Tribute to Laura Marcus

ABSTRACT

This essay pays mournful tribute to Laura Marcus through a reading of Hilda Doolittle's extrapolations of Freudian psychoanalysis, an area of scholarship pioneered by Marcus. Examining the dream-like shapes of H.D.’s writing on Freud in Tribute to Freud and her own oneiric experiences in works such as Helen in Egypt, it elaborates on what H.D. called ‘the hieroglyph of the unconscious’, cinematic realms of projection which bear testimony to ineffable events that seem to occur outside of time.

KEYWORDS:

• H.D
• Sigmund Freud
• unconscious
• dreams
• cinema

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hilda DooLittle, Tribute to Freud, Introduction by Adam Phillips (New York: A New Directions Book, 2012), p. 115.

2 The joke here is that H.D. had sent a cluster of gardenias to Freud in exile in Maresfield Gardens with an unsigned card that read ‘To greet the return of the Gods’. Freud read it as ‘Goods’. They were referring to the artefacts that had been transported from Vienna to London through the good offices of Marie Bonaparte, although Gods/goods could stand for Freud himself arriving intact after a perilous journey.

3 Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), p. 366.

4 Hilda Doolittle, Helen in Egypt (New York: A New Directions Book, 1961), p. 22.

5 Marcus, The Tenth Muse, p. 367.