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2018 The Closeted Autobiographer: Feminism, Religion, and Queerness in the Unstaged Closet Dramas of Djuna Barnes Marisa Martha Andrews

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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 issues of gender, sexuality, and religion with which this thesis is concerned. A Passion Play, an alternative recounting of what might have happened the night before Jesus Christ was crucified on the cross, expands on the religious themes found in Barnes’s earlier plays, including Maggie of the Saints

(a drama set inside of an old church near a fishing village where Maggie, the charwoman, bickers with her mother over the changing roles of women in their society). A Passion Play adds an additional component frequently found in Barnes’s work—sexuality. The second closet drama,

Madame Collects Herself is a violent comedy that explores the grotesque through the story of a woman who collects—and wears—body parts from former lovers.

There are many ways to define the term “closet drama.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of

Poetry and Poetics defines closet dramas as “dramas supposedly intended to be read in the study

(closet) or recited to a private audience rather than a performed public stage.”6 Nick Salvato, in his introduction to Uncloseted Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance (2010), cites the “mundane” definition of closet drama as “plays written for private reading or coterie performance.”7 However, Salvato expands his definition to include dramas “where the pun on closet is firmly intended.”8 In contrast, in Privacy, Playreading and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550-

1700 (2004), Marta Straznicky offers a way of analyzing closet dramas through the specific lens of a woman writer: “A play that is not intended for commercial performance can nevertheless cross between private playreading and the public sphere through the medium of print; a woman writer can use the elite genre of closet drama to engage in political discourse without exposing

6 A.G. Bennet, "Closet Drama," In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Roland Green, Stephen Cushman, and Clare Cavanagh. 4th ed. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1. 7 Salvato, 1. 8 Ibid, 2. 3 her views to an indiscriminate public; [. . .] a woman can avoid public censure by insisting that her play not be staged while also issuing it in print.”9 Although Straznicky was writing in regards to dramas produced well before Barnes’s time, I argue that due to the fact that women were still considered second class citizens in the United States during this very decade, Straznicky’s method of analyzing closet dramas is still pertinent to an early twentieth century female author like

Barnes. For the purposes of this thesis, I will combine the basic Princeton definition with

Straznicky’s analysis of the role that closet dramas can play for women in the public sphere.

Straznicky’s approach to closet dramas and their potential for political discourse is particularly important to my study, as I argue that The Passion Play and Madame Collects Herself both engage with and challenge contemporaneous ideas of religion and sexual identity.

While there are many ways to approach these intriguing texts, I will model my methodology after those of Jill Dolan and Nick Salvato. Jill Dolan’s latest book, Wendy

Wasserstein, uses a critical biography of the popular second-wave feminist playwright to reintroduce the importance of remembering both the writer and her work. In Uncloseting Drama,

Nick Salvato explores the closet dramas of four modernist writers, with Barnes being the subject of the final chapter, “Backing Barnes.” He argues that closest dramas were revived during the early twentieth century to challenge existing stage and social conventions. Both Dolan and

Salvato organize their analyses by individual plays, which I will do as well. Each short play will be the primary subject of a chapter, building on the previous in an effort to place these forgotten two works within Barnes’s oeuvre.

9 Marta Straznicky, Privacy, Playreading and Women’s Closet drama, 1550-1700, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1.

4 In the preface to Wendy Wasserstein, Dolan explains the rationale for her project:

But in the early eighties, collectives reigned in the imaginations of feminist performance theorists like myself, as we read poststructuralist theory that proclaimed the ‘death of the author’ in ways useful to women who have too long been taught only by men. [. . .] My goal has not been to avoid a feminist engagement with modes and sites of production, or the intimate exchange between form and content, or the examination of cultural context and reception as ways to understand a playwright’s work within a historical moment.10

I will utilize this methodology in my own thesis by blending literary analysis, cultural history, biography, and theatrical history.

Stories that make up Djuna Barnes’s biography are intriguing and provocative, but Salvato reminds us to question the veracity of those stories in the absence of verifiable evidence. As he explains, “[Barnes’s] biographical record (family correspondence, written and oral testimonies provided by Barnes and her friends) offers no conclusive proof that Barnes was the victim of abuses exactly like those suffered by her characters.”11 As Salvato goes on to explain, “To honor the complexity of Barnes’s literary output means not to speculate without great care about what personal experiences might be at the back of her writing, but to back that writing in all of its disturbing dimensions.”12 Because of this, Salvato focuses almost purely on a literary analysis of

Barnes’s work, almost completely ignoring her personal history.

Salvato also explicitly explores the double entendre of the term closet drama, while focusing on plays that dually fall into “private performances” and “queer – uncloseted—drama.”

Although A Passion Play and Madame Collects Herself are not explicitly queer dramas like The

Dove and An Irish Triangle—Salvato’s objects of study, both of which include objective same-sex desire between main characters – I have found his analytical methodologies for a writer like

10 Jill Dolan, Wendy Wasserstein, (United States of America: Yale University Press, 2017), Kindle loc. 74-108Z. 11 Salvato, 139. Emphasis mine. 12 Salvato, 141. 5 Barnes useful for her entire oeuvre because in both plays, Barnes explores sexuality and gender roles.

“Queer” is not a simple word to define. However, I believe it is important, in the context of this thesis, to further explain my use of the term. According to Siobhan B. Somerville’s essay

“Queer” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, “’queer’ has come to be understood in the past decade as an umbrella term that refers to a range of sexual identities that are ‘not straight.’”13 But the term queer is not limited to things concerning sexuality, which is why I have chosen to focus heavily on the term as a bookmarker throughout this project. A good example of syntactical reference for this multi-meaning word would be the use of the word in a similar, contemporaneous, and incredibly popular manner – I am referring here to Radclyffe Hall’s award- winning 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness. ‘Queer’ is utilized throughout the book not only to describe the out-lesbian Stephen, but also in various other ways that have nothing to do with her sexuality directly. For example, “The scents of the meadows would move those two strangely — the queer, pungent smell from the hearts of dog-daisies; the buttercup smell, faintly green like the grass; and then meadow-sweet that grew close by the hedges.”14 ‘Queer’ was popular both for just being a general word for “unusual” while also becoming an important sexual identifier, which is why I chose to use this term heavily in many uses throughout this project.

Although the majority of my investigation into these plays will derive from literary and cultural analysis, I argue that the inclusion of some biographical information is critical to the exploration of these closet dramas. Djuna Barnes wrote these closet dramas early in her career—

13 Siobhan B. Somerville, “Queer” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, (New York: NYU Press) 2007, 1. 14 Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, (South Australia: University of Adelaide), 2014, 71. 6 soon after her father expelled her, her mother, and her brothers from her childhood home, forcing Barnes to become the sole wage-earner for her family. These experiences formed the basis of her interactions with the world and, while Salvato is absolutely correct to argue, it would be a mistake to assume any direct correlation between Djuna Barnes’s childhood and her plays, to entirely ignore the person behind the works is equally dangerous. In the following chapters, I will address the 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

Djuna Barnes – and her fellow women playwrights – in the United States in the early 20th century?

Biographers Douglas Messerli, Phillip Herring, and Hank O’Neal have chronicled almost every minute detail of Barnes’s life. In O’Neal’s “informal memoir” of the author, Life is painful, nasty & short—in my case it has only been painful and nasty: Djuna Barnes 1978-1981, the information came verbatim from the aging artist herself. As one of Djuna Barnes’s caretakers in her later life, O’Neal spent years interviewing Barnes about her story while driving her to doctor’s appointments, sorting her belongings, and shopping for her groceries. Paired with the official biography by Herring and extensive research by Messerli, clearly, there is no lack of biographical information about Djuna Barnes.

Born in 1892 in Croton-On-Hudson, New York, Djuna Barnes spent her formative years on

Long Island, growing up on a farm in Huntington, New York. Her paternal grandmother, Zadel

Barnes, owned the farm and supplied the bulk of Djuna’s childhood education. 15 Barnes’s father,

Wald, was a failed artist who was supported financially and emotionally by Zadel. In addition to

15 For the sake of clarity, I have chosen to use Barnes’s first name when discussing other family members, and in no way desire to minimize her standing in the profession as often done when referring to a woman theatre artist by first name rather than last. 7 her father and grandmother, Djuna’s family home included her mother, Elizabeth; biological siblings; Wald’s mistress, Fanny; and Wald and Fanny’s children. At one point, both Fanny and

Elizabeth gave birth within 12 days of each other.

Djuna’s relationship with her grandmother was both close—she was reportedly Zadel’s favorite—and troubling. Two specific stories provide a way of framing this relationship. First, like many first-wave feminists, Zadel was a follower of the then-popular Spiritualist religion, the

“scientific” religious belief that humans were able to interact with those who had passed on.

Zadel organized family medium sessions that often included the spirit of novelist Jack London

“speaking” through Zadel’s corporeal body.16 Second, documented correspondence between grandmother and granddaughter after Barnes’s move to New York City was filled with sexually explicit images. In one letter, Barnes writes about how she misses Zadel’s breasts, even going so far as to name them “Redlero” and “Kedler.”17 In another, Zadel draws a picture of her breasts, with eyes where one’s nipples usually are, reading Barnes’s previous letter.18 Literature scholars such as Mary Lynn Broe (Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes) claim the two engaged in nonconsensual sex, although others dispute this claim, saying that there is no proof of any sexual relationship between grandmother and granddaughter. Despite—or perhaps because of—this, Barnes spoke fondly of her grandmother for the rest of her life. Barnes gifted her hard-earned money to Zadel for uterine cancer treatment, and when Zadel passed away in

1917, Barnes made sure to attend her grandmother’s funeral.19

16 Nancy J. Levine, “Bringing Milkshakes to Bulldogs” from Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes (Southern Illinois Press, 1991), 44. 17 Those letters were the only time these nicknames were disclosed, so the mystery as to how those names came to be and what their context was remains. 18 Levine, 55. 19 Ibid, 21-22. 8 In 1910, when Djuna turned 18, Wald arranged for her to marry the much older Percy

Faulkner, brother to Wald’s mistress, Fanny. After a short few months in Bridgeport, Connecticut,

Barnes removed herself from the marriage and returned home. Two years later, in 1912, Zadel and Wald evicted Djuna, her mother (Elizabeth), and her siblings, as they were unable to support both Elizabeth’s and Fanny’s families. As the eldest child of Elizabeth, at the age of 20, Barnes suddenly became the family’s primary source of income. She packed her mother and siblings into a miniscule New York City apartment and searched for gainful employment. In spite of her lack of formal education (she was almost exclusively homeschooled by her grandmother), Barnes landed on her feet almost immediately. By 1913, she was working sporadically as a reporter for the The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The literary classics played a major role in Barnes’s early journalism and plays, and she soon launched a foray into dramatic writing, producing closet dramas for print in New York City-based publications. As Barnes’s writing expanded to other genres, these unstaged closet dramas disappeared from view. In 1995, about twenty years after she donated her personal papers to the Special Collections and University Archives at the University of

Maryland, College Park, Douglas Messerli compiled twelve of these short plays for the anthology,

At the Roots of The Stars.

