An Analysis of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood

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An Analysis of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood Performance and Grief: An Analysis of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood by Theresa Anita McCarron Gaumond, B.A. A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English California State University Bakersfield In Partial Fulfillment for the Degree of Masters of Arts Spring 2013 Copyright by Theresa Anita Gaumond 2013 This Thesis, "Performance and Grief: An Analysis ofDjuna Barnes's Nightwood" by Theresa Anita McCarron Gaumond, B.A. has been accepted on behalf of the Department of English by their supervisory committee: Dr. Kim Flachmann Dedication I wish to dedicate this thesis to the memories of Joseph Hill, Beverly Baker and Heather Bartek. Acknowledgements I would sincerely like to thank Dr. Ayuso and Dr. Flachmann for taking the time and energy to advise me. Both of them generously offered to assist me and their guidance has been integral to the creation of this paper. I am continually humbled by both of their dedication to the education of students. Since a project of this magnitude cannot be created in a vacuum, I need to graciously thank those who have served as a sounding board for my ideas: Lisbeth Tinocco, Nora Traut, Laura Peet, Darlene Stotler, Dave Ryan, Chris Dison, Jeff Eagan, and Monica Diaz-Padilla. Also, Kathy Hafler and Milissa Ackerley both were sources of encouragement. I also need to thank my co-tutors at the Bakersfield College Writing Center for the rabid debates on word choice. The epic discussion on “myriad” and “plethora” ensured that I would not use either word in this thesis. Special thanks are also directed to Shelia Youngblood for her cheerful willingness to serve as an editor. I also must thank the three who have gone through this process along with me: my husband, Robert, and my children, Charles and Juliette. I know they will be happy to have me actively back in their lives rather than just waving at them from behind a stack of papers. I am very lucky to have such patient family members in my life. Table of Contents I. Introduction: “All her Life She Had Been Subject to the Feeling of Removal” A. Background 1 B. The Question 5 II. Review of the Literature: “Bend Down the Tree of Knowledge and You’ll Unroost a Strange Bird.” A. Introduction 9 B. Review of the Literature 14 C. Concluding Thoughts on the Review of the Literature 33 III. Masculine Failures in Biology: “A Well-Founded Suspicion as to the Advisability of Perpetuating that Race” 35 IV. Hunting for Humanity in the Throes of Grief: “The Great Blind Searchlight of the Heart:” 51 V. Closing Thoughts on Nightwood: “Haunting the Terminals” 62 VI. Works Cited 65 1 I. Introduction: “All her Life She Had Been Subject to the Feeling of Removal”1 A. Background Nightwood is one of the more innovative books to come out of the modernist period with its experimentations with structure and style. Louis F. Kannenstine wrote in his book The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation that it “seems to exist outside of the modern age” (xvii). But even before she published Nightwood, Djuna Barnes was identified among the American modernists as a distinctive writer. She was a well-known expatriate in 1920s Paris, and after the 1930s, was one of the creative denizens of Greenwich Village. A list of her friends and drinking partners reads like an indexing of the major figures in twentieth century art and literature: William Carlos Williams, Sinclair Lewis, Colette, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Peggy Guggenheim, Dolly Wilde, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, and Natalie Barney to name a few. If Barnes was not personally acquainted with someone, then more than likely she had interviewed them. She began her career as a journalist for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, then published poetry in Vanity Fair, and wrote features for the many newspapers that flourished in the years before the Great War. Her early professional journalistic output did not translate to a multitude of literary works. She spent her last 30 years rewriting the same poems over and over again. Toward the end of her life, Barnes told one of her biographers that she wasted her time, but she comforted herself by she was “marvelous” she had been when she didn’t (O’Neal 124). Excluding an occasional poem, years would pass between publications: The Book of Repulsive Women (poetry and illustrations, 1915), Ladies’ Almanack (poetry and illustrations, 1928), Ryder (novel, 1928), Nightwood (novel, 1936), Antiphon (play, 1958), 1 p. 83. All chapter headings and Nightwood quotations will be from the Dalkey Edition. 