Kandinsky, and Literary Avant-garde in H.D.’s Sea Garden
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Chang, Pei-Yu
Abstract
The two paradigms of H.D. study—psychoanalysis and feminism undermine the subversive power understated especially in her early Imagist poetry. It is often considered that Imagism suppresses the develpment of her female poetic voice. In my thesis, I aim to question the inadequecy of placing H.D. merely either in the context of female writing or taking it as a psychoanalytical model. Focusing more on the historcal framework of Modernism, this thesis unfolds the complexity of rereading the desexualized subject in H.D.’s first volume Sea Garden. Instead of reading it as an example of the preliminary, rather unmature stage in H.D.’s writing career, I would like to suggest that the re-appropration of the traditional trope of a garden, the deliberately ambiguous speaking subject, and the para-texual reference with her male contemporaries all point to H.D.’s refusal of a subordinate literary status and her aesthetic attitude toward creating an alternative female sujectivity.
In my opinion, it is necessary to trace back to the making of Modernism and Avant-garde at the turn of the early twentieth century, and draw the attention to the interdisciplinary tendency during the artistic ferment. The comparative, interdisciplinary reading between paintings, sculpture and poetry helps to better understand the whole picture of Pound’s Imagism and Vorticism in relation to the reception, re-appropriation, and refusal of this particular style in H.D.’s Sea Garden. In Pound’s Imagism and Vorticism manifesto, he contends that Kandinsky’s color theory properly explains his idea of a “good form.” Since Sea Garden is also regarded a as successful work in accordance with the Imagist discipline, this thesis attemps to establish the link between H.D. and Kandinsky in the framework of Avant-garde. It can be observed that the deliberate arrangement of a dialectic landscape, the representation of the divinity, the political coloring of the flowers, and the theme of pursuit not only corresponds to Kandinsky’s artistic quest as a fore-fronter in On the Spiritual in Art, but also examplifies an effective expression with the Imagist and Vorticist language. By mastering the seeming “male form” while paying tribute to the classical, Sapphic tradition, H.D. incoporates a bixual gender discourse to strengthen her voice as a poetess. Although taking on the symptom of a drifting, slippery subject in early Modernism, Sea Garden is very self-conscious in demonstrating a new style ahead of its time. The gender struggle should not be resolved only through the mapping of female writing, but through the metaphorical undertone that lies in the inter-texuality and para-textuality between H.D.’s writing and Pound’s poems. She intends to enchor an alternative beauty that is independent from the Imagist label, and meanwhile demonstrates an strategic Avant-garde writing practice, which can only be decoded through strategic interdisciplinary reading.
Subjects
literary Avant-garde
Imagism
Vorticism
interdisciplinary reading
alternative beauty
SDGs
Type
thesis
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