Francesca Brooks Jessie Dismorr Walking And Rewriting London

Jessie Dismorr:

Walking and Rewriting
London

Kate Lechmere, a former
lover of Wyndham Lewis, famously described Jessie
Dismorr and fellow female Vorticist, Helen Saunders,
as two ‘little lapdogs who wanted to be [Wyndham] Lewis’s slaves and do everything for him.’ ¹
In writing this article I want to overwrite this
narrative of insignificance and marginalisation with a
more powerful and suggestive one: while the unnamed
narrator of Jessie Dismorr’s ‘June Night’ (Blast!
War Number 1915) begins by waiting compliantly
with ‘happiness and amiability tucked up in [her] bosom like two darling lap-dogs’ (in a possible
retaliation to Lechmere’s dismissive comments) she
soon rebels against her male chaperone, escaping from
the ‘unmannerly throbbing vehicle’ of the omnibus to
wander in the ‘mews and by-ways’ alone, no longer
happy or amiable or a slave. In reading the radical
prose vortices which Dismorr contributed to the Blast!
War Number for all of their richness I will
argue that Dismorr’s position as a Vorticist, a writer
and a modernist, deserves greater critical
recognition.

Dismorr’s notoriety
rests upon her status as an artist working within the
modernist movement known as Vorticism: a ‘genuine
avant-garde movement having its own identifiable form
of geometric abstraction and its own vibrant and
aggressive magazine, Blast.’ ² 
Dismorr
was a signatory of the Blast Manifesto in
1914, she contributed a selection of paintings, poems
and ‘vortices’ to the 1915 War Number and
exhibited with the Vorticists until their final
exhibition as Group X in 1920. ³  As a
female artist within a movement which Wyndham Lewis
later claimed ‘was what I, personally, did, and said,
at a certain period,’ it is unsurprising that Dismorr
has been marginalised and largely invisible within
histories of modernism. ⁴  While
extensive work has been done to provide a study of
Dismorr as an artist, this article will explore the
particular significance of Dismorr’s prose writings in
Blast and their relation to the feminist and
metropolitan cultures of her day. ⁵
Despite the limited body of her writing, with literary
contributions to the modernist magazines Blast (1914-1915),
The Little Review (1918-1919), The Tyro
(1922),and The London Mercury (1935),
Dismorr’s continued involvement in radical avant-garde
movements is testament to her social and cultural
commitment to, and engagement with, her historical
moment.

My focus will be on the
two prose vortices Dismorr contributed to Blast, 
‘London Notes’ (p.66) and ‘June Night’ (pp.67-68), and
their relationship to the city of London. ‘London
Notes’ presents us with a series of abstractly
sketched descriptions of locations in the city, taking
us from Park Lane to Fleet Street via the British
Museum. The prose vignette, ‘June Night’, begins with
the female narrator being picked up by a man named
Rodengo: in the company of her ‘chaperone’ she heads
out into the city on the No.43 bus, but the narrator
soon gets bored of the Romanticism of her companion
and escapes from the vehicle, and Rodengo, to wander
the unfamiliar streets and neighbourhoods of London
alone. Both involve a drift across the city: the one
disembodied, the other embodied in a female narrator.
In order to present the former as a mapping of a
patriarchal city, and the latter as a feminist
rewriting of this city through walking, I will make
comparisons with the London Virginia Woolf maps in The
London Scene (1931-32) and A Room of One’s
Own (1928). Although this writing is
separated by more than a decade and the First World
War, Dismorr (1885-1939) and Woolf (1882-1941) lived
in the same metropolitan context and may even have
moved within some of the same creative circles. As
female artists in London, financed by private incomes,
and moving within predominantly male circles, Woolf
and Dismorr write from comparable contextual
perspectives.

___________________________________________________________________________

Full Images of
‘Monologue’, ‘London Notes’, and ‘June Night’ appear
at the end of this essay.

Mapping
the Patriarchal City

In Richard Cork’s major summary of Vorticism he
described Dismorr’s ‘naivety’, writing that it would
be easy to dismiss her work as a ‘second-rate pastiche
of other artist’s ideas’. ⁶ By looking
closely at how Woolf chooses to present an
overwhelmingly masculine vision of London in order to
expose gender prejudices, I will show that Dismorr is
acutely aware of the masculine bias of Vorticism:
rather than merely imitating, Dismorr appropriates and
manipulates Vorticist forms in order to construct her
own feminist vision of the city. 

