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The language of the poem itself seems to come from various different voices or personæ,meaning coherence is not immediately apparent unless we take the didactic dissolution of Pound’s relationship with London as the cohesive thread. Therefore, it is essential to find other chords that run through the poem that is voiceless, fleeting and ever-present in how it presents otherness and oppression simultaneously; a figure that goes further than parody and elliptical references to key figures. There is a shifting and changing presence that reappears throughout the poem and provides the spine expressing the anxiety and isolation that the poem seems to convey, while also seeming to be an anthology of people and points that necessarily ring hollow. It is hollow because of this figure, the “luminous detail” that expresses Pound’s assertion that he is “more interested in life than in any part of it”.194 The third sentence of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” begins the first line of the fourth stanza, “His true Penelope was Flaubert”.195 The expression is captivating in numerous ways. Like most allegories, it requires some translation. Penelope is the faithful wife of Odysseus                                                                                                                

194 _{Pound, Selected Prose, 1909-1965, 23.} 195 _{Pound, Personæ, 185.}

and generally represents fidelity as she resisted suitors for twenty years while she awaited Odysseus’ return from the Trojan wars. Flaubert, a mid-nineteenth Century French novelist of exacting style and fastidious commitment to accuracy of presentation, was champion of “le mot juste”, meaning the right word, and implying a sense of omniscient justice in the semantic allocation. As a result, the line presents a fantastically rich and mixed literary metaphor. Apart from the delightful, relaxing syntax of the line from its lambent and lilting and the almost soothing exhalations on “Penelope” and “Flaubert”, it also delivers a certain confused clarity that is present throughout the text. The fusion of Penelope and Flaubert and the romantic connotations of fidelity and marriage, forges a highly textured moment in the poem. The references dip into large fields of knowledge and combine to make a strange and unexpected moment. Gender seems significant but not obvious, as the lines of reference blur between a heroine of the classics and a hero of modern literature, recalling the blur of the smudged moment in Williams’s “accidental skin”.

This androgynous fusion provides the first glimpse of the figure that haunts “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”. The female Penelope is significantly not “true” because she, the symbol of fidelity, is usurped or has eventually surrendered, therefore making Penelope herself false because she is in fact Flaubert. Pound uses Penelope to present an idea of a relationship and then essentially guts the character and fills in the figure she represents with a male novelist. As a result, we have here a woman who is not who she is, making her very presence in the text a negative because she is merely a shadow whose function is to draw the prominent subject into greater relief and clarity. This shadowy figure of a woman reappears throughout the text, shifting and altering the negative form she takes and effectively “backlighting” the apparent “subject” and “characters” that play out in the “forefront” of the text itself. This is reminiscent of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the way Williams uses the order of presentation to shape and distort the image he has written. The “figure” and the “ground” seem to jostle for prominence, which is unsettling and essentially loud. The figure of the woman is fragmentary and shifting yet her reappearance unites each section and forms an emotional core response that is necessarily present in the text. This “other” woman can be read through the poem as a function of alienation and an almost eerie point in the poetic distance of language; she appears to speak or shimmer to shadow the direction of the text, appearing again in the same stanza as a more sinister “Circe”, a fluent transition of the female figure as the sorceress who operates the voice of the

poem. She reappears as voices, as portraits, as a grotesque Madonna. If the reader can bear her in mind, a whole subplot appears and runs as a counter-current to the deluge of references that tumble forth from the poem itself.

I have mentioned Jennison’s response to Huyssen’s assertions that “Mass culture has always been the hidden subject of the modernist project”.196 The focus of Kindness is the readerly experience, which is contingent on the “ideoculture” of the reader. Huyssen’s text discusses the impact of mass culture on avant-garde, High Modernist culture by exploring how modern mass culture is implicitly and explicitly presented as female. This argument supports my reading of “Hugh Sewlyn Mauberley” as haunted by a spectral woman because it suggests she represents mass culture. While this reading began as an intuitive analysis of the poem’s “behaviour” to foreground the implicit “poethical” responsibilities of the reading of Kindness in the text. The following analysis will adapt the model that Jennison to the Objectivists in terms of Huyssen, and instead focus on reading the resonances of Huyssen in “Hugh Sewlyn Mauberley” therefore developing a theoretical perspective while advocating for a reparative “grammar of reading” through Kindness.

