Progress, as Dr. Drouin duly noted in class, is not linear and Blast No. 1, despite its fervent work towards a new and better future, takes on a rather anti-woman tone at various moments. Women, in fact, often become a sacred object sacrificed on the alter of change. Rebecca West plays with the idea of woman as necessary sacrifice in her short story “Indissoluble Matrimony” (98-117), in which an unhappy husband attempts to kill his overly-sexual, overly-political wife. West writes of the unhappily married couple, “With an uplifiting sense of responsibility they realised that they must kill each other” (110), and she goes on to describe this sudden resolution as an “experience of religious passion” (110). Despite the wife’s equal desire to kill her husband, she is unable to and succumbs instead to a momentary “illusion”: “There entered into her the primitive woman who is the curse of all women: a creature of the most utter femaleness, useless, save for childbirth” (111). This momentary faltering leaves her husband to attempt, unsuccessfully, to act out his “religious” fervor—the text notes, afterall, “God might be war” (111)—and sacrifice his wife on the alter of newness.
The note “To Suffragettes” (151-152) is another startling and obvious instance of calling upon female sacrifice for the better good of all. As our introduction notes, this section has been read in various ways: "as affirming, patronizing, and guardedly admiring” towards the suffragettes. The tone is certainly fitting with the sardonic, combative nature of the magazine; in writing to the suffragettes, Blast instructs them to be careful and commands the women not to destroy artwork. In doing so, Blast establishes art as something that the suffragettes do not understand, as a practice that exists completely outside of the feminine realm of expertise or knowledge. This of course, disregards any female artists or female-created artwork, and instead totally separates the ability to create art from any woman. In doing so, Blast reinforces a binary understanding of man/woman or masculine/feminine, in which serious artwork is seen as fitting into the masculine side of the binary. In “To Suffragettes,” serious artwork exists in binary opposition to senseless destruction as woman are marked in this section as energetic, wild, active, and “the only things...with a little life in them” (151). Women are revolutionary, but too much so; they are destructive, but senselessly. Thus, the revolutionary work of the Vorticists is situated within a context of change with a purpose, while the activism of suffragettes is change without a purpose—or at least, change without the right purpose. The image of the suffragette created in Blast, to borrow the importance of the image from our Vorticist comrade Ezra Pound (154), is that of a two-year-old throwing a tantrum and accidentally breaking one of daddy’s important possessions in the process.
The destructive and active nature of women, as Blast implies, must then be sacrificed for the more important cause of male artistic creation. For art is a “greater soul than...a whole district of London” (152). If art is greater than a multitude of male and female souls, then certainly art is greater than one or many female souls or one or many female passions. Thus, woman are called upon to do their duty and "stick to what [they] understand" (151).
Comments
Megan Gibson
Wed, 10/08/2014 - 09:22
Permalink
I too noticed BLAST’s
I too noticed BLAST’s treatment of women as displaying, as Annie states, an “anti-woman tone,” despite the insistence in their manifesto that “we have made it quite clear that there is nothing Chauvinistic . . . about our contentions” (34). Even so, the writing and ideas included in this magazine are not uniformly misogynistic, but also contain a critical bent on social and cultural situations. In “The Saddest Story” the narrator makes comments that, as Annie points out, “reinforce a binary understanding of man/woman or masculine/feminine,” when he questions, for instance, whether “that last remark of hers was the remark of a harlot, or is it what every decent woman . . . thinks at the bottom of her heart?” and that “all women are riddles” (89, 92). Rather than stopping there, though, the narrator also points out the sexual double standard that exists (existed) in British society and sharply and poignantly questions the standards of masculinity that don’t or that no longer make sense. Talking to his buddies in the “smoking room,” he observes that “fellows come in and tell the most extraordinarily gross stories-so gross that they will positively give you pain. And yet, they’d be offended if you suggested that they weren’t the sort of person you would trust your wife alone with” (89). This observation of the incongruence inherent in codes of masculine thought and behavior is really poignant, especially during a time where the roles of both masculinity and femininity are being questioned. Later, he speaks more directly to his concerns and anxieties about masculinity, questioning the role and performance of chastity before stating, “Is the proper man – the man with the right to existence – a raging stallion forever, neighing after his neighbor’s womenkind? I don’t know. And there’s nothing to guide us . . . it is all darkness” (89). Victorian mores no longer stand on their own and in a rapidly changing world, they no longer make sense.
So, while this narrative and the passages that Annie pointed out demonstrate the sometimes anti-woman tone of the magazine, it may be important to note that the magazine also includes a critique of men and a sharp questioning of gender, gender roles in society, and the place of the gendered self within a transforming world.