Questing For Women’s Dreamland

As the representative epic of the American modern poetess H.D.’s works,Trilogy is created in London attacked by the German incendiary bombs during the World War II when people are tortured by being displaced and spiritual lost.As for H.D.,she has been suffering a lot from the male-dominated society.And especially in World War I and II,many traumatic experiences bring her to a state of both physical and psychological collapse.Nevertheless,through the poetic creation of Trilogy,the poetess is engaged in the quest for spiritual realism,the truth or mental blueprint for humans’ self-redemption in the desert of war.Significantly,based on Adrienne Rich’s concept of “writing as revision”,this paper is going to explain H.D.’s revisionist writing in Trilogy from three aspects: female discourse,female experience and female mythology.Firstly,the poetess attempts to confirm the healing power of female discourse in the world of war,a subversion or revision of male war discourse.The World Wars act like the “Apocryphal fire”,showing great severity and punishing cruelty against mankind.Incarnate as Thoth the scribe of God’s Words,H.D.creates Trilogy with spiritual enlightenment for the war-torn people’s redemption,and she establishes her angelology through “naming” seven new angels for peace,a female usurping male-privilege to name everything and construct social reality.Secondly,the poetess makes a deep exploration of female experience for the reconstruction of self-image as well as the identification of female emotions,revising the male’s prejudice and discrimination against women.Based on unique physical and psychological experience of women,the poetess creates two female images of seashell and warm in the dangerous world of war.But the female image of worm featuring persistence and dauntlessness is a revision of the seashell as an old woman’s image of conservativeness and cowardliness in men’s eyes.Breaking the patriarchal tradition of heterosexuality,H.D.expresses her deep love and mental attachment to female companions,which is discriminated as temporal lesbian feeling by the male.Thirdly,the poetess succeeds in recreating a new female mythology through the syncretism of different cultural traditions,a revision of the masculine myths.Denying the monotheism of Judeo-Christianity,she shows desire to be the founder of a new religion,and creates a Lady with a sacred book a new female savior instead of Christ Jesus.Also,in her revolutionary revisionist mythmaking,H.D.is actively involved in the purification and sanctification of those veiled and distorted female mythological figures caused by the misogynist ideologies of the masculine culture.To sum up,Trilogy is a great work which is a quest for spiritual realities after H.D.has suffered a lot.Comparing to the Egyptian Thoth,a god of wisdom and learning,the poetess creates Trilogy full of Words and spiritual nourishment.In her dream-vision,her psyche’s butterfly,out of the old self’s cocoon,rises from the desert of war to women’s dreamland,a spiritual heaven.Seeking the inner world,woman’s ego of H.D.confined by external reality searches for authenticity and self-identity as both woman and artist.She eliminates the repression and bondage suffered by women from the patriarchal society,and shows great affirmation of female power of regenerative love and giving life,bringing the death-centered world spiritual solace and rebirth.Briefly,incarnate as the Lady with a sacred book,H.D.creates Trilogy with revisionary writing against the patriarchal culture,which is a quest for women’s dreamland where female cultural identity and social position are well established.