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MaySyeda
ProfessorAmyRobbins
ENGL319.75WomenandtheAvantGarde
Analysispaperassignment
Due:10/25/12

Retallacks Notion of the Experimental Feminine in Rachel Blau DuPlessissFamily, Sexes,

Psyche: An Essay on H.D. and the Muse of the Woman Writer.

In her essay The Experimental Feminine, Joan Retallack calls for a grammar that
counters the empty form of mainstream narratives and resists habituated responses (78). The
experimental feminine, as a grammar, embraces the illogical and the unintelligible as a means
of resistance to a dominant culture that works to subjugate the feminine unintelligible by a
masculine logic. The experimental feminine is conceptually separate from the sexed body and
can be enacted by anyone on the gender spectrum. Rachel Blau DuPlessiss essay Family,
Sexes, Psyche: An Essay on H.D. and the Muse of the Woman Writer challenges the
conventions of the traditional critical essay by embracing a feminine dyslogic. DuPlessis is a
poet-critic and her critical essay on the poet H.D. is informed by and in conversation with her
own identity as a woman poet. She infuses her critical essay with experimental syntax, poetic
language, autobiography and shifting authorial voices. The form of her critical essay works
concurrently with its exploration of H.D.s struggle to disrupt the status-quo models of gender
and sexuality through her career as a women poet and creatively stifled poetess. It is
unintelligible as a critical essay but intelligible as an avant-gardist text. DuPlessis disrupts the
form of the academic essay to achieve a dyslogical feminist aesthetic.

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DuPlessiss essay works in opposition to the masculine objectives of the academic critical
essay which are to theorize, hypothesize, characterize and achieve a logical order. Montaigne,
the father of the essay, imbues the form with feminine traits like incoherence and inconsistency
(Retallack 94). The original spirit of the essay is diluted by the dominant cultures academia.
Twentieth-century avant-gardists began to experiment with form as answer and art-object rather
than as the promise of an answer or the forbearer of the art-object. As an avant-garde practice,
DuPlessis embraces the essay as a space for investigation and not the documented results of an
extra-textual investigation. Her essay is a site of struggle and reads incoherent in its openness
to its inability to conclude (Retallack 98). DuPlessiss essay breaks with syntactical
conventions to avoid a clear, logical progression and it reads as if she does not know to what
conclusion she will arrive by the end of the essay. In embracing the unintelligible she creates a
space for new meaning to emerge through shifting associations and identities rather than an
imposition of meaning or a control of identity.
DuPlessis uses poetic conventions and poetical syntax throughout Family, Sexes,
Psyche, defying the formal syntax of a critical paper. Examples of her alternate syntactical
conventions include frequent line breaks, sentence fragments, short paragraphs, single-line
paragraphs, page breaks, and the use of empty space to frame emotionally charged lines. As
illustrated by the soldier in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, men determine the narrative.
DuPlessis uses wordplay to emphasize womens need to take control of their story. De-story?
Destory? and lever lover. She makes a list of the central struggles of the woman writer and
in the next one-line paragraph she simply states All must be re-made (25). By setting it apart
with empty space she creates a silence in which the unintelligible can be heard and repeats this

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technique throughout the essay. The use of poetical syntax serves to re-make the structure of the
critical essay as an experimental space.
DuPlessis uses poetic language and repeats the image of woman as rock throughout the
essay. Through this repetition she reaches for a new understanding of women by creating new
associations. She starts with the line No, my poetry was not dead but it was built on or around
the crater of an extinct volcano, from H.D.s End to Torment. This line is repeated and then
extended into other rock-images. This essay is about a woman, so there is a rock (DuPlessis
30). She speaks of men eroding voice, a term with geological connotations. She creates
associative meaning by speaking of women in relation to Rodins statue Thought and the
immovable Sphynx with the stone vulval lips. The Thinker sits on a rock. Thought
emerges. She emerges or is sinking. She is self and rock (DuPlessis 39). The essay ends with
images of volcanic rock, women as rock, buried to the neck but born up through the glottal
inelegant column (DuPlessis 40). Women are rock and buried by layers of rock (the extinct
volcano), but through their voice they can free themselves out from under the geologic ruin and
into the world. The lyrical sequences in DuPlessiss critical essay give the text a valence that
cuts into the bone of the reader, conveying the urgency of the ongoing struggle that is the life of
the woman poet. The use of the lyric in the critical essay works to create emotionally charged
associative meanings that straight academic prose would fail to do. The lyric form is feminine in
the way it allows for a multiplicity of interpretations rather than imposing any one meaning on to
the reader.
DuPlessis uses several voices throughout her essay including the voice of the academic,
the voice of the woman-poet, the voice of her subjects, and the voice of Rachel Blau DuPlessis
herself. Traditional critical essays maintain an unwavering academic voice that is a distant and

