Werfel read some poems and two acts of Esther, Kaiserin von Persien. The acts carry one away. But I am easily carried away. The criticisms and comparisons put forward by Max, who was not entirely satisfied with the piece, disturb me, and I am no longer so sure of my impression of the play as a whole as I was while listening to it, when it overwhelmed me. I remember the Yiddish actors. W.'s handsome sisters. The elder one leaned against the chair, often looked at the mirror out of the corner of her eye, and then--as if she were not already devoured by my eyes--gently pointed a finger to a brooch pinned on her blouse. It was a low-cut dark blue blouse, her throat was covered with a tulle scarf. Repeated accounting of something that happened at the theatre: some officers kept saying to each other in a loud voice during Kabale und Liebe: "Speckbacher is cutting a re," by which they were referring to an officer who was leaning beside a box. [D 319]
Kafka's recollection of his first experience with the Yiddish theatre shows an obsession with gesture. Elsewhere in the diaries, he takes detailed notes on the history of Yiddish theatre, including its important dates and plays and politics. The Jewish theatre disturbed Kafka: he felt alien to it but heard in it too his own internal voice. This ambivalence expresses ambivalence about his own identity. Further, it is clear from the diary entries that the cabaret quality, the stylized movements, and the almost circus-like mannerism resonated with his own sense of the secret life of things.
The theatre of gestures--Kafka's unique emblem--makes his work at once so naturalistic and terribly difficult to translate to the stage. His scenes are essentially performative: his depictions of sex, for example, are always public, with someone watching and often annotating. The voyeurism in every expectedly "intimate" moment is a hallmark of his burlesques. Gazes are constantly interpenetrating. His matrices of arms and legs and eyes, ears and fingers and hair--a world where human limbs sport minds of their own--are more complexes of interiority than characters' "thoughts." The secret life of things and their self-appointments on the world stage are of the utmost importance in the fate of man. This common language of gesture afforded Kafka pleasure in the theatre in general, and in the Yiddish theatre in particular. To acknowledge the common bond between his stylizations and the Yiddish theatre's kabuki is to uncover the language of gesture so fundamental to an understanding of Kafka's fiction and phenomenology.
Kafka's fictive worlds are worlds of things. Gestures--the language of the sensate body--play off one another in his tales as they do in the stylized choreography of Yiddish theatre. In this fashion they establish a discrete dialogue with the reader outside of speech (if not outside of semiotics) that exploits the reader's ability to sense "meaning" rather than translate it. Take, for example, the rosy, whorled wound of the patient in "A Country Doctor": the worms bore within the folds of flesh and skin as they burrow, they cannot help but elicit a felt repulsion, even nausea in the reader. Such metaphysicians aside, his tales are told of, by, and about the body as a phenomenon. The noumenal realm is inserted a posteriori by those who would have Kafka's wounds invoke the divine rather than the Real. To quote again from the same diary entry (where Kafka quotes from Werfel's play Esther): "God's masterpieces fart at one another in the bath" (D 319). An essential mockery and laughter is entailed in the events on the stage of the world. If we can take Gustav Janouch at his word, Kafka's saying, there is hope, plenty of hope, just not for us, but for God, then why couldn't farting be the discourse we own, our freedom of speech?
Dominant readings of Kafka have dwelt on his pervasive obsession with guilt (father-son, employer-employee, native-alien) and have associated his genius with shame. In this context his radical performativity is also elided, for shame is fundamentally performative--communal, public, relational--in a way that guilt typically is not. A truly radical reading of Kafka, then, must underscore the equally important (if not more important) interest in the performance of a collective shame--a shame that includes his own. "In the Penal Colony," notorious for its description of the inscription of sin and redemption directly upon the flesh of the condemned, is a document of shame written upon the body politic.
The story of Kafka, as told by literary historians and as embedded in the popular imagination, perfectly embodies Northrop Frye's descriptive poetics of pathos. We tend to read it as God's pathetic narrative. Note how in encyclopedia entries and book jacket blurbs alike Kafka's story is consistently conflated with that of Josef K--"a tragedy basted with pathos"--with apologies made for any hint of his "social affability." 6 Forcing the author into a sort of irresistible victimhood, we have made him, pace Sander Gilman, society's patient. But Kafka was no thorough hermit; he was intimate with the most outspoken members of Prague's social scene. His affair with Milena Jesenská was not a staid courtship with a retiring and discreet young lady but a tumultuous affair with one of Prague's most noteworthy citizens. Milena was but one of his liberated lovers, a "new woman" and a socialist as well. A pioneering and politically radical journalist, the pomp of Jesenská's aristocratic pedigree was matched by her desire to sully it. Dora Dymant, Kafka's last lover, was also, by no accident, a socialist activist. 7
Hannah Arendt has said that what concerned Kafka most was not metaphysical justice or absolute moral requirement but "a world constructed by people, in which the actions of man depend on nothing but himself and his own spontaneity and in which human society is ruled by laws established by men." 8 In underlining his humanity, she subverts the image that has dominated his reception from the inception of his friendship with Brod. Kundera takes Brod to task, in the essay "The Castrating Shadow of Saint Garta," for the dissemination of the sanctified Kafka image (TB 35-53). 9 But it is not Brod's culpability in an inchoate crime that matters most here. There is a humanism that we can attribute to Kafka's "laughter": though qualified by God's ironies, Kafka's humor indicts and comforts laterally; it is concerned with "us." It is in this engagement with the human condition, and the use of irony to illuminate this condition, that Kafka ranks with the likes of Shakespeare. His ironic humor is directed at the social order and individual claims in that order. His sympathetic irony does not alienate; it supports a restoration of human compassion.
Irony frequently enters scenes of pathos in Kafka's work. His "heroes" are scorned and isolated, then suddenly and inexplicably embraced and adored, often by individuals who are scorned or isolated themselves. The intense longing he shows for affection ironically thrusts him further away from the object of his desire (recall the acute longing Gregor Samsa expresses for the photograph of the woman in fur). The officer is finally freed--neither transcendentally nor immanently but actually by the machine that he adores in his explanation, "Guilt," as in Kafka's world, "is never to be doubted."
Benjamin's reading of "In the Penal Colony" and its body in pain are informed by a modernist mission and he places more emphasis on guilt (interiority) than on shame (exteriority). The exquisite wounds carved on the soldier become a battleground between "those in power" and those subservient to it. The inscription in the flesh is a portal to the discovery of one's own (perhaps universal) guilt:
an archaic apparatus . . . engraves ornate letters on the backs of guilty men, multiplying the cuts and increasing the ornamentation to the point where the back of the guilty man becomes clairvoyant, able itself to discover the writing from whose letters it must learn the name of its unknown guilt. It is, then, the back upon which this is incumbent. 10
Yet an alternate reading can employ the same descriptors to a variant conclusion. If the project of those in power is to fix the language of the Law onto the body of its citizens, to make it legible, Kafka's is to force this eminent "legibility" into "overexposure," which then "blocks every essay of interpretation." The struggle for signification--the officer's and the reader's--is laughable. What better language to defy paradigmatic signification than that of bodily praxis? This code of gesture, of bodily signs and postures, is Kafka's foremost language. It is one Benjamin not only noticed, praised, and analysed, but also criticized for its sometimes pathetic essentialism in his 1934 essay on the significance of the Kafkan gesture. For him, the allegory of Kafka's tales cannot be apprehended through the conventional complex of symbolic correspondences: Kafka's artistic force and vision lie within the "codex of gestures" and it is from here any understanding of his work must begin. The codex of gestures is one necessarily located in the body; no surprise then that Kafka is so concerned with the body's material potential for pain, wounding, breakage, and amputation. Pain, wounding, and decampment of the body are natural, if extreme, issues of a desire to restore the body to memory--to re-member the body--that recalls Benjamin's phrase, "the most forgotten alien land is one's own body." 11 Benjamin senses a failure unspectacular in Kafka's gestural lexicon:
In the mirror which the prehistoric world held before him in the form of guilt [Kafka] saw the future emerging in the form of a judgment. But he did not say what it was like. Kafka could understand things only in the form of a gestus, but he could not understand this gestus itself. In Kafka, narrative thus regains the significance it had in the mouth of Scheherazade: to postpone the future. 12
But this failure to unravel the full meaning of the gestus is the crucial moment of his postmodernity and as such the "procedure seems to us much more subversive than the usual modernist one, because the latter, by not showing the Thing, leaves open the possibility of grasping [its] central emptiness"--a process much more terrifying and liberating, and perhaps joyful, than the exposure of lack alone (LA 144-5). For Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka is less interested in "presenting the image of an unknowable law" than in "dissecting the mechanism" of the machines that use the idea of Law to set themselves in motion. "Because it has no object of knowledge," the machine is not the Law; "the law is operative only in being stated and stated only in the act of punishment: a statement directly inscribed on the real, on the body and the flesh." 13 The punishment inscribed on the victim's flesh is a practical application of the Law, a shaming. Transcendence, proscribed or anticipated, has less to do with the sacrosanct character of the Law than with its vacuous need to be made meaningful by such gestures.
The pleasure the officer receives from his machine is well suited to the relish with which he describes it to the explorer; the story is as much about the ritual violence of language as the ritual violence of punishment:
"I don't know," said the officer, "if the Commandant has already explained this apparatus to you." [. . .] "It consists, as you see, of three parts. In the course of time each of these parts has acquired a kind of popular nickname. The lower one is called the Bed, the upper one the Designer and this one here in the middle that moves up and down is called the Harrow. ["IPC" 193]
The apparatus itself is compared, ironically, to instruments of healing--"You will have seen similar apparatuses in hospitals; but in our Bed the movements are all precisely calculated" ("IPC" 196)--and we can be certain that Kafka's ironic insertion is not lost on us. The apparatus is meant to heal. But it cannot: the machine of interpretation fails and succeeds simultaneously. Kafka's narrative keeps the wound open.
The practice of circumcision and the archaic and ornate instruments used to write one's faith on one's body are not thematically distant from Kafka's ironized machinery of interpretation. As inscriptions on the body are marks of community, so one's "guilt" (understood as the aftereffect of a transgression) may be written on the body as shame. While alienating one from the community one has betrayed, wounds inflicted by the machine of the Law on the individual body underscore the individual's essential communal existence. Inscriptions on the body, that alien territory, are designed to reconcile the individual with his community; but this gestural language of community, written quite literally on the body, individual and social, has forgotten its significance.
For all the guilt in Kafka's tale--and this may be a function of the explorer's role as witness and the narrative's tone--there is also a deep sense of the power, putatively "healing" and hygienic, of shame. After all, the prisoner, and ultimately, the officer-cum-victim, are meant to learn their transgression by reading it upon their back, a feat possible only through the sense of touch, not vision:
Many questions were troubling the explorer, but at the sight of the prisoner he asked only: "Does he know his sentence?" "No," said the officer, eager to go on with his exposition, but the explorer interrupted him, "He doesn't know the sentence that has been passed on him?" "No," said the officer again, pausing a moment as if to let the explorer elaborate his question, and then said: "There would be no point in telling him. He'll learn it on his body." ["IPC" 197]
Knowledge (and self-knowledge) is penetrative and rapaciously violating.
In an early letter dating from January 1904 to his friend Oskar Pollák, Kafka explains in a language of physical violence the effect that writing should have on us:
it's good when your conscience receives big wounds, because that makes it more sensitive to every twinge. I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? 14
The import of the body in dialogue also helps explain the frequency of nakedness in Kafka's tales. For obvious reasons, the prisoner must be naked to have his crime inscribed onto his body, but the nakedness of the officer, prior to his "self-sacrifice," stands in a different relation to the machine of Law than does the practical assignment of the prisoner's naked body:
In spite of the obvious haste with which he was discarding first his uniform and then all his clothing, he handled each garment with loving care, he even ran his fingers caressingly over the silver lace on the jacket and shook a tassel into place.  ["IPC" 220]
The officer's ritualized striptease is uncannily funny--in each gesture of the shedding of the garment lies the significance of the rite. The officer performs his last act as though on stage for an audience long gone (the ladies' gift of stale handkerchiefs comes instead of their presence). His reabsorption into the machine is literally equivalent to writing his own finale, the "Be just" sign on his body is a desperate and violent way to return the body into the communal realm, and so to restore community.