A great amount of scholarship for the majority of Barnes’s non-theatrical work currently exists. In terms of critical analysis, Barnes is mostly remembered in the literary studies field for her two novels, Nightwood and Ryder, which critics hailed as some of the most groundbreaking and confusing novels of the early twentieth century. Typically, literature scholars also align

Barnes with her fellow modernist writers. For example, Carrie Rohman’s article in American

Literature, “Revising the Human: Silence, Being, and the Question of the Animal in Nightwood,”

9 and Michael Davidson’s “Pregnant Men: Modernism, Disability, and Biofuturity in Djuna Barnes” both compare the writer to her modernist contemporaries. 20 Barnes’s early journalism career garners attention as well with work such as Alex Goody’s “Spectacle, Technology, and Performing

Bodies: Djuna Barnes at Coney Island,” which addresses Barnes’s journalistic output.

Ladies Almanack, a satirical chapbook written during the 1920s while Barnes was in Paris, and The Antiphon, a play written upon her return to the United States, are less popular, but not as obscure as the unstaged dramas. They, too, appear regularly in literary studies. Cheryl Plumb’s monograph, Fancy’s Craft: Art and Identity in the Early Works of Djuna Barnes, is an excellent resource for the other works Barnes created during this time. Editor Mary Lynn Broe’s recently published essay collection, Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, touches on the spectrum of Barnes’s life, from her early journalism to The Antiphon (her last piece of theatrical writing), and everything in between.

In terms of theatre history, Barnes is best known for her involvement with the

Provincetown Players, one of the most prominent companies of the Little Theatre Movement that took place in the early decades of the twentieth century. The Provincetown Players produced three of Barnes’s short plays during the 1919-1920 season, Three From the Earth, An Irish

Triangle, and Kurzy of the Sea. While Barnes’s success with the Provincetown Players is historically overshadowed by the celebrity status of Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill, she is still included in much of the Provincetown Players scholarship.21 Cheryl Black’s The Women of

20 Other works focusing on her non-fiction include Kate Ridinger Smorul’s “Of Marionettes, Boxers, and Suffragettes: Djuna Barnes’s Performative Journalism” in the Journal of Modern Literature and Sophie Oliver’s “Djuna Barnes in a Material World: Fashion and Transatlantic Modernity in the 1910s” in Literature Compass. 21 Cheryl Black. The Women of Provincetown, 1915 – 1922. (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002), 3. 10 Provincetown 1915-1922 and Brenda Murphy’s The Provincetown Players and the Culture of

Modernity incorporate history and analysis of Barnes’s contribution to the organization, and

Judith Barlow’s edited collection of plays, Women Writers of the Provincetown Players, includes both a critical introduction and samples of Barnes’s creative offerings. While scholars have explored the Provincetown Players works (as well as The Dove, first produced at Smith College around the same time), the short closet dramas remain all but ignored, despite their re- publication in 1995. As unproduced works by a woman best known for her poetry and fiction, and whose minimal theatre work was created in both a field that was dominated by men and within a theatre company whose most famous writers were Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill, it is easy to see how these plays have slipped through the fingers of historians. My work will begin to fill this gap by focusing on two of Barnes’s closet dramas, A Passion Play and Madame Collects

Herself, as they exemplify Barnes’s scope as a writer.

Chapter two will explore A Passion Play, a short allegory that looks into the final night of sexual encounters between two prostitutes and the other two men hung on crosses alongside

Jesus Christ during the Passion, while explicitly avoiding mentioning or ever representing Jesus

Christ in any way; Christ is “present” only in his absence, through his relationship to the otherwise forgotten and unknown thieves who hang beside him. In this chapter, I explore Barnes’s personal articulation of the binary (or lack thereof) of good and evil. Published in Others magazine in 1917,

A Passion Play is a striking example of Barnes’s ability to humanize marginalized groups in her own contemporary society, regardless of whether or not she was a member of that particular group. By muddying the established binary between good and evil, an ideology as old as the Bible itself, A Passion Play blurs existing social and cultural judgements. And in A Passion Play, all of

11 Barnes’s attention is on the thieves and prostitutes, their lives, and how society has forced them to become what they have become. The play suggests that concepts of good and evil are far more complex than a simply binary, and that good cannot exist without those the “good” often think of as “evil,” misfits, or others. I argue that A Passion Play, like many others during this decade, challenged accepted societal norms through drama.

Madame Collects Herself, the subject of the third and final chapter of this thesis, rounds out in length at a brief five pages. The play furthers Barnes’s plight to humanize marginalized groups, this time with the figurehead of Madame Zolbo. The Madame maintains life by physically removing body parts from various men and incorporating them onto her own person. The strength and character of the protagonist suggest a powerful connection to the ongoing first- wave feminist movement. I argue that Madame Collects Herself builds on the religious, sexual, and feminist themes found in A Passion Play by reinforcing the idea that Barnes’s closet dramas provide ways to focus on de-marginalized others and complicate the normalization of a specific group to the detriment of others. Madame Zolbo is a queer, feminist, witch character that exemplifies the strength of the early-twentieth century New Woman and challenges negative representations of powerful women.

My thesis expands Barnes’s critical canon by utilizing pre-existing scholarship to investigate these fascinatingly versatile short works by an even more fascinating author. In doing so, my work addresses a significant gap in the scholarship on Djuna Barnes, resituates her in twentieth-century theatre history and provokes conversation about works that are not only a stepping stone to her later and most famous work, Nightwood, but also important examples of a

12 U.S. woman playwright from the early twentieth century. It is time for these plays—and this innovative woman writer—to have their turn in the spotlight.

13 CHAPTER 2

SEX IN THE BUSHES: EXPLODING BINARIES IN A PASSION PLAY

What happens to the people that society deems evil? A Passion Play, a short closet drama published by Djuna Barnes in Others magazine in early 1918 examines just that. The play tells the story of four self-described “evil” characters—two thieves and two prostitutes— meeting on the eve of the thieves’ execution. On closer examination, however, the two thieves are not just any old criminals—they are the two anonymous men crucified on the crosses next to Jesus Christ. Written early in Barnes’s career, this short play challenges both religion as an institution and the binary between “good” and “evil” that hegemonic Christianity often perpetuates.

On the eve of their crucifixion, two male thieves sneak into the nearby woods and meet two female prostitutes. The prostitutes, unlike the thieves, have names: Theocleia, described as a tall, beautiful, Greek goddess-like woman; and her companion Sarah, “a thin, small Jewess with tiny breasts.”22 The play begins with the four characters entering a clearing in the forest, with the men chasing the women, until they end in “a heap in the foreground.”23 The group spends the entire evening in this secluded spot in the woods, discussing life, politics, love, and the nature of good and evil, even as they flirt, touch, and suggest sensual pleasures. There is a looming, eerie tone underlying their conversation, evidenced by the second thief’s early joking reference to his friend’s imminent execution: “Waste no time, my friend, each minute grows a

22 Barnes, A Passion Play, 50. 23 Ibid, 50. 14 minute short in which to love.”24 There is a dual meaning of the word “passion”: both in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and in the sense of “sexual passion,” which entangles A Passion Play in a web of excitement. In fact, although the use of the “passion” to describe the crucifixion of

Jesus was the original use of the word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the sexually charged adjective that is more colloquial today actually evolved directly out of the early

Christian usage, which was used dually as a reference to Jesus’s Passion and, “senses related to physical suffering and pain.”25

All four characters in this play consider themselves “outsiders” in a world of goodness:

“We are to the world what the odor is to the flesh,” says a sad Theocleia, lamenting over their marginalized positions.26 Once the group realizes they only have a few hours of nighttime left, they split off into pairs—one thief and one prostitute in each—and spend the rest of the night together. Overnight, stage directions denote, a third cross is erected on the nearby hill. When morning arrives, the two thieves have disappeared. The prostitutes return to the clearing and determine that the men’s crucifixion had most likely already occurred. When they look over to the hill the women notice the third cross, the cross of Jesus Christ. Unphased by the actions of the night before, the play ends with the women gambling away the material belongings that the thieves left behind before meeting their fate.

In this chapter, I will explore how A Passion Play critiques Catholicism as an institution and deconstructs any binary between good and evil. I will address the following questions: How does A Passion Play queer a classic Bible story? How do the four characters in A Passion Play

24 Barnes, A Passion Play, 51. 25 "Passion, n.1". OED Online. June 2018. Oxford University Press. (accessed April 27, 2018). 26 Barnes, A Passion Play, 55. 15 deconstruct the binary between good and evil? A Passion Play is a mix of a spiritual and moral allegory, with both groups of characters representing different types of society-deemed “evil.” I will analyze this short closet drama through close reading and cultural context in order to argue that this play, like many other plays by Barnes and her contemporaries published during the

1910s, challenged accepted codes of early twentieth-century society. A scandalous allegory incorporating religion, morality, sexuality, and gender, A Passion Play incorporates Christ as a theological figure, Christ as a character, and Christ as a historical person. As contemporary scholars, we can never be sure from which lens the non-Catholic Barnes was approaching this work at any given moment, and so my own analysis will strive to incorporate all three. At the same time, Barnes also focuses her attention exclusively on the thieves and prostitutes rather than on Christ, working to center their narratives in this allegory. I will endeavor to do the same below by focusing on my analysis of the thieves and prostitutes in A Passion Play.

