Aalia Jagwani is a third-year student of English and Literary Arts at Brown University. She is a Section Editor for Arts & Culture at the Brown Daily Herald and an emerging writer of literary fiction. She is based in Rhode Island and is originally from Bombay, India.
HERmione, a novel by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), reviewd by Aalia Jagwani
HERmione by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) New Directions, 288 pages reviewed by Aalia Jagwani When I started reading HERmione, I knew nothing about Hilda Doolittle, the American modernist poet better known as H.D. But although intensely personal and grounded in an endlessly fascinating life, HERmione’s slow unravelling of H.D.’s psychology is arguably all the more enticing in when approached unknowingly. Reading HERmione did not feel effortless—this is not a book that propels you forward. It instead holds you back, grappling in the realm of ambiguity that the protagonist inhabits. It is an exercise in restraint — from tending instinctively toward the straightforward, from attempting to categorize people and relationships that resist boundaries. Reading it felt like playing a game with myself — to piece together HER consciousness, I had to allow my own to dissolve. It is precisely this dissolution of the self that H.D. details in HERmione. She adopts an alter-ego, Hermione or “Her” Gart, who is in her early twenties, having just dropped out of Bryn Mawr college after failing a class. She finds herself completely lost, suddenly defined by her inadequacy: “I am Hermione Gart, a failure” she proclaims at the very beginning of the novel. With a feeble ...