Hysterical Virgins and Little Magazines:

Abstract

The decisions Marianne Moore made when editor at The Dial magazine between 1925 and 1929 are often interpreted as evidence of a fussy or even “hysterical” antipathy to obscenity. This article questions the gendered assumptions embedded in the critical history of Moore's editorial role at The Dial by comparing her encounters with Hart Crane and James Joyce to the less well-known cases of Mary Butts, and D. H. Lawrence. It argues that the “downstream work” of editors needs to be recovered and understood in relation to the material constraints of periodical publication.

A Peculiar Kind of Particularity: Plants and Animals in Marianne Moore’s Early Poetry

“…48 Echoing Wyndham Lewis' 1918 declaration that the 'jellyish [sic] attributes' of women writers contributed to the 'disappear[ance]' of sex in modernist literature, 49 Hart Crane famously described Moore as a 'hysterical virgin' whose strong 'grip' on the literary 'market' made it difficult to publish anything with sexually explicit content. 50 While Crane was certainly unaware of the link between jelly-fish and 'hysterical virgins' when he made this complaint to Allen Tate in 1927, remarks like this have contributed to what Benjamin Kahan has identified as the 'stigmatized model of celibacy' that has dominated Moore studies for nearly a century. 51 To cite just one example, Sandra Gilbert wrote that Moore has the 'genius of an amoeba'-'an entirely self-sufficient, apparently asexual creature'-thereby reinforcing Lewis' idea that 'a woman [is] a lower form of life', too 'mesmeric' to process sensory stimuli and too 'flaccid' to publish sexual material.…”