Barnes’s early plays were published mainly as closet dramas throughout the 1910s, when Barnes primarily worked as a journalist for multiple New York City newspapers. Looking at the content of each of these plays retroactively, many, if not all, of these short dramas were thinly veiled autobiographical explorations of Barnes’s life. Still a novice writer, Barnes had moved – along with her mother and siblings – to New York City in 1912, after her fraternal grandmother Zadel kicked the family out of their Long Island home. At this point, Barnes, as the oldest sibling, became the family breadwinner. She was never formally educated, dropping out of both grade school on Long Island as a child and art school in New York City, but Barnes was self-taught and motivated enough to make her mark. She started working with smaller newspapers like The Brooklyn Daily Eagle until she briefly joined the Provincetown Players at

16 the end of the decade. From there, she moved to Paris and spent time with some of the leading

Western writers of the century. This is where she penned her most famous novel, Nightwood.

A Passion Play was first published in February 1918 in Others magazine.27 Others: a magazine of the new verse was a part of the “little magazine” movement that boosted the profiles of many female writers throughout New York City. Others ran for a total of four years, with subscriptions peaking at 300 readers, a modest but not trifling number.28 The little magazine also launched the careers of other significant writers, including award-winning poet

William Carlos Williams.29 As Christine Stansell states in American Moderns, “In Albert

Kreymborg’s little magazine Others, published from Ridgefield, women made up anywhere from a third to half of the contributors. Entire issues were given over to Mina Loy and Djuna

Barnes, and the apprentice poets Marianna Moore and Louise Bogman published there.”30

Barnes guest-edited the magazine on several occasions, although it is unclear whether the edition featuring A Passion Play was one of them. A Passion Play is very similar to the rest of the work found within the publication, which “guaranteed poets freedom from editorial interference,” suggesting that Barnes would have met little or no repudiation from the editorial staff in terms of subject matter.31 Others magazine was proud of their achievements.

Specifically:

Providing an open forum for unknown writers, this low-budget salon de refuses helped instigate modern poetry in America, providing a stage for the seemingly harmonic

27 Messerli, The Short Plays, 49. 28 Suzanne W. Churchill, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry (United Kingdom: Routledge) 2006, 3. 29 Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible, Little Magazine & Modernism: New Approaches (Burlington: Ashgate) 2007, 57. 30 Christine Stansell, American Moderns Bohemian New York and the Creation Of A New Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 2010, 165. 31 Churchill and McKible, New Approaches, 177. 17 convergence of artistic genus known as modernism. Others championed formal innovation and artistic autonomy, dedicating its pages to free verse experiments.32

Unlike many mainstream magazines, Others did not, in fact, have to deal with reviewers or any other sort of outside scrutiny. They weren’t looking to be a big, profitable magazine that appealed to the masses. With only a few hundred subscribers, the contributing writers were less concerned with appealing to normalized social mores, therefore focusing instead on participating in a creative forum. As Suzanne Churchill writes in her monograph, The Little

Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry, “Descriptive terms for poetry in Others ranged from ‘esoteric’ and ‘irrational,’ to ‘free footed,’ ‘queer,’ and even

‘pornographic,’”33 suggesting that although Others published in a variety of ways, the magazine’s goal audience was a more niche market.

Others magazine’s moment of infamy was its 1917 “Spectra Hoax.” Spectrism, the subject of the hoax, was a fabricated “-ism” parodying the popularity of all of the other “-isms,” frequent in publications during the time, notably Imagism and Dadaism. As Suzanne Churchill describes in her essay, “The Lying Game: Others and the Great Spectra Hoax of 1917,” a part of her larger edited collection with Adam McKible, Little Magazine & Modernism: New

Approaches, “Spectrism proved to be merely a masquerade—a hoax concocted by conservative poets, Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke, to expose the pretensions of modernist poets and audiences alike, especially the Others extremists.”34 Playfully mischievous, the false “-ism” caught on and began to spread through other publications throughout New York City. Soon

32 Churchill, Renovation 1. 33 Ibid., 2. 34 Suzanne W. Churchill, "The Lying Game: Others and the Great Spectra Hoax of 1917," American Periodicals (15.1) 2005, 24. Emphasis mine. 18 after, a manifesto discussing Spectrism appeared in another little magazine, The Forum. The article, “The Spectric School of Poetry” exclaimed:

The subject of every spectric poem has the function of a prism, upon which falls the white light of universal and immeasurable possible experience; and this flood of colorless and infinite light, pass though the particular limitations of the concrete episode before us, is broken up, refracted and diffused into a variety of many-colored rays.35

Many subscribers actually believed in Spectrism and became devoted followers, until the reality of the hoax was revealed. According to Churchill, the Spectra Hoax was more important than just a silly prank. It “offers a fascinating case study of identity politics in early modernism, demonstrating how gender, sexuality, class, and nation contribute to the dialogical formation of personal identity.”36

Although A Passion Play was not explicitly part of this “Spectra Hoax,” it is a good example of the way in which Others challenged established ideologies—both externally and within their own community of literati. A Passion Play is a good example of this way of thinking in action, centered completely on personal identity, gender, and sexuality and works as a notable second case study for the argument Churchill presents with respect to the Spectra

Hoax. The four outcasts in A Passion Play spend the majority of their first—and last—night together trying to understand why society simply despises them. If Others created those literary outcasts that operated outside of readers’ pre-accepted ideas, then A Passion Play seems well- suited. The drama, like the hoax, plays with popular stories—the Bible versus the popular ‘- isms’ of the day—in order to give the audience a fresh perspective on an aspect of society they believed they were already comfortable with.

35 Leonard Deipeveen, Mock Modernism: An Anthology of Parodies, Travesties, Frauds, 1910 – 1935 (2014), 228. 36 Churchill and McKible, New Approaches, 178. 19 Religion & Feminism in Djuna Barnes’s Closet Dramas

Djuna Barnes’s closet dramas offer intriguing challenges to the traditional expectation that women should martyr themselves for their religion. Maggie of the Saints, another short closet drama for print, was published in the New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine about a year prior. The ten-page play is a conversation between Maggie and her mother, Mary

O’Brian, that takes place in the local church where Maggie serves as the frustrated and unappreciated charwoman. While the play is a more conventionally Realist work than A

Passion Play, it preserves her interest in a subtly feminist playwriting.

Although this particular day is the same as any other for Maggie—sweeping the floors, cleaning the pews, dusting the religious icons—today Maggie exhibits frustration with the job that has taken away so much of her life. Her elderly mother, Mary, resting within the shadows of the house of worship, tries to calm her daughter with quotes from Bible: “The Lord saith the mountains shall drop down new wine and the hills shall flow milk, and the rivers of Judah--,” but Maggie will not be comforted.37

Maggie argues that times have changed, implying that her mother’s advice to search for happiness within the Lord’s word is no longer the best way to seek peace. She is too focused on her recent dreams to take her mother’s advice to heart. “A change is coming,” she explains, before describing the dream she had the night prior.38 She describes her fantasies about the upcoming “judgement day” to Mary, where women like herself were placed in charge of their

37 Djuna Barnes, Maggie of the Saints from At the Roots of the Stars (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press) 2000, 41. 38 Ibid., 44. 20 city, and the rest of the wealthy and male townsfolk bow down to her greatness. Maggie’s

“dream” comes in the form of an allusion to this change that is coming, she says, for all women:

It’s fifteen years now I’ve been servant of the Lord, and it’s on my knees I’ve been more often than any of you and for a cleanlier trade. [. . .] And me going down year in and year out and rising up again for the sweetening of the planks and the dusting of the pews, and for the sweeping out and the arranging of the household that praises the Lord I have served best.39

Maggie’s frustration suggests that she is no longer satisfied with a life of service to her church and community. Day after day is spent scrubbing the dry, dark, dusty church that never seems to get clean enough. Yet her distress is about more than cleaning. Maggie of the Saints was first published on October 28th, 1917—less than ten days before women were granted the right to vote in New York State, and three years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. When Maggie, the unappreciated, working-class charwoman is represented and hailed as God-like at the end of the play – an altar boy surreptitiously lights a halo right above her head – the play’s attention to and support of the work of women is clear.40

Although executed much more subtly than in her later work, in Maggie of the Saints,

Barnes begins to queer the established religious institution. She manipulates the standard male deity found in Catholicism and transforms him into a woman – Maggie. This is most clear at the very end of the play. The two altar boys, not knowing that Maggie was cleaning one of the churches statues, light the halo above its empty spot. It just so happens that Maggie is standing right there, and as the halo is lit, Maggie visually transforms into an icon of worship – specifically a female icon. By giving this agency to Maggie, Barnes creates a world that differs

39 Ibid, 41. 40 Ibid, 48. 21 from established religious codes. Barnes would go on to continue this queering and questioning of religious institutions over a year later, with A Passion Play.

Remembering the Forgotten

According to scholar/theologian George Jackson, “The death of Jesus Christ has always held the foremost place in the thought and teachings of the [Christian] church.”41 The Passion of the Christ, otherwise known as the crucifixion, is by far the most frequently theatricalized story from the Bible. Throughout the Christian world, both in churches and public spaces such as squares and parades, the story of Jesus’s last few hours has been performed live for countless audiences. Personally, I have seen the Passion performed twice – both in very different theatrical environments. As a child, I grew up watching the annual performance of the

Passion at my local church, St. Anthony of Padua in East Northport, New York. The altar operated as the stage and, scripts in hand, our priest and a few altar boys performed the story to the best of their ability. In contrast to this quiet, somewhat sterile reproduction of the

Passion, Trafalgar Square’s yearly performance was a complete spectacle. I attended the production in the city of London in the Spring of 2013, sitting in front of the National Gallery with roughly two thousand other spectators. The bloody actor portraying Jesus struggled to the stage by passing directly through the audience, dragging a twelve-foot cross behind him.

