Il tempo in una stanza: Bid Me to Live di H.D.

Abstract

Challenging its definition as roman à clef, Camboni reads H. D. 's Bid Me to Live as a "time" novel where Julia Ashton's war-and-love story is the "surface story" of a multi-layered narrative which has at its core the search of a woman writer for identity and recognition. The closed room where most of the story is set functions both as a metaphor of the mind and as the narrative transformation of the symbolic numbers 3 and 4, and their product, 12. In H. D.'s thought, the number 12 stands for cyclic time, which transforms everything and makes the experience of eternity accessible to the human mind. The title, a quotation from Herrick's madrigal "To Anthea," stands for a literary heritage where love and death are always connected, and women are assigned the place of the Muse. By the end of the story Julia, claiming for herself the place of subject and maker of works of art, envisages the possibility that the madrigal becomes the matrix of love and resurrection