Quiet Mountain Essays
Copyright © 2010
H. D.'s "Palimpsest": A Feminist Historiography of Dissent*
by
Maitrayee Roychoudhury
Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out
under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers
of light, the fields of dark—
freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. Putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. From all the lost collections. (Rich, “For Memory” 38-43)
It is not only an act of re-membering that H. D. engages in; she also re-visions and reconfigures
inherited and living traditions to formulate a unique though troubled feminist aesthetic that inscribes
both dissent and desire.
The idea of the palimpsest, of an over-written text, was dear to H. D., one that she inherited from the
radical Victorian poets, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Michael Field). These two revolutionary
women first appropriated Sappho and brought her within the ambit of lesbian desire. Their early
verse, with its unique blend of pagan energies and crisp, stark images, prefigured the Imagist
movement. Their fusing the lyric form with Sapphic/lesbian themes provided later women poets like
H. D. and Amy Lowell with the vocabulary to fully articulate both their dissident modernist
sensibilities and their innovative poetic practices.
It is Michael Field’s voice that mingles with H. D.’s as she invokes, inscribes, and reinvents Sappho. It
is the presence of this genealogy of foremothers that transforms H.D.’s work into a veritable
palimpsest, “consisting of erasures as well as fresh inscriptions, of previous as well as subsequent
writings” (Collecott 2). This paper examines, in part, how H. D. appropriates Sappho and Sapphic
tropes to encode her own “unnatural” and proscribed desires as well as vocalize an alternative and
gynocentric vision of modernism.
Sapphic themes and imagery constantly inter-illuminate H.D.’s work, heightening the eroticism, as in
“Mid-day,”
My thoughts tear me,
I dread their fever.
…………………..
I am scattered like
the hot shrivelled seeds. (8-12)
These lines echo Sappho’s Fragment 2 in Wharton, “fire…under my skin… / I am paler than grass, /
and seem dead.” This Sapphic collocation of death and desire is used to great effect by H. D.,
recreating in words what the Sapphic fragment is in actuality—a handful of dispersed lines. The poet
is whirled away by desire, her being atomized as is Sappho’s poetry. This sentiment, however, also
serves to effectively mask the source of that desire and the sex of the desired one, something that the
Sapphic fragment makes more explicit. H. D. appears here to combine the aesthetics of modernist
alienation and self-exploration with those of archaic lyric poetry.
H. D.’s appropriation of Sappho is textured, multiform, uneven and further problematized by her
complex sexual politics. Far from a mechanical reproduction, her poetics actively engage with
Sappho. Sappho’s recurrent use of flower imagery is employed and extended by H. D., who uses
roses, violets, cyclamen, amaranth, and lilies to depict female desire and its loss. In this, she is
indebted to Michael Field, who first, in “Cyclamens,” “Irises,” and “Sweet-Briar in Rose,” used
flowers to display a passionate awareness of female sexuality. In H. D.’s own work , “as in much
lesbian literature, flowers serve as vulval metaphors, to emphasize the connection between female
eroticism and the defiance of male misogyny” (DuPlessis and Friedman 423).
H. D. also draws on the Sapphic theme of the chase in poems like “Huntress” and “Pursuit.” In
“Huntress” a novice is invited to join Artemis’ circle on a hunt while in “Pursuit,” H. D. reinterprets
Sappho to draw her within the ambit of female homosociality. She rejects Rosetti’s version of
Campbell’s Fragment 105c that connects the ravaged hyacinth with the ruptured hymen, “Like the
wild hyacinth flower which in the hills is found, / Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear
and wound / Until the purple blossom is trodden into the ground” (qtd. in Collecott 19), choosing,
instead, to rework the image into a matrix of shared sensuality,
a wild hyacinth stalk is snapped
the purple buds—half-ripe—
show deep purple
where your heel pressed. (10-13)
Words like “hyacinth” and “purple” have profound Sapphic connotations. While Sappho feminizes
Homer’s use of “hyacinth” as a symbol of male homoerotic desire, H. D. furthers this process of
inversion by imbuing the image with lesbian overtones, breaking away conclusively from the
violence inflicted by patriarchy on women.