Yet both during these performances and within the Bible, the men who are crucified alongside Jesus Christ—the thieves who are the subject of Barnes’s play—are representatives

41 George Jackson, The Teaching of Jesus, (Charleston: Nabu Press) 2010, 53.

22 rather than individuals, placeholders rather than people. Barnes chose to bring these thieves and their (imagined) stories to center stage, placing Jesus in the play only as a reference point so that her audience would identify these two characters as the thieves from the Passion. So prior to delving into my analysis of the play itself, I think it important to explore how these two thieves have been represented in the major books of the Bible.

In the English Standard Version of the New Testament, the two thieves are mentioned only in the briefest of moments, which I have italicized in the quotations below for emphasis. In the New Testament the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John each address the Passion in different ways. In the Gospel according to Matthew, he writes, “And over his head they put the charge against him, which read, ‘This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.’ Then two robbers were crucified with him, one on the right and one on the left.”42 The Gospel according to John is quite similar to Matthew:

Then [they] delivered him therefore unto them to be crucified. And they took Jesus, and led him away. And he bearing his cross went forth into a place called the place of a skull, which is called in the Hebrew Golgotha: Where they crucified him, and two others with him, on either side one, and Jesus in the midst.43

Both of these readings suggest the holy trinity and foreshadow Christ’s rise into heaven, where he will sit at the right hand of God, the father. In these cases, the thieves serve as ways to underline and highlight Jesus’s symbolic connection to God.

Meanwhile, in the Gospel according to Luke, the thieves are a bit more developed, but remain “strategies” to heighten and develop specific characteristics of Jesus or responses in readers. As Luke wrote:

42 Holy Bible, English Standard Version, Matthew 27:37-38, (Wheaton: Good News Publishers) 2016. 43 Holy Bible, English Standard Version, John 19:16-18, (Wheaton: Good News Publishers) 2016. 23 Two others, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. And when they came to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, "Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!" But the other rebuked him, saying, "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong." And he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." And he said to him, "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise."44

Luke’s telling offers different insights into the thieves. Here they speak, and one makes the very human demand that Jesus use his connection to God to save their lives. The second thief’s rebuke of the first thief suggests that he has recognized the error of his actions and embraced the fairness of earthly consequences. Further, through the act of repentance, he has become a changed man who hopes to be invited into paradise after his death. Jesus’s assurance suggests that the second thief’s path to redemption is a valid one, and the fact that the thief dies alongside Jesus reinforces the possibility that anyone—no matter how poor, disenfranchised, or seemingly morally corrupt—can be saved if they embrace Jesus Christ and his teachings.

And finally, there is no mention of the thieves at all in the Gospel according to Mark—in this Gospel, it is as if they simply do not exist.

In Djuna Barnes’s A Passion Play, these extras become main characters. Without supplying these men with names, which would decrease the correlation between the thieves of

A Passion Play and the unnamed thieves from the Bible, Barnes takes care to humanize these two mere “background” players. Moreover, she chooses not to portray the crucifixion itself, but the evening before it as the thieves await their fate and pursue physical pleasure with the prostitutes, Theocleia and Sarah. This is significant because in Christian theology, when the

44Holy Bible, English Standard Version, Luke 23:32-33,39-43, (Wheaton: Good News Publishers) 2016. 24 passion is discussed, it almost exclusively revolves around the physical violence and torture of

Jesus, and his endurance of that pain on behalf of humankind. A Passion Play, in contrast, focuses on the antithesis of pain and torture—at least in most cases—sexual pleasure.

The play also decenters the focus on the Passion away from Jesus to the two anonymous, forgotten thieves, a choice that I will respect in my own analysis as well by focusing on the thieves and their representation rather than Jesus. The Second Thief, whispering to his chosen prostitute, Theocleia, mumbles, “Come lift me for an hour, as one heaves up a kitten,” before the two follow the other pair into the woods: “There is no sound save for that of the faint rustling of leaves, the wind in the grass, and the movement of animals.”45 These stage directions could be a dual reference to the other animals in the woods, or it can be a reference to the “animal instincts” of humans during sexual intercourse. The imagery of Theocleia “lifting the thief for an hour” has multiple meanings here as well. Alongside the obvious sexual innuendo, here there is another reference to the unnamed criminal’s upcoming crucifixion. If we were to envision Theocleia lifting the thief upwards whilst he was nailed to the cross, it would provide him with a moment of relief, a respite from pain. These choices, which refocus attention on the unnamed thieves and on the physical pleasures of life (or brief respites from pain and death) rather than torture and death, queer one of the most famous and cherished representations from the Bible.

The final moments in A Passion Play rearticulate another important piece of the Biblical

Passion as well in a way that allows the prostitutes—the women—to exude agency. In John

45 Djuna Barnes, A Passion Play from At the Roots of the Stars (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press) 2000, 57. 25 19:23, after crucifying Jesus, the Roman soldiers cast lots for the tunic that Jesus was wearing upon his death:

Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part; and also his coat: now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout. They said therefore among themselves, Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be: that the scripture might be fulfilled, which saith, They parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture they did cast lots. These things therefore the soldiers did. 46

In A Passion Play, Theocleia and Sarah similarly gamble for the loin cloth left by one of the former thieves, just like the Roman soldiers do with Jesus’s garments after his crucifixion. As

Sarah explained to Theocleia, “I get the loin cloth of your little rascal if I throw double fives. It’ll make a pretty hanging, and there’s that on it they say a man draws when he dies a violent death.”47 This correlation between the two narratives strengthens the connection between A

Passion Play and the Bible and creates meaning in two specific ways.

First, by choosing to have the women cast lots over the thieves’ clothing, Barnes is setting up a parallel between Jesus and the thieves. Like Jesus, who had a name and a story and whose possessions had material worth, so too did these two men’s clothing have material value for Theocleia and Sarah. In the Bible, the Romans gamble for Jesus’s loin cloth—the cloth of the innocent martyr, who spent his life doing good works and sacrificed himself to earn eternal grace for humankind. The thieves, in contrast, spend much of the play explaining how society has pushed them to become evil:

FIRST THIEF: The world has two things – good and evil. [. . .] The world is suffused with the smell of flesh and sweat and the hot nausea of things that have died with fur on them, and things that have died naked in gestures. And the lover with his nose in this mistress’ throat, and the steer with his nostrils among the wrinkled bristles of his mate –

46Holy Bible, English Standard Version, John 19:23-24, (Wheaton: Good News Publishers) 2016. 47 Barnes, A Passion Play, 58. 26 perceive that there is an aroma in the air; a foul and penetrating stench; a thing that makes the breasts of woman bound, the tongues of men shed saliva and the mouth of those but lately smiling, draw in fear. We, my dears, are that stench.48

It is clear from this quote that the only label the thief truly knows is that of “evil.” Just like the figure of Jesus Christ was disenfranchised by the non-believers, the thieves have also found themselves “othered.”

In Barnes’s revision of this important post-crucifixion scene, the prostitutes are in charge just like the Roman soldiers. I argue that this is a tool used by Barnes to queer the Bible in order to put women in power. Theocleia and Sarah are the Roman soldiers in this narrative reimagining—they got paid in this transaction, they are the ones that came out alive, and they were in control of their situation. The thieves did not chase two unwilling women into the woods on their last night on Earth; these women knew what they wanted and, more importantly, knew that they were going to get paid for doing it. With this choice, Barnes challenges social norms further. Not only has she reimagined the Passion of Christ in such a way as to center it around the disenfranchised and Othered thieves, she also asks the reader to rethink this often marginalized profession and the women who choose (or are forced to choose) it.

Morality & the Flesh

In an allegorical play about the omnipresence of evil, that challenges the reader to rethink how she categorizes good and evil, what is evil? According to Christian theologian Chad

Meister in his monograph Evil: A Guide for the Perplexed, “A standard classification for evil

48 Barnes, A Passion Play, 55. 27 divides it into two broad types: moral and natural.”49 In the “natural evils” category fall instances of misfortune that are seemingly out of human control—hurricanes, floods, disease, etcetera. The other type of evil classified by Meister is “moral evil,” which is what Barnes is challenging in A Passion Play. Moral evils, as Meister defines them, are classified as such,

“because they are in some sense the result of a person who is morally blameworthy of the resultant evil.”50 Moral evils can have many different subtypes:

Some moral evils are of great intensity, as is this horror of child abuse. Other examples include genocide, torture and other terrors inflicted by humans. There are also less severe types of moral evils such as stealing or speaking negatively about someone. In addition, certain defects in one’s character are also classified as moral evil, including greed, gluttony, vanity, and dishonesty.”51

The four characters of A Passion Play are all self-defined as “evil,” not because of their own moral shortcomings, but because society has left them no choice.

FIRST THIEF to SECOND: We are the common pools in which the refuse is flung. In which the child dips its feet, in which the horse sluices its nostrils, in which the sparrow cools its legs, in which the entrails of fish are thrown, through which runs the blood of a day’s burst veins and the shucks of an hour’s sucked fruit. The amazing gutter in which the world casts its wash and then cries, “’Tis muddy.” THEOCLEIA: And I come from a place that’s overrun with things. Yes what can you do? Drive a rat into a corner, rascal, and all that’s left for it is the knowledge of the corner’s contour and, then, on to death.52

These characters are the “common pools in which the refuse is flung,” pools that exist in every corner of society, but that are pushed into the corners and hidden from sight because they are undesirable. They are the leftovers, the dirty water, the discarded detritus of life—the messy leftovers that are not only the by-products of life, but also entirely necessary to it. Here, the

49 Chad V. Meister, Evil: A Guide for the Perplexed, (New York: Bloomsbury Academic) 2012, 3.

50 Ibid., 3. Emphasis mine. 51 Ibid., 3. 52 Barnes, A Passion Play, 53. 28 thieves and the prostitutes suggest the society in which they live has left them no choices and then denigrates them for living that life.