In ‘Reconceptualizing
Vorticism’ Deborah Cherry and Jane Beckett note that
after 1900 there were a number of social inquiries,
guidebooks and route maps produced about London (C.
Booth 1889-1903, W. Besant 1899, C.F.G Masterman 1903,
G.R Sims 1909); evidence of the effect grand town
plans, such as George-Eugène Haussmann’s redesigned
Paris, had on more localised social interest. Francine
Prose introduces Virginia Woolf’s six essays in The
London Scene, originally written for Good
Housekeeping (1931-1932), by describing them
as ‘a practical Baedeker to the city’. ⁷
However, they form a guidebook with a very considered
purpose and an underlying polemic. Directed at Good
Housekeeping’s largely female audience, Woolf
reveals a city demarcated by gender and class. Woolf’s
essays move through spaces of industry, commerce,
religion and politics, to present us with an
overwhelming sense of masculine authority and female
exclusion. Moving from ‘The Docks of London’ to
‘Abbeys and Cathedrals’, ‘the House of Commons’ and
eventually to ‘Great Men’s Houses,’ Woolf’s essay
titles and subjects demonstrate that the city is
overwhelmingly the province of men. It is men who are
commemorated by the Church, our political system and
as literary heroes, and it is men who are represented
in the vast powers of industry and the commerce of the
‘Oxford Street Tide’.  There is a complete
absence of women of power in the city; the traditions
of privileged patriarchy are perpetuated in the city’s
public and private spaces.

Similarly, in ‘London
Notes’, Dismorr produces a chorographical map of the
city which becomes her own guidebook and social
critique of London. Each section is headed, like a
map, by a familiar location but the prosaic fragment
which underlies it goes beyond superficial details and
begins to expose the power structures and biases which
are at work in the brickwork and monumentality of the
city. Dismorr’s surreal and abstract fragments in
‘London Notes’ also map-out male control of public
city spaces, her prosaic headings mirroring many of
Woolf’s essay titles: as Dismorr moves from one of the
most expensive addresses in London, ‘PARK LANE’, to
the haven of scholarship and academia that is ‘THE
BRITISH MUSEUM’ and finally finishes with addresses of
commerce and industry, ‘PICCADILLY CIRCUS’ and ‘FLEET
STREET’, we can read a comparable vision of
patriarchal exclusivity in Woolf and Dismorr’s
writings. 

The monuments which
Woolf focuses upon in The London Scene are
also literary and show her trying to find reflections
of her own identity in civic spaces. In Westminster
Abbey we move from the tombs of Gladstone and
Disraeli, to Chaucer, Spencer and Dryden: ‘Here are
the dead poets, still musing, still pondering, still
questioning the meaning of existence.’ ⁸
A personal city is also being mapped in ‘London Notes’
and the narrative of ‘June Night’. Dismorr’s ‘Notes’
are interested in the city as a creative space endowed
with a literary history comparably weighted towards
men. ‘PARK LANE’ is a street celebrated by Victorian
male novelists such as Thackeray and Trollope. ⁹
The legacy of ‘FLEET STREET’ as a space of publishing
houses is echoed in Dismorr’s description of ‘Precious
slips of houses, packed like books on a shelf’ which
‘are littered all over with signs and letters’. The
street itself has become a text, one which literary
canons suggest is written by men.  Dismorr’s
‘Notes’ are also gesturing towards her claims to
literary heritage as a woman; her writing registers a
consciousness of the encroachment she is making upon a
male economy. 

The most significant
location which Dismorr explores is that of the
‘BRITISH MUSEUM’.  In A Room of One’s Own
Woolf visits the Reading Room of the British Museum in
order to research the history of women’s literature,
but finds a history written exclusively by men. ¹⁰
The Reading Room, as a metaphor for the Academy, is a
space dominated by men in its textual content and in
its body of visitors: ‘there one stood under the vast
dome, as if one were a thought in the huge bald
forehead which is so splendidly encircled by a band of
famous names.’ ¹¹ The huge
bald forehead personifies the Reading Room as an old,
authoritarian male and suggests its out-dated
prejudices. Woolf becomes a ‘single but harassed
thought’ as she reads, disillusioned with her sense of
increasing exclusion and alienation. ¹²
Woolf’s summation of her experience in the Reading
Room is that it is ‘distressing’, ‘bewildering’ and
‘humiliating’; a hostile environment for a woman and
writer. ¹³



