Personal Inventory Translated into Poetic Narrative: Djuna Barnes’s Spanish Poupée and the Economy of Desire in Nightwood (1936)
p. 41-56
Résumés
When her life as a Parisian expatriate crumbled, Djuna Barnes wrote to Natalie Barney from her new home in New York, stating which possessions she intended to keep from her Parisian apartment. Worthy of note among the items listed is her Spanish poupée—an object coded with desire both in Barnes’s own life and her novel Nightwood. This doll, shared between Barnes and Thelma Wood, but also characters Robin Vote and Nora Flood, is “the life they cannot have, it is their child, sacred and profane.” The doll is used to explore a variety of female sexualities, enlarging the economy of desire and challenging contemporary heteronormativity. This analysis studies the functioning of the object in Nightwood as a “place marker” for characters. It leads readers to understand that, from her own personal inventory to her roman à clé narrative, Djuna Barnes’s Spanish poupée represents a panoply of female desire.
Lorsque sa vie d’expatriée parisienne s’effondre, Djuna Barnes écrit à Natalie Barney depuis sa nouvelle résidence à New York, en indiquant les biens qu’elle avait l’intention de conserver de son appartement parisien. Parmi les objets recensés figure sa poupée espagnole, un objet de désir codé, à la fois dans la vie de Barnes et dans son roman Nightwood. Cette poupée, partagée par Barnes et Thelma Wood, mais aussi par les personnages Robin Vote et Nora Flood, est « la vie qu’ils ne peuvent pas avoir, c’est leur enfant, sacré et profane ». La poupée est utilisée pour explorer diverses facettes de la sexualité féminine, élargissant l’économie du désir et remettant en question l’hétéronormativité contemporaine. Cette analyse étudie le fonctionnement de l’objet dans Nightwood en tant que « borne de repère » pour les personnages. Elle amène le lecteur à comprendre que, de son inventaire personnel à son roman à clé, la poupée espagnole de Barnes représente une panoplie de désirs féminins.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés : Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, poupée, sexualité, modernisme
Keywords : Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, poupée, sexuality, modernism
Texte intégral
1After her Parisian expatriate life had crumbled, Djuna Barnes wrote to Natalie Barney in April 1933 from her new home in New York, including a four-page typed inventory stating which possessions she intended to keep from her 9, Rue Saint-Romain apartment.1 When she could no longer afford to keep it for herself, Barney, along with others, attempted to help Barnes rent and eventually sell the home she had shared with Thelma Wood. Worthy of note among the items mentioned is her Spanish poupée—an object coded with desire both in Barnes’s own life and in her novel Nightwood (1936). This doll, shared between Barnes and Thelma Wood, but also by characters Robin Vote and Nora Flood, is “the life they cannot have, it is their child, sacred and profane.”2 As named by Shari Benstock, the doll is one of several “dummy” female images3 in the text.4 Together with the character of a trapeze artist, it is used to explore a range of female sexualities, enlarging the economy of desire and challenging the heteronormativity contemporary to the novel’s socio-historical context.
2Djuna Barnes is often labeled as a lesser-known Modernist author but her status can be gaged by the fact that Nightwood has been referred to as a “cult novel” by Stephen Kock in The Washington Post in 1983. In other words, it is the “passion of its readers rather than by a position in the liberal arts curriculum of English departments” that has kept the book in print.5 While her works, especially Nightwood, are reclaimed by the LBGQT+ community, Barnes herself refused to be labeled a Lesbian or even a Feminist.6 She does exhibit a political agenda in the stories she writes regarding freedom of sexuality, but she has also been known to state that she was “writing for herself.”7 Nightwood tells the roman à clé story of the love triangle between Barnes (Nora Roberts), Thelma Wood (Robin Vote), and Henriette Metcalf (Jenny Petherbridge).8 However, it is frequently the character Dr. Matthew O’Connor who steals the show with his rambling monologues, attempting to instruct Nora and readers on matters ranging from love to cultural differences. A story to “experience” rather than follow, Nightwood is, as argued by T. S. Eliot in his introduction, “[a novel] that is so good […] that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.”9 Readers’ reactions are often polarized, and linear critical analysis of the work can prove difficult.
