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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1998 by Margaret Bruzelius

In the final, riveting poem of this series, "Eurydice," H.D. continues to interrogate the notion of an all-powerful (implicitly male) artistic gaze. She gives enraged speech to its object, the female occasion of the male poetic/ erotic lament: her Eurydice furiously rates Orpheus for his carelessness and egoism. But the same myth that allows her to imagine a powerful woman speaker ultimately constrains that speaker's voice: Eurydice speaks, but only finally to affirm that the limited economy of the gaze allows her no escape from the hell she inhabits. In the fatal geography of this primal myth of the gaze, the woman who occasions the story exists only to become its absent center. Eurydice understands, as Orpheus and Pygmalion never do, that the gaze of the artist does not supply the light, but the look of the artist is the only meaning available to her.(9) While not "lost," she is left with only the "black" light of hell. H.D.'s "Eurydice" moves from Pygmalion's puzzlement (shall I?) to agony (I must), but ends in an impasse whose resolution is deferred to a distant day when "hell must open like a red rose / for the dead to pass."

Because the poem is so clearly based on autobiographical material, and because it so vibrantly expresses pure rage, it is inevitably (and properly) linked to H.D.'s own struggle to establish herself as an independent voice in the artistic milieu in which she moved as a young woman. H.D. had to both absorb and resist the influence - the aesthetic and erotic "gaze" - of Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and her husband Richard Aldington in the early days of her writing career.(10) H.D. was frequently photographed and was interested in both photography and cinema (she acted in several movies directed by William Maxwell). She was a female subject in a visual field dominated by men, and photographs of her are widely disseminated in collections of her writing. But H.D. was also deeply concerned with the same issues of craft versus control that Blanchot articulates, and her struggle with the inherent possessiveness of the gaze is part of her larger meditation on the link between the artist and his object - a means of expressing an idea of the god that moves away from egoistic possessiveness. As she has her character Julia say at the end of the novel Bid Me to Live, in her final declaration of independence from one of her male mentors, "the story must write me, the story must create me" (181). As in the Ovid poems, H.D.'s heroine struggles to elaborate an aesthetic that sees the artist as herself shaped by art.

H.D.'s "Eurydice" unfolds along two separate visual planes: the surface of the world in which color, light, and the gaze are determinate, and the underworld, lit by "black" light and within which the gaze seems barely effective. The surface of the world has yellow of saffron, hyacinth, azure, and gold, and, of course, Orpheus. Hell has black, red sparks, and "colorless" light, which is "worse than black," and Eurydice. In the second section of the poem (which is divided into seven sections), H.D. develops a topography of the gaze that ultimately imprisons Eurydice in that colorless world and reiterates her dependence on the gaze of Orpheus, her inability to evoke herself the natural world that he has so ruthlessly appropriated. Eurydice asks Orpheus, "what was it that crossed my face / with the light from yours / and your glance? what was it you saw in my face? / the light of your own face, / the fire of your own presence?" The poet looks at her only to see himself. When he turns to "shed his light" on Eurydice, he sees her; he kills her.