"I don't like the second half of the Orpheus sequence as well as the first. Stick to the woman speaking. How can you know what Orpheus feels? It's your part to be woman, the woman vibration, Eurydice should be enough. You can't deal with both" (H.D. 51).Julia, who is clearly miffed, responds to Rico's inherent double standard:
"Rico could write elaborately on the woman mood, describe women to their marrow in his writing; but if she turned round, wrote the Orpheus part of her...sequence, he snapped back, 'Stick to the woman-consciousness, it is the intuitive woman-mood that matters.' He was right about that, of course. But if he could enter, so diabolically, into the feelings of women, why should she not enter into the feelings of men?" (62)The point, of course, is Julia's angry focus on Rico's advice. Why, can Rico, as Orphic poet fix on and penetrate "the woman-consciousness with his piercing gaze" (Sword 410) while Julia (as a kind of Neo-Eurydicean figure) not also "turn round" and penetrate those of a man?
Works Cited
H.D., Bid Me to Live:
A Madrigal, London: Virago, 1984.
Theweleit, Klaus, "The Politics
of Orpheus between Women, Hades, Political Power and the Media: Some Thoughts
on the Configuration of the European Artist, Starting with the Figure of
Gottfried Benn, Or: What Happens to Eurydice?," New German Critique,
36 (Fall 1985), 133-56.