental experience that the speaker undergoes. 

Having acknowledged the influence of sensual pleasures in divine creation, Loy moves on to challenge the idealization of feminine ignorance by emphasizing her speaker’s knowledge of life and death. The speaker recalls a moment in which she “Scrutinized / A dead white feathered moth / Laying eggs” (74-76) and imagines her subconscious yielding the following image:

Impression of small animal carcass

Covered with blue bottles

—Epicurean—

And through the insects

Waves that same undulation of living

Death

Life

I am knowing (113-120)

The first image of a dead moth laying eggs creates an unnerving symbiosis of embodied death giving birth to life, indeed even of parasitic life feeding on death. In the same way, the following image of a rotting corpse, deprived of life and left as banal as an empty container, becomes intrinsically tied to the animal life that feeds on it. A profound understanding of the link between life and death exists within the speaker, and when it appears in the poem it appears from within her. She is not a blank idol, ignorant of the universe—she is part and parcel with it through her sacred knowledge. 

The speaker’s omniscience acts as the mental aspect of her overall existential union with the cosmos.  After reflecting on the moment of conception, she declares:

Mother I am

Identical

With infinite Maternity

Indivisible

Acutely

I am absorbed

Into

The was—is—ever—shall—be

Of cosmic reproductivity (97-105)

The inverted syntax of “Mother I am” underscores the role of maternity in the apotheosis of the speaker from mortal to god while also complementing Loy’s rejection of structure and boundaries that limit the feminine divine. By describing her union with the cosmos as absorption, the speaker presents herself as an individual unit incorporated into an external vastness. Not only does the speaker become spatially boundless through this unity, but she also becomes temporally infinite, extending backwards into history and forwards into eternity. Unlike the religious vessel that needs to protect herself from contamination, the woman surrenders into the divinity of creation and taps into cosmic consciousness.

Through this surrender, the speaker achieves apotheosis and approaches subjectivity. Early in the poem, the speaker anticipates this transformation when she explains:

I am the false quantity

In the harmony of physiological potentiality

To which

Gaining self-control

I should be consonant

In time (18-23) 

In an elegant display of wordplay, the speaker portrays herself toward the beginning of labor as a grammatical mistake involving the incorrect use of a long or short vowel in strict Latin verse but expresses trust that in time she will regain control of herself and become “consonant” with her physiological capacity (“False No. 2a”). That is to say, her body is in crisis but will achieve its potential through her own self-control. Her assurance expresses self-affirmation as she acknowledges the importance of her agency in restoring order to herself. When describing the incessant mountains of pain, she states, “another mountain is growing up / Which…I must traverse / Traversing myself” (47-50). Not only does the speaker cross pain, but she also crosses herself, in effect enacting her own transformation while Loy also references the Christian ritual of making the sign of the cross as blessing oneself becomes self-affirmation. This self-contained empowerment aligns with Loy’s inward-looking feminism, which holds that “the truth of the female self is to be discovered from within…the path to liberation lies not in the social, economic, or political sphere, but in a transformation of the psyche” (Gasiorek 321). Aligning with the skepticism toward artificial, man-made institutions that Loy outlines in her “Feminist Manifesto,” going so far as to call for their total demolition, this notion of auto-transformation gives women the authority to become active agents. Through complete self-reliance, they become subjects far removed from the passive idols of the patriarchal narrative. 

Once the mortal woman acts as subject, the speaker implies that she achieves her deification and the apotheosis is complete. The last word about her labor that the speaker offers before moving on to the morning after the birth is “[u]nfolding” (122), a word to which she dedicates an entire line and entire verse. This act of unfolding is singular, revelatory, and miraculous. She does not explicitly describe the birth of the child because the moment is ineffable. That which was inside the body—the child—becomes outside. In fact, it is not only outside, but independent and animate. Woman has made her Creation, and for this reason, the next verse describes the birthing room as a sacred space filled with feminine saints:

The next morning

 Each woman-of-the-people

Tiptoeing the red pile of the carpet

Doing hushed service

Each woman-of-the-people

Wearing a halo

A ludicrous little halo

Of which she is sublimely unaware (123-130)

These efforts not to disturb the resting mother and child—the quiet voices and footfalls—recall the hushed reverence exhibited in churches. Each woman is sublimely ignorant of her diminutive halo perhaps because patriarchal tradition has made her feel mortal or perhaps because her divinity as an organism in tune with the universe is innate. At the end of the poem, the speaker finally proclaims:

I once heard in a church

—Man and woman God made them—

                                             Thank God (131-133)

In this proclamation there is cause to suspect that she is in fact thanking women for Creation. The forwarding-propelling and emphatic em dash, coupled with the sizeable gap before “Thank God,” purposefully creates a pause long enough to allow room for suspicion about the traditional Judeo-Christian creation myth to grow in the reader’s mind. Thus primed with doubt, and having read the speaker’s first-hand account of her cosmic feat, the reader’s mind becomes fertile for receiving the final “Thank God” as a tongue-in-cheek emphasis that it is really women who are godlike for their reproductive ability and deserve thanks for Creation. The speaker does not give us this thought; she elicits its inception in the reader’s interiority. In this way, the reader bears witness to the mortal woman’s apotheosis.

Loy’s equally careful and playful craftsmanship turns “Parturition” into a dynamic account of women’s agency through her harmony with microcosmic and macrocosmic forces. Against the patriarchal manifestation of woman as an idol of worship, long used as justification for demanding passivity and ignorance from women, “Parturition” presents a powerful response: childbirth proves that women are capable of dynamism, omniscience, and subjectivity. They have the capacity to transcend physical, mental, and spiritual boundaries. They can generate life-giving undulations, understand universal cycles, transform themselves, and unite with the cosmos. Childbirth exhibits these formidable yet socially hidden powers that make women godlike. But unlike the domestic goddesses of tradition subject to male worship, the woman-as-god portrayed by Loy is self-affirming and omnipotent. All-powerful and all-knowing, the spirit of the divine feminine has no place in man-made clay vessels: her home is the Universe, and her work is Creation.

Works Cited

“False, n. 2a.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2019, http://www.oed.com.jpllnet.sfsu.edu/view/Entry/67884.

Gasiorek, Andrzej. A History of Modernist Literature, Wiley Blackwell, 2015.

Loy, Mina. “Feminist Manifesto.” The Lost Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger L. Conover, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1996.

———. “Parturition.” The Lost Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger L. Conover, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1996.

Wells, H.G. Ann Veronica, edited by Carey J. Snyder, Broadview Editions, 2016.