Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Enikő Bollobás: (De-) Gendering and (De-) Sexualizing Famale Subjectivities: Woman-Hating and Its Revisions in Literature and Painting
dragging her knees" and starting to bark. She appears again as the ultimate transgressor, who cuts through genders and even species, deconstructing a whole epistemology based on the rigid binarisms of human/animal, presence/absence, day/night, or life/death. 2.4. H. D.: undifferentiated self H. D.'s HERmione, written in 1927 but not published until 1981, is a most intriguing novel, where the author probably went furthest of all women experimentalist —the "sapphic expatriate set" (Jay 76)—in portraying a woman's selfhood outside the bounds of both the heterosexual and the homosexual matrix. The story is highly autobiographical, depicting the two failed relationships of the very young Hermione Gart of Pennsylvania: both the romance with bohemian poet George Lowndes and the "sister-love" between Her and Fayne Rabb end in betrayals. However, the open-ended narrative allows for the continuation of the love between the two women. By the end. Her will find her autonomous self independent of either of these two relationships, and her selfhood will become scripted on the virginal snow. Her "failure to conform" and to be regular is played out in the pun H. D. exploits all through, but especially in the first half of the novel. As homonym of a subject's proper name (HERmione) and the accusative/dative declension form of the third person personal pronoun, "Her" is at once grammatical subject and object, folding, as it were, in itself selfhood as both subject and object. However, with the pronoun constantly distanced and alienated into proper name, the identity of the accusative/dative and subjective forms defamiliarizes reference. Hermione experiences herself, as Shari Benstock puts it, as a "grammatical error," recognizing in herself "a multiplicity of selves that language cannot simultaneously name" (337). Neither of Hermione's selves seem ever to conform to the norms of gender. She is never really "feminine" for George: "You never manage to look decently like other people [...] [y]ou look like a Greek goddess or a coal scuttle," he tells her (64). Her selfhood is fluid enough to include identification with the trees of her home state, Pennsylvania, and its whole landscape. But this identification is based primarily on her self-perception as trace, map, or script —as readable as the landscape. 117