If society is responsible for creating these four seemingly “evil” people, who or what is the real moral evil in this play? All four characters in A Passion Play suggest that they have been permanently labeled “evil” by the rest of society, while others in society have been labeled

“good.” They lament their marginalized positions as people labeled “evil” by others, but, as

Theocleia laments, “We are to the world what odor is to the flesh—and they cannot wash us out.”53 Here, again, this personification of “evil” is not something that can ever be removed from society, regardless of how much that society might try. It can “never be washed out,” but is as connected to society as is odor to flesh.

A Passion Play is an allegory, yet just as Barnes uses the content to queer the Biblical

Passion, she uses the form of the allegory to queer the way that her readership conceptualizes good and evil. As Jon Whitman states in his monograph, Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period, “Even today, when it has become fashionable to speak of the ‘other,’ to encounter it in allegorical interpretation remains somewhat jolting.”54 All four main characters in A Passion Play can be categorized as “others,”—either in thievery or prostitution. Barnes challenges the historically strong binary between good and evil by queering this Biblical allegory.

Allegory has been a mainstay in literature since antiquity and was often used to teach moral or ethical lessons. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when A Passion Play was

53 Ibid., 55. 54 Jon Whitman, Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period (Brill: Boston), 2000, 7. 29 first written, allegory was fading out of popularity. However, recently, “an increasing number of scholars suggest that allegorical interpretation is a form of critical balance, a way in which individual interpreters and whole communities seek to ‘make sense’ of old or strange texts in new or familiar circumstances.”55 This suggests that Barnes may have been ahead of her time in her use of allegory to “make sense,” or perhaps to make strange, the familiar text of the

Passion. Barnes, although loath to admit it publicly, really did write for the feminist “other,” trying to make sense of her marginalized position as a queer woman in early twentieth-century society.

Conclusion

Barnes had already begun her journey questioning sex, religion, and women’s rights in society prior to A Passion Play’s publication in 1918, but the play truly serves as milestone for these types of thematic exploration in her work. In further explorations of A Passion Play, I would like to investigate the connection between the characters in this play and the five senses that comprise human existence. Barnes harnesses all five senses strongly throughout A Passion

Play, many of which are heavily related to sexual passions, typically found within the outbursts of the outcast characters. Most viscerally utilized throughout the play is sense of smell – “We are to the world what odor is to the flesh,” explained Theocleia at the beginning of the play.56

But, as she continues on later in the scene, her senses have been assaulted for the majority of her life. She laments:

55 Ibid., 4. 56 Barnes, A Passion Play, 55. 30 I come from a strange place. [. . .] [T]here’s a shadow that has its security in the highest part of the room, and it swings back and forth upon the floor eternally, like the lunge of love. [shudders] And through it all somebody, sitting straight and dispassionate, speaks, saying: “Continue.” And so I know nothing’s over and nothing done.57

Theocleia sees, smells, tastes, feels, hears, and knows that her time on Earth is fraught with suffering. The other three characters recognize it as well. A Passion Play by Djuna Barnes queers the Bible through the assault of senses, both for the character and the reader.

57 Ibid., 55-56. 31 CHAPTER 3

A SALMAGUNDI OF QUEERNESS IN MADAME COLLECTS HERSELF

Madame Collects Herself is one of the most peculiar dramatic pieces Djuna Barnes created during her career which, as we know, already includes quite a bit of eccentricity.

Rounding out at a brief five and a half pages of dialogue, this play covers murder, animal transfiguration, (potentially) queer love, and…a manicure. Written in 1918 for Parisienne magazine, Madame Collects Herself arrived midway through Djuna Barnes’s career as a journalist. By this time, she was now something of a “seasoned veteran” of the little magazine closet dramas. Although it may appear to be peculiar in content, Madame Collects Herself takes different creative risks and toys with new subjects to create a compact closet drama that scandalizes readers to this day.

Inside a respectable hairdressing parlor one late afternoon, Madame Zolbo, a boisterous, prideful, over-dressed woman arrives in a hurry. She is anxious to have her hair done for a fancy dinner she is having with the Baroness—and Baron—that evening. Fifine, the hairdresser, and Lulu, the manicurist, get to work on her right away. It soon becomes apparent that this process of beautification conceals a disturbing secret. As Zolbo explains, her body— hair, skin, fingers, even some of her blood—is comprised of the body parts of men, which she personally acquired by force. Most of these men were former lovers of Madame’s. These men were still alive at the time of this bodily appropriation, whether it involved a pair of scissors or surgical operation for Madame Zolbo to remove a digit.

32 The other two women in the salon chat casually with her, unphased that appropriated human body parts literally make the Madame who she is. Monsieur Goujon, owner of the salon and husband to Lulu, enters quickly and takes over for Fifine. He abruptly stops his work on

Madame Zolbo’s hair when he notices a new “treasure” from one of her lovers. In a jealous rage, he exclaims, “This is something new?” to which the Madame indifferently replies, “Not so very.”58 He orders Madame’s immediate murder, which the ladies undertake, first stabbing her with a hot curling iron and then removing the stolen pieces of men, in order to find Madame’s core being. At this point, Madame Zolbo, or what is left of her, transforms into a canary and the ladies place her in a cage. The play ends soon after when Madame transforms back into a

“human woman” by attacking and absorbing the physical entities of masculinity of a few of the closest men on the street, before sprinting off.

Throughout this chapter, I will address the following questions: How is the acquisition of male body parts by Madame Zolbo—body parts that she removes herself from various men— used as a tool to explore queerness and femininity? How does Djuna Barnes use masculinity as a tool to challenge regimented notions of gender, prior to “gender” officially being recognized as an individualized term from “sex?” I argue that the closet drama Madame Collects Herself works as a stepping stone to forward early conversations about gender and continuing conversations about queer sexuality. As a queer woman—regardless of the fact that she often, but not always, denied the “lesbian” label– Djuna Barnes’s intricate exploration of the

58 Djuna Barnes, Madame Collects Herself from At the Roots of the Stars (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press) 2000, 64. 33 appropriation of physical masculinity in this play serves as a challenge to the widespread heteronormativity of the early twentieth century.

Before delving into the text of the play, it is helpful to explore what Madame is actually doing to her lovers and how she acquires these body parts. It seems what Madame Zolbo has done to remove these male body parts, prior to the action of the play, was intentional and precise. As she is getting her manicure, she describes the acquisition of a finger belonging to

General Pfiffing: “it is the identical one with which he pointed toward the rising sun as he cried,

‘Onward to victory.’ It has always done as much for me. Ah, but it was a delicate operation— that was a generous man!”59 The types of body parts she generally takes from these men are easily removed—not in the sense of the physical detachment from their body (as evidenced by the necessity of the General’s “delicate operation”) but rather in the sense that these body parts are things that the men could medically all survive without. Hair, fingers, a pint of blood, a mole; none of these are essential to life. They may, however, be essential to the Madame’s desired physical existence, which I will explore further on in this chapter.

I argue that Madame is acquiring the pieces of men, which only seem like her past

“lovers” at first glance due to the way she talks about them, but might actually not be sexually linked to her at all, not because she wants control of her male counterparts but, in fact, to prove that she is “male enough” for someone like the Baroness. As the title states, the Madame is Collecting Herself. When she is collecting those pieces of men, she is collecting who she really, truly is. Madame Zolbo seems to want to become as male as she possibly can to conform to the heterosexual normative, and be the perfect, acceptable match for the unseen Baroness.

59 Ibid, 64. 34 She is getting her hair and nails done for a dinner date with the Baroness, not with the Baron, nor any of her other body-part-factory men.

Some of the men that she removed the parts from – like the Baron and Monsieur

Goujon – are still obviously alive the evening this play takes place, but others are not as fortunate. For example, a lock of her hair belongs to a former lover, Michael:

FIFINE: [removing pins from MADAME’S hair] Is this one of Michael’s days? MADAME ZOLBO: [sadly] Yes, it is his anniversary—I always wear him on Wednesdays, they are my days out. Give him to me. [She takes the removed false curls from FIFINE and begins to stroke them.] How well I remember how these curls looked on him, a most talented and melancholy man, just the right pallor and dignity, a little languid, perhaps, but his hair, as you can see for yourself, was the hair of an angel. It used to touch my cheek [sighs] so often in those fiery days before he passed beyond. LULU: [dipping MADAME’S hand into castile suds] Dead! MADAME ZOLBO: Dead! Died on the way home from “Boris”—would sing the finale up to the last moment. FIFINE: [testing the irons against her cheek] You must have felt dreadfully. MADAME ZOLBO: It almost killed me, yet I can say that I am never quite so proud as when I bear the honey-colored cylinders from that departed head.60

The Madame is—at least publicly—bereft over the permanent loss (that is, death) of one of her acquired lovers. Although it does not seem that Madame Zolbo was directly responsible for

Michael’s death, his demise seems to have changed her relationship with his hair. Is it possible that the Madame might gain more energy and power once its masculine host expired? How do these pieces of masculinity actually affect the Madame?

In this chapter, I will place Madame Collects Herself in its historical period, particularly with respect to first-wave feminism in the United States, the “New Woman,” and the various ways that the New Woman was reimagined as threatening to male virility and power, including the Big-Woman, Little-Man motif and the Gibson Girls. I will then argue that Madame Collects

60 Ibid, 62. 35 Herself challenges these fears about feminism and female power by creating an effectual, queer woman who appropriates maleness through an accumulation of male body parts, an argument that is reinforced by my reading of early twentieth century sexual inversion theory and Barnes’s choices of symbol and metaphor in the play.