Huyssen begins his chapter “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other” with a passage on Flaubert, describing Madame Bovary as “one of the founding texts of modernism” before continuing to explore the implications of Flaubert’s claim that “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”.197 This lends an interesting inflection to Pound’s line “His true Penelope was Flaubert”.198 Suddenly the woman that haunts Flaubert and the poem is the failed, petit bourgeois, romantic Emma Bovary and all she represents, which Huyssen suggests is mass culture itself, the “feuillton novels, popular and family magazine, the stuff of lending libraries, fictional bestsellers and the like”.199 Quoting Nietzsche he argues that “the danger for the artists, for geniuses…is woman”.200 Huyssen discusses how the masses are characterized as female in order to describe their irrationality and the fear they provoked in bourgeois masculinity that comes to define the “male mystique” in modernism. He describes this personification of male anxiety as “the haunting specter of a loss of power [that] combines with fear of losing one’s fortified and stable ego boundaries, which represent the sine qua non                                                                                                                

196 _{Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism} (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1986), 47.

197 _{Huyssen, 44; 45.} 198 _{Pound, Personæ, 185.} 199 _{Huyssen, 49.}

of male psychology in that bourgeois order… modernism’s own fears of being sphinxed”.201 _{Huyssen’s observation of the woman as “modernism’s other” can also}

be seen in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” since a reparative reading of the poem according to Kindness observes the “singularity” of the appearance of the “other” in Attridge’s sense. It also allows for a reading that mobilizes “vibrant materiality” to inflect the readerly experience as it observes the poem as an assemblage of objects or things in order to recognize the shimmer of the “actant”, in this case, the “other” woman.

The figure of the “female other” changes in form dramatically within the poem. In the first half of the poem up to and including “ENVOI (1919)”, she is an amorphous object of contempt yet one possessing a perverse and pervasive power, thus making her correspond to Huyssen’s interpretation. Subsequently, the female figure is very much that which fascinates and eludes Mauberley himself; she is fixed and cold, unreal, and lacking the fleshy changeability of the figure seen in the first half. Rather than a cast of women, it is useful to read the female in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” as one varied version of “otherness” in this sense my reading aligns with Huyssen’s argument. Section III begins with the female:

The tea-rose tea-gown, etc. Supplants the mousseline of Cos, The pianola “replaces”

Sappho’s barbitos.202

The rhythmic condescension in its up-swinging iambic and the repetitive, nursery rhyme of “tea-rose tea-gown” in the first line is fully and curtly punctuated by the flippancy of “etc.”. The repetition of “tea”, and the presence of the “rose” and the “gown” have a forcefully “ladylike” quality, suggesting something pale pink and dainty like afternoon tea or a nursery rhyme and evoking frocks and lawns, a wonderfully kaleidoscopic artifice. The “etc.” describes the acute criticism present within the line as the abbreviation observes the unthinking imprecise quality of such a scene. However, the scene is not too benign because it has ousted the classics, while suffocation is implied in the fabric and the repetition. The oppression that the “tea- rose tea-gown” represents is far from pleasant and delicate since it feels rather sinister                                                                                                                

201 _{Huyssen, 53.}

as the light chatter of the pinks and the implied lace presents the obliteration of history and ancient art and knowledge. The female who sits in the sunny garden in prettiness is attributed a certain type of power of destruction and ignorance: mass culture versus the heroism of the male modernist. In contrast to the gutted Penelope whose form sketched out a commitment to le mot juste, the female has reappeared in a capacity that is deceptive and cloying, giggling in an act of destruction. The female present in the first half of the text is, if not passive, often destructive because her shape shifts as she provides an unspeakable presence as an object of nameless responsibility. She is drawn in vivid and fleeting sketches, appearing at numerous points in gardens, paintings, salons and trenches.

