Material Spirituality in Modernist Women's Writing

Elizabeth Anderson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350063464
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

For Virginia Woolf, H.D., Mary Butts and Gwendolyn Brooks, things mobilise creativity, traverse domestic, public and rural spaces and stage the interaction between the sublime and the mundane. Ordinary things are rendered extraordinary by their spiritual or emotional significance, and yet their very ordinariness remains part of their value. This book addresses the intersection of spirituality, things and places – both natural and built environments – in the work of these four women modernists. From the living pebbles in Mary Butts's memoir to the pencil sought in Woolf's urban pilgrimage in 'Street Haunting', the Christmas decorations crafted by children in H.D.'s autobiographical novel The Gift and Maud Martha's love of dandelions in Brooks's only novel, things indicate spiritual concerns in these writers' work. Elizabeth Anderson contributes to current debates around materiality, vitalism and post-secularism, attending to both mainstream and heterodox spiritual expressions and connections between the two in modernism. How we value our spaces and our world being one of the most pressing contemporary ethical and ecological concerns, this volume contributes to the debate by arguing that a change in our attitude towards the environment will not come from a theory of renunciation but through attachment to and regard for material things.

1

Threads and silver paper: Spirituality of gift and process in H.D.’s war writing

In 1933, H.D. began an analysis with Freud. In 1944, reflecting on the analysis, she wrote that at her first session he had said ‘you are the only person who has ever come into this room and looked at the things in the room before looking at me’. Indeed, Freud’s study and the things in it form a significant part of the analysis. H.D.’s written rejoinder to Freud is that ‘you are contained in the things you love’.¹ Freud suggests an opposition between himself and his things which H.D. denies.² Here the boundary between subject and object is troubled as the antiquities shape and contain subjectivity. H.D. might be forgiven her social lapse if we consider Freud’s study; it is a room full of shelves and cabinets of books and antiquities, objects from ancient cultures (largely Roman but also Greek and Egyptian). His collection of antiquities moves the study beyond the typical cluttered Victorian interior into the realm of the museum. Yet Freud’s study is clearly not a museum as he would frequently handle various objects, move them around or offer them to H.D. for comment. Many of them were lined up along his desk, forming a screen between the desk and the analysand’s couch, itself covered with richly detailed rugs and cushions.³ Antiquities are a certain kind of object, ancient, beautiful, expensive, markers of cultural capital and cultural memory, the opposite of the ephemeral and ordinary.⁴

This chapter will consider Freud’s antiquities alongside other objects in H.D.’s work with a humbler provenance: domestic gifts, Christmas decorations and embroidery. These things enable an exploration into some of the key concerns of H.D.’s writing in the 1940s: namely, war trauma and the subsequent search for consolation which she found in relationships, spirituality and creative practice. Both during and after the war, H.D. sought strategies for continuing to create in the face of conflict and loss. Material destruction and scarcity brought an intensified appreciation for objects and materials. H.D.’s literary work of this period resonates with ideas in process theology and anthropology in its emphasis on process as a mode of continual becoming and the movement of materials. Materials have their own peculiar life as they participate in continuous motion, moving in and through various gatherings that become things.⁵ This understanding of the flow of materials indicates the deep connectivity of the living world, which resonates with H.D.’s emphasis on the connection of all things, a worldview derived from Hermeticism.⁶

H.D. was the pseudonym for the American writer, Hilda Doolittle. She first travelled to Europe in 1911, subsequently settling in London. She began publishing poetry as part of the Imagist movement, publishing her first poems in Poetry in 1913 and her first volume Sea Garden in 1916. Shortly after the First World War, she began a relationship with Bryher – the writer, heiress and arts patron – that would last the rest of her life. They lived primarily at Bryher’s home Kenwin in Switzerland, although they also travelled extensively, until they returned to London at the outbreak of the Second World War. H.D. stayed in London through the entirety of the Second World War despite the efforts of many friends to persuade her to return to the United States. The prolonged stress and malnutrition led to a breakdown in her health in 1946. H.D. spent the next fifteen years moving between residential hotels and sanatoria in Lausanne and Lugano, while continuing to write prolifically until her death in 1961.

For H.D., writing forged a connection between the material world and divine mystery. Like many modernists, she was interested in the transformative potential of art. However, she saw art as a way of developing and expressing spiritual understanding rather than as a secular replacement for religion. H.D. drew upon a number of different religious and esoteric traditions, engaging with spiritual concerns in her writing without subordinating it to the dictates of doctrine. Her spiritual interests ranged from Moravian Christianity to astrology, from spiritualism to the cult of St Teresa. In H.D.’s writing, these varied modes of spiritual practice, expression and beliefs are consistently taken up in relation to questions of creativity and materiality; encounters with the divine are enmeshed in the material world.

Gardenias and Gods

H.D.’s memoir ‘Writing on the Walls’ was serialized in Life and Letters Today in 1945 and 1946 (and later published in Tribute to Freud in 1956). She did not have access to her notes from the analysis (they remained in Villa Kenwin in Switzerland when H.D. returned to London at the start of the war) and the memoir is a series of impressions rather than a straight record. She had gone to Vienna in 1933 in hopes that Freud would help her overcome the writer’s block she felt was caused by unresolved traumas from the First World War. However, she soon came to feel she could not discuss her war-horror with him, conscious as she was of the escalating crisis in Europe and the threat to Jews. However, she could and did explore the spiritual experiences she had in the Scilly Islands in 1919 and her tour of Greece with Bryher in 1920. Throughout the memoir H.D. draws connections between spirituality – whether the peculiar visions she saw on the wall in Corfu as she attempted to follow the path to Delphi or her memories of a Moravian Christian childhood – creativity and psychic health.

