H.D. and the Public Sphere of Modernist Women Writers, 1913-1946 (review)

H.D. and the Public Sphere of Modernist Women Writers, 1913-1946. Georgina Taylor. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. vii + 228. $60.00.

H.D.'s career seems to provide ample evidence of literary modernism's withdrawal from the public sphere. She published several of her works in small private editions, and even more of her writing remained unpublished, either circulating in manuscript or never entering the arena of public exchange. Her privileged life appears, at first glance, far removed from the pressures of mass culture and the larger world of public concerns. The bold title of Georgina Taylor's new study promises to turn such critical assumptions on their head. Arguing that H.D. was at the center of a democratic network of modernist women writers who constituted their own public sphere, Taylor provides a compelling portrait of H.D. as a publicly and politically engaged literary critic and book reviewer, feminist theorist, magazine editor, and correspondent. This portrait relies implicitly on the past three decades of feminist criticism emphasizing the sociohistorical contexts of H.D.'s literary production, but it extends and challenges that work in two crucial ways. First, it tells the story of her writing and reception in the years 1913-46, well before her work fell out of view and was recovered in the 1980s by feminist critics. Second, it displaces literary history's familiar critical models of unidirectional influence and dialogic intertextuality in favor of the multidirectional principles of Jürgen Habermas's public sphere theory—such diffuse concepts as network, exchange, consensus, democracy, rationality, and debate. In making this critical shift in reading H.D.'s career, Taylor's study offers a more generally useful theoretical model for understanding how women modernists negotiated complex questions of aesthetics and politics, access and context, audiences and institutions.

This approach to H.D.'s work is counterintuitive, because High Modernism is better known for its elitism, factionalism, and irrational methods than for any commitment to democratic access, rationally achieved consensus, and communicative transparency. In its formal imperative to chart the unconscious and its historical imperative to "make it new," modernism (or any avant-garde) often finds itself in direct conflict with the public sphere's valuation of rationality and its ideal of genuine openness to all ideas. To apply such a theory to women's literary production raises further problems, since the public sphere was structurally dependent on the exclusion of women, who were relegated, in Habermas's model, to the intimate concerns of the private sphere. Taylor tackles these and other contradictions head-on in a lengthy "Theoretical Overview," in which she describes the emergence of a network of modernist women writers as the development of a limited counter-public sphere that was open to all qualified participants, who understood their deviations from transparent speech as deliberate interrogations of idealized rational discourse. Following critics such as Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib, who replace Habermas's notion of a unified and coherent public sphere with a model of many overlapping and competing "counter-publics," Taylor understands H.D.'s limited readership, which the poet herself called the "initiated few," as comprising a specific counter-public open to anyone with the requisite education and intellectual capacity to engage in genuine conversation. Taylor lays out these issues in a manner accessible to readers with no prior knowledge of public sphere theory, giving clear and lively examples drawn from thorough archival research.

H.D. and the Public Sphere tells a convincing story of the genesis of a particular feminist public sphere during the years 1913-17; the expansion and consolidation of this public from 1918-24, as members felt increasingly comfortable debating their differences; the lessening of its activity from 1925-31, a period of "incubation"; and a resurgence of activity during 1932-46. This final periods culminated in wartime literary exchanges during which "the public sphere operated to its optimal capacity" but...