• Redefining Marriage in Interwar Britain: Internal Transformation and Personal Sacrifice in the Poetry of H.D.

    Author(s):
    Jamie Callison (see profile)
    Date:
    2021
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    H.D., Marriage, divorce, modernism, Law and Religion, Christianity and Law, poetry
    Permanent URL:
    https://doi.org/10.17613/49g9-xa44
    Abstract:
    This chapter situates H.D.'s life and work within shifting legal, philosophical and social understandings of marriage. Beginning with H.D.'s account of her own divorce, the essay explains the rationale for and the resistance to the liberalization of divorce laws in England during the interwar period. It then looks at how thinkers such as Charles Williams and Denis de Rougemont used the liberalization of divorce laws to refocus religiously informed accounts of marriage away from concern with what did or did not constitute justified reason for the dissolution of a marriage to what happened within a marriage itself, using marriage as a way of understanding social and political relationships more broadly. Finally, the essay connects the antiwar polemic of H.D.'s poem 'Helen in Egypt' and these new understandings of marriage by means of an analysis of the problematic union of Helen and Achilles at the close of the poem.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Book chapter     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110751451-008
    Publisher:
    De Gruyter
    Pub. Date:
    2021-11-23
    Book Title:
    Marriage Discourses: Historical and Literary Perspectives on Gender Inequality and Patriarchic Exploitation
    Author/Editor:
    Jowan A. Mohammed and Frank Jacob
    Chapter:
    8
    Page Range:
    187 - 206
    ISBN:
    9783110751338
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    6 months ago
    License:
    Attribution
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