The Outside Thing by Hannah Roche;

Author:Hannah Roche;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

5

FROM LESBIAN READING TO BISEXUAL WRITING

Switching Tracks with Djuna Barnes

The very Condition of Woman is so subject to Hazard, so complex, and so grievous, that to place her at one Moment is but to displace her at the next.

—Ladies Almanack (1928)

On or about May 1910, Djuna Barnes’s father and paternal grandmother arranged a “common-law marriage” between the seventeen-year-old Djuna and the fifty-two-year-old brother of her father’s live-in mistress. According to her grandmother, Zadel, Percy Faulkner’s new “bride” had already inherited her family’s gossip-worthy views on “marriage & sex questions.”1 She may or may not have regularly engaged in “sex play” with Zadel, having shared a bed and a “bawdy” correspondence with her throughout her adolescence.2 She may or may not have lost her virginity to her father, or to “an Englishman three times her age with her father’s knowledge and consent.”3 She may or may not have loved her “husband,” whom she went on to leave after only two months but whose first name later reappeared in a pseudonymously published drama: the character of Ellen in “She Tells Her Daughter” (1923) was once “in love with a fellow named Percy.”4

It is startlingly clear, to adopt her own phrasing, that to place Djuna Barnes at one moment is but to displace her at the next. Before so much as a glance at her notoriously challenging writing, it is easy to see why biographers have looked to Barnes’s texts, as critics have looked to Barnes’s life, in their attempts to make sense of “Modernism’s least-understood woman writer.”5 There has, until recently, been a tendency to approach Barnes herself as though she were an impossible novel whose elusive answers may one day present themselves. The apparent irregularities and inconsistencies in Barnes’s childhood alone have been shaped, even by Barnes, into a number of linear narratives of causality, varying in plausibility and value. Was Barnes’s “Lesbianism,” as Barnes reportedly stated, “the consequence of her father raping her when she was a very young girl?”6 Or was the “sex play” between Barnes and Zadel the catalyst for Barnes’s later relationships with women (most notably Thelma Wood, whom Barnes apparently claimed to love “because she looked like her grandmother”)?7 Biographer Phillip Herring’s suggestion that “perhaps the word ‘incest’ is too strong a word for what passed between [Djuna and Zadel], which may have been nothing more than good-natured fondling” (57) begs further, more pertinent, questions. Setting pseudonyms and misnomers aside, what are the “right words” here? Even if nonfictional and personal documents are to be included in Barnes’s oeuvre—Herring observes that “letters should perhaps be read as literary texts” (56)—can it ever be useful to search for a classifiable, “real,” and “readable” Barnes in her writing?

Herring confesses to feeling that “[Barnes’s] textual strategies continued to perform tricks while she hid behind a curtain, smiling at our gropings” (xxi). It is tempting to propose that the mock marriage to Percy Faulkner, which involved a version of a wedding ceremony without clergy, can be read as a precursor to the staging and heteronormative performance that would characterize much of Barnes’s writing.

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