In considering the significance of Freud’s antiquities in H.D.’s memoir, critics have tended to focus on their role in H.D.’s engagement with, and challenge to, Freudian theories around transference, female creativity, sexuality and religion.⁷ The most sustained attention has come from Adalaide Morris in considering the antiquities in terms of exchange.⁸ Morris’s theorization of gift economy has wider implications for H.D.’s work in this period, so it is worth outlining here. H.D. sent gardenias to Freud in celebration of the arrival of his antiquities which were shipped to London after he fled Vienna in 1938. H.D. noted the flowers were ‘to greet the return of the Gods’ and Freud subsequently shared a joke with her, describing the note that accompanied the flowers and adding ‘other people read: Goods’.⁹ Adalaide Morris reads this exchange as part of a larger gift economy based in generosity. The gardenias themselves mark an earlier exchange in which Freud and H.D. swapped stories of visiting Rome (he had remarked ‘the gardenias, in Rome, even I could afford gardenias’).¹⁰

Morris draws upon the work of anthropologist Marcel Mauss to articulate two ways in which the exchange between H.D. and Freud is marked as part of a gift economy rather than an economy of scarcity: temporal lag and a third partner.¹¹ H.D. had long wished to give Freud gardenias; she attempted to give them on a number of birthdays and failed. When she finally does so, it is several years after the initial exchange of memories. The gift marks intimacy; H.D. knows Freud’s memories of gardenias and his ongoing desire for them. The passage of time also allows H.D. to demonstrate that she recognizes the significance of his gift of reminiscence. Furthermore, telling the tale of the gardenias at the beginning of H.D.’s memoir, titled Tribute to Freud, suggests that the text is the larger gift, one that proceeds over a decade after the analysis (which was itself Freud’s larger gift to H.D.) and after Freud’s death. Morris notes that this demonstrates how Freud’s gift was transformative; it takes H.D. time to absorb the gifts of the analysis and put them into circulation again.¹² Morris goes on to argue that a third partner is essential in a gift economy. Giving-in-return involves two people and a static structure; however, giving-in-turn opens outward: ‘Before a return donation the gift must leave the boundary of the ego and circle out into mystery.’¹³ ‘The spirit of things’ or the ‘god in the goods’ increases as the gift is passed on only after the intervention of a third party. This dynamism puts the gift into process.¹⁴

Like most of the critical engagements with the gift in the American and European academy in recent decades, Morris is in dialogue with anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s seminal text The Gift (published in 1925 as Essai sure le don). Mauss’s work draws on ethnographic data from a number of diverse societies, focusing on non-Western, non-capitalist, Indigenous groups. Although he attempted to avoid the primitivism of colleagues in suggesting similarities between Indigenous economic modes and so-called modern modes of exchange, Mauss himself is subject to a similar critique of distancing ‘the West and the Rest’ in affirming a temporal distinction (i.e. that Indigenous, non-capitalist societies are archaic).¹⁵ Graham Harvey points out that Mauss misunderstands Maori worldview in interpreting hau (the excess abundance that yields from gift giving) as a spiritual or mystical force rather than a social one. Harvey argues that hau is social because Maori see trees, rocks and land as persons, and therefore they are including in the circulation of gift giving and gifting excess (rather than profiting from it).¹⁶ This point is underlined by T. P. Tawhai’s description of the purpose of religion as ‘to seek to enter the domain of the superbeing and do violence with impunity’. Thus the personhood of rocks, trees, plants and animals is acknowledged and the violence inherent in using other persons for one’s own end (i.e. eating, building a house etc.) is made possible through ‘seek[ing] permission and offer[ing] placation’.¹⁷ I argue that we do not have to read the gift in terms of opposition between the spiritual and the social. If we understand spirituality as an aspect of the material world, than the sacred nature of gift exchange does not isolate it in an otherworldly category but retains it as part of everyday spirituality. In H.D.’s gift of gardenias, the antiquities form the third party: they are persons to be included in gift exchange, while the gardenias represent the hau, the excess that yields from the gift of analysis. The things themselves are part of the dynamic, sacred nature of the gift economy, not merely items to be exchanged.

The French theorist Hélène Cixous explores the concept of a feminine libidinal economy that escapes the constricted logic of giving-in-return in an early essay ‘Sorties’.¹⁸ Cixous argues that ‘there is no ‘free’ gift. [–] But all the difference lies in the why and how of the gift, in the values that the gesture of giving affirms.’ Cixous’s understanding of the feminine economy is that such giving is positive, it does not circle around or attempt to cancel out lack but instead ‘gives for’.¹⁹ The dynamism we see in Morris’s understanding of a sacred gift economy (drawn from Mauss) is crucial to Cixous’s theorizing. She emphasizes movement when she theorises ‘a cosmos where eros never stops traveling.’²⁰ Difference is both within and without as boundaries are porous. Sal Renshaw argues that Cixous, like Derrida, argues that the gift as such is impossible – but that this very impossibility prompts us to consider how giving might happen in spite of this impossibility. For Cixous, the masculine economy is one that privileges closure, the gift always affirming the subjectivity of the giver at the expense of the other and foreclosing difference by the expectation of return. The feminine economy is based in plenitude and celebrati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Threads and silver paper: Spirituality of gift and process in H.D.’s war writing
• 2 ‘The pebbles were each one alive’: Animism and Anglo-Catholicism in Mary Butts’s writing
• 3 Darkness and dirt: Virginia Woolf’s material mysticism
• 4 Radiant dandelions: Gwendolyn Brooks’s domestic sublime
• 5 Things in the city
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page