The figure of the destructive female appears with startling ferocity and violence in the second WWI stanza:

There died a myriad,

And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization,203

The violence of this figure is thoroughly enhanced by the repeated physicality of the chomping “old bitch” and “botched”. It’s a horrifying, almost gothic, image of the gummy pink and dangerously powerful destroyer of the taught and tawny, barbito strumming vision of the classical past. The pink of roses and gowns has now become the corrupted gums in the rotting mouth of a vicious hag who was categorically not worth defense. It is logical and likely that this “old bitch” represents Britannia, the feminine personification of England itself. Or indeed in more literal relation to human age and decay, Queen Victoria herself, thus allowing for a critique of Imperialism as a cause of war. This interpretation, which is an easy one to follow, reinforces the argument for the “female other”. The strange and particular urge to gender and personify England is reasonably turned on its head in bitter criticism. Significantly, it is the “female other” that once again emerges. In this instance she may appear to be evoking England but she also evidently shadows the text. That is, rather than a new female figure, she represents the continuity of futility, fear, alienation and isolation that visits the poem throughout its “narrative.” It stands to reason that this amorphous female can and should inhabit Britannia and haunt the poem itself.

The poem then makes a sudden lurch backwards. There is a certain urgency with which the verses concerning WWI appear in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” that is enhanced by the sudden jump back to the Pre-Raphaelites and other Victorians of perhaps more contemporary eminence, such as John Ruskin and Prime Minister William Gladstone. The section immediately following is entitled “YEUX GLAUQUES”, meaning “eyes that are sea green”, or more specifically, referring to eyes that are cold, still and almost lifeless yet beautiful. The female “old bitch” vanishes and next to appear is the figure of Elizabeth Siddal, the Pre-Raphaelite muse who critics like Ruthven and Kenner argue is the female source of this section.. By following the “female other” throughout the various sections of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”, it is possible to make a stronger and more compelling reading of the poem as a whole rather than just interpreting it as a text comprised of independent poems. Reading the poem in this way allows one to form a more cohesive and useful idea of the role the “female other” has within the poem and determine whether she represents the “other”, oppression, alienation, Britannia or any of her other manifestations. Regardless, she serves as a highly satisfying emotional spine for the whole dispersed poem that lends a strong character to the poem, perhaps even an enemy or object that commonly unites the poem itself. As such, the female can be read to have a much more powerful and forceful elemental role in the behaviour of the poem.

“YEUX GLAUQUES” can certainly be read as referring to Siddal’s life since Dante Gabriel Rossetti, her lover and eventual husband, is mentioned and quoted. The last verse refers specifically to their relationship and to Rossetti’s public and prolific infidelity. The character of Siddal, however, does not appear in the poem, rather it is her image or her portrait that we see, “Beata Beatrix” posthumous and ecstatic. She presents in the text how she has been painted and what has been done to her. She is a sorry but beautiful muse because her physical features are prominent in the poem, which is arguably named after her eyes, or more specifically paintings of her eyes. Her eyes are referred to on numerous occasions, which is of real significance given that Siddal died in 1862. Pound could only have seen portraits of her yet her “gaze” almost solely concerns the poem because she is only observed, she cannot see. Her gaze is the fiction and function of painting, it is contained and unchanging, “The Burne-Jones cartons/Have preserved her eyes”, she is at once empowered and neutralised:

Thin like brook-water, With a vacant gaze.

The English Rubaiyat was still-born In those days.

The thin, clear gaze, the same

Still darts out faun-like from the half-ruin’d face, Questioning and passive. . . .