3The interest of Modernist writers for everyday objects has long held the attention of critics. For many readers, the inclusion of the quotidien through household items and personal belongings is, of itself, a characteristic of the movement. Focusing on the object of the doll, how it symbolizes same-sex female desire, and how it is exchanged between women within the novel can help readers understand what has been referred to as the structuring of queer community10 in this text. From the 1980s onward, Nightwood specific scholarship has focused on symbolism, sexuality, and objects. For example, Elisabeth Béranger has offered insight regarding the hidden meaning behind character’s names, and she has furthermore indicated specific intertextual references to Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886). Béranger speaks to James’s character Verena Tarrant as being a poupée mécanique, but she offers no analysis of Barnes’s own dolls.11 Twenty-first century analyses have continued to address the Modernist narrative strategy of objects, as indicated by the essay collections Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes’s Modernism (2020) and Modernist Objects (2020).12 Nevertheless, neither of these volumes include articles with profound analyses of the doll.13 Pender and Setz do offer a reframing of Barnes’s objects by guiding readers to interpret the “shattered,” based upon the author’s own comment: “There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole object, and likewise the surfaces of a fragment are less ‘cheering.”’14 Barnes leaves readers with the impression that, although the text and its shattered objects might not be cheerful or cheering, experiencing them through multiple surfaces and fragments is enriching. This approach is an important one to bear in mind as Robin does indeed smash the doll she shares with Nora, multiplying the object and defying a unified sense or meaning.
4To further the study of the “sacred and profane” object, the present analysis focuses specifically on the doll metonymy of Nightwood, looking at how Djuna Barnes’s personal inventory translates into a poetic narrative. As passages from the text demonstrate, the doll object is working two-fold in the text: it is first a Modernist object migrating through late 19th and early 20th century theatrical, artistic, and sexual contexts to express sexual desire. But going beyond that, within Barnes’s own economy of desire, the doll symbolisms in the novel include representing an “invert” being, a child that two lovers of the same sex cannot have, and a replacement child in an effort to escape imposed maternity. This last point is particularly important as an indicator of Barnes’s anti-maternal writing. If dolls are not consistently present in all works of her corpus, a discourse of challenging imposed motherhood is a recurring theme in Ryder (1928), Nightwood, and the Antiphon (1958).15 Barnes writes repeatedly of the dangers unwanted pregnancy can have on a woman, and the doll exchanges can be considered a model of alternative affective (yet non-physical) maternity. Furthermore, in addition to its effigy function, the doll, along with other toys, serves as a “place marker” for characters. Through a precise ordering of these objects of desire, Nora Flood attempts to build a home for the nomadic flâneuse, Robin Vote. This home, and their doll, is destroyed when Robin shares a different doll with her new lover Jenny Petherbridge. Therefore, Djuna Barnes’s dolls represent a panoply of personal and narrative female desires, offering a model of a self-sustaining economy of desire within a non-heteronormative frame.
Theoretical, Artistic, and Sexual Contexts
5Addressing the question of objects of desire can be facilitated by many theoretical, artistic, and sexual approaches, in particular when the object is that of Djuna Barnes’s doll in Nightwood. While a Lacanian reading of the doll, or even of Robin Vote herself, as the objet petit a of the text’s economy of desire would be feasible, this analysis focuses on a feminist reading of what the doll, a non-penetrable female effigy, has to say about the sexual dynamics and desires running through the novel. Symbolic invert images or “dummy” female images, such as statues or dolls that have a gender but no sex, hold a predominant place in Modernist literature and art: we can find them in works from Ulysses to Nightwood. Furthermore, the term “invert” rather than “lesbian” is often used in the movement to describe characters who are women-loving women. Critical studies, such as Lisa Rado’s The Modern Androgyne Imagination: A Failed Sublime (2000) and Andrea Harris’s Other Sexes: Rewriting Difference from Woolf to Winterson (2000), have looked in detail at the ways in which invert characters are part of the Modernist movement.16
6When it comes to sexual theories contemporary to Djuna Barnes herself, Richard von Krafft-Ebing writes at length about inversion in women in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886).17 In speaking about “female homosexuality” or “uranism,” he offers a simple (if laughable from a 21st century stance) definition of the differences between love and friendship between persons of the same sex: “Since love implies the presence of sexual desire it can only exist between persons of different sex capable of sexual intercourse. When these conditions are wanting or destroyed, it is replaced by friendship.”18 From this perspective, love is based on sexual desire and the physical possibility of sexual intercourse, and as sex is limited to partners of the opposite sex, love is excluded from any type of sentimental aspect within same-sex or invert relationships. This definition of love versus friendship is used to explain to readers that people turn to homosexuality when it is the only option available. Krafft-Ebing offers further telltale signs of female homosexuals, which include wearing short hair, “neglecting” one’s toilet, dressing as a man in daily life or on stage as an actress, engaging in male-dominated sports or activities, preferring science to art, smoking and drinking—almost all descriptions which fit Nightwood’s Robin Vote precisely.19 Krafft-Ebbing’s sexological theories of the invert therefore do not allow for female inversion as a naturally occurring trait, and at best, it is not an active choice on the part of a woman but an option in want for something better.