First-Wave Feminism, the New Woman & Madame Collects Herself

A woman’s place in US society experienced major changes throughout the second decade of the twentieth century. New York, the pioneer state for first-wave feminism, passed voting rights for white women in 1917, one year prior to the publication of Madame Collects

Herself, and two years prior to the nineteenth amendment was passed nationwide. Women were creating new career opportunities in many fields, although it should be noted that these opportunities were strictly for privileged white woman; it was not until the 1960s that African

American women gained the right to vote nationwide. Fellow Greenwich Village resident

Margaret Sanger opened a birth control clinic, while other residents like Emma Goldman worked as activists and professional authors for local New York City publications. Edna St.

Vincent Millay found a home in the theatre with the Provincetown Players.61 In her little

Greenwich Village hub, Barnes was also in the company of Henrietta Rodman, Mary Heaton

Vorse, and Neith Boyce, who together, “made a Golden Age of Feminism, chronicling oppression, defining goals, organizing movements, rallying supporters, disdaining custom, and

61 Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910 – 1960, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), various. 36 defying the law.”62 While Barnes was never a proactive member or leader of any sort of feminist—or queer—movements that were popular in the Village, that does not necessarily devalue the influence that these forward-thinking groups of artists had on her. These were her friends—the people that she spent the most time with. Intentionally or not on Barnes’s part, they influenced her, and the proof is in the text of both plays found within this thesis. As a young journalist, Djuna Barnes was able to join in on this exploration of feminine independence in a way US women had not experienced prior.

In her book American Modernisms: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New

Century, Christine Stansell discusses how the influx of free speech during this era allowed women, “to break a long taboo against female sexual expression, the new writing invited them to share literary enterprises monopolized by men, and bohemian politics accepted the fundamental premises of women’s rights and expanded on them.”63 Barnes herself was writing and publishing in magazines, and many of her works addressed issues of women’s rights in some way. Water-Ice, first published in 1923 in Vanity Fair, for example, features Lady Fiora

Silvertree – a woman most revered by all of the men in her country of Avalon. In Madame

Collects Herself, Madame Zolbo demonstrates the fundamental right of women to exercise power in their personal relationships. She is the dominant partner in all of her relationships, as established by her ability to draw physical power through the reallocation of male body parts.

She is also emotionally detached, as Monsieur Goujon’s very deep feelings for her are not only unmatched, but completely ignored. When the Monsieur notices a “new” piece of man on

62 Ibid, 162-163. 63 Stansell, American Moderns, 225. 37 Madame Zolbo, he grows crimson with jealous rage and confronts her.64 “How you tremble!”

Madame Zolbo teases after seeing Monsieur reaction, demonstrating that she really does not care about his feelings.65 Madame Zolbo is unaffected by the salon owner’s lustful envy—he is just another set of body parts to her. When Monsieur Goujon realizes her indifference, he flies into a “jealous rage,” and yells, “Kill that woman!”66 Madame Zolbo, like many other women in the early twentieth century, was starting to find her independence.

First-wave feminist ideology was ingrained within many aspects of early twentieth century Greenwich Village culture, with a particularly visceral impact in the work of women writers. These writers were influenced by a complex web of social culture, including both the literary and visual representation of the newfound “New Woman” ideology. Specifically, I argue that Madame Zolbo falls underneath two specific subsets of “New Woman” visual representation—the “big woman, little man” motif, and artist Charles Dana Gibson’s “Gibson

Girl” drawings.

As Ross Wetzsteon states in Republic of Dreams Greenwich Village: The American

Bohemia, 1910—1960: “Educated, white, and middle class, the New Woman was privileged by

Victorian standards, yet realized not only that her ‘privileges’ were a form of enslavement but that she had abilities society would not allow her to use, aspirations society would not allow her to attain.”67 The New Woman was an icon of first-wave feminism—a first chance for

(privileged white) women to really see their independent potential represented in popular

64 Barnes, Madame Collects Herself, 64. 65 Ibid., 64. 66 Ibid., 64. 67 Ibid., 163. 38 media. Figure 1, an 1896 self-portrait by artist Frances Benjamin Johnston, is an example of how New Women were visually portrayed:

Figure 1- Frances Benjamin Johnston,

“Self-Portrait (as ‘New Woman’),” 1896.

This image of the New Woman includes Johnston in a sitting position, casually leaning forward in front of her fireplace, with a teapot in one hand, and a cigarette in the other. Her body exudes an air of confidence suggesting her power and, more importantly, her masculinity, within her own living space.

However, as quickly became apparent, there existed widespread social anxiety about the shifting roles of women the 1910s. According to scholar Carolyn Kitch in her essay,

“Destructive Women and Little Men: Masculinity, the New Woman, and Power in 1910s Popular

Media,” using the New Woman to challenge traditional representations of gender in early twentieth century newspaper dramas was very popular. Kitch states, “During the 1910s,

39 Americans’ hopes for, and anxieties about, changing gender roles were frequently debated in magazine and newspaper articles.”68 From widely disseminated newspapers like The Times and

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle to smaller little magazines such as Others and Parisienne, women authors were finding their voice on the page. The New Woman typically represented the newfound drive for female education and independence directly within the pages of these publications.

It was a decade of rocky transformation in gender roles and women’s rights, and closet dramas like Madame Collects Herself frequently found themselves on the pages of magazines and newspapers as a way for women to express their concerns publicly. As Kitch explains:

At no time did lasting change in gender roles seem more likely than in the 1910s, the final decade of the suffrage drive. The vote was not only potential gain for women during this era: radicals who called themselves “feminists” pushed for reforms in the institution of marriage, the American popularity of the works of Freud prompted a public acknowledgement of women’s sexuality, and a new birth-control movement enabled women to express that sexuality more freely and safely.69

Madame Collects Herself puts this argument into practice, pushing the boundaries of free expression for women.

Kitch’s primary argument focuses on the first subset of the New Woman ideology that was commonly found in New Woman inspired dramas, the “big-woman, little-man” motif. The

“big-woman, little-man” (BWLM) motif was simple:

The spectre of a world in which domineering and destructive women emasculated weak and powerless men inspired a distinctive motif that ran through various forms of popular culture: the pairing of large (though usually beautiful) women and little, often tiny, men. While this motif was always presented as a joke, it never was only a joke.70

68 Carolyn Kitch, “Destructive Women and Little Men: Masculinity, the New Woman, and Power in 1910s Popular Media,” Journal of Magazine and New Media Research, Volume 1.1, Spring 1999. 69 Ibid, 1. 70 Ibid., 2. Emphasis mine. 40 The motif, already widespread by the 1910s, incorporated much more than just the physical differences between a large woman and a tiny man. The men in the BWLM motif, “sought the favor of a well-dressed woman whose attention seemed to be elsewhere,” as well as displayed their “desperate hopes to win the favor of women superior to them.”71 Upon her entrance,

Madame Zolbo is described as a “stout” woman, her “high piled hair upon which rests an enormous velour hat,” making the Madame appear physically daunting.72 Her great size establishes her as a “domineering and destructive woman”—“a big woman” from the trope — and sets the stage for the violent destruction she will wreak through the rest of the play.

Madame Zolbo sustains her strength through the acquisition of men’s body parts, such as the blood of the impetuous Conrad the anarchist. As Madame explains to the salon employees, “It was he, my dears, who gave me a pint of blood when I lay at death’s door in Aix-les-Bains on day last summer. Yes, one pint of an anarchist’s blood flows through my veins.”73 By having anarchist Conard’s blood inside of her, Madame Zolbo becomes the “real threat” that was created by BLWM, the threat that was, “never just a joke.” She goes on to leave other men, in this instance Monsieur Goujon, groveling at her feet. Although it is somewhat amusing to contemplate the absurdity of a woman sewing a stolen mole onto her body, Madame Collects

Herself exaggerates the BWLM motif to the extreme, with the haughty Madame not only dominating but dismembering the men she comes into contact with. The idea of appropriating the physical bodies of men in order to gain power is a critique of the BWLM motif in the sense that, like the motif, in Madame Collects Herself, “what seems to modern eyes to be a funny

71 Ibid., 6-7. 72 Barnes, Madame Collects Herself, 61. 73 Barnes, Madame Collects Herself, 63. 41 historical curiosity was in fact a patterned and pointed commentary on gender relations, as well as broader tensions, in early-twentieth-century America.”74 As a “big woman,” she is so strong that she actually, physically, is able to suction the physical masculinity out of men. Her height is increased by the towering piles of hair she has gathered from her constituents, making her appear physically taller than she really is. Appropriating actual pieces of the male body,

Madame Zolbo’s character simultaneously speaks to both the feminist and queer dilemma of the new century.

According to Kitch, artist Charles Dana Gibson brought the New Woman into popular conversation with the Gibson Girl drawings. In these drawings, Gibson, “envisioned the New

Woman as beautiful, upper class, and extremely haughty, someone who cowed and frightened men.”75 Figure 2, pictured below, demonstrates these qualities:

Figure 2 – Charles Dana Gibson, "Love in a Garden," 1901.

74 Kitch, 6. 75 Kitch, 2. 42 Titled “Love in a Garden,” this Gibson Girl differs quite a bit from Frances Benjamin

Johnson’s self-portrait. Rather than simply being in control of herself and her domicile, the

Gibson Girl pictured here exudes power in a public setting. She stands physically taller than the men, who look flustered and bashful under her command.

Barnes’s Madame conforms well to this image, as she is described in the stage directions as, “forty odd, with high piled hair upon which rests an enormous velour hat supporting a bird of paradise.”76 Sporting a “sable muff in jeweled complacency” with a red plush draped dramatically over her arm, as readers we can only envision the haughtiness that reeks from

Madame Zolbo’s very presence.77 The artistic “Gibson Girl” of Charles Dana Gibson’s was a realistic threat to the New Woman, just like the “big-woman, little-man” motif, because it found ways to dismantle and subtly mock the traits that made it possible for women to claim independence. Secondly, the Gibson Girl germinated from the New Woman in such a way that it used sexual inversion to represent the dichotomy of power between the sexes. Again, taking this idea to the extreme in Madame Collects Herself, Barnes has created a Gibson Girl who is so haughty and frightening that she turns sexual inversion on its head, queering the Gibson Girl, which was, in turn, a largely negative reimagining of the New Woman.

