Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Very Clever Woman in Vanity Fair

Edna St. Vincent Millay was a magazine celebrity in the 1920s. Vanity Fair trumpeted her poetic skill and her loveliness in its presentation of her poetry and biography. The October 1921 issue cast Millay both as an artist of sentiment, the traditional nineteenth-century province of feminine influence, and a representative modern girl: "The Most Poignant Lyricist of the Modern Generation."¹ As Sandra Gilbert observes, Millay mocked her own reputation for romanticism.² She addresses her celebrity in a November 1922 column signed with her nom de plume Nancy Boyd: "the girl sitting at the next table was Edna St. Vincent Millay . . . eating an enormous plate of sauerkraut and sausages . . . Such a shock. I had always imagined her so ethereal."³ Though many may have "imagined her ethereal," the public image of Millay as a modern girl with unabashed appetites and ironic self-appraisal was also central to her literary reputation. Her 1922 volume of light verse, A Few Figs From Thistles, included poems that would number among her most quoted and anthologized, including "First Fig," "Recuerdo," and "I think I should have loved you presently."

Her epigrammatic style and personal focus in these verses represented a departure from the high seriousness and cosmic concerns of a poem like "Renascence," which marked her entrance into the national literary scene through a contest run by St. Nicholas magazine. Her adult engagement with midtown magazine culture as represented by Vanity Fair—the quipping style this magazine encouraged and the gendered types it employed to market a sophisticated lifestyle—explains in part her development of this comic aesthetic. Further, her periodical work provides an ironic commentary on the gender tensions found within intellectual and print culture in New York in the 1920s.

In Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York's Literary Women, Nina Miller explores Millay's self-conscious manipulation of her celebrity as a representative Greenwich Village bohemian, and she helpfully suggests some of the ways in which Millay's poetry addresses Village vogues like the Free Love movement and the economic concerns of would-be political radicals. As Miller puts it, "Millay stood for more than lyricism and sentiment; she represented New Womanhood and the assertive female sexuality that gave focus to the culture's diffuse ambivalence about contemporary social change."⁴ Millay not only stood in for the penurious and promiscuous bohemian lifestyles of the Village; she also provided a mouthpiece for the cosmetics-wearing and cocktail-toting sophisticates of midtown even as she mocked the superficiality of their concerns. Millay engages this middlebrow modernism using the personae of women who complement their sexual prowess with social poise and sardonic sensibilities, fitting into their fashionable context while criticizing it. By thus indirectly commenting on the periodical medium, Millay expresses concerns about magazine discourses that contain or minimize intelligence and humor in and by women.

The urban "smart" magazine was a type of periodical that enjoyed unparalleled success in the first four decades of the twentieth century, as George H. Douglas argues in his history of the genre.⁵ According to Douglas, these magazines were characterized by an appeal to "sophisticated urbanites, for the kind of person who was well traveled, well read, well acquainted."⁶ The reserve, irony, and social savvy of the sophisticated urban perspective was often established at the expense of the unsubtle flapper, caricatured both for her intellectual limitations and her flirtatious manipulations.

Millay published a parable in Vanity Fair in July of 1922 about male reluctance to share the stance of cynical superiority with women. She recasts the tale of Diogenes the Cynic, and the tub he inhabited to pursue an ascetic life. Millay introduces into this confined space "the woman," whose presence Diogenes finds intolerable. This parable is suggestive of the interrelation among the gender dynamics of Vanity Fair, publication, and professionalism. After all, this story describes a newly and uncomfortably shared space, perhaps an image for the magazine itself, that prizes "cynicism," a pose of superiority and irony. In an unusual move, Millay signs this story with her own name. She...