Contextualizing Helen’s Hieroglyphs

Throughout “Pallinode,” the hieroglyph motif serves to highlight a larger conflict within the text for the reader, namely the tension between symbols and their interpretation. H.D.’s complex construction of hieroglyphs within the text allows for her heroine to adopt and later discard a variety of postures toward myth and symbol as well as the secondary language of their analysis and interpretation. When the motif first appears within the text, she depicts Helen as favoring a scientific, exact translation of them, ultimately suggesting that, if approached correctly, all subjective meanings can eventually be extracted from a single image. “I am instructed, I know the script, / the shape of a bird is a letter…” she wrote. In other words, she portrays Helen as approaching the interpretation of symbols scientifically, believing that they can eventually be dominated by reason and intellectual scrutiny.

Such an empirical approach to understanding symbols and their interpretation remains especially apparent in the early poems of “Pallinode,” particularly the seventh poem of book one. She writes in describing Helen’s understanding of the language of hieroglyphs in the prose preface, “She knows the script, she says, but we judge that it is emotional knowledge, rather than intellectual.” The notion that a “script” exists, in which one hieroglyphic symbol corresponds to a presumably correct translation, evokes a scientific logic of which Doolittle remains skeptical. As the prose passage unfolds, she continues to cast doubt on Helen’s reasoning, stating, “She says she is ‘instructed,’ she is enchanted, rather.” In distinguishing between reason and emotion, the author suggests that Helen unwittingly draws from the latter. While Helen styles herself as being capable of empirically translating the strange Egyptian friezes, Doolittle ultimately cautions the reader against the veracity of such claims.

H.D.’s complex construction of hieroglyphs within the text allows for her heroine to adopt and later discard a variety of postures toward myth and symbol as well as the secondary language of their analysis and interpretation.

As the book progresses, other postures emerge, in which Helen adopts a stance of aesthetic appreciation without the ideologically fraught rhetoric of science. Particularly apparent in the later poems of “Pallinode,” this attitude contrasts sharply with the personnage’s earlier exactitude. Doolittle writes in the prose passage of the eighth poem of the second book, that “It is not necessary to ‘read’ the riddle,” suggesting that Helen has discarded her prior scientific posturing. As she transitions to verse, Doolittle suggests the hubris inherent in an authoritative approach to something so complex. She writes in verse spoken by Helen, “let Helen’s imperious quest / through this temple, to solve the riddle / written upon the walls / be shed.” Such a presumptive attitude risks simplifying and limiting the possibilities that “the riddle” holds, rather than elucidating it.

In many ways, Helen, like H.D., recognizes the dangers inherent in such an authoritative approach. In Doolittle’s own life, the hubris of an authoritarian attitude remained prominent in her encounters in the literary world. As Kathleen Fraser argues in “The Blank Page,” Doolittle’s own life had witnessed language as both a vehicle for patriarchy as well as personal discovery, namely as Doolittle simultaneously sought the approval of a male literary tradition and her own voice. Fraser writes, for example, in her essay, “Reviewing H.D.’s progress toward the trust of her own ‘page,’ a contemporary poet might well identify with this struggle to circumvent the tremendous pressure of prevailing male ideology that had so conveniently persisted, historically viewing women contemporaries as “receptacle like muses rather than active agents,” thus reinforcing long-dominant ‘notions of what was properly and naturally feminine.'” As Fraser argues, at the time of authoring Helen in Egypt, these questions were of paramount importance to Doolittle, and the rhetoric of psychoanalysis presented similar conflicts between the dangers of ideology and the rewards of such personal discovery.

As Doolittle increasingly valued Freud’s help in resolving her memories of loss and trauma during World War I, she also struggled to resolve the more patriarchal aspects of psychoanalysis with her ardently feminist views. As Susan Edmunds observes in Out of Line, Doolittle constantly negotiated such Freudian ideas as female hysteria with a feminist view of both history and the mythic quest of introspection, “Freud identifies the typically female hysteric’s practice of registering repressed memories on the body’s surface and in hallucinations, her inability to compose coherent life histories, and her appropriation of other people’s bodily traits and symptoms as debilitating manifestations of a neurotic disorder. In H.D.’s hands, however, these same symptoms of hysteria function as effective strategies of revisionary reform.” Likewise, Doolittle continually revises Freudian theory while positing alternatives, and, in depicting Helen, she often favors an unmediated experience of myth, symbol and the sub-conscious, thus placing her heroine in the role of both analyst and analysand.