By being supernaturally comprised of body parts from other humans, Madame Zolbo might even be superior to an average “Gibson Girl”—she is not playing around with mere mortals. These mass-produced images spread via newspaper in a seemingly innocuous way to family homes, but in fact these artistic “Gibson Girls” were actually a very realistic threat to the

76 Barnes, Madame Collects Herself, 61. 77 Ibid., 61. 43 heteronormative patriarchal society. As Kitch continues, “Of the various threats the New

Woman posed to the American status quo, the prospect of sex-role reversal –masculinized women and feminized/emasculated men—was the easiest and funniest to handle through visual communication.”78 This idea of “appropriating masculinity” is central to Madame Zolbo’s modus operandi, especially, as I argue, as a queer female character. Like the image perpetuated by the “Gibson Girls,” Madame Zolbo was a physical threat to men around her—it is not so easy for one to simply acquire a man’s pint of blood, or a pointer finger. And yet, the Madame seems able to handle all this and more with laughable ease in the world Barnes creates.

Queerness, Appropriating Maleness, and Collecting Herself

In spite of first-wave feminism and Margaret Sanger’s work on birth control, female sexuality was still generally under discussed, and mentioning it publicly was taboo in 1918 New

York City society. The works of Freud directly contributed to a marginal increase of discussion regarding women’s sexuality; Freud, however, still considered women to be “defective” men, so the topic was still problematic. Barnes was personally loath to admit the psychoanalyst’s small, but significant influence on her own work, once stating: “One always looks up an authority to avoid quoting him. I looked up Sigmund Freud, and so I am in a position to go on with this story without further contemporary interruption.”79

Queer culture—especially in New York City—was experiencing a boom during this time, but in an underground way. Most frequently seen were the subtle intrusions, or “hints” of

78 Kitch, 5. 79 Djuna Barnes, “The Superstitions of Sensible New Yorkers”, New York Tribune, February 20, 1916, 31. 44 queerness, within writing that was disseminated to smaller audiences than mainstream newspapers. Queerness in Barnes’s work was most explicitly exhibited in her one-act play The

Dove, which premiered onstage at Smith College in 1926.80 The play features two sisters and a young “dove” they dote over, ending in a scene where the Dove’s breast gets exposed and sensually nibbled by one of the sisters. After her groundbreaking novel Nightwood, The Dove is

Barnes’s piece with the most critical commentary on queer female relationships.

Djuna Barnes was not alone in her artistic ventures that explored themes of sexual freedom; she was joined by Emma Goldman, C. E. S. Wood, and many others in the “free love” movement of the time.81 In addition, Barnes frequented the salon of Mabel Dodge, one of many “out” lesbians of Greenwich Village. Dodge was an official member of the “Heterodoxy

Club,” a club “for unorthodox women” based in New York City.82 Barnes was never an official member of this intriguing club, but many unofficial members, especially a large group of writers, frequented the Heterodoxy Club’s activities. Barnes was right there, in the middle of it all.

The word gender was not used separately from the word “sex” until the 1950s, meaning that, at the time of publication, sex and gender as terms were utilized differently than they are today. As J. Halberstam states, “Since sex neither predicts nor guarantees gender role, there is some flexibility built into the sex-gender system.”83 Although not verbally defined during this early twentieth century, that flexibility was already in existence. In contrast, as far back as the

80 Messerli, At The Roots of the Stars, 148. 81 Stansell, American Moderns 278. 82 Wetzsteon, 174. 83 J. Halberstam, “Gender” from Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition, (New York: NYU Press), 2014, 116. 45 eighteenth century, humans were perceived to have the “same” body, with females having a few differences that made them “inferior” to the bodies of men, the most obvious being the lack of a penis.84 Though proven scientifically fraudulent well before 1918, this idea still circulated through early twentieth century society. Although this play dismantles the most popular criticisms of the New Woman, there is still something overwhelmingly “wrong”—at least, as implied by the text—with the Madame desiring male body parts. She remains an outcast because of her differences.

The reason that the Madame is getting primped and pampered is, as she mentions upon her arrival to the salon, to see the Baroness. Yes, she is also having dinner with the Baron as well, but of all the men (and women) she mentions during the course of the play, it is only the

Baroness that she shows any reverence to or respect for. Madame Zolbo, in fact, is interested in the Baroness more than any one male from whom she has appropriated a body part. But by no means is Madame Collects Herself an overtly lesbian play. The Baroness is the only person in the play that the Madame treats as more than an object to appropriate.

Without appropriated maleness, Madame Zolbo feels incomplete. She goes to the most extreme, violent measures to present as physically male as possible for the woman that is her true desire, the Baroness. This imperious “New Woman” has taken her independence one step farther and is free—to some extent—to be sexually attracted to whomever she pleases. This is the real threat the “New Woman” posed to the patriarchal structure as a whole, and the fact that Madame Zolbo exhibits potentially lesbian pursuits is particularly groundbreaking.

84 Veronique Mottier, Sexuality: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 2008, 34. 46 The “inversion model” of homosexuality was still fresh in the minds of the English- speaking world, although there was a move away from the term as the nineteenth century rolled into the twentieth. Common during the early twentieth century, the inversion theory— although outdated today—serves as a useful lens through which to examine Madame Collects

Herself. The idea of sexual inversion referred to:

the widespread belief of the time that people with same-sex desires suffered from some kind of gender disorder and were really women in men’s bodies, or vice versa [. . .]. Same-sex desire was widely interpreted through the lens of gender, but disagreements raged over what the exact link between sexual identity and gender was.85

By acquiring the body parts and life energy of these men, the Madame is, in turn, becoming at least somewhat male.

However, the fact cannot be ignored that the Madame Zolbo is simultaneously acquiring masculine and feminine characteristics throughout the play. She is, after all, in a beauty parlor to get her hair and nails done, a classic feminine pastime. This duality presents something of a challenge to the already difficult articulation of the “Gibson Girl”/sexual inversion narrative. For help with this, I turn to J. Halberstam’s “Perverse Presentism” chapter in their monograph Female Masculinity. In this chapter, they explore the intricacies of masculinity in females throughout historical moments, specifically making it clear that not every masculine woman falls into the general category of lesbian, and that masculinity in early twentieth-century writing was not the only signifier of lesbianism. Because of the widely articulated types of lesbianism by Halberstam, I am confident that the Madame has the potential to transcend the stereotypical categories of masculinity and femininity that prevailed

85 Ibid, 38-39. 47 in the early twentieth century, an era where nothing was stereotypical in terms of queerness.

As Halberstam states:

[T]he momentous negotiations about gender that took place at and around the turn of the century, which were created by earlier developments, produced particular forms of femininity and masculinity and clearly showed that femininity was not wed to femaleness and masculinity was certainly not bound to maleness. 86

So not only is Madame arguably queer, but her gender expression also correlates within the conversations of her contemporary moment. This means that Madame Collects Herself, as a text written and published in 1918, is more important than might meet the eye. Madame Zolbo is an icon of femininity and of queerness, imagining both the idea of queer un-belonging and anticipating the feminist upswing that would follow with the passing of the Nineteenth

Amendment.

After she is murdered, transforms into a canary, and is entrapped in a suspiciously placed empty birdcage that just happens to be right outside the door of this hairdressing salon,

Madame Zolbo’s super objective is not just to return to her human form, but to jump right back in and continue her quest to the Baroness, evidenced by the hairdresser as she screams, “Look, look! Monsieur, down on your knees. The bird’s the Madame again—she grows larger and larger every minute; three men are already lying dead beneath her cage, and she is smiling and making ringlets over her fingers!”87 Madame Zolbo, without appropriated maleness, is incomplete. She must go to the most extreme, violent measures to be as physically male as possible, and the implication is that her endgame is to reach the Baroness for their date. But

86 Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity, (Durham: Duke University Press) 1998, Kindle Loc. 1176. Emphasis mine. 87 Barnes, Madame Collects Herself, 66. 48 the New Woman / Gibson Girl connection is not the only way Zolbo connects to established queer and feminist ideologies – it goes back much farther than that.

As a poet, Barnes’s imagery symbolically reinforces this queer feminist reading as well via the familiar figure of the bird. Ovid’s Amores carved out a path for birds to fly into symbolic literary criticism, and birds have been popular symbols in literature ever since. According to

Leonard Lutwack’s 1994 monograph, Birds in Literature, “Familiarity and transcendence have given birds a wider range of meaning and symbol in literature than any other animal.”88 From common sparrow to elusive lark, authors and artists alike have utilized this animal to strengthen the lyrical quality of their writing. As Lutwack states in his introduction, “[B]irds are profoundly deliberate in every move they make. Performing the same functions year after year, never appearing to change, birds present to humans enviable examples of self-possession, permanence, and changelessness.”89 Because birds are so visible to us as humans, they make an excellent target for allegory and symbolism. Humans envy birds because they can fly, seeing the world in a way we can barely imagine. People have used this animal, with its abounding variety of species, to help explain the mysteries the world has to offer. And Djuna Barnes, in

Madame Collects Herself, follows this same path.

In her entrance stage directions, Madame Zolbo is sporting an “enormous velour hat supporting a bird of paradise.” 90 Birds of paradise are famous for their sharp, brilliantly-colored plumage, varying in colors from maroon to turquoise to a bright sunny yellow. At first glance, this might be seen as a simple ornament, or possibly even an allusion to her later

88 Leonard Lutwack, Birds in Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida), 1994, xi. 89 Ibid., xi. 90 Barnes, Madame Collects Herself, 61. 49 transformation into the winged animal. However, according to the New Encyclopedia of Birds, this eye-catching species is only eye-catching fifty percent of the time: it is the male birds of paradise who have this brilliant plumage that we associate with the ornate.91 So, although not explicitly stated in the stage directions, if Madame was wearing this hat to be ornate, it would have most likely been the more ornate sex of the bird of paradise. Her stealing of maleness, therefore, also transcends species. I argue that the bird of paradise, since it is most likely a male bird of paradise that she is wearing on her head, is an allusion to her habit of appropriating maleness and pieces of male bodies.

