H.D.'s Post-Freudian Cultural Analysis: Nike versus Oedipus

H.D.'s 1944 Writing on the Wall is the first of two works later combined in the text Tribute to Freud, an autobiographical memoir of her analysis with Freud in 1933-34.1 Most interpretations of this work rest on a narrow set of assumptions: that H.D. was principally a modernist (imagist) poet, that her world was unwilling to accept a female modernist, and that the stress of such suppressed creativity drove her to creative silence. Such assumptions evaluate H.D.'s work with Freud as part of her creative potential, as the start of a “Freudian poetics,” as many critics will have it. For this reason, this text is considered H.D.'s reassertion of her poetic gifts, her reemergence intoive writing after she found her “own LEGEND” in her sessions with Freud (Pearson, v), her mental health, and her artistic creativity. Moreover, Writing is seen as a turning point in H.D.'s career: as a creative work that allowed her to abreact the personal problems that had kept her silent for the better part of a decade (as Freudians would have predicted),2 a biographical turning point synthesizing her art and her history,3 an example of Freud's work translated into a model for a poetics of the unconscious,4 or a key to a particular modernist poetics stressing writing about writing.5

While the aesthetic implications of Writing on the Wall have been considered in detail with respect to H.D.'s later poetry, the structure of the text and its purpose as a memoir have been virtually ignored. Yet H.D.'s contact with Freud clearly had a much more personal dimension, one suggested by a March, 1933 letter that Kenneth Macpherson wrote to Bryher: “Oh that awful Kat. She has got in, hasn't she. She'll be unbearable. A pupil of Freud. She'll live on that till she dies” (Guest 1984, 207). “Living on” her contact with Freud points to an H.D. who was interested in more than tending her poetic muse. Like Macpherson, H.D. had to have realized that contact with Freud