Woolf’s feminist use of the anecdote of the Reading
Room to expose female exclusion from intellectual
spheres draws out the hostility in Dismorr’s own
penetration into this space.  ‘THE BRITISH
MUSEUM’ is the only interior space Dismorr explores in
‘London Notes.’ Dismorr’s progressive movement through
the public space of the ‘EGYPTIAN GALLERY’ to the more
private and privileged space of the ‘READING ROOM’,
reflects the greater intellectual access opening up to
women. Heathcock’s research highlights that it was not
easy for women to gain access to the Reading Room and
an application process was necessary. Dismorr applied
to the British Museum Library at the age of 21, which
was the minimum age of application, and she made her
first visit on the 13th March 1906 and renewed her six
monthly ticket frequently up to 1925. ¹⁴
The ‘Notes’ reflect Dismorr’s personal development as
an artist and her own negotiation of access to these
exclusive and predominantly male spaces. 



Like Woolf, Dismorr comments on the ‘foreheads’ of
intellectualism: ‘The colossal globe of achievement
presses upon two-hundred cosmopolitan foreheads,
respectfully inclined.’ There is an intimidating
grandeur in this interior space which is typically the
domain of the male academic. The ‘achievement’ which
‘presses’ upon Dismorr becomes an oppressive male
force, reminding her of her transgression into what
has previously been deemed an exclusively male space.
Dismorr’s inclusion of this landmark is an assertion
of the access she has gained as an academic and an
artist. However the Reading Room is still only a
research space. Women have a new access to the city
and its creative places but Dismorr must move from the
disembodied observation of this to the personal
narratorial voice of ‘June Night’ to actively use the
freedom she has forged for herself.

Male Monumentality

The London Woolf writes is marked by
masculine symbols of power which reinforce male
demarcations of space. In A Room of One’s Own
Woolf walks her thoughts about women writers through
the city and this walking and thinking is punctuated
by male monuments, the city is dedicated to, and
dominated by, this male assertion of power. A
reflection upon the ‘imperial glory’ of the Admiralty
Arch leads Woolf to look more critically at what these
monuments represent: ‘the lack of civilization, I
thought, looking at the statue of the Duke of
Cambridge […] with a fixity that they have scarcely
ever received before.’ ¹⁵ Woolf’s
‘fixity’ upon this statue is particularly significant
as it rewrites the male gaze of Peter Walsh in her
fictional Mrs Dalloway:

Striding,
staring, he glared at the statue of the Duke of
Cambridge.  […] Still the future of
civilisation lies, he  thought, in the hands
of young men like that; of young men such as he
was, thirty years ago. ¹⁶

While Peter reads
civilisation into this statue, Woolf perceives the
lack of it. As Peter moves on, his walk and his
thoughts are punctuated by other statues, Nelson,
Gordon, Havelock; this monumental city is adapted to
his thinking and reveals everywhere reflections of
himself and his ideals. In fixing her attention upon
these male monuments Woolf exposes a London which is
adapted to the vision of men and suggests that
perception and the gaze are gendered, giving her the
power to present alternative readings of the city.

____________________________ Jacob Epstein: Rock Drill (1913)

______________________________ Jacob Epstein: Venus (c. 1914-1915)

In Rock Drill
(1913) and Venus (c.1914-1915) the
Vorticist, Jacob Epstein, presents us with his
antithetical vision of modern man – part human, part
inimitable machine, and the archetypal woman – slumped
and hunched in a passive pose. In ‘Monologue’ (p.65),
a poem which precedes ‘London Notes ’in the Blast
War Number, Dismorr plays with these visions of
the masculine and the feminine Vorticist. The female
body in ‘Monologue’ is subjected to the ‘new
machinery’ of Rock Drill: the poem’s subject
becomes automated, mechanic, with ‘arrogant spiked
tresses’ and ‘chains of muscles’, yet she also
struggles with the corporeal apathy of Venus
as she lies a ‘slack bag of skin’; the two corporeal
identities (slack skin and chain muscle) are seemingly
at impossible odds with each other. ‘Monologue’ is
evidence of Dismorr’s negotiation of the gender
archetypes implicit in Vorticism’s aesthetics and her
struggle with their aggressively binary nature. 
In ‘London Notes’ Dismorr’s vision of the monumental
city also addresses this binarism to expose a London
adapted to masculine aesthetics and ideals.

