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introduct ion The Modern Nation, Identity, and H.D. In her short story “Two Americans,” H.D. stresses the arbitrary nature of nations. Her character Raymonde muses, “States, people, nations—it was all a matter of a slice of water or a muddy river or the shattered edge of a blood-spattered precipice, to go by” (68). At the moment she offers this insightful comment on the constructed nature of nations, Raymonde is looking at Lake Léman, a lake bordered by both Switzerland and France. Noticing this distinction, Raymonde thinks, “they were Swiss, they were French, with just that narrow upper arm of Lake Léman to measure them off” (68). The sketchy boundary separates one nation from another, nations with much in common. On the one hand, the separation between quite similar European nations clarifies the temporality and ambiguous construction of nations—these lines are drawn by people and exist in a theoretical, ideological space often unacknowledged by geological features. Still, on the other hand, the real resonance of nation is a particular focus of this story, as its title implies. Raymonde is faced with two visiting fellow Americans, and all of the story’s characters accept that the three of them share a special sense of empathy because of their shared nationality . According to the story’s logic, Raymonde instinctively understands the other Americans, who are virtual strangers to her. Raymonde even feels that through their visit the United States has come to her, despite her long sojourn in Europe. Somehow, through their embodiment of nation, Raymonde reconnects with the nation of her birth. Nationality has become an essential identity characteristic. 2 Introduction “Two Americans” is autobiographically based with Raymonde shaped upon H.D. herself. Hence, in 1930, after nineteen years lived as an expatriate , H.D. lays claim to American identity, as she did before writing this story and would for the rest of her life. Perhaps H.D. viewed nationality much as did Henry James, another expatriate whom H.D. avidly read and greatly admired. In Portrait of a Lady, James wrote, “The old gentleman at the tea-table, who had come from America thirty years before, had brought with him, at the top of his baggage, his American physiognomy ; and he had not only brought it with him, but he had kept it in the best order, so that, if necessary, he might have taken it back to his own country with perfect confidence” (18–19). James’s ironic commentary, that nationality is so integral as to shape one’s physical appearance, is not that far distanced from H.D.’s assertion in “Two Americans” that nationality forms a bond unbreakable by distance and time, and yet its construction is clearly arbitrary. Like H.D. and James, contemporary historians and nation theorists wrangle with the fluidity and power of nations, even disagreeing on basic terminology. Since this study claims that American identity plays a pivotal role in H.D.’s literary imagination, this introduction situates H.D. in the theoretical debates about what nation means and how it comes about. It delineates the commonly accepted components of the modern nation and identifies which aspects are most germane for H.D. Lastly, it theorizes how Americans perceived their own national identity during the years when H.D. lived in the U.S. (1886–1911), especially in the wake of the Civil War, for it is this construction of Americanness that H.D. would have packed into her baggage in 1911 and carted off to Europe. Ernest Renan asked the famous question “Qu’est-ce qu-une nation?”— what is a nation?—which he answered with the assertion that “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle” (17). Renan proceeds to delineate two components of nation, which are a glorious past and the desire to continue that heritage, but his emphasis on the spirituality of nation anchors one strand of thought in nation theory. This strand focuses on how people feel about their nations and the psychological components of nation. This approach is necessarily amorphous because it emphasizes emotional attachments, Introduction 3 rather than any concrete characteristics of nation. Hans Kohn also fits into the psychological vein of thought, asserting that “nationalism is first and foremost a state of mind, an act of consciousness, which since the French Revolution has become more and more common to mankind” (10–11). Because nationality, and nationalism, have no physical characteristics like gender or racial identities, it becomes much more...

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