But something goes terribly wrong: "The Harrow was not writing, it was only jabbing, and the Bed was not turning the body over but only bringing it up quivering against the needles. The explorer wanted to do something, if possible to bring the whole machine to a standstill, for this was no exquisite torture such as the officer desired, this was plain murder" ("IPC" 224). And it is now that the machinery lives a life of its own, apparently also struggling to fulfill its duty to the Law: "The Harrow tried to move back to its old position, but as if it had itself noticed that it had not yet got rid of its burden it stuck after all where it was, over the pit" (ibid.). The explorer races to help but it is too late:
And here, almost against his will he had to look at the face of the corpse. It was as it had been in life; no sign was visible of the promised redemption; what the others had found in the machine the officer had not found; the lips were firmly pressed together, the eyes were open, with same expression as in life, the look was calm and convinced, through the forehead went the point of a great iron spike. ["IPC" 224-5]
Penetrative knowledge indeed, but not exquisite transcendence. The tale's conclusion is anticlimactic, but this suits a reading of inscription--all writing and reading--as violent. The explorer returns to the "teahouse" where he finds the grave of the Old Commandant. The laborers there push their chairs aside, as though changing sets, so that the hidden gravestone's inscription becomes visible. The explorer's suppliant pose as he reads--Kafka's language of gestures again--indicates an impulse to knowledge that is choreographed by power relations:
It was a simple stone, low enough to be covered by a table. There was an inscription on it in very small letters, the explorer had to kneel down to read it. This was what it said: "Here rests the old Commandant. His adherents, who now must be nameless, have dug this grave and set up this stone. There is a prophecy that after a certain number of years the Commandant will rise again and lead his adherents from this house to recover the colony. Have faith and wait!" ["IPC" 226]
The bystanders meet the inscription with amusement. The explorer only restores the table and departs. What are we to make of this final inscription in a story of the violence of inscription? The violence of the prophecy written in stone, the body of the world, is clear. But even the promise of final judgment--the future itself--is written in the body of the world, buried, hidden, and ridiculed (as it is written, so it shall be). The violence of living it out is inescapable: "They could have jumped in the boat but the explorer lifted a heavy knotted rope from the floor boards, threatened them with it, and so kept them from attempting the leap" ("IPC" 227). The inscription virtually written into the earth in this alien territory is left to be articulated. The ferryman rows off with the explorer.
The conclusion allows nothing of the penal colony on board the departing ship. The officer has been stilled forever in the machine as the explorer is trapped forever in his alterity (home is not a possibility) and the historical narrative of the island's inhabitants written in the Old Commandant's gravestone. With the final--suspended--gesture of departure, "In the Penal Colony" is about only itself, resisting symbolic "interpretation" and underscoring the territorial (bodily) violation of the machine. Conventional, sanctifying, readings of Kafka have long made metaphors of his life and works. Yet he begs to be read by the body, to be felt like the spike through the forehead. Whose back fails to arch (involuntarily) as the machine inscribes its Law? But as gruesomely performative as the narrative is, it is also funny at the gut-level. The reader is caught in a community of convulsion and comedy, not unlike Kafka himself was caught standing in the shadows of the Yiddish theater, unmindfully slapping his thigh in laughter. The reader abandons the colony with the explorer, orphaning the story to a fatal distillation--but not without a final incredulous laugh from Kafka's Sarah at the irony of this ineluctable end.
Malynne Sternstein is Assistant Professor of Slavic Literatures and Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. She is kept awake not only by Kafka, but also by Central European cultural studies and the avant-garde. She is currently working on a study of the Czech avant-garde and socio-sexual, linguistic, and perceptual arbitrariness.
I am deeply indebted to Rowdy Olsen for his kindness and inspiration.
1. Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 146; hereafter abbreviated LA.
2. Milan Kundera, "Jerusalem Address," in The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 158.
3. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Aaron Asher (New York: Harper Perrenial, 1996), 106, 96-7.
4. For more on Kundera's Kafka, see the essays in Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995); hereafter abbreviated TB.
5. Frank Kafka, The Diaries, 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 318; hereafter abbreviated D.
6. For more on pathos, tragedy, and irony see Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 39-42.
7. Jesenská's and Dymant's and, for that matter, Felice Bauer's own accomplishments have too long been overshadowed by their relationships with Kafka; their names are inextricable from his and literary history has thus killed their stories where his ends. Derek Sayer makes some admirable amends for Jesenská in The Coasts of Bohemia.
8. She continues, "and not ruled by arcane forces, whether they are interpreted as higher or lower forces." Hannah Arendt, "Franz Kafka," in Franz Kafka: An Anthology of Marxist Criticism, ed. and trans. Kenneth Hughes (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1981), 3.
9. Here too Kundera implies that by aligning Kafka/Nowy with Buddha, Moses and Christ, Brod writes Kafka's hagiography. I agree, and yet the fault may lie in with a misconception of "sainthood," a failure to honor the humor of the Buddha, of Christ, or of the Torah, rather than in "sanctifying" Kafka.
10. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 133.
11. Ibid., 132.
12. Peter Osbourne, "Small-Scale Victories, Large-Scale Defeats," in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (New York: Routledge, 1994), 73.
13. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 43.
14. Franz Kafka, The Basic Kafka (New York: Washington Square Press, 1979), 290.
From impressionism to futurism to surrealism and beyond, the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century seem to share a rigidly oppositional logic. These antagonistic programs are united in their efforts to construct authority against and through the rival claims of each other. For each, the attempt to establish a certain authenticity, a new perspective, a transcendent consciousness depends upon the presence of some fallen other, some decadent or marked double. Indeed, as argued by critics from Walter Benjamin to Rita Felski, it is this oppositional logic that informs the avant-garde's tendency toward violence. 1 Avant-gardism is all too easily aligned with imperialism, with discourses of racial and cultural superiority, of progress and evolutionary advance. Similarly, it often exhibits an aggressive chauvinism, a hostile and repressive attitude toward the cultural markers of the feminine. Moreover, it is precisely this oppositional logic that links the avant-garde with totalitarian politics. The aesthetic and fascist movements of the early twentieth century are united in their celebration of violent renewal, by their faith in an aesthetic transcendence of the fallen world. 2 What needs to be realized, however, is that these movements, both aesthetic and political, tend to abandon the conventional terms of tyranny--order, control, stasis--for a dialectic between stasis and change, regulation and revolt. In other words, what defines the aesthetic politics of the period is a romantic metaphysic in which authority exists only by way of dissent, the center by way of margins, the self in and through the other. As the romantic artist evokes a creative struggle of work and world, the nation establishes itself through "war, the world's only hygiene." 3 Importantly, as Russell Berman and Andrew Hewitt have argued, these violent dialectics move us beyond specific aesthetic and political regimes to a much more pervasive influence. The conflation of order and progress helps to affirm a specific economy. For both art and politics, only within the bourgeois struggle for significance is any significance possible--individual, national, or historical. A romantic aesthetic, as it is diffused throughout the social order, offers ontological stability to a culture driven by market relations. 4
The British avant-garde, however, needs to be explored as part of a larger national reaction to both bourgeois liberalism and the successive invasions of romantic modernism from the continent. Artists such as T. E. Hulme, Lewis, and Ezra Pound found themselves in the peculiar position of needing to be modern after the modern had, in some ways, already occurred. The value of their work, as they saw it, was its recognition of the collusion between romanticism and reification. Modern society, they argued, may now exhibit an unprecedented state of freedom, but it has never experienced a greater standardization. Thus, throughout Blast, Wyndham Lewis argues that the aesthete and the average man have grown indistinguishable; chaos and conformity work together to destroy social integrity. He laments a seemingly free world given over to mechanical progress and ceaseless faddism, a world in which "there is no revolt, it is the normal state." 5 In response to this state of affairs, the British avant-garde turned to classicism. For them, classicism represented an artistic and social integrity, one that eschews bourgeois individualism and foregrounds the material tensions that define and delimit individuals, classes, and nations. The classical aesthetic, particularly in its more tragic aspects, begins with the chaotic energy of the romantic spirit, but subject and object exist in a dynamic tension that restricts the tendency of either to spin out of control. Worldly forces restrain and refine each other, producing a balanced order that is at once fluid and formal. The classical work of art expresses as it reinforces these tensions, and thus serves to halt, clarify, and redirect the violent production (and reproduction) of the world. It reveals as it challenges the material constraints of the individual and his seemingly free activity. In Hulme's famous formulation, "The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas." Similarly, the classical work of art foregrounds discursive limitations, the symbolic coordinates of the individual. Again, Hulme, in his essays on political conversion, argues, "Beliefs are not only representations, they are also forces, and it is possible for one view to compel you to accept it in spite of your preference for another." 6
I hope to show that many feminists at this time, attuned to the material and discursive structures that shape experience, turned to classicism as a viable form of aesthetic politics. For these activists, classicism functioned as a critique and alternative to the oppositional logic of the avant-garde and modernity at large. Classical art spoke to the creative tensions between the private and the public, the fallen and the pure, worldly praxis and the work of art. Specifically, though, feminists adopted and adapted the principles of classical ritual. For them, ritual explicitly united action and symbol, the body and its representation, and thus became an important tool with which to reconre the terms of culturally inscribed power. It was neither static nor reactionary, but served as a continuous argument, a constant construction and reconstruction of those categories that govern the social. To borrow from Jacques Rancière, this form of protest can be defined as a "process of subjectivization," in which the individual, made subject to others, achieves a provisional identity. According to Rancière, subjectivization is "the formation of a one that is not a self but is the relationship of a self to an other." For militants, this process not only established their presence within the public sphere, but revealed the extent to which women participated in those processes whereby subject positions are produced and maintained. More specifically, Rancière argues that, for the disempowered, subjectivization entails an "enactment" or "demonstration" of ideal identities and positions. Insofar as this "enactment" exposes the conditional nature of authority, it confounds and subverts the traditional relations of power. 7 For the modern militant, that performance was directed at the foundational principles of the bourgeois public sphere, both its self-serving discourse of "equality" and its exclusionary construction of "universality." In the words of Janet Lyon, militant ritual, like the manifesto form, reconceived politics as "political dramaturgy" in which "the concept of universal equality is not a property available to particular groups of people, nor a coherent ideal, but rather a logic to be used in arguments that test the viability of the distribution of equality." 8 Ultimately, women writers and activists defined the social as a ceaselessly creative medium, one that conditions, and is conditioned by, multiple identities and relations. The individual, through ritual performance, was able to grasp and reshape the possibilities that limited her experience. According to Jane Ellen Harrison, suffragette and classicist, "Life is doomed to make for itself moulds, break them, remake them." 9 The relationship between the individual and her society is a single, conscious continuum, one in which "the soul is like a bird caught in a cage, caught and recaught ever in new births. . . ." 10
The sections of this essay, then, explore the politics of classicism as well as the relation between feminist thinkers and modernism in general. In suffrage protest, Harrison's anthropology, and H.D.'s poetry we find a charged matrix of worldly and aesthetic praxes. Each posits human desire as the basis of expression, and thus each finds in ritual a medium at once vital and static, affective and conscious. For these activists, ritual practice both activates and defines subjects in relation to one another. It functions as part of a generative process in which a community as a whole can create and understand its condition. The following three sections, however, differ in their position along a single continuum; the essay moves from political protest to ritual performance to the written word. The first section offers protest at its most explicitly physical, the latter at its most textual. In this manner, I hope to dramatize not simply the differences between these forms of activity, but the ways in which social praxis exists as both cause and effect of all aesthetic activity. I seek to uncover the political aspects of what are often criticized as the most rarefied and escapist forms of modern literature. According to Harrison, the stages of social praxis are "life with its motor reactions, the ritual copy of life with its faded reactions, the image of the god projected by the rite, and, last, the copy of that image, the work of art." 11 For the scholar and her feminist cohorts, it was precisely this continuum that countered the oppressive logic of modernity and its avant-garde.
