The Invisible Other

Chapter 8 turns to the figure of the spy, a recurrent trope of her 1956 novel Magic Mirror and the accompanying memoir Compassionate Friendship. If the “other woman” is predicated on a position of alterity, the therapist-spy feigns an identification—and an empathetic connection—that does not in fact exist. At the level of the private sphere, H.D. uses espionage as a mode of critiquing Freudian psychoanalysis, offering in its stead the short-lived existential psychology, a movement which grew out of the trauma of World War II and emphasized an empathetic rather than transferential model of therapy. Shifting outward to the public sphere, her analysis of the figure of the spy becomes an examination of the politics of nationalism.

By Avon River, Arranged Marriage, and Shakespeare’s Empire

This chapter examines H.D.’s scrutiny of the European custom of arranged monarchial marriage as a strategy to consolidate imperial power, and the tacit parallels she draws between Italian and British empire-building. Half verse, half prose, this hybrid text explores Shakespeare and his Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporaries and ancestors against a perilous landscape of unscrupulous monarchs, constant warfare, and imperial conquest. It is deeply concerned with the unsettling abuses of power by the English monarchy and the origins of the British Empire, positioning Shakespeare as plagiarist and plunderer.

Coda

A brief coda turns to H.D.’s memoir End to Torment, penned three years before her death in 1961. It explores how this late prose text picks up the threads of all of her postwar prose and weaves them into a meditation on the role of memory in personal and national narrative. In its spirit of disorder—in its rejection of chronology, its unabashed claims of radical uncertainty—the text resists “history” as we, as individuals and as citizens, tell it.

Autobiography and Ghost Story

Chapter 1 examines the first half of The Sword Went Out to Sea, her first postwar novel, arguing that its construction relies upon two disparate genres, autobiography and ghost story, that exist in an inexorable tension, constantly interrogating one another. H.D. wrote throughout her career in autobiographical modes. In this novel, in an implicit critique of her own previous autobiographical novels, H.D.’s narrator, Delia Alton, is so obsessively self-focused that her psyche becomes unstable and the narrative explodes under the pressure of its repetitive autobiographical excess. Readers are offered a tediously transparent autobiographical story that simultaneously asks them to believe, impossibly, in the materiality of ghosts. They are thus confronted with central, unanswerable questions about truth and the nature of reality.

Märchen and Historical Fiction

Chapter 3 examines the second half of The Sword Went Out to Sea. This chapter looks at how H.D. combines fairy tale and historical fiction to create the fragmentary vignettes that comprise Part II of the novel. In the second half of Sword, the narrative spins out centrifugally into vignettes that record the history of Britain by focusing on scenes of war and imperialism from the ancient world to the Renaissance. In these vignettes, history is a seemingly endless series of one nation conquering and colonizing another. The unresolvable fracture of narrative form recreates the experience of war, in effect traumatizing her readers. Moreover, by constructing a text of generic hybridity that deconstructs the myriad genres it deploys, she demonstrates the fictionality of nationhood and the impossibility of its representation.

Mysticism and Time Travel

Chapter 2 examines the structural break that occurs in the middle of The Sword Went Out to Sea, and the concomitant fragmentation of narrator and narrative voice. This break can be traced, again, to the merging of two genres—mysticism and time travel—that coexist but destabilize one another. Though H.D. had been interested in mysticism decades earlier, the war compels her to revise her way of thinking about it. In Sword, a traumatized Delia experiences an apocalyptic vision that thrusts her into a liminal space, at once in time and out of time, and launches her as time traveller into the historical vignettes that comprise the second half of the novel.

Introduction

The introduction describes H.D.’s traumatic experience of World War II and its aftermath, documenting her heightened interest in global politics from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, as well as her abandonment of a lifelong pacifist stance in the face of rising Nazism. Taking into account the scope of her entire career, the Introduction suggests a shift from static to more dynamic modes of writing, culminating in the historical fiction and epic poetry that dominate the postwar years. It contextualizes her work within the context of scholarship on late modernism, including other work by women of the period on gender and imperialism, and concludes with a summary of the book’s chapters.

Facing the Past, Becoming l’autre

Bringing together two prose narratives that consider sexual betrayal in relationship to empire, Chapter 7 compares the treatment of the “other woman” in the 1926 “Hipparchia,” to that in Sword. The chapter argues that in earlier works H.D. is unable to tolerate alterity, fearing engulfment by or repudiating the other, and that she consistently casts Romans as other, as hostile conquerors of her beloved Ancient Greece. In Sword she creates an autobiographical character, by contrast, that inhabits the Roman body of the other woman. For H.D. in 1947, imaginatively embodying the position of l’autre Romain constitutes an attempt to understand, even embrace, the permeable and contingent nature of the relationship between self and other, to exorcise the “political onus” of German-ness.

The Mystery

The Mystery, completed in 1951, represents an interlude in H.D.’s postwar prose. By the 1950s, H.D.’s interest in global affairs began to diminish, and The Mystery returns to a more utopic sensibility in its quest for a world free of war and to a renewed faith in the supernatural. Bringing together a trickster figure, the magician, with the descendants of the Moravian movement, The Mystery very much straddles a divide in her career, and this chapter traces the ways in which the text draws on many of the devices and themes of Sword and White Rose—the critique of narrative, the use of historical fiction as genre, the time traveling narrator—but from a more hopeful perspective that re-privileges the transcendent feminine presence that readers encountered in her Trilogy.

Disappearing Bodies in White Rose and the Red

In her second postwar novel, H.D. creates a layered historical narrative of the wars and uprisings of the mid-nineteenth century; the Crusades of the Middle Ages; and, implicitly, the Second World War and the partitioning of India and Pakistan. A story of Elizabeth Siddall and the Pre-Raphaelites, the novel relies upon the historical backdrop of the Crimean War and the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion in India to destabilize the narrative and to emphasize a series of dismemberments of female bodies. Siddall and India itself are fragmented, abstracted, and aetherialized to the point of nonexistence.