Abstract
In 1905, Sigmund Freud published in Vienna and Leipzig his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and their English translation appeared in New York five years later. In these early essays, Freud draws liberally on a number of contemporary exponents of what was already called Sexualwissenschaft or scientia sexualis; among others, he refers to Iwan Bloch, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, each of whom sought to taxonomize sexuality in a scientific manner and to contest sexual normativity on historical and social grounds.3 Unlike the sexologists to whom he refers, however, Freud declares in the first of the Three Essays, on ‘The Sexual Aberrations’, that he is ‘forced to a suspicion that the choice between “innate” and “acquired” is not an exclusive one or that it does not cover all the issues involved in inversion’,4 thus anticipating a problem formulated, at the end of the century, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.5 ‘Aberration’ and ‘perversion’ sound to the modern ear insufferably moralistic, but Freud starts from the assumption that if we define perversion as anything that diverges from heterosexuality aimed at sexual reproduction, then we have to admit that all sexual practices, including those defined as ‘normal’, belong to the category of the perverse. A case in point is his illuminating definition of the kiss as contact
‘And I was doing well enough’, he snapped, ‘until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes.’1
[…] her work will not fall into oblivion: it was predestined to it from the outset.2
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Notes
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, with an introduction by T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 216.
In addition to these well-known figures, influential sexologists in the Anglophone world included John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter and Xavier Mayne. Barnes owned a copy of Edward Carpenter’s Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origins and Meanings (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1920).
The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was founded by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin in 1919 and dismantled by the Nazis in 1933. For an important anthology of documents on sexology, see Laura Doan and Lucy Bland (eds), Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), and their Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires (Cambridge: Polity, 1998).
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols (London: Vintage, the Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 2001), vol. VIII, pp. 121–245, this quotation p. 140.
See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 41.
I do not wish to enter here into the century-old debate about Freudian psychoanalysis, feminism and literature. I read Freud’s psychoanalysis as based on the unconscious and deriving from his fascination with the obstinate power of normativity and his dissatisfaction with either purely culturalhistorical or neurological explanations of sexual behaviour. In this interpretation, I follow a long line of critics ranging from Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell to Shoshana Felman, Peter Brooks and Rachel Bowlby. See Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1982);
Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 2005) and On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World (London: Vintage, 2004);
Shoshana Felman (ed.), Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982);
Peter Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Story-Telling (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993) and (ed.), Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005);
and Rachel Bowlby, Shopping with Freud (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) and Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
There are no copies of Freud in the Djuna Barnes library held at the University of Maryland. For readings that engage with sexology and psychoanalysis in Barnes, see Carolyn Allen, Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996);
Sandra Chait and Elizabeth Podnieks (eds), Hayford Hall: Hangovers, Erotics, and the Aesthetics of Modernism (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 2005);
and Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2009).
For a more detailed discussion of censorship in the history of Ladies Almanack, Ryder and Nightwood, see Daniela Caselli, Improper Modernism: Diuna Barnes’s Bewildering Corpus (Aldershot: Ashegte, 2009).
Frann Michael, ‘“I Just Loved Thelma”: Djuna Barnes and the Construction of Bisexuality’, in Nancy J. Levine and Marianne Urquilla (eds), Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13:3 (Fall 1993), 53–61,
this quotation p. 59; Michael is quoting from Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 256.
Jeanette Winterson, ‘Introduction’, in Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), pp. ix—xv, this quotation p. ix.
Catherine Stimpson, ‘Afterword’, in Mary Lynn Broe (ed.), Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, with an afterword by Catharine Stimpson (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), pp. 370–76; Stockton, The Queer Child.
Monique Wittig, ‘The Point of View: Universal or Particular?’, in The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 59–67, this quotation p. 62.
Edwin Muir, quoted by Barnes from his essay in Bonamy Dobrée (ed.), Introductions to English Literature, 5 vols (London: The Cresset Press, 1939), vol. V. Djuna Barnes to James Laughlin at New Directions, 13 October 1945, Barnes Papers, Series II, Box 11, Folder 60.
Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963), p. 28; see also pp. 31–2.
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), pp. 24–5.
For a discussion of the passage in the context of feminist theory, see Daniela Caselli, ‘Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With: Body Hair, Genius, and Modernity’, in Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 18–47.
Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: Arts and the Dialectics of Desire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. xv–xvi.
Mark van Doren, ‘Mouse Meat’, The Nation, 3 April 1937.
See Dylan Thomas, ‘Nigh Wood’, Oxford and Cambridge Journal (March 1937), n.p., and Winterson’s reading of his review in her ‘Introduction’ to Nightwood.
Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 85 and 87.
Djuna Barnes, The Antiphon, in Selected Works of Djuna Barnes: Spillway, The Antiphon, Nightwood (London: Faber and Faber, 1998). p. 203.
Charles Henry Ford and Parker Tyler, The Young and the Evil (Paris: Olympia Press, 1933).
See Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 255.
Maurice Girodias, The Frog Prince: An Autobiography (New York: Crown Publishers, 1980), p. 7.
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Caselli, D. (2012). The “Indecent” Eternal’: Eroticism in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood . In: Schaffner, A.K., Weller, S. (eds) Modernist Eroticisms. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030306_9
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