"Deeds, not words!"--a fitting motto for the militant suffrage movement. From protests, pageants, and fisticuffs to sabotage, smuggling, and arson, deeds defined the movement from beginning to end. For women who had been effectively barred from public life, action was imperative and struggle a goal. Members argued that "revolt is a great and glorious thing in itself" and drew little distinction between "the joy of battle and the exultation of victory." 12 But, despite these claims, one cannot deny the spectacular, performative aspects of the campaign. Firsthand accounts reveal that punches and kicks were often only suggested or mimed. In fact, one of the very first "deeds" was nothing more than an imitation of spitting; as Christabel Pankhurst explained, "It was not a real spit but only, shall we call it, a pout, a perfectly dry purse of the mouth." 13 Often, suffragettes would tie stones to their wrists or wrap them in paper so that, when tossed, they would not cause material damage. Axes rarely fell, bricks dropped limply, and flags would poke into open windows and doors. 14 Tellingly, militants defined themselves as a "stage army" and labored under the knowledge that she "Who takes the eye takes all!" 15 According to Lisa Tickner, these forms of demonstration were understood as "a way of living the abstract relations and demands of politics." 16 Militants were well aware of the power won through representation, and therefore focused their efforts upon the symbolic. Thus, as I hope to show here, the movement ultimately attests to a mutuality of deeds and words, and the ability of such to transform the public sphere. Militants sought not only to exploit this mutuality, but to posit it as the basis of an alternative, intersubjective community.
Any history of the suffrage movement, however, must begin with the fact that militants consistently defined their cause in opposition to the attitudes and values of the Liberal Party. Their campaign moved well beyond the issue of the vote; its force and appeal lay in a much wider attack on a complex matrix of individualism, free trade, progress, and machinery. 17 Countless statements and speeches made by militants denounced the flat, frictionless world of Liberalism, the standardized chaos of bourgeois individualism. Moreover, they critiqued the presumed consensus of the rational public sphere, which could only obscure and uphold specifically masculine interests. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, for example, criticized Liberals for conceiving freedom as an "ideal only of opposition, of vested interests, of inertia, and of prejudice." 18 Dora Montefiore argued that Herbert Asquith "is against the women because they are for peace and he is on the side of the capitalist." 19 As Lyon has argued, it was precisely this critique that aligned the militant with the British avant-garde. The militant's disgust with the "sluggish respectability of the 'plain man'" clearly echoed Lewis's attack on the "abysmal inexcusable middle-class." 20 Aptly, she defines this unity as a "shared sense of deep disappointment that the promises for radical change . . . had in fact been co-opted by the modern instrumental status quo" (M, 94).
It was in opposition to this seemingly rational order that militants developed their strategy, particularly its materialist emphasis. For Emmeline Pankhurst and her followers, history had taught that reasoned argument would only delay change and protect the status quo, while efforts to raise public sympathy proved nothing more than regressive. Thus, throughout the campaign, militants focused upon the effective power of the physical, what they called life's "hard and cruel facts." 21 In her famous address at Hartford, for example, Pankhurst describes her work as an attempt "to bring enough pressure to bear upon the government to compel them to deal with the question of woman suffrage." She argues that "it is not by making people comfortable you get things in practical life, it is by making them uncomfortable." As a whole, the movement measured effectiveness in terms of size, strength, and duration. Protests and pageants maximized pressure and discomfort upon civic surroundings. A turn to arson and vandalism sought wider and more lasting effects. As Pankhurst told her audience, "You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else, in fact you have to be there all the time and see that they don't snow you under, if you are really going to get your reform realized." 22
Moreover, this materialism was aligned with decisively antiproductivist and antiprogressivist attitudes.  Opponents dismissed most tactics as mere nuisances--scraping golf greens, painting over house numbers, home and prison blockades. 23 But larger maneuvers--refusing the census, cutting down communication lines, and a rather peculiar week of self-denial--began to reveal a pattern. These acts of insurgency replaced the passion and violence of romantic revolution within conscious strategies of obstruction. According to Pankhurst, the most effective policies worked to create "a very paralyzing situation. . . . an impossible situation." 24 Thus, upon entering the streets, militants sought to impede civic flows. One observer acknowledged that "More and more it became difficult to belittle the movement . . . which could hold up the traffic of London with processions two or three miles long, and decked from end to end with hundreds of banners, some of them of vast size. . . ." 25 Similarly, in breaking shopwindows and cutting down communication lines, militants halted the flows of the market. Their leader explained that "in this effort to rouse business men . . . we entirely prevented stock brokers in London from telegraphing stock brokers in Glasgow, and vice versa; for one whole day telegraphic and telecommunication was entirely stopped." 26 Most radically, in hunger striking, militants interfered with the activity of the female body itself. This weapon, the "weapon of self-hurt," helped not only to generate sympathy for the cause, but to bring "great pressure" upon an otherwise smoothly functioning nation. 27 As Jane Marcus explains, "When woman, quintessential nurturer, refuses to eat, she cannot nurture the nation" (SP, 1-2, 339). Militants thus "withheld their consent" from what was considered their most important role in a social economy defined precisely in terms of ceaseless production and consumption. 28
Similarly, militants consistently valorized restraint. According to the leaders of the movement, "our words have always been, 'be patient, exercise self-restraint, show our so-called superiors that the criticism of women being hysterical is not true. . . .'" 29 On the one hand, this emphasis countered misconceptions about the supposedly hysterical female body. Lyon points out that a "discourse of anti-sentimentality and pure objectivity" provided access to "universalizing discourses that had been formative in the historical exclusion of women. . ." (M, 116). But, as important, restraint red as a powerful antidote to a dissipated liberal community. In The Great Scourge and How to End It, for example, Christabel Pankhurst presents sexual restraint as a positive quality that both clarifies and increases human potential.  "Men whose will-power fails them," she laments, "are constantly infecting and reinfecting the race with vile disease, and so bringing about the downfall of the nation!" 32 In this context of bodily and national dissipation, Pankhurst outlines a metaphysics of restraint. As in the most radical modernist work, she provides an intriguing economy of energy and restriction, strength and intellect. Reversing gendered tropes, Pankhurst argues that excessive male sexuality leads only to physical distress and irritability. 30 Incontinence res as "a waste of vital force which impoverishes [men's] moral nature and weakens their body." She contends that passion "ought to lie dormant until legitimate occasion arises for its use, when it will be found to exist in full natural vigour" (GS, 60-1). This dynamic system extends well beyond the body to incorporate other practices and values. Pankhurst turns to the intellect and praises the "active man who directs his energies more to his brain and muscles than to his sensual nature" (GS, 59). She even offers a radical aesthetic theory, one we will find echoed in the work of Harrison and H.D. She boldly concludes that "Art is creative. Sexual excess is a waste of man's creative energy" (GS, 127).
This very logic--in its emphasis on materiality, control, and clarity--also informs the representational strategies of militancy. Insofar as women found their efforts hampered by stereotypes and standards, they focused their attacks upon the discursive. As Cicely Hamilton notes,
Like nearly all girls of my generation I was bred in the idea that my duty and advantage was to conform to the masculine ideal of womanhood; this or that exercise of habit was forbidden because it clashed with the ideal, and would therefore lessen our value in masculine eyes. I do not mean that this principle was a matter of bald statement; but as a tradition--spoken or half-spoken--it was a constant influence on our thoughts and a constant director of our energies. 31
Not surprisingly, Hamilton equates her turn toward feminism with a growing suspicion of male constructed ideals and symbols, to which the female body was meant to conform. As she explains, "I became a feminist on the day I perceived that--according to the story--[a girl's] 'honour' was not a moral but a physical quality. Once that was clear to me my youthful soul rebelled. . ." (ibid.). Similarly, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence argues that "The world as we know it today is ruled by law, by custom, and by public opinion, and women are beginning to realize that it is a man-made world in the deepest sense of the word." For her, feminism struggled against a world in which "there is nothing that expresses the woman's point of view. There is nothing that tallies with the woman's soul . . . everything is arranged on a plan different from their own, and upon a system which has taken no account of their point of view." 32 One cannot overemphasize, however, that these experiences allowed feminists to recognize and thus focus their attack upon the material aspects of language. Militants adopted an aggressive symbolism, one committed to manipulating the effective potential of the sign. They fully welcomed the spectacular, using pageants, publications, and speeches in order to control and manipulate the process of their signification. As Tickner asserts, "The raison d'être of the suffragette movement was the campaign for the vote but one of the aims that motivated its supporters . . . was the legitimizing of new representations of women. Or, more precisely, the contesting, modifying and restructuring of representations of women already in circulation or in the process of emerging" (SW, 172).
Several scholars have already explored the narratives and symbols of suffrage discourse and the manner in which they helped to shape new female identities and communities. Barbara Green, Mary Jean Corbett, and Caroline J. Howlett have each examined how even the most unique feminist experiences would inspire imitators, thereby influencing and informing other subjectivities. 33 Most suffrage statements, Green argues, "take up the performative nature of identity, revealing how feminist identities are produced through constant reiteration or performance." She adds that even "many of the seemingly less dramatic writings and speeches of suffrage also functioned in ways that constructed an oppositional identity." 34 Significantly, militant "experience" always occurred within a conscious performative loop, one in which origins and repetitions seemed to blur, lost in the infinite process of reiteration. By performing certain values or identities in public, militants inevitably called them into being. In the words of Pethick-Lawrence, "While working for the idea of political liberty, we were individually achieving liberty of a far more real and vital nature." 35 The most radical example of this reiterative process was Lady Constance Lytton's masquerade as the fictional Jane Warton. Hoping to publicize the hypocrisy of the legal system, Lytton disguised herself as a lower-class militant and was forcibly fed in prison. Her account of the affair and its aftermath suggests that even the most personal, incommunicable aspects of her experience contained performative, mimetic qualities. As she writes, "To think that I who have endured by far the least of all the 'forcibly fed' should be making people wake up more than all of them. . . . It is the other more heroic and first ones who have really done what I seem to have done." 36
With Lytton's example, it becomes clear how difficult it is to separate the militants' active and representational strategies. Throughout the campaign, the militant body functioned as the site of both work and signification. While its force was inevitably expressive, its expression released implacable forces. Deeds and words combined in an aggressive struggle against the cultural inscriptions of power. "The argument of the broken pane" was perhaps the most explicit realization of this unity. In a seemingly random series of attacks on nonpartisan shops and offices, suffragettes did their best to assert female power and make Londoners very "uncomfortable." The attacks, however, also gave expression to the interconnectedness of private and public spheres, particularly as that link was informed by economics. The protest, and others of its kind, spoke from within a dynamic matrix of power. In fact, Emmeline Pankhurst's speeches described with increasing confidence her position within this larger network. As she told one audience,
Your business man who reads important communication through the post does not want his communication to be interfered with as a regular and permanent institution. . . . Your business man, whose customers mostly are women, does not like that in the interval of buying hats, his customers may be breaking his shop windows; and your insurance companies won't like to have the drain upon their resources and their profits cut down by having to make good these insurance policies. 37
Conversely, verbal protest tended to heighten and expose reservoirs of oppositional power. The interruption of speech evoked previously hidden hostility from the status quo. By shouting at government meetings, dinner parties, sporting events, and theater performances, suffragettes not only asserted their right to participate in a discursive order, but also heightened, and thereby gave expression to, problems that had previously been hidden within that order. Thus, Pankhurst was able to argue that one of the most effective militant acts consisted of nothing more than a question. For asking a question, just as men would have asked it, "girls were treated with violence and flung out of the meeting; and when they held a protest meeting in the street they were arrested, and were sent to prison, one for a week as a common criminal, and the other for three days." 38
This conflation of deeds and words, power and knowledge, was most compellingly expressed in the popular slogan "You are an argument." 39 In fact, it informed the militants' conception of suffrage.  40 Most intriguingly, this intense dualism can be detected in Pethick-Lawrence's understanding of the law. In one of her most famous speeches, she defines the law as a contingent process, a changing matrix of force and form. She claims that "In common we have felt the compulsion of this Law that has brought us into association together and has made us part of a living pattern, woven by destiny in the loom of Time, to a rhythm and rune which is making the world's story." Echoing Christabel Pankhurst, Pethick-Lawrence defines the law as the result of multiple pressures and demands. It is simultaneously revealed and transformed by the tensions that exist between various subjective positions. In fact, she argues "it is by the very enemy and the betrayer that the law is accomplished and destiny fulfilled." One cannot ignore the speaker's romantic excesses, but she consistently subsumes her mysticism within the material world. The rhythms of force and form are the rhythms of history. Power is made known only because it is contingent and immanent: it is both experienced and understood through the "material substance of things," "our own bodies." 41
Ultimately, militancy abandoned the modern valorization of the individual for a more closely integrated community. It critiqued the myth of the universal subject and the empty abstractions of representational politics in order to explore the social as a modality of various interests and desires. The bourgeois public sphere and its seemingly rational laws, paradoxically constructed upon principles of exclusion and noninterference, were rejected in favor of what appeared to be more fluid processes of exchange and mediation. Perhaps, then, the importance of the movement exists in its awareness that modern politics are essentially negative in character, founded upon the belief that the "individual" must not be encroached upon. In response, it proposed a community that was radically positive, based upon a constructive or creative interaction between its constituents. Of course, community of this kind does not imply ideological freedom; the continuous negotiation of power denies the possibility of a stable, transcendent position from which that power can be clearly evaluated. Nevertheless, this proposed community implies a point of access from which to grasp and perhaps reconre specific relations. According to Pethick-Lawrence, the individual does not exist apart from the "living pattern" and only achieves "human consciousness" within that pattern. 42 It is precisely this positive sense of the limited and the contingent that defines modern classicism and its power for feminist thinkers. Jane Ellen Harrison explored this collective mode as it existed in suffrage protest as well as the more formalized realm of ancient ritual. Her work argues that power relations can be radically transred by the performance of public rites.