In the ‘Notes’ Dismorr
plunders the possibilities offered by the lines and
forms of Vorticism to present the streets, buildings
and monuments of London as abstract line
drawings.  In fragments and shards organised by
location, the prose is arranged in collections of
lines which are as volatile and aggressive as a
Vorticist painting; she creates a highly stylised and
radical prose which reflects the aesthetics of her
movement. The ‘Notes’ seek out the angular, abstract
lines of Vorticism in the built environment: the
classical exterior of the British Museum becomes,
‘Ranks of black columns of immense weight and
immobility […] threaded by a stream of angular
volatile shapes.’ The clipped sentences and the forms
sketched out, fit with the Vorticist aesthetic and yet
the feminine entity which shares this space registers
an uneasiness. The ‘Notes’ begin in ‘PARK LANE’ where,
‘Long necked feminine structures support almost
without grimacing the elegant discomfort of restricted
elbows’. The uneasiness here is evident in the
anthropomorphic corporeality of these monuments which
is at odds with the regular, machinated, and inanimate
lines of Vorticism.  This isn’t merely
assimilation and imitation: the ‘feminine structures’
become a reading of the ‘restricted’ woman within the
city and her refusal, or her inability, to adapt her
body to the new aesthetic. The juxtaposition of the
feminine and the Vorticist is a means for Dismorr to
make visible the masculine biases inherent in the
movement.

In ‘HYDE PARK,’
‘Commonplace, titanic figures with a splendid motion
stride across the parched plateau of grass,’ and
‘highly-bred men and horses pass swiftly in useless
delightful motion’ in poses of confidence and
statuesque assurance, while the women simply ‘sit
sewing and knitting, their monotonous occupation
accompanying the agreeable muddle of their thoughts.’
The feminine continually fails to fit into abstract
patterns of lines and shapes; it stands out for its
difference in this monumental vision of the city.
Described in mundane or non-abstract terms Dismorr
also ironically points to the way in which women are
marginalised or trivialised in society. Despite the
overall Vorticist aesthetic in ‘London Notes’ the
troublesome feminine entity suggests that Dismorr is
simultaneously calling this aesthetic into question
and fighting to give her own feminist reading of the
city visibility beyond those ‘perspective lines,
withdrawing, converging’ and beyond ‘the limits of
sight.’

Un-mapping:
The Dèrive

Criticism on women writers walking the
streets of the modernist city continually focuses upon
the Parisian flâneur and Walter Benjamin’s theorising
of the city as a model. In their studies of women
writing about walking in the early half of the
twentieth century, Janet Wolff, Rachel Bowlby, and
Elizabeth Wilson use this context to establish a genre
of feminist literature. ¹⁷  
However it continually leads them to the conclusion
that the female ‘flâneuse’ is ‘rendered impossible by
the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century’. ¹⁸
If this criticism is a walk, as Bowlby suggests, then
it moves in a circle. The literature of these women is
made ‘invisible’ by its inclusion within a
gender-exclusive discourse. For Dismorr, the walk is
more than just ‘flânerie’ and the detached observation
of society from the streets: through diversions into
unplanned routes the walk has the power to affect a
re-mapping of gendered city-space, diverging from
masculine routes to claim new female spaces.

Writing for the Situationist International,
Guy Debord explained the theory of the ‘dérive’ (1956)
as a ‘mode of experimental behaviour’:

In a dérive one or more
persons during a certain period drop their relations,
their work and leisure activities, and all their other
usual motives for movement and action, and let
themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain
and the encounters they find there, ¹⁹



As Debord explains, the dérive makes ‘progress’
possible by ‘breaking through fields where chance
holds sway, by creating new conditions more favorable
to our purposes.’ ²⁰ The dérive
recognises that cities are ‘rich centers of
possibilities and meanings’ with data that can be read
and repurposed; by enacting a kind of Vorticist
dérive, Dismorr is able to repurpose the data of the
modernist city for her female narrator, offering her a
liberating ‘interlude of high love making.’ ²¹
The walk is a means of enacting emancipatory, as well
as physical, progress through city spaces. Although at
the beginning of ‘June Night’ the narrator is only
able to watch the city passively in the company of her
chaperone through the windows of the bus – her
‘desires loiter about the silent spaces’ from a
distance – in the second half of the narrative her
desires physically inhabit and engage with the city
space as Dismorr’s narrator breaks from the planned
route to make her own dérive.

