Putting Together The Pieces (Part One of Two)

H.D.'s autobiographical novel, HERmione, opens with the protagonist naming herself: "I am Her" (3). With this assertion, Hermione demonstrates a self-consciousness characteristic of the classic hero in Aristotelian tradition. Indeed, she undergoes a moment of self-awareness similar to that "'sudden change from ignorance to knowledge,' which Aristotle defines as the [hero's] discovery of identity " (House, 97). For Hermione, however, this moment of self-discovery is undermined by the fact that she does not feel fully in command of her own identity. Instead, by juxtaposing the pronouns "I" and "her," the protagonist implies that part of her identity has been wrested from her control and objectified, leaving her torn between an inner sense of self - the subjective "I" - and an outer one - the objective "her." By linking subject and object through the verb "am," Hermione seems to be trying to assert complete control over her identity in the manner of male heroes, such as Sophocle's Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Arthur Miller's Willy Loman. Hermione's struggle for a sovereign sense of identity corresponds to H.D.'s own experiences of self-fragmentation at the hands of male modernists, in particular Ezra Pound; these experiences, in turn, comprise the driving force behind several of her early modernist poems.

H.D. first became affiliated with modernism through her friendship with Pound. The latter took it upon himself to classify H.D.'s poem, "Hermes of the Ways," as the quintessential example of modernist imagism. By imposing his own theories of modernist structure upon the poem, he effectively transformed it from a work to a text in the manner denoted by Roland Barthes. Indeed, Pound "diminish[ed] the distance between writing and reading" by inserting himself, the reader, as a joint signifier of meaning in the poem (Barthes, 161). In so doing, he undermined H.D's role as author of the poem and principal agent of its meaning.

Under Pound's scrutiny, H.D.'s voice in the poem became objectified to "the I which writes the text [that is] never more than a paper-I" (Barthes, 161). Now functioning as a text, the poem ceased to belong to H.D. any more than it belonged to others, like Pound, who elected to read and critique what she had written. In the words of Barthes, H.D. could choose to "'come back' in the Text, in [her] text, but [only] as a 'guest'" (161). Thus, the part of H.D.'s identity that had informed her work was removed from her sovereign control, to be imposed upon, and subsequently fragmented, by the interpretations of her readers.

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