Perhaps in order to avoid charges of deviancy, and as a testament to their intellect and learning, suffragettes often borrowed from the art of classical antiquity. They would frequently mimic the gestures and attitudes of the Greek heroines, their pristine strength, grace, and justice. This turn to antiquity, however, also implies an awareness that militant protest--in its imagery, organization, and publicity--recalled ancient transformative rites. 43 Participants often dressed in the robes of ministrants or supplicants, and often formalized their practical, everyday activities. Memoirs and narratives frequently reveal "saints," "martyrs," and even "an overblown Adelphi heroine." 44 Similarly, service was interpreted as a process of suffering and redemption, death and rebirth. According to Mary Gordon, the average militant was "seized and used. She was both flame and burnt offering." 45 However, it would be left to a trained scholar of antiquity to explain the modern politics of ancient ritual. Jane Ellen Harrison, self-proclaimed feminist, suffragette, and anthropologist, offers an explicit account of the feminist turn to classical practice. Her work moves away from an ideological vision of enlightened antiquity in order to celebrate the material activity of the ancient masses. It redefines the public sphere by emphasizing the desiring body and its ability to enact law. Harrison's work offers a serious challenge to the oppositional logic of the avant-garde and modernity in general, as it more fully links deed and word within a single ritualized praxis.
Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion looks beyond the religious myths of fifth-century Greece in order to disclose the material conditions and motivations of their creators. According to her, "Some of the loveliest stories the Greeks have left us will be seen to have taken their rise, not in poetic imagination, but in primitive, often savage, and I think, always practical ritual" (P, xvii). This assertion is grounded in the conviction that every religion is essentially "conditioned by the circumstances of its worshippers" (P, 85). Myths, gods, divine names and attributes are but reflections of the mortal world, the material conditions that govern earthly life. According to her, "the gods are as many as the moods of the worshipper, i.e. as his thoughts about his gods. If he is kind, they are Kindly Ones; when he feels vengeful, they are Vengeful Ones" (P, 214). Ultimately, these ideal subjectivities owe their existence to mere mortals; for Harrison, divine power is alienated human power. In speaking of women's rites and festivals, she argues that it was the goddess "who imitated her youths and maidens," and not the reverse (P, 30).
Harrison's work, however, entails an intriguing ideological critique. She first turns to the fifth-century and its unique deities, lonesome heroes, and popular poets. These various incarnations of the divine, she argues, affirm a social order driven by individualism and commerce. The Greek of this period--with his carefully departmentalized gods, with his rituals of "tendance" or exchange--is nothing more than an "archpatriarchal bourgeois" (P, 285). His rites, his professions, and his faculties are neatly governed by "ideas of law and order and reason" (P, 397). More importantly, she criticizes this period for its immaterialism. Its heroism, she argues, "is for individuals"; such people "are cut clean from earth and from the local bits of earth out of which they grew" (AAR, 161). She links this immaterialism with an excessive pragmatism of language and an attendant violent aestheticism of the natural world. "Eikonism," she explains, "takes the vague, unknown, fearful thing, and tries to picture it, picture it as known, distinct, definite . . . something as far rationalized as man himself." 46 For her, eikonism implies a desire to control and master that which is other; it works to "comprise and confine the god within the limitations of the worshipper," affirming his power over the material world (P, 258).
Harrison, of course, laments the similar conditions of her own historical moment, and asks readers to look beyond the affirmative myths of the heroic age, beyond Homeric individualism and Platonic abstraction. Her work returns to an even earlier period characterized by an intense materialism, immanent deities, and sensual rites. Earlier societies are celebrated for being in "touch with the confusions of actuality" (P, 215). For these people, fears and joys are never abstract, but earthly, tangible; they are haunted by the "actual ghost, not a mere abstract vengeance . . . " (P, 217). Harrison's return to the material world suggests a return to worldly potential. She asks us to look beyond the omnipotent godhead to an originally human force, beneath Olympian abstraction to a primal, chthonic practice. Specifically, she locates an alternative model of social order and change within ritual practice, within a performative logic that unites material force and aesthetic form, bodily desire and abstraction.
Much like Pound, Yeats, and Joyce, Harrison places desire at the center of ritual practice. She claims that most, if not all, rituals are initiated through passion, the "supreme mysteries of ecstasy and love." The Eleusinian rite of sacred marriage, for example, cultivates sensuality as the precondition for the revelation of the divine. "It is indeed," Harrison writes, "only in the orgiastic religions that these splendid moments of conviction could come . . . " (P, 568). In Ancient Art and Ritual, the scholar more specifically argues that traditional ritual practice focuses on the representation of a "thing desired" (AAR, 25). Here, she defines ritual as a form of sympathetic magic, a conscious "mimicking of nature's processes" (AAR, 129). This magic, she elaborates, begins with the subject's desire for the return of certain natural events, such as the spring or the rising of crops. In remembrance of past pleasure and in anticipation of future power, the participant copies or mimics the conditions under which these might occur. In seasonal rites, for example, the "savage utters his intense desire for food." Harrison explains that "His impulse is towards food. He must eat that he and his tribe may grow and multiply. It is this that he utters and represents in his rites" (AAR, 65).
Like Christabel Pankhurst, like H.D., Harrison reveals a bias toward the creative potential of restraint. In Ancient Art and Ritual, she explains that the primal unity of desire and representation is founded upon an inevitable tension or restriction. She offers a psychological model that presents human constitution not as a bundle of separate faculties, but as a continuous cycle of activities. Emotion, perception, and action exist concurrently, in a ceaseless causal loop, without hierarchy or telos (AAR, 39-40). Harrison, however, notes that "perception is not always instantly transformed into action; there is an interval for choice between several possible actions." She argues that "Perception is pent up and becomes, helped by emotion, conscious representation." It is only out of this "momentary halt" in the cycle, this "unsatisfied desire," that "all our mental life, our images, our ideas, our consciousness, and assuredly our religion and our art, is built up" (AAR, 41). Thus, through restraint, Harrison connects desire with the performance or representation of its fulfillment, linking motive force with expressive form. As she explains:
A rite is . . . a sort of stereotyped action, not wholly practical, but yet not wholly cut loose from practice, a reminiscence of an anticipation of actual practical doing; it is fitly, though not quite correctly, called by the Greeks a dromenon, "a thing done." . . . its mainspring [is] not the wish to copy nature or even improve upon her . . . but rather an impulse shared by art with ritual, the desire, that is, to utter, to give out a strongly felt emotion or desire by representing, by making or doing or enriching the object or act desired. [AAR, 26]
For Harrison, ritual occurs at the interface of desire and restriction, and thus it exists between the active and the symbolic, the creative and the intelligible. The ritual participant at once utters and enacts desire, proclaims and repairs the terms of his or her existence.
In some sense, for Harrison, society is always ritualized, seamlessly shifting between worldly and aesthetic praxes. It ceaselessly combines dromenon (things done) and drama (performance). She emphasizes, however, that insofar as desire is intersubjective, its ritual performance mediates intersubjective relations. For her, public ritual extends beyond the expression of bodily need in order to expose social inequality and disadvantage. In fact, for Harrison, social status exists only in its performance, in the part-practical, part-symbolic gestures of public protest. For the primitive as well as the modern, "one's ritual 'dances' are the [expression] of one's importance" (AAR, 31). Ritual, however, does not simply reveal, but shapes social relations; its power is transformative as well. The ritual participant does "not simply 'embody' a previously conceived idea, he begets it. From his performance springs the personification. The abstract idea arises from the only thing it possibly can arise from, the concrete act" (AAR, 71). Ritual, much like suffrage spectacle, serves to conceive and thus enact new modes and relations. The performance of desires arouses the spectator's desire. Power is perceived in gestures that are then mimicked by the larger population. More specifically, she contends that ritual first obstructs the spectator's habitual patterns of behavior. The rite first halts, then models and channels desire for the community as a whole. These various stages of mimicry--because conscious--are open to choice and change. At her most idealistic, Harrison argues that the process is at once active and thoughtful, infinite and infinitely negotiable.
Harrison's discussion of the "Thesmophoria" offers the clearest example of this theory and its political significance. Participants in this rite, a self-elected group of women, would gather and then lower pigs into deep clefts outside the village walls. After some time, the women themselves would descend into the clefts, retrieve the rotten flesh and "place it on certain altars, whence it was taken and mixed with seed to serve as a fertility charm" (P, 123). Harrison asserts that the myth of Demeter and Persephone was only later appended to this rite and thus obscures its original, sympathetic intention, the mimicking of natural cycles. But she focuses on the full name of the first deity, Demeter Thesmophoros, which is translated as "law-carrier" or "law-giver." The name of the deity, like all such names, is bound to an earlier adjectival form. Thesmophoros derives from the activity of the earlier ministrants, the original carrying and laying down of thesmoi or sacred objects. The goddess who represents the law took her name from the human ministrants who were "called Thesmophoroi because they carried 'the things laid down'" (P, 137). For Harrison, this implies that the law was laid down by the rite; it was based on an earlier "thing done," on the ritual gestures of earlier societies.  Words uttered during a sacred performance correspond to specific gestures and activities (P, 570); they re as an "avowal of things performed" (P, 156). Harrison argues that ancient law derives from these vocal components. The ritual creed developed "on its social side into the ordinance and ultimately into the regular law" (P, 142). For the ancient Greek, law, ritual, and desire are inextricably linked. Power is at once symbolic and sensual.
As I mentioned above, the dynamics of ritual seem to embody what Rancière calls the "process of subjectivization." Harrison clearly echoes Rancière when she argues that "many, perhaps most of us, breathe more freely in the medium, literally the midway space, of some collective ritual" (AAR, 206). The strength of this theory, however, is its avoidance of the binary logic that governs bourgeois politics. As a "universal transition space," ritual confounds those dichotomies--the irrational and the rational, the marked and the fallen, the private and the public--that enforce often gendered conrations of power. Similarly, Harrison's theory offers a valuable counter to the logic of the avant-garde. By locating material tensions and restrictions at the center of representational practice, she confounds the avant-garde opposition between aesthetic and worldly praxes. While ritual permits contemplation, it denies the possibility of an autonomous, purposeless space from which the world may be addressed. In fact, we will find that the work of art, born of desire, is but "a later and more sublimated, more detached form of ritual" that yet maintains its social power (AAR, 225). For Harrison, as for H.D., art is always already material, purposive, and social. Its beauty is collectively determined, conditioned by "a keen emotion felt toward things and people living today. . . " (AAR, 237).