The narrator’s journey
in ‘June Night’ is initiated by the mediation of man
and machine. Rodengo is the chaperone who frees the
narrator from her ‘little dark villa’ which has become
claustrophobic. While she waits for him, ‘with
happiness and amiability tucked up in my bosom like
two darling lap-dogs,’ she is a subservient woman
waiting to be a ‘lap-dog’ to a man.  But the
narrator’s eventual rejection of this man and the
assertion of her independence becomes a powerful act
of rebellion. The narrator explains with irony and a
new rhetorical power: ‘Rodengo, you have a magnificent
tenor voice, but you bore me. Your crime is that I can
no longer distinguish you from the rest of the world.’
This rebellion is only made possible through the
dérive and its un-mapping of the male city.

___________________________ Above: Maurice Delondre, ‘On the Omnibus’, 1880 Right:  Traffic around the statue of Eros in  Piccadilly Circus, London 1910 (via Tate Museum) Photo © Getty Images

 

Rodengo and the narrator
begin by getting on the omnibus, a symbol of modernity
and social mobility:

    
No 43 bus; its advertisements all lit from within,
floats towards us like a luminous balloon. We cling
to it and climb to the top.   
Towards the red glare of the illuminated city we
race through interminable suburbs.

From ‘suburb’ to
‘city,’ Dismorr’s narrator gains greater visibility
and is taken from the female domestic space of her
home towards the male-dominated mercantile centre.
Heathcock notes the significance of the seat at the
top of bus, ‘which still carried connotations from the
late nineteenth century and was viewed as
characteristic of an “advanced” woman’. ²²
Dismorr’s narrator climbs to the top where she can
view the city and be visible within it.  The bus
which ‘floats towards us like a luminous balloon’ is
representative of the rise of the woman, whose ascent
is facilitated by this symbol of modernity. The
movement to this prime position is not easy; Dismorr’s
narrator must ‘cling to’ the bus, and the vehicle is
volatile, like the social and public position of
women.

However Dismorr’s
narrator soon comes to reject the bus too, dismissing
it as an ‘unmannerly throbbing vehicle.’ While the bus
offers women movement through city spaces it is still
a mediator between body and street. The narrator
becomes increasingly frustrated with her position of
obscurity within the crowds and the bus’ control over
her trajectory:

Now we stop every
moment, the little red staircase is besieged. The
bus is really too top-heavy. It must look like a
great nodding bouquet, made up of absurd flowers and
moths and birds with sharp beaks. I want to escape;
but Rodengo is lazy and will not stop warbling his
infuriating lovesongs. Ribbons of silver fire start
into the air, and twist themselves into enormous
bows with fringes of tiny dropping stars. Everybody
stands up and screams. These people are curious, but
not very interesting; they lack reticence.

The gorgeousness of the
language here, of metaphor and simile, registers the
narrator’s growing frustration with the hyperbole and
sensory overload the bus. Everything here seems
synthetic, surreal and overly decadent, the narrator
admits that the experience makes her ‘too emotional:’
it is ‘cool normality and classicalism’ which tempt
her, and ‘spacious streets of pale houses.’ When the
narrator escapes from the bus she finally becomes an
active protagonist in the city-spaces she longed to
inhabit from the bus windows. Indulging in her civic
desires and defiantly making herself visible within
these spaces she is now ‘half-sordid, half-fantastic;’
aware of the implications of her transgression but
also empowered by it. 

Dismorr’s narrator’s
dérive is an act of protest against the restrictions
on women in public spaces, it concludes with the
narrator’s assertion that she now makes her own way
through the city:

     
Rodengo, you have long disappeared: but I think of
your charm without regret. I have lost my taste for
your period. The homeward-going busses are now
thronged. Should I see you, I shall acknowledge you
with affection. But I am not returning that way.

