Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2018 The Closeted Autobiographer: Feminism, Religion, and Queerness in the Unstaged Closet Dramas of Djuna Barnes Marisa Martha Andrews Follow this and additional works at the DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS THE CLOSETED AUTOBIOGRAPHER: FEMINISM, RELIGION, AND QUEERNESS IN THE UNSTAGED CLOSET DRAMAS OF DJUNA BARNES By MARISA M. ANDREWS A Thesis submitted to the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts 2018 Marisa M. Andrews defended this thesis on May 7, 2018. The members of the supervisory committee were: Elizabeth A. Osborne Professor Directing Thesis Mary Karen Dahl Committee Member Patrick McKelvey Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii For EAO and CMD; my heroines. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many, many thanks to the entire Theatre Studies Faculty at Florida State University - especially Dr. Mary Karen Dahl, Dr. Patrick McKelvey, and Dr. Samer Al-Saber. I would also like to thank the Florida State University Library staff for providing exceptional library services, without which this thesis would have been impossible. Special thanks to Dr. Chrystyna Dail for being my very first mentor. She has led me onto this path with gracious, unyielding support, continues to provide me with the confidence to continue on an almost daily basis, and is a real-life Tiffany Aching – frying pan included. Most of all, thank you to my chair, Dr. Elizabeth A. Osborne, an incredible mentor and scholar. It was an absolute honor to work with her these past two years, and her dedication to the field and relentless cheerleading of her students is unmatched. Thanks, WWST. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ vi Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ vii 1. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................... 1 2. SEX IN THE BUSHES: EXPLODING BINARIES IN A PASSION PLAY .............................................. 14 3. A SALMAGUNDI OF QUEERNESS IN MADAME COLLECTS HERSELF .......................................... 32 4. CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 53 References .................................................................................................................................... 58 Biographical Sketch ...................................................................................................................... 62 v LIST OF FIGURES 1 Frances Benjamin Johnston, “Self-Portrait (as ‘New Woman’),” 1896 .................................. 39 2 Charles Dana Gibson, "Love in a Garden," 1901. ................................................................... 42 vi ABSTRACT Throughout her time as a member of the famed Provincetown Players, for which she penned three successful plays, playwright Djuna Barnes simultaneously wrote twelve short closet dramas, none of which saw the light of the stage. Despite the fact that they were officially republished in the 1995 anthology At the Roots of The Stars: The Short Plays, edited by Douglass Messerli, scholarly criticism on these fascinatingly weird plays is all but non-existent. With this gap in mind, in this thesis I analyze two of these short closet dramas: A Passion Play (1918), published in Others magazine, and MaDame Collects Herself (1918), published in Parisienne. These two plays, read in conversation with the rest of Barnes’s work throughout the 1910s, crystalize the intersecting issues of gender, sexuality, and religion, which also have significant connections to the rest of Barnes’s canon. In this thesis, I address the following questions: How do these plays fit into the Barnes canon? What might their texts reveal as standalone works of closet drama? What might they reveal about the work and lives of women playwrights in the United States in the early 20th century? While there are many ways in which to approach these texts, I have specifically chosen the dual methodologies of Jill Dolan and Nick Salvato. Utilizing Jill Dolan’s latest book Wendy Wasserstein, a critical biography of the highly acclaimed second-wave feminist playwright, and Nick Salvato’s UnclosetinG Drama: American MoDernism anD Queer Performance, I will combine two seemingly disparate methodological processes to form an analysis of these plays for the first time. Following the introductory chapter, chapter two will explore A Passion Play, a short drama that looks into the final night of sexual encounters between two prostitutes and the vii other two men hung on crosses alongside Jesus Christ during the Passion. In this chapter, I explore Barnes’s personal articulation of the binary (or lack thereof) of good and evil. Chapter three explores MaDame Collects Herself, a gruesome, five-page comedy that takes place in a hair salon. I argue that MaDame Collects Herself builds on the religious, sexual, and feminist themes found in A Passion Play, suggesting that Barnes’s closet dramas both serve as early examples of Barnes’s creative work and operate as intriguing examples of her interest in de- marginalizing those who were often seen as other. viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION “You maKe horror beautiful - it is your Greatest Gift.”1 ~ Philip Herring Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes By the time her groundbreaking novel NiGhtwooD was published in 1936, Djuna Barnes was collapsing boundaries on and off the stage. An accomplished playwright, illustrator, author, journalist, and traveler, Barnes was also an infamous socialite known for her eccentric antics; she was once seen sprinting up and down the aisle in the Provincetown Players’ theatre to galvanize the morale of the company.2 A resident of the Greenwich Village bohemian arts scene, she was one of many twentieth-century authors to travel to Paris after World War I. Barnes mingled and created with some of the most influential modernist writers of the time, including Gertrude Stein and Solita Solano. After the war, and influenced by the other wandering expatriates, Barnes became a serious and respected author.3 Yet she remained a woman of many talents—a portrait she drew of novelist and poet James Joyce, also living in Paris at this time, still remains a favorite visual representation for Joyce’s devotees. In critical circles, Barnes is best remembered for her contributions to the modernist literature of the 1920s and 1930s, specifically her later works – Ladies Almanack (1928), RyDer (1928), and NiGhtwooD (1936). Some of her earliest jobs were with The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and 1 Philip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes, 78. (New York: Penguin, 1995), 78. 2 Brenda Murphy, The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity (United States of America: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 151. 3 Nick Salvato, Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance, (USA: Yale University Press, 2010), 138. 1 the New York Press, where she illustrated and wrote articles on commission in order to support her struggling family during the 1910s.4 She moved on to the theatre scene later in the 1910s, working briefly as a playwright for the nascent Provincetown Players before going abroad to Europe, where she stayed for most of the next decade. NiGhtwooD was published after Barnes’s return to the United States in the 1930s and it single-handedly raised Barnes to the apex of her career. With an authoritative forward by T.S. Eliot, NiGhtwooD became one of the leading works of fiction containing a lesbian relationship in the first half of the twentieth century. Following the critical and popular success of NiGhtwooD, Barnes retreated into a life of almost complete privacy, living in self-imposed isolation in her small Greenwich Village apartment for the remaining decades of her life until her death in 1981. In addition to her many articles, poems, and short stories, Djuna Barnes penned twelve short closet dramas. Few of these plays have ever seen the light of the stage. Magazines ranging from The New YorK MorninG TeleGraph to Vanity Fair published the novice playwright’s works, which ranged widely in both length and content. Douglass Messerli rescued these plays from the University of Maryland archive and republished them in At the Roots of The Stars: The Short Plays in 1995. And yet, in spite of this increased availability, scholarly criticism on these fascinatingly weird plays remains all but non-existent. As Messerli writes in the introduction, “Unsurprisingly, few critics of the day could make sense of the plays of Djuna Barnes,” and few contemporary scholars have leapt into this analysis.5 With this gap in mind, I will analyze two of these short closet dramas, A Passion Play (Others, 1918) and MaDame Collects Herself (Parisienne, 1918). 4 Herring, 66. 5 Douglas Messerli, At the Roots of The Stars- the short plays of Djuna Barnes (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1995), 10. 2 These plays, read in conversation with one another, crystalize the intersecting