Finally, Harrison's theory grants contemporary women a position from which to challenge institutional conrations of power. Her work clearly celebrates an early primitive society defined by female practice. However, insofar as she defines this practice as the ritual performance of desire, she accounts for its possible return. In "Homo Sum," she argues that this return has already taken form as the contemporary struggle for suffrage. She explains that it was through her studies of antiquity that she first became receptive to the activity of the militants. The sexes have always been defined by an "artificial division of moral industry." The current struggle res as part of a constant inscription and reinscription of the relationship between the sexes. Harrison, therefore, celebrates the suffrage movement not as an expression of essential womanhood, but as a ritualized effort to rewrite the terms of cultural power. She confirms that militant activity is based on the same unity of knowing, feeling, and acting that marked ancient ritual. The militants, she explains, have recognized that "To feel keenly is often, if not always an amazing intellectual revelation." Their work is based on an "awakening of the desire," which is also "the awakening of the intention to act, to act more efficiently and to shape the world more completely to our will." 47
For Susan Stanford Friedman, H.D.'s early work is complicated by its association with patriarchal attitudes and conservative politics, with the "totalizing mythos of the reactionary center." Imagism, in particular, comes under attack as a "critical cage from which the female poet needs 'liberation.'" 48 Consequently, Friedman praises H.D.'s turn toward nonrationalist, nonmaterialist perspectives in the mystical hermeticism of the later poems and novels. The late work is valuable as "a case in point for the gendered history of modernism, for the situation of a woman who writes out of the position of the Other." 49 Although it would be hard to deny H.D.'s romantic tendencies, I contend that her work consistently confounds the notion of otherness. If H.D.'s poetry gives voice to certain marginal experiences, it emphasizes the social tensions that define those experiences. Her verses foreground a dynamic intersubjectivity and only thus entail a certain political, if not explicitly feminist, engagement. We now turn to a third point on our continuum of deeds and words, to the most formal mode of engagement, the work of art. H.D.'s poetry reveals the effective unity of often gendered binaries, such as subject and object, public and private, work and world. Her ritualized poetry does not avoid political responsibility; rather, it raises possibilities for a community that always already incorporates the marginal, the feminine, and the poetic. As H.D. explained, "My work is creative and reconstructive, war or no war, if I can get across the Greek spirit at its highest I am helping the world, and the future." 50
For H.D., spirit is always an immanent, effective presence. Her work celebrates powerful, irrational forces as they both inform and clarify worldly objects. Thus, while her poetry is infused with a fluid energy, its images are vibrant and crisp. Its landscapes are at once tangible and expressive, vital and intelligible. H.D.'s sea flowers, for example, are caught amidst violent drifts and tides, but it is precisely their openness to these conditions that lend them their beauty. Subject to elemental forces, their features turn "hard," "bright," and "fresh." The "marred" rose and "slashed" reed are "doubly rich" for their torment. Conversely, these precise forms, in their graceful motions and swift mutations, suggest the presence of elemental forces. The reed that is "lifted" gives shape to the wind; "pebbles drift and flung" reveal the motion of the sea. 51 In "Sheltered Garden," H.D. explicitly celebrates this charged, contingent landscape. The poet first condemns the imaginative excesses of romanticism, which re as suffocation, solipsism, and satiety: "Beauty without strength," she declares, "chokes out life." Repulsed, the poet demands a spare, classical beauty governed by pressure, tension, and precision. The speaker turns to violent forces that "break," "snap," "scatter," and "fling," and forms that lie "torn" and "twisted." A true classicist, she seeks the beauty of a "terrible / wind-tortured place" (CP, 19-22).
These aesthetics are based on processes akin to those that inform militant protest and classical ritual. H.D.'s clear, crystalline images do not exist in isolation, but are embedded, and indeed result from tensions within a dynamic field. Their existence is neither spontaneous, isolated, or permanent, but conditional, resulting from their subjection to larger forces. H.D. observed that she
grew tired of hearing the poems referred to, as crystalline. . . . For what is crystal or any gem but the concentrated essence of the rough matrix, or the energy, either of over-intense heat or over-intense cold that projects it? The poems as a whole . . . contain that essence or that symbol, symbol of concentration and of stubborn energy. 52
More importantly, this "energy," insofar as it informs and shapes the phenomenal world, is decisively human. The winds and tides of H.D.'s poetry suggest the power of a specifically mortal force--inspiration--which she conceives as desire itself. From early poems such as "Pursuit," "The Cliff Temple," and "Eurydice," to the later "Choros Sequence" and "The Dancer," we find a passionate intensity that cuts and marks all in its path, leaving its traces on both body and world. The subject exists in a constant liminal state, between palpable forces and a formal precision. Her body is subject to contingent energy from both within and without, and thus grows powerful as well as acutely sentient. According to Eileen Gregory, the most remarkable quality of H.D.'s lyrics are their "liminality," a constant mediation of "boundaries between inner and outer, between self and other." Its central qualities are at once "deeply subjective and radically impersonal . . . they represent deep interiority infusing in outward shape or motion, making it vibrant and golden." 53
In the 1920s, H.D. revisited her early classicism and developed a clear theory of the desiring subject. H.D.'s "Notes on Thought and Vision," argues that the subject reaches her full potential only through "definite physical relations." Sensual activity shapes identity and cultivates physical as well as intellectual "talents." 54 This unity of experience and knowledge finds its clearest expression in the image of the "over-mind":
I should say--to continue this jelly-fish metaphor--that long feelers reached down and through the body, that these stood in the same relation to the nervous system as the over-mind to the brain or intellect.
There is, then, a set of super-feelings. These feelings extend out and about us; as the long, floating tentacles of the jelly-fish reach out and about him. They are not different material, extraneous, as the physical arms and legs are extraneous to the gray matter of the directing brain. The super-feelers are part of the super-mind, as the jelly-fish feelers are the jelly-fish itself, elongated in fine threads. (NTV, 19)
Albeit bizarre, H.D.'s image of the over-mind provides a consistent intersubjective model. The over-mind, subjectivity itself, exists only in mutuality, in a kinetic coupling that is at once sensuous and conscious. Moreover, for H.D., this model suggests the possibility of the subject's empowerment. "The centre of consciousness," she explains, "is either the brain or the love-region of the body" (NTV, 20). This conflation suggests a faculty that is at once active as well as perceptive, creative as well as conscious. To illustrate her theory, she turns to the sacred rites of Eleusis, in which "One must understand a lower wisdom before one understands a higher" (NTV, 31). The rites entail a three-step process that moves from "Crude animal enjoyment" to pure "over-mind consciousness." Physical lovers re as prototypes for "spiritual lovers," the latter having the power of "concentrating and directing pictures from the world of vision" (NTV, 50). Like Harrison, H.D. places desire at the center of her phenomenology. Body and vision, "seed" and "word," coexist in a single, dynamic process. Thus, subjection becomes subjectivization, and a position from which to negotiate power.
As we have seen in our discussion of "Sheltered Garden," H.D. associates imaginative freedom with solipsism, sensual satiety with suffocation. For this poet, true creation depends upon the constancy of desire; precision is the result of restriction or tension. Thus, her work, much like that of Pankhurst and Harrison, consistently outlines the benefits of bodily restraint. "Notes on Thought and Vision" repeatedly warns against sexual fulfillment and consummation. She pleads for chastity, claiming that the artist can "retard" his powers by "neglect of his body" (NTV, 52). The "love-region," she argues, must remain in a state of constant excitation, "its energy not dissipated in physical relation" (NTV, 22). Helen Sword's work on the visionary tradition elucidates this logic:
Eros, or desire, in fact signifies an absence so powerful that it takes on the role of a presence, so that the romantic pairings that generally characterize human sexuality--dualities, if not always necessarily of male and female, then at least of lover and beloved, self and an erotic Other--triangulate into complex constellations that include as a third party desire itself: eros as a force both motivational and mediatory. 55
Sword here locates the expressive power of those boundaries between self and other. Eros proceeds from the absence of fulfillment, in longing, in tension and pain. The artist must struggle with and against the other, and thereby "create the desire that creates poetry" (ibid.).
Tellingly, it was H.D.'s psychic experiences in Greece that enabled her to link desire, restraint, and vision. In Tribute to Freud, the poet recalls how her trip was supposed to culminate with a visit to Delphi. At Itea, however, she and Bryher were told that "it was absolutely impossible for two ladies alone, at that time, to make the then dangerous trip on the winding road to Delphi. . . ." 56 H.D. dramatically depicts her feelings of restriction and longing, but she also suggests that it was precisely these intense sensations that inspired her visionary experiences. Unable to visit the oracular seat, the poet finds her desire transmuted into oracular signs. Well-versed in psychoanalytic theory, she places her projections squarely between the wish-inspired dreams of Freud's work and the mystical, otherworldly speech of the mystics. Each one can be translated, she argues, "as a suppressed desire for forbidden 'signs and wonders'" or "an extension of the artist's mind, a picture or an illustrated poem, taken out of the actual dream or day-dream content and projected from within. . ." (TF, 76). Thus, for H.D., the event is both personal and impersonal; the visionary is caught between her intense passion and abstract form. One image, she claims, is "so impersonal it might have been anyone, of almost any country.  Lost friend?" (TF, 66). The deity that presides over this hybrid experience is none other than the winged Nike. The goddess appears upon a ladder, between two realms, the worldly and the divine. For her, the image, like those found in her early poetry, is "doubly rich" (TF, 83).
H.D.'s poetry repeatedly returns to this relay of desire, restraint, and creativity. Her verses are populated by "broken" lovers and distraught visionaries, whose powers exist only in a passion deferred. "Fragment Thirty-Six," for example, presents the following, frustrated lament:
I know not what to do,
my mind is reft:
is song's gift best?
is love's gift loveliest?
[CP, 165]
The speaker cannot decide whether to seek fulfillment in the arms of a lover or attenuate and thus transmute her passion into the clear words of song. Masterfully, H.D. presents the lips as the source of both desire and language. Kissing, of course, would "slake / the rage that burns." With this act, all tension would subside as subject and object dissolve into one. The speaker, however, wonders whether she should turn away and "press lips to lips / that answer not. . . ?" The verse aptly conveys the nervous transmutation of passion into speech. In the absence of fulfillment or response, in its willed deferral, kissing becomes song. Moreover, the lips offer a precise image of that creative doubling or enfolding that defines all experience. Difference and unity, engagement and detachment--it is this "brokenness" that produces song:
so my mind hesitates
above the passion
quivering yet to break,
so my mind hesitates
above my mind,
listening to song's delight.
[CP, 167]
With this verse, it becomes apparent that the song is already being sung. The poem itself is an expression not of a decision made, but of an attenuated state. Both sensual and sentient, aroused and detached, the speaker writes herself within the dynamics of desire. Restraint produces language, as language heightens and prolongs passion.
Not surprisingly, a similar dynamic informs the social potential of classical art. Put bluntly, modernists understood the power of classicism as its ability to occasion pain. The classical work of art both offers and denies its beauty and thus arouses passions that remain torturously unfulfilled. In other words, aesthetic distance prohibits the potential sublimation of kinetic desire. Consequently, the energy that would be lost in the work is diverted back toward the world at large. Harrison, for example, argues that while the beautiful image can "discredit the actual practical world," it never insists on its own "actuality and objectivity" (AAR, 227). For her, art "invigorates life, but only does it by withdrawal from these very same elementary forms of life, by inhibiting certain sensuous reactions" (AAR, 236). Thus, "imagination, cut off from practical reaction as it is, becomes in turn a motor-force causing new emotions, and so pervading general life, and thus ultimately becoming 'practical'" (AAR, 210). For H.D., also, the sterile, ascetic aspects of the work refuse immersion and enforce a return to worldly praxis. In "Notes on Thought and Vision," the poet argues that aesthetic beauty is similar to that of the "loved one," but its inaccessibility leaves the mind "enflamed and excited." While the work of art may excite the "love-region," energy is not "dissipated in physical relation" and thus "takes on its character of mind. . . " (NTV, 22). More aggressively, in a 1916 review, H.D. praises poetry that "holds, fascinates and half-paralyses us, as light flashed from a very fine steel blade, wielded playfully, ironically . . . with absolute surety and with absolute disdain." As the poet explains, this hostile beauty does not simply negate, but actively confronts a "world of shrapnel and machine-guns," wages "battle against squalor and commercialism." 57 Ultimately, like other forms of protest, her poetry halts, foregrounds, and suggests alternatives to the everyday. It both arouses and impedes desire, and thereby permits consciousness, various models of behavior, and the possibility of choice. Adalaide Morris, in a stunning article on H.D.'s Trilogy, explicitly aligns this aspect of H.D.'s work with ritual practice. She argues that H.D.'s poetry "not only means but does"; "it labors to create a formal break with everyday life, a ritual space that invites the reader to return to, reexamine, and rearrange the ethos of a community in crisis." 58 Similarly, Gregory contends that H.D.'s lyrics "demand from the reader a distinct dramatic form of attention and participation." By short-circuiting fulfillment, by refusing to dissolve into abstraction, they turn the poetic experience "inward, so that the reader is forced through the singular experience of the poem." Ultimately, the mediated space of the poem becomes a space of collective mediation. It signifies as it inspires "threshold states" in which "the tribe as a whole renews itself." 59
H.D.'s various statements on the Eleusinian rites offer the most striking account of this painful beauty and its effective power. In "Notes on Thought and Vision," the poet argues that while the "Eleusinian mysteries had to do with sex," sensuality was countered by "a certain amount of detachment . . . a certain amount of artistic appreciation"(NTV, 29-31). Similarly, in "Helios and Athene," she claims that the participant neither surrendered to desire nor achieved detachment, but experienced a love that is "the merging and welding of both, the conquering in herself of each element, so that the two merge in the softness and tenderness of the mother and the creative power and passion of the male" (CP, 330). In the poem "At Eleusis," however, H.D. does not simply describe, but enacts this rite and its divine pain:
What they did,
they did for Dionysos,
for ecstasy's sake:
now take the basket,
think;
think of the moment you count
most foul in your life;
conjure it,
supplicate,
pray to it;
your face is bleak, you retract,
you dare not remember it:
stop;
it is too late.
