The mystery: H.D.'s unpublished Moravian novel edited and annotated. Towards a study in the sources of a poet's religious thinking.
Item
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Title
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The mystery: H.D.'s unpublished Moravian novel edited and annotated. Towards a study in the sources of a poet's religious thinking.
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Identifier
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AAI8821063
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identifier
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8821063
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Creator
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Augustine, Jane.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Charles Molesworth
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Date
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1988
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Literature, Modern
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Abstract
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H.D. (Hilda Doolittle: 1886-1961) wrote her last, still-unpublished novel, The Mystery, between 1949 and 1951, concluding a period of intense interest in her Moravian religious background. Her mother, Helen Wolle, belonged to the Unitas Fratrum, commonly called the Moravian Church, and was descended from eighteenth-century settlers who founded Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where H.D. was born. The text of The Mystery presented here is H.D.'s final version found in her archive at Beinecke Library at Yale. The novel's dense allusions to Moravian history, to the church's founder, Count Zinzendorf, and to occult figures and events necessitate the annotation, supplied chiefly from sources in H.D.'s notes and reading. An introduction provides the context of the novel's genesis in H.D.'s childhood memories and lifelong quest to transcend the painful oppositions of experience, in particular those of male to female, conscious mind to the unconscious, and time to eternity.;Psychoanalysis, theosophy, medieval romance, Goethe's Faust and Dante's Paradise join Moravian Christianity as major elements in the myth of history which the novel attempts to create. Its plot centers on a search conducted by Zinzendorf's grandchildren, Elizabeth de Watteville and Henry Dohna, into the Unitas Fratrum's origins as the old Church of Bohemia. In their quest, they encounter an eighteenth-century occultist, Louis Saint-Germain, and discover that all three of them are interconnected as 'adepts,' possibly reincarnations, involved in a mystical evolution toward higher spirituality.;Elizabeth embodies the healing powers of H.D.'s Bethlehem ancestors as she also mirrors queens and goddesses, both pagan and Christian, linked to them through palimpsestically layered images, names and symbolic attributes. She is also the Lady to whom the medieval knight pledges himself and the eternal Mother, bearer of love and peace, a key to the "world unity without war" which H.D. saw as Zinzendorf's goal. All three characters manifest aspects of the poet herself revitalized by contact with goddess-mothers, religious leaders and visionary poets of all ages. The vision of female presence in The Mystery anticipates the radical re-vision of the woman hero in H.D.'s final epic, Helen in Egypt.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
