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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1994 by Donna Hollenberg

Finally, Raymonde's inability to identify with either Saul or Paula eradicates the parallel between gender and race that has occluded the deeper sources of Raymonde's anxiety, and she is driven into psychological retreat. Though she feels a rivalry with Paula for both Saul and Daniel, Raymonde prefers to detach herself from sexual competition. Instead she allies herself with Gareth (Bryher), whose asexual, "schoolgirlish" interest in Saul is less threatening to Raymonde's fragile artist-identity. Unlike the black singer, whose sexuality coincides with his artistic goals, or his light-skinned wife, who trades on hers, she adopts the asexual mask of "scribe and priestess" to avoid guilt or compromise.

In the mid-thirties, analysis with Freud was a key factor in enabling H.D. to move from this self-protecting emotional stance to a more positive utilization of her maternal subjectivity in her art, a process that has been described more fully elsewhere.(6) Although beyond the scope of this paper, it is noteworthy that H.D. glanced back at the period around her abortion and her friendship with the Robesons in the first section of her last long poem, Hermetic Definition. Here the speaker's ability to mediate between opposites in the universe (her connection with Hermes) is dramatized by employing the trimesters of pregnancy as a central trope. Again, infatuation with a young black man is instrumental.

Problematic maternity as a catalyst in the development of authentic, cohesive selfhood, viewed from an expatriated perspective, is also evident in three of Kay Boyle's first four novels, Plagued By the Nightingale (1931), Year Before Last (1932), and My Next Bride (1934). Based on traumatic events in Boyle's life, these novels cover the period between 1923, when she and her French husband, Richard Brault, arrived in France, and 1929, when she began a new life with her second husband, Laurence Vail. In this interval she separated from Brault during a serious illness, conducted a doomed love affair with the dying poet Ernest Walsh, gave birth, out of wedlock, to her daughter Sharon, and joined Raymond Duncan's "artists' colony," where, according to her account in Being Geniuses Together, she became increasingly depressed and self-destructive. As in H.D.'s novels, fears of self-loss through traditional female roles determine the atmosphere of these three works, although the heroines of most of Boyle's novels are not fledgling artists but simply bohemian young women in search of definition. Again, troubled motherhood and abortion combine with expatriation to cause self-division and regression. In Boyle this combination leads not only to insight into the way female self-denial is socially constructed, as it does in H.D., but to a more outer-directed thematic focus on her later work, and to political activism upon her return to America.

In Boyle's novels the initial equating of America with convention and entrapment and Europe with freedom and independence is reversed, illuminating both as geographical metaphors for inner struggle. Her heroines come from American families who have instilled a spirit of adventure and individuality that they are inexplicably unable to realize. They experience painful interpersonal relationships in terms of European cultural decadence and class warfare, thus externalizing an inner conflict that has oppressed them. In Plagued By the Nightingale, although her own American family has inculcated individualism, Bridget finds the security offered by the inbred, tightly knit family of her French husband, Nicolas, reassuring despite its price. She welcomes the prescribed world of his Papa, Maman, and sisters, although she recognizes the literally paralyzing control they have over her young husband, who is heir to the family bone disease as well as its fortune. Desiring freedom and independence on one hand, she is afraid of being alone on the other. In the end she succumbs to the family's pressure to become pregnant despite her husband's unwillingness to inflict his disease on future generations and his resentment at having to produce an heir in order to receive money from his father. Willing to accept his family's proviso because she can think of no other way to "make a fortune" and get away, she denies her own tears at the unacknowledged exploitation of her body (90).