University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2012 H.D.: The Politics and Poetics of the Maternal Body Aliki Sophia Caloyeras University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the American Literature Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Caloyeras, Aliki Sophia, "H.D.: The Politics and Poetics of the Maternal Body" (2012). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 618. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/618 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/618 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. H.D.: The Politics and Poetics of the Maternal Body Abstract This dissertation reads the work of modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961) through the lens of the maternal body, which was systematically repressed and concealed in the first half of the twentieth century despite the very public nature of women's reproductive issues in this period. H.D.'s era was one which saw the changing legal status of women, the medicalization of childbirth marked by its movement from the home to the hospital, the entry of women into the medical profession, the mainstream popularity of eugenics, the development of the psychoanalysis, and the rise of the technology of film. H.D.'s life and work provides a unique opportunity to bring together these major events of twentieth-century history with literary studies, not only because of H.D.'s connections to the Imagist movement, avant-garde cinema, and psychoanalysis, but also because of her personal experiences as a childbearing woman, a bisexual mother, and a patient of Freud.