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This chapter focuses on Mina Loy, a writer enmeshed in the avant-garde conversation about abstraction and invested in identifying a purity of form in the work of those she admires. Responding to her contemporaries, friends, and lovers, Loy lauds recognizably mainstream aspects of abstract form—the particulate core, the fundamental element, the essential shape—in the service of surprising ends, most notably an emphasis on the body and emotional intimacy. Thus, poems such as the autobiographical Songs to Joannes (1917) and the ekphrastic “Brancusi's Golden Bird” (1922), among several others, encourage one to reframe the interarts notion of pure form as something other than entirely sterile, since Loy's work consistently demonstrates how abstraction can coincide with affect and sexuality. Loy asks one to revel in the erotics of formal purity found in the denuded body and self, text and art object; her protean forms are always on the verge of merging with other forms or generating new forms. Loy's ardent futurity accordingly represents a strain of maximalist abstraction that counters the colder modernism of F. T. Marinetti, Ezra Pound, and others.

“Jekyll and Hyde” is a phrase known to many, though few have read the short novella published in 1886. It is far more likely that people have encountered the phrase during conversation or in one of its numerous adaptations. In fact, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson is the most adapted story of all time, even exceeding such texts as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Rose 1996). The idiom “Jekyll and Hyde” usually refers to someone or something that manifests its opposite tendency in different contexts. Colloquially, it does not always carry an explicit chemical connotation. But, in the more than 100 stage, movie, television, and cartoon adaptations (for a continually updated list, see Dury 2006), Jekyll is nearly always transformed into Hyde after ingesting or injecting a chemical formula of his own manufacture. For this reason, it is the single most important example of chemical self-experimentation in the movies. Nearly all of the dramatic Jekyll and Hyde adaptations have important scenes in which the mirror is used as a research tool. After Jekyll transforms into Hyde for the first time, he determines that the experiment was a success by looking into a mirror. He sees the monstrous Hyde in the reflection and knows that he, Jekyll, no longer looks like himself. It is very likely he no longer even feels viscerally like himself. The transformation scene, preceding the mirror scene, often shows Jekyll painfully grimacing, shaking, or groaning. The mirror scene is the point of full realization. We can conclude that Jekyll’s mind, though now contained in the persona of Hyde for the first time, is still able to internalize this realization with a scientist’s thinking process. As the story progresses, however, Hyde becomes increasingly more powerful and uses the mirror for self-satisfied confirmation that he has trumped Jekyll yet again. The mirror is the axis on which the status of the Jekyll and Hyde character flips. The mirror scene initiates an understanding that Jekyll and Hyde function as a paired unit.