Weighed in the Balance: H.D.'s Resistance to Freud in “Writing on the Wall”

H.D.'s memoir Tribute to Freud has been celebrated by feminist critics for its assertion of the integrity of female selfhood and artistic power, and for its critique of male gender authority in the theorization of female sexuality. In this essay I suggest that H.D.'s critics must look more closely at the means by which she resists Freud's unwelcome interpretation of her sexuality. H.D.'s rhetorical strategy for denying Freud's interpretations turns on Freud's Jewishness in a way that demands our attention. Before we applaud H.D.'s triumph in the contest with Freud dramatized in her memoir, we must consider whether we wish to ally ourselves with the means by which she effects gains in the field of gender.

H.D. enters into psychoanalysis with Freud in 1933 because she wants his help in understanding the strange psychic effects of “a number of severe shocks” connected with her experiences during the First World War, including the death in action of her brother in France (1974, 40). One of these effects is a visionary experience to which she gives the name “Writing on the Wall,” consisting of a “series of shadow- or of light-pictures I saw projected on the wall of a hotel bedroom… “(1974, 41). H.D. sees these pictures on the wall in the course of a trip to Greece with her lover and companion Bryher (Winnifred Ellerman). Convalescing from double pneumonia at the end of the war, H.D. says to Bryher “‘If I could only feel that I could walk the sacred way to Delphi, I know I would get well’” (1974, 50). They make the trip, but “we were informed… that it was absolutely impossible for two ladies alone, at that