H. D. and "The Contest": Archaeology of a Sapphic Gaze

Abstract

What need - yet to sing love, love must first shatter us. - H.D., Fragment Forty (Collected Poems [CP] 175) Scholars have long documented relationships between and her poetic successors.(1) More recently, few critics have unearthed those between and H.D. Thirteen years ago, for example, Susan Gubar insisted that status as female precursor empowered number of female modernists (44), including H.D., and enabled them to try to solve problem of poetic isolation and imputed inferiority (46) that they experienced as women writers. Two years later, while acknowledging that H.D. never explicitly names in poems of Sea Garden as crucial source of lyric (Rose Cut in Rock 529), Eileen Gregory viewed Sea Garden as a consciously crafted whole (536) in which H.D. attempts to recover imagination of goddess-centered Lesbos as exemplified by Sappho, the first love-possessed lyricist (528-29).(2) Robert Babcock, indicating that Thomas Swann was critic who established canon of [H.D.'s] Sapphic verses (43), extended Gregory's thesis in 1990 by demonstrating that Pursuit from Sea Garden was based specifically on Sappho's fragment 105. Babcock proposed that [t]he failure of [H.D.'s contemporary] critics to recognize sources of her work or to treat her as serious engagement with literary tradition may have led H.D. to begin explicitly detailing sources in her later books (44). Babcock referred to Pursuit as H.D.'s earliest published version of Sappho and concluded that it could contribute to fuller appreciation of range and depth of Sapphic influence on her writing (46). Today, seven years after Babcock's it is my intention to add my voice in order to reenvision link between and H.D. However, I will argue that Sappho's influence on H.D. extends beyond what Gubar labels the dynamic of collaboration (58); beyond what Babcock identifies as startling but simple treatment of an as an (46); and beyond what Gregory calls the aesthetic of early work, which conjures and reenacts the experienced power of image (Rose Cut in Rock 545). I suggest that also teaches H.D. the experienced and sexual erotics of gaze that initiates not fixed subject/object exchange but an oscillating sense of subjectivity. In this essay I demonstrate that H.D., rather than encountering male-dominated tradition of the gaze, creates gaze influenced by what she interprets as viewing employed by in sixth century BC. In first section of this essay, I explain why readings that rely solely on ways in which authors have oppressed women without including ways in which female authors are part of women's literary tradition can be reductive - in destructive as well as an analytic sense. I then examine literary tradition of that would eventually influence H.D. In second section, I attempt to reconstruct ways in which I believe H.D. inherited and interpreted that tradition. In third section, I examine early poem Contest from Sea Garden as part of Sapphic vision of poetry that is something other than an oppositional, perpetuating, or marginal discourse against patriarchal tradition. And in concluding section, I speculate on why H.D. might have refrained from both mere imitation and direct translation of Sappho. I dare more than singer offering her lute, I offer more than lad singing at your steps, I give you my praise and this: love of my lover for his mistress. - H.D., Fragment Forty-one (CP 184) I want to explain my use of terms archaeology and gaze in this essay's title. The latter undoubtedly recalls film theorists such as Laura Mulvey and her articulations of visual pleasure and male gaze.(3) Considering H. …