The book concludes by turning to Lévi-Strauss’s short essay, “New York in 1941,” in which he recounts his surprise at finding a Native American taking notes with a pen at the New York Public Library while he was conducting research for The Elementary Structures of Kinship, published in 1949. Recalling that H.D.’s The Gift was written during this same period and similarly features a cross-cultural encounter between Native Americans and Europeans, the Coda suggests that Lévi-Strauss’s encounter constitutes an instance of failed exchange—a moment when he might have imagined that writing and not woman is the “supreme gift,” the fundamental medium of exchange. The work of Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. offers a critical counterpoint to Lévi-Strauss’s both in privileging writing’s mediating power and in self-consciously wrestling with the risk of failure that haunts every gift of writing and which, historically, has shadowed women’s writing in particular.
Wasted Gifts