| Hilda Doolittle (1886--1961) is one of the few modernist writers who acknowledges that the Pre-Raphaelites played a vital role in the development of her aesthetic beliefs. H.D.'s fascination with the Pre-Raphaelites crystallized in the 1930s and 1940s with Violet Hunt's biography of Elizabeth Siddall, Richard Aldington's anthology of aesthetic poetry, and the Whitechapel Gallery's 1948 exhibit of Pre-Raphaelite art. H.D.'s White Rose and the Red (1947 or 1948) revises the history of the Pre-Raphaelites from the perspective of D. G. Rossetti's model, muse, and wife, Elizabeth Siddall. It is H.D.'s narrative and thematic experiments with the prose genre as well as her exploration of these nineteenth-century visual artists that this dissertation uses to highlight another side of the professional identity of H.D. " Imagiste." White Rose shares with other novels about the Pre-Raphaelites (such as Violet Paget's Miss Brown [1884], Margaret Hunt's Magdalen Wynyard, or, The Provocations of a Pre-Raphaelite [1872], and Olivia Shakespear's Rupert Armstrong [1898]) an interrogation of a "cult of youthful beauty" that confirmed heterosexist and middle-class norms about women in the Victorian art world. These four novels are distinctly Pre-Raphaelite in their "plasticity" in that they challenge generic norms and engage in dialogue with the nineteenth-century art sphere. This metaphor of "plasticity," used by Bakhtin to denote the novel's intertextual potential, is also used to discuss H.D.'s recreation of Siddall, whose image has also been described as "this plasticity" (Legend 6) by Jan Marsh. In White Rose, H.D. enters into dialogue with the many versions of Siddall circulating in autobiographical and biographical portraits of the P. R. B. over the years: through her revision of Pre-Raphaelite history, H.D. delights in the shadows of myth that characterize Siddall's legacy. In White Rose, H.D. mourns Siddall, lost woman and artist. Through this process of mourning, H.D. resurrects the spectral figure whose enforced marginality has been so curiously central to Pre-Raphaelite history and criticism. The dynamism of the novel---underscored by its generic and stylistic hybridity, the emphasis it gives to the "present-ness" of the past---and its refusal to solidify the image of Siddall as an icon of youthful beauty and decay paradoxically ensure the liveliness of the spectacularly dead woman.;This dissertation produces a five-chapter study of H.D.'s novel, one that contextualizes White Rose within the Pre-Raphaelite and modernist issues of personal and professional self-definition, and the creation of male, homosocial bonds dependent upon the circulation of particular models of femininity. Through its emphasis on copies, versions, and selves constructed and circulated in criticism, this dissertation employs Siddall to represent epistemological and ontological crises in the Victorian and modernist literary periods. A documentary transcription of White Rose following the editorial practices of D. F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann, and those who follow their example, especially George Bornstein, will accompany this dissertation. |
