Modernist Magazines and Digital Humanities

I discovered “Coals of Fire” by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews because of Alonzo Kimbault’s illustration that goes with it. On the first page alone, Andrews brings up a few of the big issues facing women of that time: World War I and suffrage. Her protagonist, Aileen O’Hara, begins the story convincing a rally of suffragists that they should give up their fight for the right to vote and put all of their effort, time and money into the war. The discussion at the rally is an incredible feat of displaying different views on the subject, views that were probably being discussed at the time. Should women put aside their longstanding struggle for suffrage to help their country? When one suffragist states that the cause is not theirs another asks if they aren’t all English to which the woman replies, “No. I am a woman first” (54). The story is a very interesting look into the issues women faced in that time period.

I first noticed the D.H. Lawrence story because I recognized his name from a modern British poetry class. I’ve read a lot of his poetry and one of his books, but I wanted to see how he handled the short story genre. The Soiled Rose is about a man returning to his old hometown and visiting an old girlfriend. The story is naturalist in that only the mundane happens and none of the characters seem to make any free will decisions. Also, Lawrence spends a lot of time making the flowers of the fields surrounding his characters reflect their emotional state. When the main character, Syson, first looks down the slope that leads to his old girlfriend’s house, he is struck by the beauty of it. Then the man he just met, Arthur, who wants to marry his old girlfriend, accuses him of wrongdoing in their relationship and suddenly the very same hillside changes to something ironic (9-10).  There are no big revelations or extraordinary circumstances, just people dealing with the circumstances of their situations.

A first glance through some modernist magazines leaves us with a sense of unrest, shifting norms, and social tension.  As I looked more thoughtfully at some pieces, my first impression did not change, but gained more ground with each scanned page.

The New Age, a socialist magazine, advertised along with butter and socialism a brand of suffragism I have never encountered before.  As a student of several women's suffrage and feminism movements, I took for granted the idea that, just as black people were the front runners of the civil rights movement, and gay people were the front runners of the gay rights movement, women were the front runners of the movement for their own rights.  What I found in this magazine was an advertisement that called a meeting for women's suffrage that was to specifically include only men.  It appears that in 1907, concepts like participation, collective voice and public presence were not considered integral to the earning and progressing of women's suffrage.  The very things that separated women from politics, science, education, business, and society at large were in fact perpetuated by the leaders of a movement that claimed to create equality and rights for women.  So the thing on the surface, as is demonstrated by the crux of modernist culture, in actuality has the opposite intentions and results.  What on the surface is a meeting for women's suffrage turns out to be a publicly acceptable, and even advertisable, exercise of exclusion and continued oppression of women.

In contrast to the streamlined essay message of The New Age, Wheels is much more the literary and artistic voice of modernism.  Sandwiched between vintage sea-man illustrations and full-color ads are small literary gems.  These are the kinds of things you may find ruffling through the desk of a great novelist.  Coming upon a scrap of napkin with a few lines of verse, you can at once detect the small human parts that make up the grandiose whole you might see on a shelf in the library.  This is the sense of the several narrative prose pieces from Aldous Huxley.  Each bit contains within it a deep internal darkness, a sceptical view of the world, a fear of machinery and intrusion, a wall that at once blocks off and absorbs inside itself a sharp and putrid reality.  One of these snips, "Fatigue" is both the surface and the things that can be smelled through it.  There is the narrator, the human mind, the social machine, the mechanical machine.  They each have a surface, and something disturbing lurking directly beneath it.  Such is Huxley, and such appears to be the essence of modernity.

"The Old Houses of Flanders" by Ford Madox Heuffer was published in the second incarnation of Blast.  The houses in question are personified as a kind of witness to the destruction of the town as a result of the war.  The windows of the houses have eyes, "mournful, tolerant and sardonic, for the ways of men" which watch first as the cathedrals of Flanders burn, and then sort of lean into each together "drunkenly" before collapsing themselves.  With the destruction of not only the town, but these houses specifically, which have existed through many generations, there is a sense not only of physical lost but of the loss of memory, of something less tangible, and less easily duplicated/reconstructed.

From the first issue of Blast, I chose "To Suffragettes." which does not appear to have an author.  (Perhaps it was Wyndham Lewis?)  Like some of the poems we read in class, this one, a kind of open letter to woman suffragists, seems to take a didactic tone without fully explaining its logic.  Although the author admirably backs female suffrage, he also discourages suffragettes from participating in the creation of art.  One can't really tell from reading this piece alone if the author includes all women when addressing the suffragettes, or if he means suffragettes particularly.  In any case, the author ostensibly views the fight for suffragism as a violent act, one of tearing down conventions in order to promote equality.  Based on this, "suffragism," to the author, seems to equal "destruction."  As such, he asks that women "stick to what [they] understand" and refrain from participating in the creation of art, lest they "destroy" a great work of art also.  This is all a very muddled interpretation of an equally muddled text.  It probably needs more context for an accurate reading.