The next stands by the altar step,
a child's face yet not innocent,
it will prove adequate, but you,
I could have spelt your peril at the gate,
yet for your mind's sake,
though you could not enter,
wait.
What they did,
they did for Dionysos,
for ecstasy's sake:
Now take the basket -
(ah face in a dream,
did I not know your heart,
I would falter,
for each that fares onward
is my child;
ah can you wonder
that my hands shake,
that my knees tremble,
I a mortal, set in the goddess' place?)
[CP, 179-80]
The italicized refrain clearly suggests a worldly enactment of the divine. An anonymous, ecstatic "they" perform the power of the god. Through their activity, they do not merely conjure, but become that which they desire. Thus, with the poem's contrasting registers, H.D. presents a rich doubling of deed and word, power and thought. Her verses alternate between the abject and the divine, between passionate engagement and formal gesture. The poet, however, is not content with description or even suggestion, for she demands the reader's complicity and thereby enacts the intersubjective nature of this rite. The speaker engages us directly, calls forth an erotic potential thus far obscured. However, the speaker demands our understanding as well. Thus, the differing registers inspire and impede our desire, encourage and deny the possibility of fulfillment. This call for restraint is most dramatically seen in the transition between the second and third verse, when the speaker shouts "Stop." With this "sudden halt," the moment of unity is forestalled, and thus power and power relations are made conscious. The priestess bars entry, and commands us to "wait," presumably in order to achieve understanding, for "mind's sake." Ultimately, we turn away, but now enflamed by a conscious desire, by a renewed potential that still seeks outlet. Passion is heightened, but now mediated and made thoughtful. Consummation is yet possible, but informed by consciousness. The painful feeling of restriction transforms dream into knowledge. As mortals, we wield the power of the divine.
Classical modernism, particularly as it finds expression in ritual practice, complicates those categories with which we tend to organize modernist literature: commitment and reaction, abstraction and objectivity, masculine and feminine style. Not surprisingly, classical modernism also complicates the distinctions that inform the logic of modernity at large. First and foremost, it defines the individual as inseparable from the material and discursive forces that shape experience. Ritual performance consistently foregrounds the tensions that exist between the desiring subject and its objective surroundings. Related to this, classical modernism blurs the boundary between expressiveness and the physical body, between the symbolic and the kinetic. In protest as in poetry, image and desire are eternally yoked, together urging the forces of history. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, classical modernism confounds the relationship between modernism and its legacy, namely, the politics of postmodernity. Oddly, while classicism, particularly in its approach to gender, anticipates postmodern strategies and attitudes, its most vocal advocates--Lewis, Hulme, and H.D.--have either been dismissed as reactionaries or dropped out of discussion altogether. Conversely, those modernists who were most often criticized as romantic--Woolf, Stein, and Joyce--meet today with almost universal approval. This complex genealogy raises valuable questions not only about literary history, but about political and economic history as well. The debate between classicism and romanticism masked a much larger battle over the terms of postwar society. It is time to revisit that debate and its consequences.
Edward P. Comentale is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University. He is completing a book manuscript entitled "Masses in Relation: A Modernist Primer of Art and Politics."
1. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) and "Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection War and Warrior," ed. Ernst Jünger, trans. Jerolf Wikoff, New German Critique 17 (spring 1979): 120-128; See also Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), chs. 1, 6.
2. Most recently, this connection can be found in Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and The Birth of The Modern Age (New York: Anchor Books, 1989).
3. F. T. Marinetti, Let's Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Classics, 1991), 50.
4. See Russell A. Berman, Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics, and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 46, 48; Andrew Hewitt, "Fascist Modernism, Futurism, and Post-modernity," in Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. Richard J. Golsan (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992), 44, 54. See also, Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
5. Wyndham Lewis et al., Blast 1 (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1992), 42.
6. The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 62, 136.
7. Jacques Rancière, "Politics, Identification, Subjectivization," October 61 (summer 1992): 60-2.
8. Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 36; hereafter abbreviated as M. My understanding of modern ritual finds its historical foundation in the work of David Cannadine, "The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the 'Invention of Tradition', c. 1820-1977," in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1994).
9. Jane Ellen Harrison, "Alpha and Omega," in Alpha and Omega (London: Sedgwick and Jackson, 1915), 218.
10. Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 570-1; hereafter abbreviated as P.
11. Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (1913; Montana: Kessinger Publishing Company, n.d.), 191-2; hereafter abbreviated as AAR.
12. Christabel Pankhurst, "Speech Delivered by Christabel Pankhurst. Queen's Hall, December 22, 1908," in Speeches and Trials of the Militant Suffragettes, ed. Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp (London: Associated University Press, 1999), 90-1; hereafter abbreviated as ST; Emmeline Pankhurst, "Why We Are Militant: A Speech Delivered in New York October 21st, 1913," in Suffrage and the Pankhursts, ed. Jane Marcus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 162; hereafter abbreviated as SP.
13. Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (London: Hutchinson and Company, 1987), 52.
14. See Commentary (ST, 101,104); Brian Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 51; Antonia Raeburn, The Militant Suffragettes (London: Michael Joseph Limited, 1973), 121, 135-6; Sandra Stanley Holton, "In Sorrowful Wrath: Suffrage Militancy and the Romantic Feminism of Emmeline Pankhurst," in British Feminism in the Twentieth-Century, ed. Harold L. Smith (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 21.
15. Christabel Pankhurst, "The Commons Debate on Woman Suffrage" (SP, 31). Mary Lowndes, "Banners and Banner-Making," in Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 263; hereafter abbreviated as SW.
16. Ibid., 287.
17. George Dangerfield persuasively argues that the Women's Social and Political Union (W.S.P.U.) helped to initiate a larger social revolt against Liberalism that eventually transformed the face of British politics. George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England 1910-1914 (New York: Capricorn Books, 1935), 139-213.
18. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, "Speech at Albert Hall, November 16, 1911" (ST, 142).
19. Quoted in Raeburn, Militant Suffragettes, 19.
20. Elaine Kidd, Materialism and the Militants (Hampstead: Macdonald, n.d.), 1; Lewis et al., Blast, 18.
21. Sylvia Pankhurst, "Minimum Wage for Women" (SP, 264).
22. Emmeline Pankhurst, "Address at Hartford" (ST, 332-3).
23. See Commentary (ST, 272).
24. Emmeline Pankhurst, "The Women's Insurrection" (ST, 290).
25. Quoted in SW, 58.
26. Emmeline Pankhurst, "Hartford" (ST, 336).
27. Constance Lytton, "A Speech by Lady Constance Lytton" (ST, 109).
28. As Lyon explains, hunger striking served to challenge the "'natural market' ideology of free trade economics" and to expose "the joints between economic coercion and sexual subjection" (M, 116). It should also be noted that the Liberal government responded in every possible way to restrict women to their former activity. The most violent of these efforts, force-feeding, expresses clearly the extent to which this patriarchal order was dependent upon the constant activity of production and consumption.
29. Quoted in F. W. Pethick-Lawrence, "The Trial of the Suffragette Leaders" (SP, 77).
30. Christabel Pankhurst, The Great Scourge and How to End It (London: E. Pankhurst, 1913), 12, x-xi; hereafter abbreviated as GS.
31. Cicely Hamilton, Life Errant (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Limited, 1935), 282.
32. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, The Meaning of the Women's Movement (London: Woman's Press, n.d.), 4-5.
33. Barbara Green, Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage 1905-1938 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997); Mary Jean Corbett, Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women's Autobiographies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Caroline J. Howlett, "Writing on the Body? Representation and Resistance in British Suffrage Accounts of Forcible Feeding," in Bodies of Writing, Bodies in Performance, ed. Thomas Foster, Carol Siegel, and Ellen E. Berry (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
34. Green, Spectacular Confessions, 7, 16.
35. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, My Part in a Changing World (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), 215.
36. Quoted in Howlett, "Writing on the Body," 41.
37. Emmeline Pankhurst, "Women's Insurrection" (ST, 290).
38. Emmeline Pankhurst et al., "Closing Days of the Trial" (ST, 238).
39. Quoted in SW, 102.
40. Emmeline Pankhurst, "Emmeline Pankhurst's Speech in the Portman Rooms, London. March 24, 1908" (ST, 31).
41. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, "The Rune of Birth and Renewal" (ST, 283, 285).
42. Ibid., 284.
43. See Commentary in Raeburn, Militant Suffragettes, 77.
44. Elizabeth Robins, The Convert (1907; Old Westbury: The Women's Press, 1980), 87; May Sinclair, The Tree of Heaven (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1917), 229.
45. Letters of Constance Lytton, ed. Betty Balfour (London: William Heinemann Limited, 1925), 129.
46. Harrison, "Alpha and Omega," in Alpha, 202.
47. Harrison, "Homo Sum," in Alpha and Omega, 81.
48. Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 17, xi.
49. Susan Stanford Friedman, Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.'s Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 19.
50. Quoted in Barbara Guest, Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1984), 218.
51. H.D., Collected Poems 1912-1944, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1983), 5, 14, 25-6, 21; hereafter abbreviated as CP.
52. H.D., "H. D. by Delia Alton," Iowa Review 16, no. 3 : 184.
53. Eileen Gregory, "Rose Cut in Rock: Sappho and H.D.'s Sea Garden," in Signets: Reading H.D., ed. Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 133.
54. H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision and The Wise Sappho (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1982), 17; hereafter abbreviated as NTV.
55. Helen Sword, Engendering Inspiration: Visionary Strategies in Rilke, Lawrence, and H.D. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 131, 133, 138.
56. H.D., Tribute to Freud (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), 73; hereafter abbreviated as TF.
57. H.D., "Marianne Moore," The Egoist 3 : 118.
58. Adalaide Morris, "Signaling: Feminism, Politics, and Mysticism in H.D.'s War Trilogy," Sagetrieb 9, no. 3 : 121-2.
59. This study is greatly indebted to Eileen Gregory's work on H.D. and Hellenism, particularly as such suggests a direct connection between H.D.'s poetry and Harrison scholarship, see especially H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 123-5.
Artists and critics alike view high modernism within scenes of rupture and yearning. Even when artists vigorously stage "the new," anxiety and nostalgia shade desire. Wallace Stevens's "poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice" once the past becomes "souvenir" conveys this need for a modernist rescue operation in a present defined by loss. 1 Modernist writers, as we often acknowledge in one way or another, want to separate themselves and their work from the recent past as well as from other modernist writers and to preclude the possibility of rescue from their thrilling and despairing isolation.
To this understanding of literary modernism, we must add the idea that modernists were interested not just in rupture, but also in continuity, and specifically in continuities with the Victorian period, 1837-1901. We must try to hear, within the rallying cry of "make it new," the harmonic of "preserve it through change." It is important to tell critical stories of both destruction and preservation, and one way to do so is to bring the mid-century, high Victorian into relation with high modernism. As we do, a Victorian modernist aesthetic of both rupture and continuity, of stark differences and relations across gaps, develops.
Studying Victorian modernism, we learn to consider works of art as webs of relations and ideas with multiple centers and gaps, a filigree-in-progress. Or, in weightier terms, we should learn to pay attention to collections of things, arranged but subject to rearrangement. In parallel, our critical goal must be to chart coherences that begin and end with critical venturings from divers centers. As we shall see, George Eliot writes of "multiplex" structures, and William James of "concatenated unions." Both urge us to consider delicate and complicated structures, not solid blocks.