7For his part, in the Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion (1902), Havelock Ellis posits that it would be ridiculous to think that a female brain could act out of a male body: “It is quite another matter to assert dogmatically that a female soul, or even a female brain, is expressing itself through a male body. That is simply unintelligible.”20 The male body is valued over a female body; whereas Ellis does allow for male tendencies to come from a female body, the male body must only be possessed by a male brain. Djuna Barnes’s Dr. O’Connor challenges this idea with his desire to be a woman. Andrea Harris has even suggested that Barnes parodies these sexologists by having Dr. O’Connor, as a transvestite gynecologist, explain female inversion to Nora.21 While both Matthew O’Connor and Robin Vote serve as examples of the invert, they represent different invert expressions: Matthew “wishes to be a different sex and a different gender” and becomes a woman in a man’s body by dressing as a woman.22 In this way, there is a double parody on the sexologist by Barnes: she challenges his authority through Matthew’s cross-dressing and has the character representing the sexologist live out the spoofed theory of a woman trapped in a man’s body.
8Yet, the type of male-centered sexual system evoked by Ellis is similar to that described by Luce Irigaray in “Women on the Market,” a chapter from This Sex Which is Not One (1976). Even though this feminist theoretical text was written in the 1970s, the comments made within it regarding the concept of woman as commodity prevail in Barnes’s Nightwood. Irigaray sees women functioning as goods traded between men: “The law that orders our society is the exclusive valorization of men’s needs/desires, of exchanges among men. […] The exchange of women as goods accompanies and stimulates exchanges of other ‘wealth’ among groups of men.”23 This statement suggests that it is the male-centered needs and desires which dominate the ways in which society is ordered. When female sexuality is non-existent in culture, women become objects of male sexuality and are traded as goods between men. Furthermore, Irigaray’s over-riding argument comes down to equating exchangeable goods with those that are sexually penetrable. Some Modernist writers counter this male-dominated market by positing just such “invert” objects, including the doll, that are coded with a gender but not necessarily sexually exploitable.
9Speaking of the doll, it is not a banal symbol, as it is mentioned nineteen times in the text. There are philosophically and psychologically joined artistic and sexual practices when it comes to this often-female effigy. Djuna Barnes speaks of her own “Spanish poupée”—a term that relies on code-switching. That is to say, it does not seem to make sense to qualify the doll as “Spanish” when calling it a doll (poupée) in French. Barnes’s 1933 communications with Natalie Barney established it as one of the inventory items she wished to keep from her Rue Saint-Romain apartment, and she mentions it again twice in letters to Barney in 1934, the year after she sent the apartment inventory. In discussing the state of her apartment over a year after sending her inventory, on May 23, Barnes writes: “If I sell it I want some of my furniture, and naturally, my books, pictures and Mss as well as a few things such as my Spanish poupée and griffon etc.”24 This shorter list includes the poupée, thus further demonstrating that it is among Barnes’ prized possessions. Just a few weeks later, on June 16, Barnes returns to the topic of her belongings with Natalie Barney:
I want all the books there, manuscripts, pictures, my Spanish wooden doll, my griffon, a few of the plates, glasses—the long table, the old fashioned paint box affair in the front room, the tip-table, the two upholdstered [sic] chairs, the mirrors and the chandalieres [sic]—in fact you see, I want too much (oh yes, and Mina Loy’s atlas lamp—all quite expensive and impossible!).25
10Specific objects are mentioned in this letter, ranging from furniture to the doll, even including a lampshade made by Mina Loy. This extract gives readers an intimate view of Barnes’s own appreciation for and relationship to her material objects. However, despite her specific references to it, the precise details about Barnes’s acquisition of the doll or her displacements through Spain remain unknown. As the doll is called “Spanish,” readers could imagine it is a flamenco doll. The doll mentioned in Nightwood does wear skirts,26 and it is made of something that can be smashed, such as porcelain, bearing in mind that dolls of that time were also made of wax, papier mâché, cloth, and pressed felt. The famous Fábrica Muñecas Marín, located in Chiclana de la Frontera,27 would conveniently be on the way to Tangier, where Barnes stayed in April 1933 with Charles Henry Ford.28 However, this factory did not open until 1928—towards the end of the Barnes-Wood relationship. Furthermore, it is likely that this Spanish poupée is not a Lenci doll,29 as these dolls were made from pressed felt with painted features. Furthermore, as seen previously, Barnes speaks of it as her “Spanish wooden doll.”30 For the ensemble of these reasons, it seems that there are some technical discrepancies between Barnes’s doll and the one about which she writes.
