H.D., archaeology, and modernism

H.D.'s literary recovery of matriarchal myths has been examined by a number of her critics. H.D. scholars have approached her interest in matriarchal myths either through events in her life or through feminist methodologies. My dissertation grounds H.D.'s approach to the past in archaeology, history, and myth. From a New Historicist approach, I argue that these influences shaped her literary reperception of the conflicted relationship between history and myth.; For H.D., museums and myths were the repositories of artifactual knowledge of the past; they were cultural reconstructions through which the past could be reperceived, even revised. History was the repository of facts, of verifiable events enacted in the course of linear time. The mind, for H.D., was the place where the factual knowledge of history and the artifactual knowledge of myth could be restructured by language and perception.; Chapter One opens with a brief narrative of H.D.'s journey to Luxor, Egypt (1923) during Howard Carter's excavation of King Tutankhamen's tomb. Textual and cultural influences conditioned how H.D. perceived this important archaeological event. Chapter One locates these influences in the rise of nineteenth-century archaeology and in the books H.D. owned, read, and referred to that resulted from its impact on history and myth. Chapter Two situates her literary career within the contexts of museums and modernism. H.D.'s intellectual pursuits in classical history and literature revealed to her that poets were better prepared than academics to reperceive and reconstruct the life of the past.; Chapters Three, Four, and Five analyze H.D.'s thematic search for a framework of myth that can empower the lives of her women characters. Palimpsest, "Hesperia," "Pilate's Wife," and Helen in Egypt demonstrate H.D.'s imaginative reconstruction of the mythic pattern of Isis' search for the scattered body of Osiris. These works exemplify two related projects in H.D.'s work: to search through archaeology, literature, and history for dispersed fragments of myth, and to reconstruct a mythological framework from them that can guide her women characters to enact myth as history.