Abstract
James Frazer’s notion of resurrection symbolism being re-enacted via various myths shaped the mythopoeia of both H.D. and D. H. Lawrence. Their biblical rewritings, Pilate’s Wife (1929, 1934) and The Escaped Cock (1928–9), which earth the sacred mission of Christ so as to reject transcendent spirituality and body-soul dualism and to re-sacralize the material world, are a testament to the influence of comparative mythology. Both authors creatively engage with the symbolism of a Christian heritage by unearthing myth sources or parallels, yet each author’s revisionary poesis is distinct in the context of modernist mythopoeia. Lawrence’s mythopoeia is served by a genealogical method, which recovers pagan antecedents deemed to indicate more authentic states of spirituality than subsequent Christian deformations. H.D.’s syncretic mythopoeia, which unearths a palimpsest of religious and myth associations as exemplified in Trilogy (1946), forms part of a feminist-Christian tradition that serves both her gnostic poetics and feminist-humanist agenda. H.D.’s revisionary intent, with an emphasis on the female gospel, is to recover from the theme of resurrection the unifying symbol of human love, whereas Lawrence is more intent on a neo-pagan vision of mysticism, as exemplified in Birds, Beasts and Flowers! (1923), that celebrates the eclecticism of animal spirituality.
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Notes
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual’ (1913),
quoted from Piers Gray, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development 1909–1922 (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982), p. 130.
Jane Augustine, ‘Teaching H.D. and Spirituality’, from Approaches to H.D.’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Annette Debo & Lara Vetter (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2011), p. 64.
Certain critics have identified underlying parallels between the myth thinking of Nietzsche and Lawrence’s interest in the genesis of religion. See Colin Milton, Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987). Other critics have noted correlations between Nietzsche and Lawrence’s Apocalypse. T. R. Wright argues that there are suspicions that ‘Nietzsche lies behind Lawrence’s argument’ in Apocalypse with his reading of the book of Revelation anticipating deconstructive readings. D. H. Lawrence and the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 234–5.
For Michael Bell, ‘Lawrence’s palimpsestic sense of the evolutionary past living on within the psyche was made explicit in his late study of the Apocalypse.’ D. H. Lawrence, Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 69.
D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and Other Writings on Revelation (London: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 99. Various essays reveal a Nietzschean mode of inversion, such as ‘Blessed are the Powerful’ which through its inversion of the Beatitudes echoes Zarathustra: ‘The reign of love is passing, and the reign of power is coming again’ from Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 321.
Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone (London: SPCK publishing, 2009), pp. 53–4. Matthew Henry too argues that the Lamb is not of ‘another nature, an inferior worship’. Commentary on the Whole Book (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), p. 1988.
Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 88.
Letter to Rolf Gardiner, 4 July 1924, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume V March 1924–March 1927, eds. James T. Boulton & Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 67–8. Lawrence’s religious pluralism is also evidenced in his history textbook for schools, Movements in European History (1918), where he aligns pre-Christian paganism of the Greeks and the Romans with liberal polytheism: ‘The Romans did not hate the Ephesian Diana, the Asiatic many-breasted mother, or the bull-slaying Persian sun god. They even welcomed them to Rome, these strange deities, and built them temples.’ Ed. Philip Crumpton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 26.
Rachel Potter, Modernism and Democracy: Literary Culture 1900–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 52–3.
For example, see Earth Shattering, ed. Neil Astley (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2002).
John Donne, ‘The Flea’, from John Donne, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 89.
See Anne Baring & Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (London: Viking Arkana, 1991). The mother goddess ‘is an image that inspires and focuses a perception of the universe as an organic, alive and sacred whole […] Earth was her divinity: the divine was immanent as creation’ (pp. xi–xv).
Ernst Cassirer, ‘Language and Art II’ (1942), from Symbol, Myth and Culture: Essays and Lectures 1935–1945, ed. Donald Phillip Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 171.
John Berger, Why Look at Animals? (London: Penguin Books, 2009), p. 13.
The Escaped Cock, ed. Gerald M. Lacy (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1973), p. 21.
Letter to Frederick Carter, 1 October 1929, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume III November 1928–February 1930, eds. Keith Sagar & James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 507–8.
Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1985), p. 25.
John Schad, Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida (Brighton: Sussex University Press, 2004), p. 4.
Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 171.
Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), p. 111.
Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 3.
‘Stephen Guest brought me a copy of The Man Who Died. He said, “Did you know that you are the priestess oí Isis in this book?” […] I was certain that my friends had told Lawrence that I was at work on this theme [the wounded but living Christ]’. Ibid., pp. 141–2. See also Janice S. Robinson, The Life and Work of an American Poet (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982). Janice argues that the two developed a strong spiritual bond partly because of their interest in comparative mythology, which linked the Christ story to Osiris, p. 203.
James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 372.
Keith Sagar argues that the essay, ‘The Risen Lord’ (July 1929) is the ‘third part’ of The Escaped Cock. When responding to the gospel of the crucified Christ, Lawrence states: ‘We must accept the image complete […] He rises with hands and feet […] then with lips and genitals of a man.’ In learning to become part of a living cosmos, Lawrence’s Jesus, according to Keith Sagar, becomes an Etruscan. The Complete Stories: D. H. Lawrence, eds. Keith Sagar & Melissa Partridge (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 42.
Charlotte Brontë, ‘Pilate’s Wife’s Dream’, from Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, ed. Hannah Wilson (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014), p. 13.
Letter to H.D., 10 July 1918, Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Lives in Letters 1918–61, ed. Caroline Zilboorg (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 92.
Brenda S. Helt, ‘Reading History in The Gift and Tribute to Freud’, from The Cambridge Companion to H.D., ed. Nephie J. Christodoulides and Polina Mackay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 160. Aldaliade Morris argues that the images and signs from her unconscious were read by H.D. as ‘signs and wonders from another world’. ‘The Concept of Projection’, from Signets Readings H.D., eds. Susan Stanford Friedman & Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 274. Nanette Norris states: ‘In Freud’s psychology, the boundlessness of the inflnite-as-deity became the boundlessness of the personal unconscious: what had been outside the person was now inside, and infinitely “deep”.’ 68. See also Vincent Quinn, Hilda Doolittle: ‘[…] H.D.’s book is both a tribute to Freud and a disavowal of his naturalistic viewpoint’ (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1967), p. 115.
William Blake, ‘The Human Abstract’, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), plate 47.
Claire Buck, H.D. and Freud: Bisexuality and a Feminine Discourse (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 134.
Susan Gubar, ‘The Echoing Spell of H.D.’s Trilogy’, from Susan Stanford Friedman & Rachel Blau DuPlessis (eds.), Signets Reading H.D. (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin, 1990), p. 311.
Rebecca Styler, Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 82.
Elaine Pagels, Gnostic Gospels (London: Phoenix Books, 2009), pp. 153–4.
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Freer, S. (2015). Hilda Doolittle and D. H. Lawrence: Polytheistic and Pagan Revisionary Mythopoeia. In: Modernist Mythopoeia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035516_5
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