Abstract
Nora Flood’s quest to ‘understand’ her estranged lover, Robin Vote, whose promiscuity, drunkenness and nightly disappearances end only with the end of their relationship, emerges on page 125 of Nightwood as the novel’s central question, when Nora says to her confidant, Dr Matthew O’Connor, ‘It means — I’ll never understand her — I’ll always be miserable — just like this’.1 Nora’s search for understanding can be readily interpreted as Djuna Barnes’ rationalization of her own relationship with silverpoint artist, Thelma Wood. The temptation is there, then, to read Nightwood as a purely autobiographical text, in which a difficult style partially obscures the story of Barnes’ victimization at the hands of a disturbed alcoholic.2 As well as being implicitly homophobic, readings such as this validate a typically modernist misogyny that renders personal writing less than ‘serious’, thus explaining Shari Benstock’s warning about the dangers of reading Nightwood in terms of its ‘roman à clef aspects’.3 However, with its subtle negotiation of style and subject matter, Nightwood is equally open to misinterpretation if its roman à clef aspects are denied or dismissed.
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Notes
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1936), 125.
See Elizabeth Hardwick, American Fictions (New York: Modern Library, 1999) and Andrew Field, The Formidable Miss Barnes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985) for interpretations along these lines.
Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 233.
Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 235.
All references to this text will be taken from Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack (Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1928).
Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London: Virago, 1928), 413.
Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 7. That the description of Musset emerging from the ‘Womb’ an ‘Inch or so less’ than the boy she was intended to be is clearly ‘tongue in cheek’ (see Susan Snaider Lanser, ‘Speaking in Tongues: Ladies Almanack and the Discourse of Desire’, in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe [Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991], 159), is further supported by Barney’s repeated claim that she was a born lesbian, and her refusal to accept that the necessary corollary of this was an inherent ‘mannishness’. See Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 178.
Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999), 8.
Philip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (New York: Viking, 1995), 152.
Michael Warner, ‘Queer World Making’, interview by Annamarie Jagose, Genders 31 (2000): 28.
See Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
The unsigned review of Nightwood published in the Newstatesman and Nation on the 17th of October, 1936, describes Nightwood as ‘extremely moral’ and states that ‘had I a daughter whose passions for mistresses and older girls were beginning to cause scandal and alarm, I should certainly insist that she read Night Wood’. (Review cited at length in Jane Marcus, ‘Mousemeat: Contemporary Reviews of Nightwood’ in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe [Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991], 198.) More recently, Susan S. Martins has suggested that ‘it is the ambiguity of Barnes’ position on political issues in … Nightwood — namely, her treatment of Jews, blacks, lesbians, gay men, prostitutes — that her readers have found most unsettling’. See ‘Gender Trouble and Lesbian Desire in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 20.3 (1999): 109.
T.S. Eliot, introduction to Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1936), 1.
Miriam Fuchs, ‘Djuna Barnes and T.S. Eliot: Authority, Resistance and Acquiescence’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 12.2 (1993), 293.
See Fuchs, ‘Djuna Barnes and T.S. Eliot: Authority, Resistance and Acquiescence’, 289–313; and Cheryl Plumb, foreword to Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, by Djuna Barnes (Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995). Plumb acknowledges Coleman’s contribution, but attributes the significant excisions to Eliot.
Carolyn Allen describes Nightwood and the Ladies Almanack as such in, ‘Looking Like a Lesbian/Poet’, in The Modern Woman Revisited, eds Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer (New Brunswick, London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 148.
Barnes’ membership of this circle was somewhat tenuous at times, and she is thought to have been closer to fellow journalists Janet Flanner and Solita Solano and their friends, than to her one-time lover Natalie Barney and her wealthier associates (see Frances Doughty, ‘Gilt on Cardboard: Djuna Barnes as Illustrator of her Life and Work’, in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe [Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991], 151). Karla Jay suggests that Barnes’ satire is motivated by the bitterness of poverty, yet this argument is difficult to support unless the humourous element of the text’s parody is refused, its tongue-in-cheek aspects ignored. Nevertheless, Jay does make some interesting observations with regard to Barnes’ self-imposed distance from the women whose financial assistance she required (‘The Outsider among the Expatriates: Djuna Barnes’ Satire on the Ladies of the Almanac’, in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe [Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991], 184–93).
Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 18. Una Troubridge’s relationship with Radclyffe Hall was cemented by her willingness to document Hall’s (somewhat obsessive) visits to a medium in order to contact her dead lover, Mabel Batten. Hall often said she would have married Troubridge if she had been born the man she felt she was. See Diana Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998).
Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 13. Mina Loy would not allow her older daughter to associate with Natalie Barney, for fear Barney would seduce her (Diana Souhami, Wild Girls, Paris, Sappho and Art: The Love Life of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks [London: Phoenix, 2004], 185).
Dianne Chisholm, ‘Obscene Modernism: Eros Noir and the Profane Illumination of Djuna Barnes’, American Literature 69.1 (1997): 173. Chisholm’s article on Nightwood appropriates Benjamin’s writing on French Surrealism in terms of its ‘profane’ juxtapositions, which shock the reader to a ‘“nihilistic” awareness of capitalism’s devastating progress’ (172). In her later work, Queer Constellations, she discusses Sarah Schulman’s late twentieth-century ‘nihilism’ in terms of ‘Benjamin’s conceptualization of history as dialectics without progress’.
Dianne Chisholm, Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 246.
Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), xv.
Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (London: Wilson and Macmillan, 1897), 87.
Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981), 365. For Faderman, Nightwood represents Barnes’ internalized homophobia, and her inability to transcend dominant literary images of lesbians. She uses Matthew’s assertion that ‘love of woman for woman’ is an ‘insane passion for unmitigated anguish’ as evidence that this is Nightwood’s message: apparently only happy lesbians have the potential to subvert the dominant paradigm.
See Jagose on the work of Adrienne Rich, in Lesbian Utopics (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 11–12. Valerie Traub suggests that the privileging of the ‘universalizing’ over the ‘minoritizing’ view of female homoeroticism is often productive, especially when piecing together a ‘lesbian’ history, yet it must be employed ‘strategically’. See Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 13. In her study of early modern ‘lesbianism’, Traub examines the intersections of universalized and minoritized ‘representational figures’ (the ‘friend’ and the ‘tribade’ respectively).
Karen Kaivola, All Contraries Confounded: The Lyrical Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Maguerite Duras (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 76.
Carolyn Allen, Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Love (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 32.
Jane Marcus, ‘Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic’, in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 223.
See Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, 1925–1939 (London: Angus and Robertson, 1973), 156. In a ‘Letter from Paris’ drafted in 1935, Flanner criticizes the lack of French resolve to combat Fascist aggression (more specifically, Mussolini’s aggression in Ethiopia), as the Right press criticizes the call for sanctions and the Left ‘says nothing’. That political conservatism was not restricted to countries under Fascist rule is a point worth noting in relation to Nightwood.
Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 142. Brake is referring specifically to the means by which Oscar Wilde transformed The Woman’s World when he edited the journal in the 1890s.
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© 2012 Sashi Nair
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Nair, S. (2012). ‘On her lips you kiss your own’: Theorizing desire in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. In: Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230356184_3
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