Maternal instincts and the matrix of nation: H.D., Marianne Moore, and genealogies of an American motherland (Hilda Doolittle)

This dissertation examines works of American modernists H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Marianne Moore with the goal of including national identity more prominently within the realm of criticism about those forms of consciousness modernism explored.; I take as my premise that the literary and cultural interdependence of nation and family so prevalent among Americanist studies of nineteenth-century literature adapts and changes at the turn of the twentieth-century to account for new constructions of identity. Common articulations of this shift in international or transnational terms do not adequately account for the symbolic legacy of earlier constructions within the literature, criticism, and culture of the modernist period. Placing mother and family near the center of the political and cultural rhetoric of both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American nation, I trace this trajectory through the literature as economic changes, experimental modernism, and World War I usher America onto a newly international stage.; This dissertation focuses on H.D. and Marianne Moore, but similar work may just as fruitfully take up the writings of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, or even Ezra Pound. In this case, I chose female writers in order to highlight the shift in domestic metaphors and the rhetoric used to describe culture and society in specifically gendered terms. I contend that acknowledging the links between modern discourses of gender, sexuality, and psychoanalysis and those of nation, empire, and international relations is essential to understanding American modernism and the modernist uses and revisions of domestic metaphors for structures of collective identity.; Both H.D. and Moore represent heightened examples of the larger, modernist response to the structures of collective modes of belonging. Significant parallels in their relationships with both their mothers and their nations in their everyday lives surface vividly in their works. Based on their examples, the textual representations of these relationships suggest that the nation is available to modernists not only to provide political surface content in modernist works, but also to influence the literary form in its narrations of personal and public identity and its performances of modern consciousness within the contexts of family, culture, and state.