The “Unusual Dimension”: H.D. , Jean Rhys, and the Projection of Bodies Through Time

abstract: Through analysis of H.D.’s encounters with Sigmund Freud and Jean Rhys’s novel, Good Morning, Midnight , this article explores how these two modernist writers navigate the complexities of perception, embodiment, and temporal experience. Using theory of mind and other frameworks, I argue that H.D. and Rhys suggest for readers two different ways of understanding perception and the impact of embodied experience, particularly in their attempts to resolve the tensions they present between their own minds and bodies. In tracking these attempts—and their perceived success and failures—the article argues that theory of mind, informed by embodiment, enriches our understanding of these writers’ efforts to reconcile self-perception with external interpretation within the modernist aesthetic.