She rejects the route
proscribed for her by her former guide and no longer
feels the need to be led by a chaperone. However when
the ‘refuge’ Dismorr’s narrator finds in ‘mews and
by-ways’ transforms her, an ambivalence is evident:
‘Creeping through them I become temporarily disgraced,
an outcast, a shadow that clings to walls.’ Dismorr’s
character moves cautiously as though she is aware of
the danger which underlies her journey. The ‘shadow
which clings to walls’ recalls the prostitutes or
‘passantes’ of flânerie and the Surrealist narrative
of pursuit. ²³ In the street she is in
danger of being captured by the male gaze. As a
‘stray’ and an ‘outcast’, the walk registers a brave
transgression: whilst offering freedom, it also
destabilises the comfortable position the narrator
occupied as a woman of class. As Dismorr asserts: ‘At
least here I breathe my own breath;’ the freedom
negotiated for women is not absolute but it does offer
a progressive movement forward. Dismorr’s narrator can
only be ‘temporarily’ disgraced; eventually she ‘must’
go ‘back to the life of the thoroughfares to which’
she belongs.  While the journey made her an
‘outcast’ her return is to a definite sense of
‘belonging:’ ‘I must get back to the thoroughfares to
which I belong’ she tells us. For all the rebellion of
her dérive ultimately this freedom is only, as Dismorr
describes it, ‘an interlude of high love making’: a
momentary fantasy.

While the emancipation
the dérive of ‘June Night’ offers women may be
momentary rather than absolute, by changing her
narrator’s course and allowing her to wander into
unplanned diversions and empty streets, Dismorr is
able to re-write the patriarchal city she mapped out
in ‘London Notes’.  If ‘London Notes’ presented
us with a patriarchal map of the city mediated by the
aesthetics of Vorticism, then ‘June Night’ navigates
an alternative map of competing aesthetics and
artistic movements, to show the writer’s personal
progression through the city’s rich cultural
offerings. Dismorr grew up in Hampstead and North West
London (c.1897-1910) where the journey on the No.43
bus begins and the city she is mapping here is
inevitably tied to personal memory and experience. An
ulterior narrative of progression also lies beneath
the surface of ‘June Night’; an aesthetic walk which
is mimetic of Dismorr’s own development as an artist
within the creative space of the city and its new
avant-garde movements.

Rodengo has a multiplication of aesthetic identities
as a Romantic, the ‘old poetry’ of Germany and a Latin
Futurist. The narrator begins by expressing an ‘ardent
admiration’ for all that Rodengo represents,
suggesting that he is an ‘indispensable adjunct of the
scenery.’ Yet as the narrator’s sense of independence
grows throughout the vignette, Dismorr challenges the
clichés of romanticism and our aesthetic expectations;
the narrative voice steadily becomes more and more
disillusioned by her chaperone’s Romantic affectations
and his ‘infuriating lovesongs.’ By the end of ‘June
Night’ she reflects that she has ‘lost’ her ‘taste’
for Rodengo’s ‘period,’ she breaks free from him to
make her dérive into new aesthetic territories:

Surely I have had
enough of romantics!  their temperature is
always above 98 ½ , and the accelerated pulse throbs
in their touch.  Cool normality and
classicalism tempt me, and spacious streets of pale
houses. At the next arret I leave you my friends, I
leave you Rodengo with the rose in your ear. I
escape from the unmannerly throbbing vehicle.

The passion of the
romantics is hyperbolised as she moves from personal
passion and emotion to aesthetic rationality. Out in
the open streets the narrator is finally able to think
for herself and to explore the aesthetic and artistic
terrains which appeal to her personal desires.

The turn of the century
witnessed what Lynne Walker has described as an
‘intense interest in town-planning’. ²⁴
The advent of the Machine Age caused an increase in
traffic and populace which had overwhelmed cities: new
civic plans recognised that they needed to be
restructured to reflect the adaptations taking place
in modern life. Vorticism, which had ‘sprung up in the
centre of this town’ of London, proclaimed in the
first pages of its ‘Manifesto’ an interest in the
development of modern cities. ²⁵ Blast
claims that the literature and art which it presents
are part of the creation of a London Vortex; the
re-conceptualisation and modernisation of the city
from which it was born. However women were excluded
from the developments being made to cities. While
female architects were involved with domestic and
small scale projects, they were not involved in the
design of large scale public buildings or the redesign
of cities. Dismorr’s participation in the movement of
Vorticism gives her a feminist access to city spaces;
while female architects cannot redesign London,
Dismorr is able to re-write it. 

