| In reading H.D.'s The Gift and Trilogy and Sylvia Plath's "The Fifteen-Dollar Eagle," The Bell Jar and Ariel within the context of the Second World War and the Cold War, I argue that both writers were involved in an examination of the complex relationships between language, the body, and a militaristic culture. In applying Julia Kristeva's theories of the pre-Oedipal phase in language acquisition, particularly as they are developed in her Tales of Love and Powers of Horror, I foreground Kristeva's suggestion that pre-Oedipal identifications that are mobile and provisional might be a way out of the manifestation of aggression towards the other. Kaja Silverman's theory of the "active gift of love," as developed in The Threshold of the Visible World, and Jessica Benjamin's theory of pre-Oedipal recognition, as developed in The Bonds of Love, are used to elucidate Kristeva's theories.;I argue that in The Gift and Trilogy, H.D. arrived at a poetics of peace by accessing an alternative pre-Oedipal disposition in language through her style. I trace a gestural quality in H.D.'s prose and poetry which establishes a spacing of meaning through which otherness becomes an invitation rather than a threat. In reading Plath's use of images of purity, I suggest she provided a critique of the unified Transcendental subject through her analysis of the logic of purity. She suggests that both World War II and the Cold War can show us the workings of such a logic. Writing within the context of war, Plath leaves us with an X-ray of both the way the subject has been constituted in Western culture and the implications of this constitution, while H.D. suggests that through a particular relationship to language we might find our way out of war. |
