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The Gender of Form and British Modernism: Rebecca West’s Vorticism and Blast

In 1914, Mary Richardson, an artist and suffragette, walked into the British National Gallery, stood in front of the “Rokeby Venus” by Velázquez, withdrew an ax, and gave the painting seven strikes. It was the first of a dozen or so slashings to occur in the next year. For Richardson, this was a protest against the treatment of women in modern British culture. On one hand, several of the suffragettes under Emmeline Pankhurst had been on hunger strike due to continual police arrest; on the other, the Velázquez portrait had been recently purchased and lauded as a depiction of universal femininity. Richardson claimed that she had “tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas” (Willis). This action mirrored precisely the rhetoric of violence against museums that F.T. Marinetti had called for in his Futurist Manifesto of 1909. It would seem that Richardson had put Marinetti’s ideas into action and would therefore exemplify the burgeoning Futurist movement. The same suffrage movement that had placed women’s rights at the forefront of political action was also dovetailing with avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century that demanded aesthetic revolutions. The paradox is that among his points to destroy museums, Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto also declared its “scorn for women” (187). The brash and provocative statement made two claims: one against the staid traditions of the lyrical nineteenth century that were too florid and another against the actual women that were seeking the vote and insisting on, for Marinetti, a weak and feminine democracy. Nowhere was this collision of figural and actual women played out more extensively than in Britain, where the stages of advanced consumer capitalism and progressive feminist politics stood side by side with Britain’s own burgeoning avant-garde movement founded in dialogue with Futurism: Vorticism. In the opening salvos of the Vorticists’s manifesto in the magazine Blast (1914), Wyndham Lewis (sole author of the endorsed manifesto) states that Vorticism “will not appeal to any particular class, but to the fundamental and popular instincts in every class and description of people, TO THE INDIVIDUAL” (emphasis in the original). When one combines this concern about the individual with the polemics against the suffrage movement later found in Blast, one finds a familiar paradigm of Modernism that nonetheless reveals profound intricacies and paradoxes. The