"Singing Like an Echo of an Echo in a Shell": H.D.'s Search for the Feminine Voice in Tribute to Freud

Abstract

Abstract:This paper suggests a reading of H.D.'s Tribute to Freud as the daughter's quest for the maternal language. This distinctive memoir has commonly been read either through the daughter's Vatersehnsucht, desire for her father, or through the feminist lens of the woman poet confronting the authoritarian Freud. Here I offer the quest of the daughter for the maternal as an obscure dimension of the text, yet one that is crucial in the formation of the feminine voice. It is created through allusions to Goethe's Wilhelm MeistersLehrjahre (1795) and, most distinctly, to the enigmatic figure of Mignon in that novel and to the maternal absence that formed her distinct character and poetic voice. H.D. offers her translation of the maternal as a language of echoes, curly structures, and spiral-like meandering. The maternal dimension of the feminine voice is presented as an impossible yet inevitable work of translation that embodies a continuous struggle of becoming.