The ‘squalor and
glitter’ of romanticism transforms in the process of
the dérive into a new architectural vision of the
city:

I wander in the
precincts of stately urban houses.  Moonlight
carves them in purity. The presence of these great
and rectangular personalities is a medicine. 
They are the children of colossal restraint, they
are the last word of prose. (Poetics, your day is
over!)  In admiring them I have put myself on
the side of all severities.  I seek the
profoundest teachings of the inanimate.  I feel
the emotion of related shapes.  Oh, discipline
of ordered pilasters and porticoes!  My
volatility rests upon you as a swimmer hangs upon a
rock.

Dismorr’s solid
sentences without internal punctuation ‘carve’ her
writing into ‘related shapes’ as though the sentences
themselves are an architectural re-construction of the
city she looks upon. The narrator proclaims ‘Poetics,
your day is over!’ In Dismorr’s only conventionally
prosaic piece, poetry is replaced by ‘the last word of
prose;’ the narrator’s rebellion against the poetics
of Romanticism is mimetic of Dismorr’s own literary
choices as she ‘carves’ her sentences in ‘purity’ and
explores a new prosaic and architectural form. As
Dismorr’s narrator is taught the lessons of the
‘inanimate’ she develops as an artist. Instead of
relating herself to abstract feelings and emotions,
the narrator relates herself to the architecture of
the space which she inhabits, projecting herself as a
part of the very fabric of the city. Her ‘volatility’
is intimately entwined with the ‘emotion’ and
‘discipline’ of the world she finds before her. At
this moment the city is completely open to Dismorr’s
rewriting: it is a city which belongs to her narrator
and which reflects, not a vision of patriarchal power
structures as it did in ‘London Notes’, but a mirror
image of our female narrator and the world as she
perceives it. Dismorr has succeeded in making her
chorographical map of ‘London Notes’ in to a personal
and physical space where a woman’s presence can no
longer be ignored or dismissed as merely
transgressive.

Conclusion

Lewis wrote that man is ‘in a sense
[…] the houses, the railings, the bunting or absence
of bunting. His beauty and justification is in a
superficial exterior life’. ²⁶ Dismorr’s
contributions to Blast, a magazine
distinctly of its cultural moment, show that women are
also a part of the city, having an impact on its
atmosphere and culture. While London offers
predominantly patriarchal trajectories, as women walk
or travel along prescribed and symbolic routes they
make progressive movements forward, opening out new
spaces of access. In Dismorr’s ‘June Night’ walking
becomes an exploration and a renegotiation of the
access available to women in the male city mapped in
‘London Notes’. The dérive of ‘June Night’ attempts to
break through fields of exclusion for greater access:
Dismorr’s written walk becomes a protest which exposes
the oppressive bias of the patriarchal city. Her
abstraction of monumental civic culture reduces its
symbolism to basic gender polarities. Once we have
only line and form it is possible to reconstruct the
city and its male foundations in a written
re-conceptualisation of London’s spaces.

Dismorr would continue
to experiment with abstraction in landscapes and
portraiture, exhibiting with the London Group
and the 7 + 5 Society throughout the
twenties and thirties. She also contributed
other poems and critical pieces to other modernist
magazines. Her work appears to become less radical and
Dismorr did not publish any more fictional prose
pieces but this only strengthens our sense of the
importance of ‘June Night’ as a protest within its
historical moment. Dismorr’s contributions to Blast
present us with a city that belongs to her experiences
and developments as a woman at a time when the
Suffragettes were staging radical protests, and as an
artist struggling to find an individual voice within a
masculine movement. As war began to eclipse the
importance of metropolitan art movements, The
Blast War Number made a statement about its
commitment to culture and experimentation: ‘This
puce-coloured cockleshell will, however, try and brave
the waves of blood, for the serious mission it has on
the other side of World-war’ (p.5). Dismorr’s
reconceptualization of London denies the war its
silencing of female protest; Dismorr fights alongside
Blast’s defence of art, but goes further, by
defending the creative freedom of the female artist.
Her radical architectural prose gives her a bold voice
within her contemporary context and above all within
studies of modernism.

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LONDON NOTES by Jessica Dismorr ________ from: Blast ( No. 2 ) (page 66) London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1915-07 via Modernist Journals Project ___________

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Above: JUNE NIGHT by Jessica Dismorr _____________________ from: Blast ( No. 2 ) (pages 67, 68) London: John Lane, the Bodley Head,  1915-07 via Modernist Journals Project

_______________

MONOLOGUE by Jessica Dismorr _____________________ from: Blast ( No. 2 ) (page 65) London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1915-07 via Modernist Journals Project ___________

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Footnotes