Victorian modernist criticism might speak of seeming solidities, for example, "the modern epic" or "the New Woman novel." But like the structural designs of buildings that John Ruskin often found less interesting than their surface ornamentations, the solidities such studies describe exist for the intermingling patterns they make possible, not the patterns for the solidities. 2 The house of modernism may be aggressively streamlined or built anew; but it also embraces yesterday's house, absorbing the patterned bric-à-brac of the Victorian parlor and carefully rearranging it. It is no accident that, in examining the cozy and ornamented characteristics of Victorian art and literature, we will see that nineteenth-century domestic and sentimental novelists in both Great Britain and the United States were engaged in creating works taken up by twentieth-century modernist writers, high and low. Indeed, distinctions between high and low or serious novels and domestic novels no longer serve us well. Henry James was a domestic novelist just as surely as Elizabeth Stoddard wrote difficult, impressionist, experimental prose. This connection is not meant simply to redraw the lines of recent literary history, but rather to challenge a central truism of literary study: that modernist writers, beginning in the 1890s, made an art that clearly departed from what had come immediately before. 3
But why posit Victorian modernism in the first place? One answer--that some modernist artists themselves did so--may be exemplified by William Butler Yeats's "Introduction" to his anthology, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935. In their darker tableaux, modernist artists--and Yeats is no exception--often choose rupture as an alternative to repeating now emptied forms of the recent past. Yet when modernist writers insist upon radical discontinuity, we should not take them at their word. We should examine those words and the resulting works of art carefully, because Victorian practices often vitally inform modernist works. What is dismissed is also summoned. Yeats, for example, in writing the introduction to his anthology, describes the advent of the "modern" as the "wringing [of] the neck of rhetoric." It appears that Victorian poetic practices had to die in order that modernism could be born. Nothing less than revolution would do:
The revolt against Victorianism meant to the young poet a revolt against irrelevant descriptions of nature, the scientific and moral discursiveness of In Memoriam--"When he should have been broken-hearted", said Verlaine, "he had many reminiscences"--the political eloquence of Swinburne, the psychological curiosity of Browning, and the poetical diction of everybody. 4
We should not blind ourselves, however, to the fact that such revolt is only part of Yeats's programme for modernist poetry. Yeats weaves a contrasting tale throughout this very introduction that has gone largely unnoticed by scholars of modernism.
Yeats's poetic manifestoqua introduction not only announces a break with Victorianisms but also embraces them. In the very sentence in which Yeats states that young poets believe that discursiveness must go, he discursively interrupts the rhythm of his sentence to quote Verlaine--as if to challenge in expansive prose the chiseled reticencies of modern poetry. He tells us that modern poets dismiss rhetoric, yet the force of this statement depends on the ornate parallelisms of its lists and the satisfactions of its rhythms. In substance, too, Yeats argues with himself. Although the passage describes rupture from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Browning, Yeats continues to reject and embrace so-called Victorian discursiveness, eloquence, curiosity, and poetical diction as he describes modern poets and poetry worthy of our admiration.
He tells us that Walter Pater's "pure gem-like flame" [sic] gave modern poets an alternative to moral earnestness and a desire to "purify poetry of all that is not poetry" but--and here it's important to keep reading--that these poets found the flame "was an insufficient motive." As the essay proceeds, Yeats establishes a shimmering ironic stance conveying dual desires: simplification and complication, concentered gem-like flames and unruly flights and divergences. Increasingly calling into question the efficacy of attacking things Victorian as a way of setting modernist poetry apart, Yeats insists, "When my generation denounced scientific humanitarian pre-occupation, psychological curiosity, rhetoric, we had not found what ailed Victorian literature. The Elizabethans had all these things, especially rhetoric" (OMV, xvii).
So what did call for amendment in poetry, if it wasn't Victorianisms per se? For Yeats the answer seems to lie in the need for passion--and he proceeds, in this argument with himself, to find such passion precisely in Victorian poets and poems. Modern poets, he argues, must revivify people and poetry that have become too passive, wrest control of events and speak for the mind's "responsibility." Intellectual passion and engagement must have their day as "man's naked mind" claims its place (OMV, xxviii, xxix). Along with the Victorian virtue of responsibility, other aspects of Victorian poetic culture appeal to Yeats--his own taste (which he attributes to his Irish nationality) tends not to man's naked mind but to "a man so many years old, fixed to some one place, known to friends and enemies, full of mortal frailty, expressing all things not made mysterious by nature with impatient clarity" (OMV, xxxvii). The modernist sage of 1935 might have been describing a Victorian triple-decker novel, with its social world represented in painstaking detail.
The differences between "them," the modern poets, and himself, the always respectful Victorian modernist (Irish) outsider to modernism, accumulate throughout the essay. The modernists, Yeats tells us, may look for hard, positive subject matter and an avoidance of political ranting in poetry or in Trafalgar Square, but he prefers a poetry of passionate politics, a poetics of the heart. When in 1900, "everybody got down off his stilts and Victorianism had been defeated," the modern movement, in Yeats's view, was fruitfully dominated by two late Victorian writers, Rudyard Kipling and William Watson, "who had never heard of that defeat or did not believe in it"(OMV, xi-xii).
Why have Yeats's own Victorian passions been all but invisible to the central narrative of modernist literary study? And what will we begin to see once we seek the Victorian in the modern? The answers to those questions will, of course, depend on one's own modernism, since there is so little agreement about modern literature's formal qualities, its decade of origin, its longevity, and its groupings of artists and texts-- whether generic, national, philosophical, or historical. Yet as Stevens says, "It is time to choose," and so we shall. One conception of modernism calling for revision often goes by the name "high modernism," and its dates are roughly 1880-1945. It features a literary work whose mask of darkness and suffering may be flipped to reveal the mask of a retrieved Romantic, visionary illumination.
Conceived in a time of spiritual crisis, such "anti-Victorian" modernist art communicates an exile from the homeland of certainty as it sits high on the shelf of autonomous art. An object to be admired, or in some cases excoriated, for its self-sufficiency and self-involvement, the modern work is purely sculpted, durably masculine, paradoxically spiritual or cerebral for all its hardness, and preferably not for sale. Its internal incoherencies are bounded by its autonomy, made whole by its separation from the familiar. It takes the long and impersonal view, turning away from the ordinary and the fleshly, the vulgarly emotional and the preachy. One must work hard to understand and appreciate such a modernist work of art, and most people will fail to do so.
What happened between Romanticism and modernism--namely, the mid-century Victorian--has been largely left out of the story. This is not to claim that there are no studies of mid-nineteenth-century writers with modernist desires, or of modernist writers with ties to that portion of the literary past lying between the Romantics and the turn of the century. 5 Rather, it is to say that the task of integrating the two is far from complete, and that we as modernists should become self-consciously intradisciplinary. Over specialization, in particular the periodization of literary study, has narrowed our view for better and worse.
This modernist portrait, like all composites, presents a being that never existed. It is nonetheless one that we shall choose to take down and handle in order to move toward a conception of Victorian modernism. Chronologies of modernism often begin at the turn of the century, as the airless Victorian parlor, filled with bric-à-brac, is replaced by the "Aesthetic suite" of decadence, mysteriously layered with exotic objects and moody atmospheres. This is replaced in turn by the modernist "living space," cleared of conflicting patterns and sleek in its functional elegance. The chronology of Victorian modernism, in contrast, imagines these three periods as gathered into an incomplete unity because they share important ideas about artists, works of art, and audiences. Aesthetic notions and artistic practices intermingle, entwine; or they flow and pool, even metamorphose, one into the other. Juxtapositions become intimate relations. Phenomena of rupture and loss give way to relation and addition, and the patterns thereby formed link to other patterns.
Victorians themselves had been pattern-makers, reimagining a Romantic organic unity as a process of bringing internally linked complexities into expanding sets of relations with external complexities. George Eliot, for example, describes artistic form as a process of knowledge that grows "by its alternating processes of distinction and combination," arriving at the "conception of wholes composed of parts more and more multiplied and highly differenced." Multiple wholes are themselves internally multiple, and the highest form in art involves "the relation of multiplex interdependent parts to a whole which is itself in the most varied and therefore the fullest relation to other wholes." The best artistic form creates not a monistic unity of through-and-through synthesis, but something more complicated: "The most varied group of relations bound together in a wholeness which again has the most varied relations with all other phenomena." 6
What Eliot imagines is echoed by the modernist William James, in part because he came of age in a Victorian household. Eliot's multiplex interdependencies become James's "concatenated union" as he describes
the world . . . as a collection, some parts of which are conjunctively and others disjunctively related. Two parts, themselves disjoined, may nevertheless hang together by intermediaries with which they are severally connected, and the whole world eventually may hang together similarly, inasmuch as some path of conjunctive transition by which to pass from one of its parts to another may always be discernible. Such determinately various hanging-together may be called concatenated union, to distinguish it from the "through-and-through" type of union, "each in all and all in each". . . which monistic systems hold to obtain when things are taken in their absolute reality. 7
George Eliot emphasizes the wholes, James the transitions between and within them, but they share a notion of incomplete completions, multiple and multiply connected centers, and discontinuous continuities. Yeats, too, describes "the ultimate reality" as "neither one nor many, concord nor discord," the tertium quid, as it were, of all antinomies. 8
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, this essay's exemplary re of Victorian modernism, embodies these notions in the patterns of his daily life which are complexly linked to the patterns and arrangements of his artistic creation. The "multiplied and highly differenced" arrangements and rearrangements within his painting and poetry are akin--in the full sense of the word "kin"--to the interior decoration of his London house at 16 Cheyne Walk. This is the representative story of Victorian modernism that I will tell. But first, a brief look backward, to an eclipse of Romantic Imagination that made modernism possible.
Concatenated unions or multiplex relations have a Romantic pedigree of inferiority that goes by the name of Fancy. For the Romantics, Imagination trumps Fancy, because it allows the artist to work as a divinely creative force. The Victorian modernists' Romantic forebear, Coleridge, describes the supreme, God-the-Father-like powers of the Secondary Imagination. He even coins a term, esemplastic (to shape into one), both to describe such imagination and to enact it as he collapses two Greek words into one "Angloid" word. The Secondary Imagination "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create . . . struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially dead and fixed." In contrast to Imagination, Fancy is of the kingdom of death, for it "has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites . . . [like ordinary memory] the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association." 9 Fancy is, as it were, the interior decorator of the art world--it never creates from unformed matter paintings or poems of the first order, but merely rearranges existing artistic furniture. Surely, the moving of received, dead objects about is--in comparison to the vast seminal power of the unifying and idealizing Imagination--woman's work. 10
Yet through the rearranging energies of a latter-day Fancy, modernist writers such as Marcel Proust, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce brought dead objects back to life: railroad timetables, cracked teacups, golden bowls, heather-mixture stockings, Connemara cloth, vaseline and orangeflowers. And they moved these fixities about not just as objects, but as objects that require us to rethink the nature of artistic unity as we come to grasp the Victorians' avant-garde notions of discontinuous continuity. Gertrude Stein's patterns of words on a page as objects on a page continue this tradition: "What does literature do and how does it do it. And what does English literature do and how does it do it. And what ways does it use to do what it does do." 11
Fancy has its own power of life in Victorian modernism, and once we reassess its value, hitherto marginalized texts of many kinds will suddenly appear more worthy of study. For example, mid-nineteenth-century domestic, sentimental, or highly wrought novels by American women will come into focus as a center, not the center, of Victorian modernism. Henry James read widely in such popular fiction, and wrote, for example, a review of Elizabeth Stoddard's fiction which conveys not just his dissatisfaction, but also his fascination with the links between his (high) art and her domestic and sensational fiction. In her children's tale, Lolly Dinks' Doings , Stoddard tells of a spider fairy named Fancie who moves in with the Dinks family and enchants them with her miniature domestic arrangements. Fancie is kin to the "little airs" who explore the Ramseys' abandoned house in Woolf's novel of aesthetic domesticity, and who "all sighed together, all together gave off an aimless gust of lamentation." 12 Summoned home to fairyland, Fancie tells Mrs. Dinks what she will miss:
"And dust, cinders; above all the human-crowd smell. I am not quite sure how I can get out of the tangle in your air of human speech. Missis, I see a thousand curves and threads crossing each other, making a great web, that rises and rises like a balloon in the sky. It is all words; and where is it trying to get to?"
"Heaven, Fancie."
