Abortion, identity formation, and the expatriate woman writer: H.D. and Kay Boyle in the twenties

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1994 by Donna Hollenberg

These early works of H.D. and Kay Boyle, written in the context of extreme, even transgressive, maternity, move toward filling in this gap in representation. Here Shari Benstock's point concerning numerous white American women writers is relevant: that because such women were already "expatriated in patria," living abroad enabled them to externalize in their writing the internalized exile they felt at home (25). Instead of providing an escape from gender roles, expatriation resulted in clarification, so that they could "write out" their sense of exclusion from internalized patriarchal law and self-definition. I would add that, because they were unable to reconcile their artistic ambitions with the conventions of motherhood they had internalized, H.D. and Boyle delineated a threshold of conflicted female affiliation that was crucial in the development of their mature vision.(5)

Like many other women writers, in their early fiction H.D. and Kay Boyle write about fears of self-loss through immersion in the roles of marriage and motherhood. Such fears drive H.D.'s fictionalized autobiographies Asphodel and Paint It Today, written in the early 1920s, both of which return obsessively to the period 1911-1920, years marked not only by her expatriation but by the attenuation of her friendship With Frances Gregg, the failure of her engagement to Ezra Pound, the failure of her marriage to Richard Aldington after the stillbirth of their first child, her near death during the second, successful pregnancy, and finally, her rescue by Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), the younger woman writer who would become a lifelong friend. As in H.D.'s life, in both novels the heroines' fear of the incompatibility between their literary ambition and the social institutions of marriage and motherhood threatens their integrity. In both, trauma connected with pregnancy causes them to regress.

Since a woman reexperiences her self as a cared-for child when she becomes a mother, her identification with her own mother often revives issues from her childhood that have remained unresolved (Nadelson). As I have written elsewhere, trauma in pregnancy bound up this identification in H.D.'s case, increasing her need to reconcile motherly virtue with intellectual achievement. In these early novels she invented competing imaginative strategies to accomplish this reconciliation, both of which revealed instead the social and emotional constraints that inhibited it. In Asphodel, H.D.'s heroine, Hermione, associates writing with virgin birth, thus tacitly acknowledging the power and safety of the patriarchy by excluding men who would make her feel vulnerable. Her affair with Cyril Vane, who takes her to his country home in Cornwall to rest and write poetry after the stillbirth of her first child and the failure of her marriage, is depicted as an idealized compensation for her extreme emotional distress. Her second conception in this magical setting, amid the remains of Druid goddess worship, has a marked parthenogenetic quality: she thinks about her compelling wish to develop her own genius and welcomes a swallow flying outside her open window as an omen of God's will. A symbol of artistic annunciation, this swallow is associated less with biological conception than with her need to incorporate an omnipotent idealization of herself.