2 and Creatures in an Alphabet (poetry and illustrations, 1982). She is arguably the least known of the modernist writers, but the ramifications of her small oeuvre are great. Her pieces have inspired a range of writers from Truman Capote to William S. Burroughs. Dylan Thomas recorded the entire chapter “Watchman, What of the Night?” from Nightwood for the BBC, and he said Barnes wrote “one of the three great prose books written by a woman” (Field 20). Anaïs Nin believed Nightwood was foundational in her development as a writer and frequently had a character named Djuna—much to Barnes’s dismay. Perhaps Barnes’s most fortunate admirer was T.S. Eliot; Nightwood would not have been published without his influence. Also, he would have never read it if one of Barnes’s acquaintances, Emily Holmes Coleman, had not been so impressed by the draft. Coleman coerced Eliot into reading Nightwood, and, in turn, he became one of the editors along with Coleman. Although the complete story of the editing process is beyond the scope of this paper, the information on editorial framework is necessary since I will occasionally refer to Barnes’s notes and manuscripts in addition to the published text. As Cheryl J. Plumb writes in her introduction to the Dalkey edition, the extent of Eliot’s and Emily Coleman’s role in revising Nightwood is problematic to many researchers (xiii). Eliot changed some of the sexual references in order to retain the marketability of the novel. According to Emily Coleman’s diary, Eliot switched “bugger” to “boys,” and he was “embarrassed” by the references to male genitalia and pubic hair (Plumb xxii). Plumb also says that “most of the phrases blue-penciled by Eliot [. .] relate to sexuality or religion”; however, she does not believe the meanings were changed, but rather “softened” (xxiii). Eliot was invested in getting the novel published; he even made the final choice on the title. Fortunately, a good deal of the correspondence among all three is available, and his blue-colored editorial 3 notations are preserved in both in University of Maryland’s Djuna Barnes Collection and Eliot’s Faber archives. The clearest picture of the editorial process, however, comes from Emily Coleman’s archives at the University of Delaware. Djuna Barnes wrote much of Nightwood while she lived with Emily Coleman at Peggy Guggenheim’s summer home. Since she was in closer proximity with Barnes than Eliot was, Coleman may have been more responsible for fixing the numerous spelling errors and narrative shifts. A published author in her own right (The Shutter of Snow, 1930), Coleman was also a prolific diarist who kept detailed accounts from the 1920s until her death (Plumb Introduction xv). The editorial process of the novel is outlined in Coleman’s correspondence and journals. According to Plumb’s research, Coleman was the impetus for alterations in chapter order and characterization (Introduction xvii). Still, the amount of influence on the novel by Eliot and Coleman will continue to be investigated by Barnes scholars and will be a fertile area for research over the next decades. Although Barnes undoubtedly left a profound literary influence on those she encountered, she was not known for having a genteel personality. Part of what Emily Coleman did was soften Barnes’s reflexive responses to Eliot’s criticisms. She had a vicious wit and temper which scathed many a potential acquaintance; she was famously reclusive and irritable during her last forty years in New York. Phillip Herring in Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes claims she “terrorized the shopkeepers of Greenwich Village” (296). When a burglar crept into her apartment, she slapped him (Herring 300). One of the more amusing stories in Andrew Field’s biography, Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes, concerns Carson McCullers’s desperate attempts to meet Barnes. She would ring Barnes’s apartment bell repeatedly until one day Barnes shouted to McCullers, “Whoever is ringing this bell, 4 please go the hell away” (Field 233). According to Hank O’Neal, she called the police on “more than one occasion to remove weeping women from her doorstep” (xv). Highly suspicious of their motives, Barnes snapped at academics who wished to interview her in the 1970s by calling them “idiot children” (Field 244). In fact, when O’Neal was finishing his book, Life is Painful, Nasty, and Short . In my Case it Has Only Been Painful and Nasty: Djuna Barnes, 1978-1981 in the late 1980s, he could not find even one of her remaining living literary colleagues who was willing to write an introduction. Berenice Abbott said that “Djuna bores her to death and she was a literary snob” (xiii). Malcolm Cowley was even blunter in saying that “an introduction to a book about Djuna is one of the subjects that I would least willingly undertake” (xiii). She had alienated many of her literary contemporaries. Even though her acerbic manner outraged many, she still had devoted admirers of her work that helped care for her. E. E. Cummings and Marianne Moore lived near her in Greenwich Village, and Cummings called an ambulance when she fell and broke her hip.
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