If Michael Field offset Victorian Hellenism by undermining the purely male authority of classical
antiquity to create poetry conscious of lesbian erotics and the Sapphic legacy of modern lyricism,
H. D. takes this project further by countering the misogynistic discourse of both Pater’s Victorian
Hellenism, and, Pound and Eliot’s modernist homophobia, with a re-calibrated sense of
mythography. Her speaking voice combines drama, lyric, and narrative; her use of myth and ritual
parallels Eliot’s; her poetry is littered with allusions to the past and fabulous figures like Circe,
Demeter, and Leda. “Eurydice” was one of the earliest articulations of this aesthetic of dissent and
H. D.’s revisionary politics.
Forced to return to Hades, Eurydice lashes out at Orpheus, “So for your arrogance / and your
ruthlessness / I have lost the earth” (83-85). The silent spouse of Orpheus, remembered only through
him, is recast empowered. She declares her independence from Orpheus and by implication, from the
patriarchal regime that de-recognizes women as complete entities, “I have the fervour of myself for a
presence / and my own spirit for light” (128-29).
While Pater valorized the unclothed male body and the simple life of primeval Greece, H. D.
celebrates the “effeminate” Asiatic impulse (Collecott 115-16). Her poems pulse with color,
“Turquoise, sapphire, lapis-lazuli,” crimson bed covers, gold leaves, and “purple flower-lips”
(“Hymen”). The bride in “Hymen” is dressed in silks and veils, her head covered with a mantle, her
delicate white feet encased in shoes. Even the color white becomes in her poetry symbolic of lesbian
passion and resistance: the blanched face of the bride in “Hymen” signifies desire and not fear. H. D.
rejoices in what Snyder calls the “Sapphic aesthetic” and the “Sapphic texture of desire” (qtd. in
Collecott 116), her poetics firmly entrenched in a matrisexual eros (Collecott 130-31).
H. D.’s poetic universe, like Amy Lowell’s is tactile, privileging touch over sight, containing energies
that constantly clash—tides swirl, boats climb, people whirl and fall (Sea Garden). Her poetic practice
seemed to flourish within its own Sapphic circle. Women writers like H. D., Marianne Moore, Amy
Lowell, May Sinclair, and Charlotte Mew, constantly reviewed each other’s work and kept up a close
correspondence. H. D. and Amy Lowell were especially close, both American writers, sexual
“deviants,” intelligent, articulate, yet acutely conscious of bodies and desires that defied stereotypes of
normality. Sappho also functioned as an inter-animating force in their poetics, linking the two.
Sappho recurs in their poetry, as a figure and a metaphor, making them “singing sisters” who drew
inspiration from their Lesbian foremother, “themselves ‘mother-creatures, double-bearing’” (Collecott
28).
For Pound H. D.’s poem, “Hermes of the Ways,” formed part of Imagism’s inaugural moment. Her
poetry summarized for him the Imagist manifesto: “Objective – no slither; direct…It’s straight talk,
straight as the Greek!” (Roberts 128). This formulation, along with Aldington’s assertion that Imagists
render “images” that possess “hardness, as of cut stone” (qtd. in Roberts 33), betray the masculist
underpinnings of Pound’s modernism. Yet, as one may discern, H. D.’s Imagism had its roots in
Sappho and Michael Field, female precursors who challenged the cultural silence surrounding
women’s sexuality and lesbianism (Roberts 33).
It is possible this bond threatened Pound and caused him to disregard H. D.’s critical abilities and
discount the Lowell group as “Amygists.” Female modernists, with their emphasis on touch, desire,
rich color, and lesbian erotics, came to represent the dangerous, the effeminate, and the decadent
“Other” that had to be exorcised and sublimated through dismissal. Pound and Eliot’s ubermasculine
discourse and Pound’s later figuration of the female as an “octopus” and “a chaos” (Gilbert and
Gubar 176) betray the male poet’s anxiety over the burgeoning freedom of the New Woman in the
modern metropolis.
