"I Read the Writing When He Seized My Throat": Hysteria and Revolution in H. D.'s "Helen in Egypt"

Abstract

Between 1952 and 1955, H.D. wrote her montage poem, Helen in Egypt, which returns to Stesichorus's Palinode and Euripides' Helen to resurrect the argument that a phantom Helen presided over the Trojan War while her real counterpart was held captive by the gods in Egypt. Yet where Euripides' play is a marriage comedy in which Helen proves her innocence and wins back her husband, H.D.'s poem is a more somber meditation on the trauma of war, in which Helen and her three male lovers Achilles, Paris, and Theseus-gather in Egypt and Leuke to brood over their part in the killing at Troy. The poem has strong autobiographical underpinnings. Modeling Helen after herself and her mother, Helen Wolle Doolittle, H.D. takes Lord Hugh Dowding, air chief marshal during the Battle of Britain and a fellow spiritualist, as her model for Achilles; her friend Erich Heydt, a young psychiatrist at the Kiisnacht sanatorium, as the model for Paris; and Sigmund Freud as the model for Theseus. H.D.'s trip to Egypt with her mother and Bryher in 1923, which included a visit to Tutankhamen's newly opened tomb, informs the poem's setting in ancient Egypt. And, as Susan Friedman has argued, H.D.'s experiences during the London Blitz inform both the poem's condemnation of war as an inevitable effect of patriarchy and its attempts to recover a lost matriarchal and pacifist tradition (253-72).