Butterfly Effect - ressourcesfeministes

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17 H.D. The original Imagist, Hilda Doolittle is a poet’s poet. Her work is steeped in
Greek mythology and its influence continues today. The 1980s saw a veritable H.D.
industry grow around her work. There are several fine books on her life and work,
but none more fascinating than Paint It Today the roman à clef which she wrote
about her relationships with Francis Gregg and Bryher (Winifred Ellerman). H.D.
1992. Paint It Today. For biographical and literary treatments of H.D.’s life that
acknowledge her as a lesbian, see Rachel Blau DuPlessis. 1986. H.D.: The Career of
That Struggle; Susan Stanford Friedman. 1990. Persephone’s Web: Gender, Modernity,
H.D.’s Fiction. For an interesting examination of modernist lesbian writers see
Gillian Hanscombe and Virgina P.M. Smyers. 1987. Writing for Their Lives and Jane
McIntosh Snyder. 1997. Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho, especially the Epilogue
in which she discusses the work of H.D. and Olga Broumas.
18 classicists. Among the greats in this field is Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), a
Cambridge scholar and hugely influential in the interpretation of mythology, art
and ritual. Her two most important works are Prolegomena to the Study of Greek
Religion (1903) and Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912). By
the time I came to study Ancient Greek in the early 1980s, these books were out of
favour, but I was able to read the copies still standing in the library stacks and not
borrowed for years. They were an eye opener, and contributed enormously to my
study of the language. Having the language to understand her work made it
possible to plough through the war-mongering Thucydides. Virginia Woolf makes
a reference to Jane Harrison in A Room of One’s Own. For more on her life see,
Sandra J. Peacock. 1988. Jane Ellen Harrison: The Mask and the Self. Jane’s twentyyear
friendship with Hope Mirlees is cast as non-sexual by Sandra Peacock but I
would argue that the evidence suggests otherwise. Another classicist is “Michael
Field”, also poet and philosopher. She was in fact two women, Katharine Bradley
(1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913). This aunt and niece duo, also lovers,
collaborated on some of the most passionate lesbian poems of the nineteenth
century. See Alison Hennegan’s The Lesbian Pillow Book (2000) and Lillian
Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men (1981), pp. 209-13.
19 Greek. Virginia Woolf lamented this in her essay “On not knowing Greek” (1968)
pp. 39-59. I suspect it was also because it kept her out of the conversations of her
Cambridge-educated brother, Thoby and his friends, all of whom were later to be
known as the Bloomsbury Group. Barbara Deming, writing of her travels in Greece
in the early 1950s, describes an epiphany at Eleusis in which the stone breasts of a
statue become the possibility for claiming her self. She writes. “I am. And I will not
be robbed of my sex. And I will not be shamed.” Barbara Deming. 1985. A
Humming Under My Feet: A Book of Travail, p. 221.
20 there’s no word in our language to describe what we are. This is what Sita says to
Rada in Deepa Mehta’s film, Fire. In the face of Giti Thadani’s research it appears
this is not the case, although it might be true that because of hatred few wish to
use the available words.