“Ah, poor Jenny’s case” . . . 204

The female here is an unmoving, unresponsive and tragic figure presenting stillness, a weakened objective figure that perhaps even shows a sort of gothic remorse in her passive and sorrowful beauty. She is a comfortable mould for the female to fit into. Siddal famously sat for Ophelia, Beatrix, the Lady of Shalott, Isabella and numerous other figures. She, like the “female other” in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”, represents and presents various characters, suggesting a symbiotic relationship with the individual and the painting, and by extension the female and the poem. This facet of the female necessarily reveals her to be precisely absent from who she is painted as. In turn, the chosen shape of the female in that instance to be the woman is the model who is painted as her, the model poses as Elizabeth Siddal as opposed to Elizabeth Siddal posing as the model. This act of fictionalising both parties is an illuminating way to consider the role and fluidity of the “female other” in the poem.

The preservation of Siddal’s eyes leads to a weird and sinister bent in the “SIENA MI FE’; DISCFECEMI MAREMMA” section, which begins with “pickled fœtuses and bottled bones”.205 _{It refers to Rossetti’s poem “Jenny”, which is a loving}

indictment of prostitution that takes place in a prostitute’s bedroom, but readjusts in this section, “Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels”.206 In “BRENNBAUM”, the eyes are “sky-like” and “limpid” in contrast to the sea-green “brook water” gaze of the “YEUX GLAUQUES” section. In addition, submerged in “BRENNBAUM” is a strange, grotesque Madonna figure who can be found holding “The circular infant’s face” but is rendered absurd in “The stiffness from spats to collar”.207 _{This reading is}

made possible by the portrait-like quality of the first two lines. The pastel blue and Renaissance circularity of the face suggest paintings of Christ as a baby and the title                                                                                                                

204 _{Pound, Personæ, 189; 189.} 205 _{Pound, Personæ, 190.} 206_{Pound, Personæ, 190.} 207 _{Pound, Personæ, 191.}

of the previous section refers to birth, “SIENA MI FE” meaning “Siena gave me birth”. The typical virginal stillness of the portraits of Siddal in the “YEUX GLAUQUES” poem is also worth noting. These factors create an atmosphere ripe for reading the Madonna into the text since Christ the infant is very often held, doted on and watched over by his mother Mary. The biblical references that begin the second stanza of this section reinforce this reading, even if their absurdity make them almost sacrilegious. The female is only implied by the presence of a child and so the extolled and sorrowful still image of the woman is replaced by the weird adult/child Madonna image that is highly ridiculous. The female’s power, then, is demonstrably extremely changeable and her role, though constant, is to be the object of unsayable moments of feeling. In this sense, her function as the subject for the emotional core-narrative of the poem is much more significant than the catalogue providing the context for her appearances. Significantly, it is the context that defines the female, emphasising the solely symbiotic relationship between the context, or landscape, of the poem and its emotional core. She is affected and effected by the language that forms her and is specifically a presence though markedly not a “contact” because she does not represent specific content. Here is the shadowy figure of the “other” “woman” in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”, the presence of experience and manifest response, not an “objective correlative” but rather a “vibrant singularity” in reading.

This might explain why there is the temptation to call “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” Kind and the difficulty a reader could have in locating these essential moments. The appearance, disappearance and use of the female do not represent the same moments as the “accidental skin” in Williams but they work to service an idea of Kindness in narratives that has been characterized as resisting Kindness because these instances, or moments, cannot be sustained. However, the female as a mirage or a reoccurring, layered developing figure that can be recognized or known in the context of the poem provides a strange, diluted moment of “vibrant singularity” or “behaviour” that can be achieved and sustained within the poem as a whole. The figure allows the reader to engage with the “behaviour” of the poem itself rather than the necessary translation and deciphering that it initially seems to demand. As Pound is exorcising daemons in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”, they can appear for the reader and these moments of alienation and horror are what permit a “grammar of reading” to experience a Kindness. Importantly, therefore, such moments demonstrate how this might be maintained, particularly in the context of a narrative.

The “MAUBERLEY” section encircles the “female other” rather than being circled by her. Possession has been assumed yet it is a capture or indeed a conquest