Electric Imagination
In early 1919, Hilda Doolittle, also known as H.D., lay on her deathbed. She had contracted the viral influenza of the 1918 flu pandemic, which swiftly spread across the globe in the wake of World War I. Pregnant and abandoned, she feared she would not survive. But she, and her newborn daughter Perdita, did. Months later, with the young writer Bryher, also known as Annie Winifred Ellerman, who would become her lifelong partner and co-parent, H.D. travelled to the Isles of Scilly in southwest England to recover.
It was there off the Cornish coast she wrote the essay “Notes on Thought and Vision” in which she ponders the profound experiences of life and death she had experienced just months prior. In her other fiction, specifically her later 1935 novella Nights, she again ponders these tensions between creation and destruction. Throughout these two texts, H.D. uses a discourse of electricity to reflect and process her characters’ and her own experiences with life and death. H.D. used electric power as a metaphor for creation and destruction. But what is more, she employed electric technologies to understand a woman’s mind and body and to consider the root of a woman’s artistic impulses and creative powers. Indeed, H.D. understood electric power as keenly connected to, and even the medium for, the way modern women might write and express their stories.
Photographic portrait of Hilda Doolittle, signed “H.D.” from Tendencies in Modern American Poetry by Amy Lowell. Public Domain.
H.D. was a modernist poet, writer, and actress, perhaps best known for developing the poetic genre of Imagism with Ezra Pound in the early 20th century, a hallmark genre of early modernism. But beyond her poetry, in her lesser-known and lesser-studied works, we can see H.D. 's pursuit of and experimentation with new modernist themes. Modernist literature, in broad terms, sought newness by breaking from the shapes and styles of storytelling in the past into new ways of telling stories and sharing experiences that were more deeply rooted in individual minds and perceptions. Such a break from the ways of the past might, modernist authors believed, allow them to discover new truths and experiences in the world.
Across her nonfiction and fiction, H.D. not only engages in this kind of experimentation, seeking out newness in her work, but also wonders about what might spark it. In “Notes” and Nights, she wonders if the artistic work that inspires new modernist forms can be best described as electrical.
In “Notes,” she uses a metaphor of electric telegraphy to understand how art leaves an impression in the human mind. Then in Nights, she extends the telegraphic mind metaphor and uses electricity to understand the relationship between a woman’s mind and her art. But as modernist scholar Tim Armstrong writes, literature does not just reproduce metaphors about electricity. Thus H.D.’s electric discourse is also more than metaphor and can be read through Armstrong’s definition of modernist texts as “electrical, plugging into a scientific rhetoric which channels flows of energy.” In her works, H.D. suggests electricity is this “flow of energy” that might lead artists to new discoveries and may even be the medium necessary to create modern art.
In “Notes,” H.D. wonders about the limits of the human mind and ponders from where her own artistic impulses come. She looks at paintings, sculpture, and culture. And she analyzes what kind of mental powers and artistic imaginations could bring works of art, like the Charioteer of Delphi, into existence. “If we had the right sort of brains,” she writes, “we would receive a definite message from that figure [the Delphic charioteer], like dots and lines ticked off by one receiving station, received and translated into definite thought by another telegraphic center….We want receiving centres for dots and dashes.”
For H.D., the ideal modernist mind is an electrified receiving center, where the pulses of art, the impressions gathered from looking at a work of art, come clearly into the mind like Morse code. This model of a telegraphic mind becomes even more overtly electric as she continues to define the state of mind an artist must occupy to follow modernist dictums to make it new. She writes, “two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought, could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of dead, murky thought.” Here, H.D. leverages the multiplicity of electricity—to be both uncontrollable and governed, powerful enough to create shock that is equally halting and productive.
In her novella Nights, H.D. uses this discourse of electricity to find a language, or a “scientific rhetoric,” for a modern woman’s sexual experiences, which she represents as a pathway to new insights and modern perceptions of sexuality. The novella teems with allusions to electric power as both a metaphor for transcendent experiences and as a very real, scientific explanation of what the character Natalia feels happening within her body during sex. In fact, the story fuses her sexual, flesh body with the radiating powers of electricity that seem to run through her and animate her. She is described as "a surcharged battery," "a scientific lyricist," and she eventually believes that her body configures the perfect conduit on which sexual forces can run free. Natalia even believes that to create new art, "she must express herself in luminous electrons,” once again suggesting that electricity may be the medium for modern works.
Across these descriptions, Natalia becomes the artistic “receiving center” H.D. had mentioned in “Notes;” she receives external impressions or forces—of art, creativity, and sexual intimacy—and uses them to channel a higher plane of artistic experimentation. By opening her body to electric forces, Natalia hopes to both experience and create new art—and this becomes synonymous with having an orgasm.
Lying in bed with her husband David, Natalia feels an orgasm ripple through her body like electric current. Electric energy moves agonizingly throughout her body: “It crept up the left side, she held it, timed it, let it gather momentum, let it gather force; it escaped her above the hip-bone, spread, slightly weakened, up the backbone; at the nape, it broke, distilled radium into the head but did not burst out of the hair. She wanted the electric power to run on through her.”
“Indeed, H.D. understood electric power as keenly connected to, and even the medium for, the way modern women might write and express their stories.”
This electric orgasm becomes a network of power that Natalia carefully navigates and controls within her body, even as she seems to give herself over to it, until “it”—that enlivening force, sex or electricity, or both—escapes her. This moment marks all the tensions and contradictions H.D. saw earlier in electricity as something multiplicitous: its capacity for destruction coupled with its potential to create and give energetic life.
But electricity’s potential for death and destruction haunt Natalia. As her obsession with her electrified body grows, so too does her awareness of how close such an obsession will bring her to death, signaling the life-and-death powers of electricity. Natalia feels herself tugged across the line between life and death: “She saw no force for it but death, and as the aura of radiant life sped through her, she saw that she was not so much healed as shocked back, re-vivified, for fresh suffering.”
These transcendent sensations of her body filled with electric energy, as she hovers on the boundary between life and death, become both her literary obsession (something she cannot stop writing about), and, dangerously, a rush she cannot stop seeking. Natalia seems to have reached the limits of her mind and body.
In other words, the artistic and sexual experiences Natalia seeks are inherently fleeting and contradictory—and as such, they echo those experiences that haunted H.D. as she recovered from the Spanish Flu on the Scilly Islands, contemplating her own precarious experiences with death in modernity. Natalia, perhaps like her author H.D., craves a form of connection that only modernity’s energies can make possible; she wants to “plug in,” to be the electrified wire charged with impossible and tantalizing power.
Natalia’s fictional editor notes that “she seemed to work actually in…electricity. Is that, I ask you, the medium for a novel?” Here, H.D. poses the central question of Nights, and perhaps of modern fiction more broadly: what medium could possibly capture the chaotic energies of modernism? It seems a combination of inspirations from both the arts and sciences would be required by that “right mind” to reach transcendent states. To make it new, H.D. suggests electricity—modernity’s key power—might be the medium a modern woman needed to write her story.
Further Reading
H.D., Annette Debo, ed., Within the Walls and What Do I Love? (Tallahassee: University of Florida Press, 2014).
Correction: An earlier version referred to “Notes of Thought and Vision” as a novella; it is an essay.
Image credit: Electricity by TjFlex2 on Flickr, 2012 (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