An indeterminate doubleness that persistently inhabits H. D.’s poetry could only have accentuated
this male anxiety. The sexual voids and silences that punctuate her imaginary also indicate, however,
the peculiar nature of the spectre that haunted women writers like H. D. The shifting contours of her
own sexual relations found overt utterance in H. D.’s prose yet most of these works remained
unpublished during her lifetime, reflecting as Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Susan Stanford Friedman
put it,
the contradictory pressures H.D. felt for public speech as an artist and silence as a
lesbian. The growing homophobia of the twenties and thirties in the cultural
mainstream, symbolized by the violent reaction to Radclyff Hall’s The Well of Loneliness
made explicit exploration of lesbian love problematic for many women, among them
H. D. and her circle of intimates (423).
Her poetry, thus, is heavily encoded, torn as it is between the contending energies of silence and
speech.
The abbreviated nature of her published identity, the alphabetic fragments that constitute “H. D.,”
embody poignantly the woman poet’s conflict to be both anonymous as well as a recognized
presence. Virginia Woolf, writing of nineteenth-century women writers who published under male
pseudonyms observed, “Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them”
(qtd. in Collecott 138). H. D. both embraced and ran away from this desire, creating in her work
tense fault-lines and pregnant pauses. While her gender-free initials appear to have contributed to her
sense of freedom as an artist, this desire for anonymity may also be read in terms of an internalization
of patriarchal injunctions on women to be silent and invisible.
“In the corridors of the Diocletian Gallery she saw the little figure…It lay comfortably asleep. The
Hermaphrodite” (Guest 51). The image of the hermaphrodite would become, for H. D., a recurrent
preoccupation. Perhaps entranced by its promise of completeness and self-sufficiency, she came to
perceive in this figure the possibility of a much desired space for unification. Unlike Swinburne’s
representation of a sterile hermaphrodite who can please neither sex in “Hermaphroditus,”H. D.’s
figuration would gesture towards a positive ambisexuality.
H. D.’s perception, of course, had been mediated by her interaction with the sexologist Havelock Ellis
and his radical book, Sexual Inversion. The book had been banned in England following the Oscar
Wilde trials but was covertly available. In it, Ellis traced the roots of hermaphroditism to Plato’s
concept of primitive bisexuality and linked this with pathological studies that stressed the
fundamental ambisexuality of human beings. The sterility of the hermaphrodite was, according to
research that both Ellis and H. D. were familiar with, located not in “sexual frigidity” but in a
“double sexual impulse” (qtd. in Collecott 52).
For H. D., this knowledge resulted in a joyful rendering of lesbian love in her novels. Even in
“Hermes of the Ways,” her earliest poem, one may discern the presence of the hermaphrodite,
embodied in the figure of its mythical father, Hermes, “facing three ways, / welcoming wayfarers”
(18-19). Located at the cross-roads of sexuality, the figure is nonetheless a constructive one. For H. D.,
the re-creation of this frequently reviled figure served to counter the reigning homophobia of her days
and to confront her own bisexuality, the doubleness that existed within her. Perhaps, the
hermaphrodite came to represent for her what the lips of the vagina connoted for Luce Irigaray, that
women’s sexuality is “always at least double” (qtd. in Roberts 108).
H. D.’s acceptance of herself was furthered by her sessions with Freud who proclaimed her “that all
but extinct phenomena, the perfect bi–” (Gilbert and Gubar 191). It is in “The Master” that one
finally sees H. D. admitting to her bisexuality conclusively, “her two loves separate.” The poem is free
of the subtlety and encoding so characteristic of H. D. Perhaps this openness is one reason why she
never let the poem be published in her lifetime. Alternatively, perhaps like Adrienne Rich, she realized
that she “want[ed] to do away with encoding, or to break the given codes” (Rich, “An Interview” 272).
