Modernist autobiography, hysterical narrative, and the unnavigable river: The case of freud and H.D.

摘要

The Freudian case history, which reads the history of the self as the history of a psyche, offers a useful model of autobiographical narrative. This essay examines Freud's famous case history of "Dora" as a context for H.D.'s memoir Tribute to Freud. Freud's portrait in Dora of what scholars now call "hysterical narrative" has attracted long-lasting critical attention even as the genre has expanded beyond its original association, the halting reports given by patients with hysteria. By pulling this concept back to its historic construction in an important source text, Dora, I hope to demonstrate that it made available a productive model for Modernist autobiography, in particular H.D.'s memoir of a critical time in her artistic formation. Elaine Showalter, in her influential study "On Hysterical Narrative," points out that Freud drew upon earlier negative links between hysteria and narrative but that use of the term has, since Freud, spread to encompass all manner of writing by or about women. Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous celebrated the hysteric's tics and silences as a radical gesture, a feminine language outside patriarchy, and an array of feminist critics, led by Mary Jacobus, began associating women's words (and reading) more generally with hysterical narrative. Claire Kahane, another major critical voice on "hysterical narrative," extends the quality of hysterical narrative to male authors but still associates it with women, as she theorizes it to be an anxious response to the rise of the vocal New Woman.