"Sparse and geometric contour": transformations of the body in H.D.'s 'Nights' - Hilda Doolittle - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2001 by Miranda B. Hickman

As Susan Edmunds notes, such arguments are characteristic of the strong wave of Anglo-American feminist criticism that brought H.D. to prominence in the 1970s and 80s (3). Even in an era of post-structuralist feminist work--which, in building on earlier feminist work, has challenged many of its assumptions (questioning, for instance, the possibility of achieving an "authentic female voice")--Friedman's reading of H.D.'s prose as gynopoetic remains influential. (10) Much of its continuing power, I would argue, both derives from and is registered by the frequent contemporary use of the notion of ecriture feminine to describe H.D.'s prose, as well as recent claims about the way H.D.'s writing inscribes a Kristevan maternal semiotic. (11) The ways in which these notions of ecriture feminine and the Kristevan semiotic have been understood and used in H.D. scholarship have been conditioned by a critical tendency to favor one of H.D.'s texts as best articulating her poetics of feminist resistance: Notes on Thought and Vision, a meditative essay from 1919. (12) As Kathleen Crown observes, "Feminist critical assessments [...] have focused on the Notes as a modernist poetics that writes the female and maternal body" (218). (13) This emphasis on Notes, ultimately, has inflected understandings of what H.D.'s subversive feminist turn in the 1920s entailed--of what, in H.D.'s case, it means to write the "feminine."

Friedman's approach typifies the common practice of positioning Notes as a locus classicus for the modernist gynopoetic assumed to be not only crucial but central to H.D.'s work. Again, when describing H.D.'s gynopoetic in Penelope's Web, Friedman first suggests that H.D. "forged a prose discourse that wrote the female body." In her discussion, she briefly invokes Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva, thereby leaving open the question of to what degree writing the female body involves the expression of a cultural position that dissents from patriarchal, logocentric values and how much it involves the articulation of a biological condition. With these theorists, Friedman initially seems to move toward the post-structuralist assumption that to "speak" or "write woman" is to inscribe a cultural status rather than a biological state. Because Friedman then draws on Notes to elaborate her claims about H.D.'s gynopoetic, however, the accent on cultural place in her account recedes and the "specifically female body that g ives birth" comes to the fore.

In Notes, written in the Blakean visionary tradition, the text's narrator often does overtly celebrate the female body. In fact, as Kathleen Crown observes, Notes can be read as a "manifesto" about how the female childbearing body can engender states of transcendent vision (217). The narrator of Notes avers, for example, that "it was before the birth" of her child that a visionary state first came upon her (20). Her visionary moments are described with amniotic images: a mind in a state conducive to visionary consciousness seems like a "jelly--fish" (19) and "like water, transparent, fluid yet with definite body" (18-19). As DuPlessis suggests, the speaker in Notes "declare[s] the advantages of female physicality, of female Otherness" in the "quest" for "vision" (H.D.: The Career 40).