Waiting at the entrance to the Law: Modernism, gender and democracy

This article begins with an analysis of Franz Kafka's short story, 'Before The Law,' in order to construct a wider argument about the way that modernist texts often register a perceived crisis in the idea of democracy and legal representation. While modernist writers notoriously construct either authoritarian or radically individualistic responses to this crisis, gender difference has often been seen to cut across this characterization. Women writers, in these accounts, have a more complicated relationship to such gestures, as women are seen to be intellectually entangled in the move towards rather than away from democracy. This article argues, however, that both political feminists and women modernists share a sense that legal democracy is not as static as this would imply, that modern law becomes formally inclusive at the same historical moment as it becomes increasingly abstracted from the individuals it claims to represent. I argue that an understanding of the historical nature of these debates allows us to read the gestures of modernist writers in a more nuanced way, as attempts to think about the way that literature could embody an ethical and rational moment which the law is unable to embrace. The article then turns to the early poetry of Mina Loy. Through an analysis of her two manifestos, 'Feminist manifesto' and 'International psycho-democracy,' and her poems 'Love Songs' and 'Apology of Genius,' it suggests that she criticizes liberal rights-based notions of feminist action, egoistic understandings of individual power and postwar visions of cultural and political authority. Like Kafka's 'Before the Law,' Loy's writing illuminates the moral vacuity of ideas of legal 'equality' without substance, law without reason. The article suggests that an understanding of these historical questions allows us to rethink the relationship between gender and modernism.