Monsieur Goujon refers to the transformed Madame as a sparrow. As the New

Encyclopedia of Birds defines, “The sparrows have a well-developed tendency to associate with humans, and are probably the best-known of all the world's birds.”92 Sparrows are a common bird, and will live just about anywhere. According to the stage directions, however, the species that she has actually transfigured into is a canary. Perhaps, then, this mistake was more intentional on Monsieur Goujon’s part. By calling the Madame a sparrow, the Monsieur is degrading her—a “common woman” (or a common bird) who thrives on human attention and has been unfaithful to him. Madame Zolbo is no longer that “special someone” to the

Monsieur, the object of his desire.

But she is in fact the delicate, fragile, “pet” canary, a bird that was and is still widely see in popular literature as a symbol for feminine fragility. Bird symbolism in theatre specifically has also been a metaphor for femininity onstage, and especially popular during this time.

91 Christopher Perrins, The New Encyclopedia of Birds (Oxford: Oxford Press), 2003, 1. 92 Ibid. 50 Barnes’s fellow Provincetown Players playwright, Susan Glaspell, produced her noted play

Trifles two years prior, in 1916. In Trifles, it is a canary that is the center of a murder mystery. In the wildly popular A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, husband Torvald frequently refers to his wife

Nora as his “skylark,” his “little singing bird.” This was a way to demean Nora’s independence, and to confine her to the patriarchal hierarchy of male superiority to females. But, like Madame

Zolbo, Nora breaks out of her cage and escapes. Perhaps Madame Zolbo then is truly a delicate female at her deepest inner self, but, like Nora, this is not who she wants to be.

CONCLUSION

It goes without saying that Madame Zolbo is a complicated woman. But might she, perhaps, be so complicated as to not even be human? After closer inspection, and with further exploration in the future, I would like to argue that Madame Zolbo is more than a mere mortal

– she is a witch. Madame Zolbo’s ability to turn into a canary might actually be more literal than symbolic.

Bodily transfiguration has been a part of witchcraft throughout human history. Roman witches are specifically known for their transfigurative abilities. In Ancient Rome, poet

Proprietus Sexus wrote stories about the witch Acanthis, who not only also possessed the ability to produce erotic magic—one of her spells involved convincing chaste women to cheat on their husbands—but was also able to “turn herself into a wolf,” just as Madame Zolbo can transform herself into a canary.93 Roman poet Ovid’s Amores explores the Stridge (Strix)

93Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient times to the Present, (New Haven: Yale University Press) 2017, Kindle Loc. 1609. 51 character, a mythological bird that brings bad omens in relation to women: “Ovid left open the question of whether striges were actual birds, or crones who had been turned into bird form by spells.”94 So clearly, witches and transfiguration have been staples of witchcraft for a long time.

Although there are many different types of magical beings that have the same kinds of

“power” that Madame Zolbo does, it is Madame Zolbo’s abject queerness that really makes me believe that she’s a witch. Miscast from society, Madame uses her skills to feed off of those less powerful than herself. Paired with her New Woman independence and her Gibson Girl terror,

Madame Zolbo is an unstoppable force of nature.

94 Ibid., Kindle Loc. 1762. 52 CHAPTER 4

CONCLUSION

“Never mistake activity for achievement.”95 There is definitely a reason why not many people have attempted to critically analyze Djuna Barnes’s short closet dramas. With every new reading of these plays throughout my 11 months of working with them, I discovered something new that completely contradicted previous readings. It took months, for example, to realize that

Madame Zolbo of Madame Collects Herself was a witch – there is no evidence in the text that she was physically attacking the men on the street or at all, which is suggestive of supernatural powers. Regardless of this difficulty, however, there are a few elements of synthesis to be found within these closet dramas.

As a resident of the edgy Greenwich Village, Djuna Barnes was surrounded by an artistic society that was the cynosure of bohemian culture. Her plays read more like poetry – a medium she used extensively and expertly later in her career. They are imaged-based rather than realist, forcing the reader to digest the text slowly, cautiously, and repeatedly.

Both A Passion Play and Madame Collects Herself give illustrious literary platforms to under-appreciated groups of society. Combined with her other plays during this era such as The

Dove, a performed play, and Maggie of the Saints, another closet drama, A Passion Play and

Madame Collects Herself emphasize Djuna Barnes’s ability as a novice playwright to incorporate the underdog in subtle ways. For example, in The Dove, first performed at Smith College in

95 John Wooden. 53 Northampton, Massachusetts, two sister take in a young female “dove” and dote over her. The play ends with the young dove semi-erotically biting the exposed breast of one of the older sisters. Barnes predated this queer-platform with Madame Collects Herself by creating the character of Madame Zolbo – a haughty, prideful, in-the-closet queer with the ability to scare most mortal men away.

Although never hailed as one of the leading feminist writers of her era, by the time Barnes penned her groundbreaking novel Nightwood, it was clear that she was an artistic force to be reckoned with. Nightwood, published in 1936, was by far Barnes’s greatest critical and commercial success. With an introduction by T.S. Eliot, the novel was one of the first highly popular literary works to contain an explicit female homosexual romance. A Passion Play and

Madame Zolbo, published almost two decades before, offered a way of learning by doing. As

Barnes had no formal education and never completed college, she learned her art through her own personal and creative experiences. These closet dramas serve as important precursors to her later work.

In A Passion Play, published in 1917 in the little magazine Others, Barnes queers one of the most famous stories from the Bible, bringing attention to the two unnamed men that hung on the cross next to Jesus Christ and imagining how they came to be in that situation. She gives a story and a voice to the men who were typically only glibly mentioned, rather than simply assuming that because they were thieves they deserved to crucified. Moreover, A Passion Play humanizes a second marginalized group – female sex workers. Prostitutes like Theocleia and

Sarah have been – and still are – victims of society’s judgement. By making them the only characters with names, Barnes gives the prostitutes agency. Theocleia and Sarah, like the two

54 thieves, are given a backstory and character development so that they become more than just their trade. Barnes also pulls apart the binary between good and evil, muddying it so that the disenfranchised get a chance to be allowed some goodness within them. Considering Barnes was marginalized herself -- both as a woman and as a queer person – A Passion Play advocates for people like her, always on the sidelines.

A year later, Barnes penned Madame Collects Herself. Shorter in length by almost half, this play also attempts to give a platform to under-discussed members of society. Rather than prostitutes and criminals, however, this time Barnes focuses on a woman who is powerful, masculine, queer, and a little bit magical. In this play, Madame Zolbo, a wealthy upper-class lady of the town, survives solely on the appropriation of body parts from her male companions. By removing body parts with anything from scissors to a scalpel, Zolbo is both a superlative example of the “New Woman” of the early twentieth century – a new-age representation of an independent woman – and an actual witch. The combination of her supernatural powers, alongside of her upper-class, haughty nature, creates a play that establishes a place in the world for a physically strong “New Woman.” Using both magic and physical force, Madame Zolbo proves that strong-willed women can truly be the ones that are in control. She embodies masculinity in the most literal sense as a way to symbolize feminine strength and queer existence.

By taking a finger, a pint of blood, a mole, or even some hair away from a man, Madame Zolbo proves that even queer women can be powerful and successful members of society.

It is important to attend to these overlooked works by Djuna Barnes for a number of reasons, as these plays are early pieces of many of the larger conversations that were happening throughout the early twentieth century. Barnes was challenging social norms regarding the

55 acceptance of queerness, feminism, and dedication to religious institutions. In addition to this, adding Djuna Barnes’s work into the theatrical canon is crucial as an important early twentieth century female writer. Finally, these early closet dramas are vital for analysis of Barnes’s oeuvre as a whole. They serve as stepping stones to her other major works, particularly Nightwood.

There is a major gap in literary criticism and analysis on these pieces, and it is my hope that this thesis has begun to fill that gap.

Looking forward, if I were to continue this project, I would like to do a comprehensive analysis of Barnes’s printed closet dramas in conjunction with the non-fiction journalism and published sketches she was producing at the time these dramas were written. When looking back at published criticism and historical analysis of this wildly interesting and mysterious artist, it is here, in the early 1910s, that her work is most overlooked. With Nightwood being such an unbeatable success, along with her substantially documented years abroad in Paris, and her years of affiliation with the popular Provincetown Players, it makes sense that these are the plays that have been historically overlooked are most in need of attention, and that putting this work into conversation with her other contemporaneous writing could reveal important parallels.

Both A Passion Play and Madame Collects Herself engage the reader and force them to question well-established societal conventions of the early twentieth century. Although Djuna

Barnes was personally loath to be labeled as either a feminist or a lesbian (or queer at all, but at this time it was simply referred to as lesbian), these two plays forward nascent conversations about gender expression, sexual freedom, woman’s rights, and the questioning of religious institutions. In this way, Djuna Barnes’s closet dramas demonstrate her role as a writer and

56 woman who used her skills to help establish a platform for marginalized women – a platform that is still being built today.

57 REFERENCES

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Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. London: Faber & Faber, 2015.

----- Ryder. Lisle, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995.

------"The Superstitions of Sensible New Yorkers." New York Tribune, February 20, 1916.

Bennett, A. G. "Closet Drama." In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Roland Green, Stephen Cushman, and Clare Cavanagh. 4th ed. Princeton University Press, 2012.

Black, Cheryl. The Women of Provincetown, 1915 – 1922. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002.

Broe, Mary Lynn. Silence And Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes. Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.

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61 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Marisa M. Andrews is a Masters student at Florida State University. She is a proud alumna of Ithaca College’s Department of Theatre Arts, where she received her B.A. in Drama. Her research interests include death rituals as performance, twentieth century Russian Drama, theatre and medicine, and performance theory.

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