Hard women, hard modernism: Gendering modernist difficulty

This dissertation approaches a paradoxical grouping of women modernists—H.D., Mina Loy, Laura Riding, and Gertrude Stein—through their antipathy toward literary community and gendered representation, both of which were key features of traditional modernist canon formation. I argue that foundational works of twentieth-century modernist poetry encode a universalizing literary masculinity grounded in the metaphors of hard and soft, for which Ezra Pound\u27s “The Hard and the Soft in French Poetry” (1919) sets the tone. Modernism\u27s canonically entrenched masculinity—best embodied by Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Lewis, the “Men of 1914”—presupposes a profound ambivalence toward femininity that mythologizes woman-as-muse while repudiating feminized language as antipathetic to modernist aesthetics. This masculinist ideology posed formidable obstacles for women modernists trying to “make it new” within a modernism that defined itself as doubly hard (difficult and masculine) against the feminine soft. Whereas the women writing in this lineage might have countered modernist hardness by galvanizing around a shared model of femininity (the soft), or reclaiming feminine difference as a universalizing ethos, they did not. I argue instead that their work—though it reflects the idiosyncrasies of modernist innovation and embraces an ethics of rupture integral to the avant-garde—rejects femininity as a centering aesthetic and mobilizes gender as a personal, ego-centered construct. H.D., Loy, Riding, and Stein struggle to theorize Woman in discrete, irreconcilable ways (all of which unsettle modernist orthodoxies), but their work refuses to uphold a collective experience of femininity. An uncomfortable but necessary grouping, these women embody an anti-communitarian feminism that destabilizes the hard/soft dynamic and allows us to re-historicize modernism by freeing modernist praxis from the burden of gendered representation. Positing this genealogy of women modernists, for whom collectivity imperils aesthetic innovation, this dissertation documents how each in her way works to deconstruct the stable gender categories that frame difficult modernism