Putting Together the Pieces (Part Two of Two)

Surrounded by a veritable army of male artists and intellectuals (including Pound, Eliot, her husband Richard Aldington, D.H. Lawrence, and Sigmund Freud) H.D. was understandably self-conscious about the role of gender in defining identity. In "Leda," her poetic persona alludes to the price women must pay (that of unqualified submission) in order to achieve fulfillment in relation to men. Like Hermione, the "Leda" speaker uses water imagery of a "river" (1) and a "tide" (2) to invoke a sense of division, this time along gender-specific lines. A red swan, symbolic of the Greek god Zeus that raped Leda, functions as an objective correlative for male aggression. The swan is juxtaposed with the image of a lily, denoting female passivity. These two components come together, where the "tide" and "river" meet, in a scene suggestive of a rape. Offering no opposition, "the gold day-lily / outspreads and rests / beneath [the red swan's] soft fluttering [wings]." The lines "no more regret...to mar the bliss" (25, 27) indicate that the lily and, by association, the speaker herself are experiencing a renewed sense of identity and self-fulfillment. Thus, resolution of female identity is shown to be established through complete acquiescence to male desire.

In "HERmione", H.D. reflects on her own "failure to conform to [the] expectations" imposed by males in both the personal and artistic aspects of her life. These expectations include the wifely duties that she relinquished, following the collapse of her marriage to Aldington and her subsequent decision to pursue a lesbian affair and an artistic collaboration with Bryher. In one sense, H.D.'s foray into lesbianism constituted the fulfillment of a sense of identity evoked in "Hermes of the Ways." The title character of this poem, as noted in class, functions as an objective correlative for an androgynous romantic ideal that offers the promise of sexual love, and subsequent self-renewal, without the threat of gender-based oppression.

As an artist, H.D. ultimately summoned the "subtle form of courage" that led her to defy the oppressive expectations of Pound and his fellow imagists (4). Only by abandoning their peculiarly constrictive brand of modernism (which the critic F.S. Flint likened to "snobisme" in its disregard for other literary approaches (41)) was H.D. able to more freely assert herself as a female artist, and to assemble a literary identity that could qualify as heroic, by Aristotelian standards.

WORKS CITED "HERmione", Barthes Text, Flinn, Baym, Nina, gen. ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 5th ed., vol. 2. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.

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