She looked dull and dumb, and then I recollected that fairies have no spirits, and so cannot understand what the land of souls means. 13
Fancie takes a ride on the back of the pet bird, "up and down my new chintz lambrequins." She calls out, "Am I high enough for your heaven, Missis?" 14 Stoddard asks directly in Lolly Dinks' Doings whether fancy (Fancie) can get to heaven. It (she) cannot, but instead locates a new kind of earthly transcendence in the heights of lambrequins, in the chintz patterns of a domestic scene that Mrs. Dalloway herself would have recognized, and in a web of human speech akin to that which Joyce offered to Stephen Dedalus as he tried for heaven but never arrived.
Indeed, the very notion of decorative art, ornamentation and detail work--as opposed to one central infusion of breath that, like God creating the world, makes a work whole--has a gendered history. 15 To the extent that detailed ornamentation can obscure the central subject, or even take on an important life of its own, to decorate or ornament is intrinsically to challenge the notion of unified, mastering form. When Adolph Loos writes of the crime of ornament and captures the spirit of high modernism by articulating a coolly functional aesthetic of purity, he has repressed, but not erased, Victorian plenitude. 16
If the notions of fancy, concatenation, or multiplexity are to be useful, they must place us on paths that lead somewhere, to borrow an image from William James's Pragmatism. In one of the earliest treatises on aesthetics that we have, Alexander Baumgarten's "Reflections on Poetry" , we read that "The more that is gathered together in a confused representation, the more extensive clarity the representation has." 17 Baumgarten articulates a central finding of Victorian modernism: mixings, minglings, and confusions within the home as well as between homemaking and art-making, may yield clarity. Again, it is time to choose. Let us start down the path that links Dante Gabriel Rossetti's artistic practice with his actual domestic arrangements. Rossetti was a man who knew his lambrequins, and who--in poems, paintings, and rooms alike--assembled bric-à-brac.
As an artist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti moved among a confusion of categories that nevertheless, to borrow William James's phrase, hung together. First, he decorated the interiors of his homes, most notably that of 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Second, he depicted, intensely and repeatedly, domestic spaces and objects in both his poetry and his painting: bedrooms, halls, sitting rooms; nests, bowers, cages; windows, doors, thresholds; cups, washbasins, chairs, cabinets, screens, and mirrors. His "fine art" on its face represents a choice of spaces and things resolutely quotidian in nature, if frequently exoticized. Third, and in a sense encompassing these two domestic exercises, Rossetti passionately made "arrangements" with paint, words, and people. "Applied" art (interior decoration, crafts), "high" art (painting, poetry) and "household" art (practical affairs of home, hospitality)--these three arenas of aesthetic arrangement intermingled in Rossetti's creative life, fueled by tender sentiments as well as by pain and fear.
Rossetti lived at 16 Cheyne Walk from 1862 until his death in 1882. To understand his house, by many accounts strangely or fascinatingly decorated, and to appreciate its relation to his painting and poetry, we should begin with a few facts, consider a few legends, and then examine some of the best evidence we have of its appearance: the catalog of its contents printed for the auction held shortly after his death. 18
The London City Council tells us that the house, Georgian in style, was built in 1717, that it was called Queen's House because of its association with the flight of Queen Catherine Parr on the death of Henry VIII, and that it has especially well-preserved and beautifully wrought ironwork. 19 Rossetti's studio evidently occupied the dining room on the ground floor; a vast drawing room on the first floor runs along the entire front of the house, and the second floor is primarily given over to bedrooms. 20 Judging by exterior and interior Council photographs, the house is large and elegant, a gentleman's residence. In addition to these photographs, we have paintings by Treffry Dunn of the studio, dining room, drawing room, and--reflected by one of Rossetti's many convex mirrors--part of his bedroom. 21 Most of Rossetti's friends mention aspects of the house; but George Meredith, T. Hall Caine, Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton, William Michael Rossetti, and Dunn provide the fullest accounts. 22
Descriptions of 16 Cheyne Walk have tended to focus on the mysterious quality of its bedrooms, probably because the concept of the Gothic was most available as a descriptive device for the house's hodgepodge of strange furnishings. Watts-Dunton writes that the guest bedroom where he frequently slept
got the reputation of being haunted; for it was hung about with sombre hangings and antique picture panels. . . . Scattered about the room in most admired disorder were some outlandish and unheard-of books, and all kinds of antiquarian and Oriental oddities, which books and oddities Rossetti had picked up at various times during his ramblings about Chelsea and elsewhere--such as old carved heads and grinning gargoyles, and Burmese and Chinese Buddhas in soapstone of every degree of placid ugliness. . . . Rossetti's own bedroom was scarcely less weird in character. There again were to be seen heavy curtains drawn closely around an antiquated four-post bedstead. . . . 23
Caine writes a similar description; Dunn bewails the unhealthy darkness, airlessness, and gruesome pictures of the bedrooms. 24
But the rest of the house strikes Dunn as, above all, filled with interesting and beautiful objects, which he breathlessly catalogs:
The mantelpiece was a most original compound of Chinese black-laquered [sic] panels, bearing designs of birds, animals, flowers and fruit in gold relief, which had a very good effect, and on either side of the grate a series of old blue Dutch tiles, mostly displaying Biblical subjects treated in the serio-comic fashion that existed at the period, were inlaid. The fire-grate itself was a beautifully-wrought example of eighteenth century design and workmanship in brass . . . in one corner of the room stood an old English china cupboard, inside of which was displayed a quantity of Spode ware.  [RDR, 17-8]
Like Dunn as he awaits his first glimpse of the great man, others describe coziness rather than Gothic horror. William Rossetti perhaps sums up this position when he passes judgment on the house: "old-fashioned, many-roomed, homelike, and comfortable." 25 After looking at Dunn's paintings, a comparatively recent critic, Mario Praz (himself a house-obsessed man), complains of the eclecticism of Rossetti's house: "in the end there was no style at all. Non-style was created from an excess of styles." 26 When the texture of Victorian eclecticism becomes extreme, it shades into modernist minimalism.
The common observation among these varying assessments is of the striking number and variety of decorative things in Rossetti's house. These he collected (in excursions ranging from the elegance of Murray Marks's premises to the junk shops of the East End), received as gifts, ordered to specification, and sometimes made himself. To explore this pattern, we can consider primarily the auction catalog, with a bit of contextual help from Dunn's paintings. An impressionistic perspective is helpful here, not only because consideration of the material history of Rossetti's belongings is beyond the scope of this study, but also because there is no evidence to suggest that Rossetti considered himself an expert in anything but blue and white china. He bought what he liked, and the evidence suggests a happily roving rather than a professionally focused taste. Even allowing for the randomness of anyone's household belongings, the list of Rossetti's household effects indicates an aesthetic of incoherence, repetition, and complication: all qualities that have been remarked within autonomous modernist works--think of The Waste Land--even as we have insisted that they represented a break with the Victorian past.
Almost everything in the house is out of context, collected from other places, times, and cultures. One particularly intriguing page of the catalog lists Indian, Japanese, Albanian, Venetian, Chinese, and Irish objects. Perhaps the candidate for the most stunning example of the unassimilated "other" would be a foreign object that also announces itself as freakish: "A curiously carved mahogany frame chair with cane seat, formerly belonging to the Chinese Giant 'Chang'" (VCR, no. 104). At the same time, Dunn's paintings of Rossetti's house portray a mood of serenity and sumptuous ease. How to reconcile these two accounts?
Perhaps this sense of order issues from the very quality of confusion, or mingling, which these objects possess, in both their internal and external multiplexities, to borrow George Eliot's term. Rossetti's arrangements of these objects within the rooms of his house throw the sentimental context of "home" into high relief. We might say that feeling provides the energy that draws them into patterns. Rossetti liked, even adored, these things--his feelings about them provide the only aesthetic principle informing his acts of acquisition and arrangement. Many parts are here gathered, however loosely, into a whole. Certainly that is one tide of energy within 16 Cheyne Walk. But complication within individual objects can create confusing crosscurrents. The Elgin Marbles these are not. Consider "Pair of Chinese antique girandoles [the very descriptive terminology appears to fail], fitted with 4 shelves each, elaborately carved and heavily gilt" (VCR, no. 257). Or "A very handsome plated centre stand, inlaid with reflected glass, fitted at the ends with 3-light candelabra with serpentine arms, the centre supporting a cut glass flower dish" (VCR, no. 400). Rossetti liked this kind of complexity: such an item sits quietly, yet scintillates with multiple shapes and reflections.
And he liked repetition as well. Although classification can be a problem, a conservative count of items in the catalog reveals twenty-five cabinets, chests, and cupboards, and thirty-one glasses and mirrors. Such repetition--think of Stein's "otherwise there is a pleasure in adding / a doubling of their plan. / They will add adding to their tender care"--has, like incoherence within a house, two contesting qualities (W, 116). Mirrors everywhere indicate either a comforting similarity or an unnerving replication both of the mirrors themselves and the scenes they endlessly reflect. They can make us feel at home, eerily unhoused, or even entrapped. As for the cabinets, the issue is not just numbers--after all, this era antedates the built-in closet. Most of these cabinets, however, have interior shelves and drawers enclosed by highly decorated folding doors in various arrangements. Within cabinets are smaller enclosures, themselves holding discrete items, repetition within repetition.
Such proliferation makes of Rossetti's house a patchwork of borrowings that announce both their common ground (they rest with a sigh in the sentimental space of the Victorian middle-class home) and a nervous, modern sense of contingency. Furthermore, his house is in flux as items come and go, or are moved about: what Elizabeth Bishop, in a poem about fishhouses at the water's edge, would call knowledge itself, "flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown." 27 Even the status of items within the house can never be clear. How heavily carved or exquisitely veneered must a chest be before it metamorphoses from storage bin to objet? Or perhaps at the very limits of artful impracticality the ordinary suddenly reappears: "A curious cabinet of Burmese glass workmanship, having grotesque res, with stand for same (suitable for a hall as a receptacle for carriage rugs)" (VCR, no. 217).
Such complexities will yield clarity once we learn their syntax. To do so, we must take seriously Rossetti's carefully arranged relations to other people, those relations interwining with the various uses of 16 Cheyne Walk: studio, gallery, literary salon, family home, stage set, and shelter from nature. Things, people, and works of art together form a rich confusion, "a collection, some parts of which are conjunctively and others disjunctively related."
Consider, for example, the hawthorn pot in Rossetti's painting Monna Rosa (1), a bit of the "blue and white" china that has become the emblem of aestheticism itself. 28 Our understanding of the painting might begin with a formalist appreciation of the pot's decorative texture in relation to res on the woman's robe and the background of peacock feathers and roses. We might then proceed to an appreciation of the pot as an incipiently Symbolist image of imagination and artisanry, and from there to a consideration of the woman herself as a beautiful, "vital object" and so on. But we should also attend to the aesthetic arrangements Rossetti made beyond the painting's frame, at the center of which the pot still beautifully rests. Rossetti's carefully cultivated and deeply affectionate relationship with the art dealer and collector Murray Marks, one of his principal suppliers of oriental ware; his own collector's obsession that led him to entertain other collectors at dinner and thus to people his solitude meaningfully; his feeling that an earlier and better culture of beauty and virtue inhabits the hawthorn pot, and his belief that such significant beauty can be placed both in his home and on his canvases (themselves to be placed in homes, not public galleries): all these and other arrangements must inform our appreciation of Monna Rosa precisely because Rossetti painted and lived them simultaneously, interchangeably.
Above all, the hawthorn pot reminds us that translation is one of Rossetti's defining practices, as it will be for Ezra Pound. The "bringing home" or domesticating of foreign speech is central to Rossetti's intense practice of domestic aestheticism. He translated not only Italian poetry into English poetry, but also real Chinese pots (already translated from the Chinese when Rossetti named them "hawthorn") into items of English domesticity--part of the ensemble of his sitting room--and then into painted pots, themselves carefully placed in painted bowers and rooms.
Just as a vase could be bought and sold in the marketplace, used to develop relations with other people, treasured for its living qualities, transformed into a painted vase, and placed, beautifully, on a real shelf in a real house as part of ongoing domestic arrangements, so people, too, could be patterned into art at the same time as they worked in his home, itself an artistic studio and work of art. For Rossetti, objects were not, as Coleridge programmatically states, dead. Rossetti understood the "vital" as a free-floating energy that can infuse (and ebb from) people, objects, rooms, paintings, and poems alike, as he arranged them in complex patterns.