"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

We are clearly a long way from Friedman's version of H.D.'s prose, in which the childbearing body is valorized as a source of artistry and knowledge, even visionary knowledge--and in which that valorization is accompanied by a pacifist stance. In fact, by endowing the geometric image with connotations of violence in Nights, H.D. assigns geometry a role like the one it plays in "Responsibilities"--but she now uses that geometry to express a desire, albeit an ambivalent one, for the very values she condemns in "Responsibilities. (19) In Nights, H.D. uses geometric images, linked with violence, to transform the female body so that it is no longer associated with its capacity for childbearing, no longer a body marked as capable of maternal abundance, and perhaps no longer a recognizable organic body at all. (20) If we juxtapose the geometry of "Responsibilities" with the geometry of Nights, H.D. seems to have transformed something to be feared--geometric violence done to the body--into something to be desired.

The geometric visionary body in Nights thus serves to question claims about the dominance in H.D.'s work of a gynopoetic founded upon the celebration of the female childbearing body. The geometric body even places Nights, I would argue, beyond the reach of interpretations of H.D.'s work like Hollenberg's, which rightly read in H.D.'s aesthetic choices evidence of her conflicted attitude toward childbearing. Through the geometric body of Nights, H.D. presents a state of being conspicuously removed from the female body and its entailments, and does so seductively--etching not only conflict but also forceful desire. In other words, Nights does not so much signal an anxiety about childbearing as suggest a resolved distance from it. Moreover, because of its encoded wish for erotic violence, the desire for the geometric body expressed in Nights also sits uneasily alongside most accounts of H.D.'s gynopoetics, which presume H.D.'s resistance to aggression.

"One has to be true to one's daemon": Narrative frames and seductions

Of course, the above claims presuppose that Nights presents as admirable Natalia's yearning for the geometric body, her uncompromising quest for fire and ice, radium and electricity, utmost intensity. I would maintain that it does. Friedman suggests instead that Nights offers a portrait of a dangerous "erasure of the feminine through suicide" (Penelope's Web 270). For Friedman, Natalia's flight toward suicide is much like that of Rhoda in Virginia Woolf's The Waves--a character who internalizes misogynist violence and self-destructs. Accordingly, Friedman reads the sa domasochistic dynamic between David and Natalia as profoundly disturbing, an inscription of Freud's death drive; Natalia's "erotically charged wish to overpower and be overpowered in a sadomasochistic economy of desire explains why Natalia is not healed in her affair with David, but brought ever closer to death" (275). Suzanne Young notes that critics like DuPlessis and Friedman regard Nights and other "autobiographical" texts of this moment in H.D.'s career as "working through certain themes [...] and aesthetic modes [...] in order to discard them" (325). According to this view, the representation of Natalia's suicide allows H.D. to work through a therapeutic rejection of a hampering possibility that then enables her to advance toward a more affirmative "mature art."