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impassioned vehicle for an argument supported by direct textual analysis. The unstable voice of
her essay accounts for a multiplicity of identity that simultaneously defies the masculine logic
and embraces the feminine dyslogic. The essay begins in the voice of the academic that states
the essays attempt to explore the cultural problems posed by H.D.s male sexual attachments.
This academic voice, however, is quickly destabilized with the line Im telling you what to do,
now do it! which is DuPlessis adopting the voice of D.H. Lawrences character Rico in Bid Me
To Live. Further down, the line Not rigor morits. No, No.! (21) is separated by blank space,
framing it in silence and giving it a weight that demands consideration. This line can be read as
the voice of H.D. or DuPlessiss own voice as a woman-poet fighting against the dominant
cultures myth of the dead woman-poet who does as commanded. What does a woman do who
will be a poet? Those from whom you stand to learn the most can also destroy you. /I flee from
them. She asks that of both H.D. and herself and the response of I flee from them is
understood as both her voice and H.D.s voice. This situates the text as not just a critical essay
on H.D. but an essay in which DuPlessis explores her own identity as a woman-poet in a
patriarchal society. As H.D. fled from Pound, DuPlessis fled from male mentors in university
(Frost 106). She combines the voices of H.D. and herself with the line That I am inside the
truck. I am the highway of my own repression (28). In the next paragraph she shifts into the
autobiographical I of Rachel Blau DuPlessis in the passage that begins On my desk, Capulin
Mountain and shifts back to H.D. by echoing the line from End of Torment. The shifting
identity of the authorial I gives life to the struggle on the page. The career of the woman poet
is the career of that struggle; to resist being reduced to either muse or poetess. H.Ds struggle is
DuPlesssiss struggle is the struggle of every woman poet.

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As the feminine cannot exist without the masculine, there is a final attempt towards logic.
But that logic gives way to dyslogic. DuPlessis rejects the idea of the male-muse for the womanpoet but when she concludes the family is the women-poets muse it is unclear if she means the
traditional heteronormative structure of family or the structure in which the woman-poet creates
her own family. Can the Janus-faced doors of parents and sexuality be unhinged by adopting a
sexuality that resists classification and resists classifying any one person as lover, husband, wife,
mother, father, brother, sister, child, cousin, uncle, aunt, and so forth? Can it be done? DuPlessis
recognizes that H.D.s long and close relationship to Winfried Bryher, which cycled through
periods of sexual activity and inactivity, did not serve as a satisfactory solution to her sexual
desire for men (DuPlessis 20). Does the erotic cupid that is her imagined child with Pound
satisfy the role of muse to the woman poet? The meaning of her argument is open to
interpretationvague, unclear, unintelligiblethe embodiment of the experimental feminine.
Rachel Blau DuPlessiss Family Sexes Psyche, features a weaving in and out to form
an argument lacking tensile strength. It is unable to hold up against its own weight. The
tenuousness of meaning allows for a multiplicity of meaning through associations and reassociations, embracing Retallacks notion of the experimental feminine. The essay is chaotic,
disordered, and frustrating to read as a critical essay. It does not satisfy under the rules of
dominant culture. It does not present a clear linear argument but allows for meanings to emerge
gradually through unstable associations. The essay is an embodiment of struggle. The poetic
conventions work to embody a tension as frustrating and revolutionary as water flowing
upwards. She does not burn the myth of the woman as muse and summon a new muse from its
ashes but attempts to destabilize the myth and form new associations through a new grammar.
DuPlessis uses this essay to reach for a new feminist aesthetic and the unintelligible becomes a

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new way of engaging with the world rather than a problem that needs to be solved or
incorporated into a logical, masculine framework.

Works Cited
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. Tuscaloosa:
Univeristy of Alabama Press, 2006. Print.
Frost, Elisabeth A., and Cynthia Hogue, eds. innovative women poets: an anthology of
contemporary poetry and interviews. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. Print.
Retallack, Joan. The Poethical Wager. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Print.