H.D. and the Victorian fin de siècle

by Cassandra Laity

H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siecle argues foremost that H.D. eluded the male modernist flight from Romantic "effeminacy" and "personality" by embracing the very cults of personality in the Decadent Romanticism of Oscar Wilde, A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater, and D. G. Rossetti that her male contemporaries most deplored: the cult of the demonic femme fatale and of the "effeminate" Aesthete androgyne. H.D., Laity maintains, used these sexually aggressive masks to shape a female modernism that freely engaged female and male androgyny, homoeroticism, narcissism, and maternal eroticism. Focusing on the early Sea Garden, the plays and poetry of the 1920s, and her later epic, Trilogy, H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siecle demonstrates H.D.'s shift from the homoerotic, "white," vanishing tropology of the male androgyne fashioned by Pater and Wilde to the "abject" monstrously sexual body of the Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent femme fatale.