H.D. and Eurydice - woman author Hilda Doolittle; mythologic character

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1998 by Margaret Bruzelius

The second section of the poem addresses both Adonis and Aphrodite as statues on a temple front. The contrast between the living transformation implied by the "each of us like you / has died once" of the first part and these dead artifacts is immediately apparent in this list of negatives:

Not the gold on the temple-front where you stand is as gold as this; not the gold that fastens your sandal, nor the gold reft through your chiseled locks is as gold as this last year's leaf . . . not all the gold hammered and wrought and beaten on your lover's face, brow and bare breast is as golden as this.

The expression "beaten / on your lover's face, / brow and bare breast," while clearly referring to the working of the gold used to fashion the statue, suggests the violence inherent in the gaze, in which the object is subdued - "hammered . . . wrought . . . beaten" - in order to create the work of art. The artist is entirely absent except as brute force (who made these statues?) in the shaping of these alienated objects that are present only in their insufficiency ("not . . . not . . . not"). The transformed leaf, in contrast, stands as a collaboration in which the artist is contained, and the anemone, though dead, is its own source of light, more alive than living flowers. In the absence of Aphrodite, who in the Ovidian version is the artificer, H.D. makes Adonis a self-created work of art, the source of its own radiance: "lighted afresh" and "so golden in the sun fire / that even the live wood-flowers / were dark."

In "Adonis" H.D. entirely eliminates Aphrodite - Ovid's artist/maker - while preserving the object of her affection - the Adonis/anemone - as an independent and seemingly self-generated artwork fully alive in its deathlessness. In a similar move, she eliminates Galatea - the emblem of successful artistic creation - from her account of Pygmalion. Like the other stories in the Orpheus series, Ovid's account of Pygmalion emphasizes the artist's overwhelming desire and its ability to transform his object. In Ovid, Pygmalion is a completely successful artist (although not a tragic lover). Because his desire is absolute, he is able to create a living art object (granted, Aphrodite helps him out). Since Ovid never names the statue, nor has Pygmalion do so, she/it remains the quintessential embodiment of a fantasy of unresisting femininity, unquestionable virginity, and total possession of an erotic other. Ovid's Pygmalion stands in the same relation to art as the statues on the temple in H.D.'s "Adonis" and the Orpheus of "Eurydice": his gaze illuminates a passive and previously nonexistent object.

H.D. switches the emphasis of the story from the erotic wish fulfillment articulated by Ovid to its exact opposite, Pygmalion's helplessness when his statues come to life, turn their backs on him, and walk away. Her Pygmalion neither sculpts a woman's statue nor has any erotic success (although since his name is indelibly associated with the creation of Galatea, his predicament in H.D. necessarily comments on the erotic wish fulfillment captured by the myth). With the first line of the poem, "Shall I let myself be caught / in my own light?" H.D. suggests Pygmalion's misunderstanding of his relation to light, which he assumes emanates from himself - "my own light" - rather than from the objects around him. Pygmalion's assumption that he can choose to be "caught in the light" betrays his belief in his control of the light, his autonomy as artist, and the dependence on his gaze of the objects he perceives. For H.D., the idea of the isolated spotlight of the artist's gaze, a gaze so intense it can create life, represents a fundamental misunderstanding of art. In a paradoxical moment of failure that reflects the absence of collaboration between the artist and his subject (and is the emblem of the revenge of that alienated object), when Pygmalion succeeds in creating life, when his statues of the gods live and move, they turn their backs on him: he can create only objects that see him as alien.