Beatrice Hastings, as Alice Morning, contributes another installment of "Impressions of Paris," and as usual, it is the most interesting piece in this particular issue of The New Age. She dips into the surrealist mode that she used in stories between 1910-13, and which appears only occasionally in "Impressions." I think she's describing the struggles of having a maidservant (remember, Hastings wrote a column on how to live without servants a while back), but she figures her servant as a "patent doll that boils your tea-kettle" (611). It's not Hastings' finest moment, but it gives her space to pivot and reflect on the war and feminism, an intriguing glimpse into the past: " Do not expect any thoughts from me. I am become simply a suffering receptacle of the horrid comedy of things. The battle of a mechanised, over-feminised world against itself leaves me without any other excuse for existence." War, mechanized and over-feminized? One, but not the other, has become a cliche. I believe that for Hastings, feminized is equivalent to emotional, and the nominal manliness of the emotion doesn't exonerate it from being feminine, as opposed to intellectual. It's an old and invalid train of thought, and I wonder what her career would have been like if she had managed to avoid it.
She then pauses to look back at the suffrage movement, seemingly nostalgically:
"Only to think how, two or three years ago, nothing had a banner to its name save the Rights of Women, and now we are thankful to be out of reach of violation and slaughter ! Just when we were on the Point of leading men to Glory, getting the vote and putting everything right- just there and then they went frantic and spoiled it all. And they may very well stay frantic for another thirty years, settling what’s what and who’s who among themselves, while the real question as to who shall decide about vaccinating little Johnnie is left without a man behind it! And here is a case of one of those curious, bungling, partial conditions of Nature: it needs a man even to decide who shall decide. If Papa decide that Mamma shall decide, Mamma will decide; but if Papa decide to decide, Papa will decide."
The men have brushed aside the struggle for women's rights, which has revealed the unshakable patriarchy controlling the system. Hastings, who has been a collaborator with the patriarchy for years now, seems yet to see the tragedy of this system.
Turning abruptly to the lighthearted (and mean-spirited), TNA satirizes The Egoist's announcement of Pound's College of the Arts from last November's Egoist. In a similar announcement, it is dubbed "The College of Tea-hearts," where one can get instruction from Mr. Pound-Cake in the Cake Atelier, among other confectionery's delights. Check it at page 619.
Similarly, intellectual woman artists get satirized in "The Confessions of a Solitary Traveler," nominally by Anastasia Edwardes. It's probably a satire of someone in particular--but who, I'm not sure. She goes to the beach with Dostoyevsky and Hume, but ends up getting seduced by a man who buys her candy. The form, content, and boots lead me to guess that the author is actually Beatrice Hastings.
Quick Notes:
The issue has several anti-American articles. Not allies yet.
"Letters to a Trade Unionist" describes how clerks have shifted their alliance from the management to the proletariat and the unions.
Sol Davis's "The Mad City" is a transparent allegory of the war in Europe, told as a brawl between neighbors. Not that great
"Readers and Writers" complains of a press boycott, accusing the London publishers, except Macmillan, of ceasing to send him books to review. He also praises The Yale Review as the best magazine America has produced.
Llewelyn Powys contributes a story set in British East Africa, titled "Rubbish," about the tragedies of Africans under British colonialism. The story doesn't escape its own racism and sentimentality, but it fits into the genre of abolitionist writing turned to the colonial situation.
Lastly, I noticed a strange letter under the pseudonym "Ignotus Quondam" on why England might be better off losing the war. This is pretty radical, for the time and place.
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