This spirited defense of feminine subjectivity and the attempt to ground women as centres of cultural
authority find utterance in “The Master.” While H. D. was grateful to Freud for unshackling her
mind, her differences with him ran equally deep, “I was angry with the old man / with his talk of
man-strength” (146-47). Her basic quarrel with him seemed to relate to his theories of penis envy and
the girl’s castration complex. As DuPlessis and Friedman point out, a woman is “perfect” for Freud
only by virtue of the imperfection of castration, “one created by the absence of the phallic mark of
power” (DuPlessis and Friedman 421). H. D. inscribes her resistance to this theory by joyously
proclaiming, “woman is perfect.” The woman in the poem is a conjurer, a life-giver who awakens
nature with her summons. Section V is a lyrical outpouring that fuses the erotic and the mystical, the
dance of nature with the figure of the ecstatic woman dancer. Unlike the sterile Fisher King of Eliot
who lays the land to waste, H. D.’s female protagonist brings forth renewal and sexual fertility,
countering the alleged sterility of the female-female union.
The perfect bisexual appears to displace patriarchy, “for she needs no man, / herself / is that dart and
pulse of the male” (195-97). H. D. further destabilizes both the heteronormative and the male
Christian orders by conflating the figures of Freud and God and then making them subservient to the
“Lord become woman.” “The Master” emerges as one of the fullest explications of H. D.’s vision of
women as prophetesses and forces of creativity, her cry of protest against a rigid social order that has
continually and consistently exiled the woman, especially the lesbian.
H. D.’s poetics was complex, riven by pain and desire, and a sense of separation. It was also one that
constantly engaged with the past, re-visioning it and re-deploying it to generate an incredible range
of voices and meanings. Her “modernist gynopoetics” (Friedman 11) encompassed the Sapphic
sensibility, extending it and moulding it to foreground her own sexual politics. Her poetry also
resonated with echoes from the past, enriched by the work of pioneering writers like Katherine
Bradley and Edith Cooper, reflecting at the same time the shared concerns of the women of her time.
Feminists and writers who wish to trace a living historiography of dissent will discover her work to be
a true palimpsest—time layered on time, encoding a plural pattern of rebellion and radicalism.
___________________
* A revised version of this paper was presented in September 2008 at a seminar, “Sexual Dissidence
and Modernism: Oscar Wilde and After,” supervised by Prof. Sumanyu Satpathy.
Bibliography
Collecott, Diana. H.D. and Sapphic Modernism: 1910–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, and Susan Stanford Friedman. “‘Woman Is Perfect’: H.D.’s Debate with Freud.”
Feminist Studies 7 (1981): 417-30. 23 Sept. 2008. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177758>.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, and H.D.’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1991.
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in Twentieth Century. Vol 3:
Letters from the Front. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994.
Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World. New York: Doubleday, 1984.
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---. “Fragment Forty-one.” 20 Sept. 2008. <http://mkatz.web.wesleyan.edu/cciv110x/sappho/cciv110.
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---. Hymen. London: Egoist Press, 1921. A Celebration of Women Writers. Ed. Mary Mark Ockerbloom. 22 Sept.
2008.<http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/doolittle/hymen/hymen.html>.
---. “The Master.” DuPlessis and Friedman.
---. “Mid Day.” Sea Garden.
---. “Pursuit.” Sea Garden.
---. Sea Garden. London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1916. American Verse Project. Ed. John Mark
Ockerbloom. 1996. U of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative. 22 Sept. 2008.
<http://name.umdl.umich.edu/BAD4143.0001.001>.
Rich, Adrienne. “An Interview with David Montenegro,” 1991. Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose. Eds Barbara
Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi. New York: Norton, 1993.
---. “For Memory.” 1979. Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose. Eds Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi.
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Roberts, Neil, ed. A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
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Contributor's Notes...
Maitrayee Roychoudhury holds a Masters in English Literature from Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi. She is,
at present, an M.Phil. student at the Department of English, Delhi University. Ms. Roychouhury currently engaged
in research that looks to examine the refashioning of feminine selves and gendered spaces in late Victorian England
through the work of Mary Louisa Molesworth, Juliana Ewing, Mary de Morgan, and Edith Nesbit. This is her first
publication.
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