Domestic Trauma in H.D.’s HERmione

Abstract

From the foundation that trauma studies of Hemingway provide in chapter 1, I turn now toward another, less canonical author: H.D. Critics position her securely in the modernist tradition, in fact, as one of its key figures, despite her lack of public renown. Both her poetry and her prose are definitive examples of the modernist project; however, she sought publication (almost exclusively) for only her poetry. H.D. approaches her projects of prose writing from her position as a (female) outsider exploring themes she kept separate from her more public poetry writing—themes such as sexuality and her artistic development did not fit into either publishers’ expectations or readers’.¹ Largely autobiographical, her prose work presents a female writer’s representation of her own situation; one that, I argue, traumatizes her. “Psychological, textual, linguistic, and material conditions shaped the self H.D. fashioned in her prose into a multiply split, gendered subject characteristic of both modernism and an oppositional discourse that positions women within, yet against, patriarchal representations of female identity” (Friedman, Penelope 80). Writing within such a system, H.D. experiences both domestic and professional trauma in her early years as an artist; such events consume her prose work for the rest of her life as she struggles to represent that trauma. H.D. expressed her bisexuality in writing, but subsequently repressed the work, keeping nearly all of her prose work hidden (Penelope 25).