H.D.'s Nonbinary Poetics

Abstract: H.D.'s poem "The Master" (1934–1935), which works through her ambivalence about having been Sigmund Freud's analysand, has long been viewed as challenging his theories of castration and penis envy. Although the speaker's repeated statement that "woman" is "perfect" has justifiably led scholars to read "The Master" as revaluing "woman" over and against her diminishment by early psychoanalysis, the poem also inscribes non-binary subjectivities. It foregrounds a "woman … beyond women" who "is" the "dart and pulse of the male," and imagines a future in which "men" such as Freud will embrace transfemininity's insights to "feel / what it is to be a woman." In so doing, "The Master" shows that by leaving H.D. "free … to prophesy"—to invent new forms of gender subjectivity—the analysis created a space well beyond Freud's initial premises in which H.D. could figure the subjectivities of both analysand and analyst as nonbinary.