11In addition to her own personal object, Barnes’s use of the doll was likely informed from literary sources: in “Laughing at Leviticus,” Jane Marcus suggests that E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale “Sand Man” (1816) and its automaton Olimpia may have influenced Barnes, underscoring the “uncanny” nature of the female representations in Nightwood.31 Barnes was not the only modernist artist also undertaking dolls and their symbolisms. A few years prior to the publication of Nightwood, Hans Bellmer was also experimenting with dolls. He created his first doll in 1933, but the series from 1935 is more easily recognized.32 In The Sex Doll: A History, Anthony Ferguson argues that: “The uncanny, eroticized models created by Bellmer in the 1930s differed from the functional sex doll only in that they lacked the necessary orifices for penetration.”33 This observation is important as it underlines the importance of penetrability. Furthermore, he continues:
The Surrealists claimed that Bellmer’s images of the doll were intended to represent a metaphorical attack on the rigid patriarchal regimentation of the Nazi state. The images also illustrate the castration complex, fetishism and the uncanny. A more recent critique suggested that, by breaking his Doll and rearranging its parts in fetishistic, erotically charged ways, Bellmer is at once assuaging his own castration fears and asserting his phallic, “creative force.”34
12These particular dolls, though missing orifices, have become highly sexually charged. Again, just a few years later, in 1938, Man Ray orchestrated the Résurrection des Mannequins, in which artists made over fifteen plastic mannequins, some of which are more sexualized than others, and photographed them.35 Man Ray and Djuna Barnes had met by 1920, so it is conceivable that this dummy image intertextuality within the Modernist movement was shared between them.36 Finally, while the argument here is not that either Barnes’s Spanish poupée or Robin Vote’s dolls are sex dolls, the symbolism of both are inscribed in the literary, artistic, and sexual traditions of Modernist female images. By definition, “[a] sex doll is best described as any object replicating an ideal object of lust with the necessary apertures or attachments to allow for genital penetration.”37 Like the objects of desire on sale in Irigaray’s market, sex dolls are penetrable, whereas Barnes’s dolls are not. Therefore, when they function as objects of desire, that desire is for something other than penetration by a male sexual organ.
The Symbolism of the Doll Object and the Economy of Desire
13The doll in Nightwood is used as a symbol to communicate at least three different desires in the text: 1) that for the “invert” or androgynous or homosexual being; 2) the child that two lesbians cannot have; and 3) the desire to escape from an imposed hetero-normative sexuality and maternity. Readers are presented with the sexless “invert” state as an alternative to imposed heterosexuality or as an alternative to being passed from person to person as an object of desire. The narrative description of the trapeze artists early on in the text places emphasis on her costume, and how it renders her sexless:
The stuff of the tights was no longer a covering, it was herself; the span of the tightly stitched crotch was so much her own flesh that she was as unsexed as a doll. The needle that had made one the property of the child made the other the property of no man.38
14This description alludes to the idea of the openings of the trapeze artist’s vagina having been sewn shut, rendering her sexless. There is a certain liberty that goes along with the failure to reproduce or be penetrated. If the trapeze artist is sexless, she will not be desired as property by men, thus she will be excluded from the marché des femmes mentioned earlier.39 On the other hand, the trapeze artist is considered dead or dying because she cannot reproduce. This is not an easy message to decipher or accept—women are either sexual objects based in male desire, or they are non-penetrable, and thus non-reproductive and dead/dying. The trapeze artist represents an unobtainable female object of desire, who herself lacks agency to express her own sexual desire.
15Almost a doll herself, the trapeze artist foreshadows the other dolls of the text. The ensuing doll symbolism is complex: itself an invert image, the doll is the infertile result of an invert relationship. Robin is in the habit of giving dolls to her female lovers to symbolize the child they cannot have: it is in this way that Nora realizes Robin is cheating on her with Jenny:
[…] I went to see Jenny. […] The walls had mustard-coloured paper on them as far as the salon, and something hideous in red and green and black in the hall, and away at the end, a bedroom facing the hall-door, with a double-bed. Sitting up against, the pillow was a doll. Robin had given me a doll. I knew then, before I asked, that this was the right house, before I said, “You are Robin’s mistress, aren’t you?”40
16Nora recognizes the doll in Jenny’s bedroom as similar to the one Robin gave her—this symbol of female desire reveals Robin’s betrayal. A few paragraphs later, Nora returns to the doll object:
I kept thinking, what else is it that is hurting me; then I knew—the doll; the doll in there on the bed. […] “We give death to a child when we give it a doll—it’s the effigy and the shroud; when a woman gives it to a woman, it is the life they cannot have, it is their child, sacred and profane; so when I saw that other doll—” Nora could not go on. She began to cry.41
17This passage indicates a shift between the child’s reception of the doll and that of the two adult women, but both are meanings of female sexuality circulating within the text. Offering a doll to a child potentially condemns her to an enforced maternity, thus putting an end to her own life. When exchanged between two adult women, the doll is the symbol of life they cannot physically reproduce together. Employing another binary dichotomy, Nora says the doll is both sacred and profane. As metonymy for their sexuality, the doll is sacred within the economy of desire of the text created by Barnes—women’s wants of and from other women. Yet this doll is also profane, especially when viewed from the heteronormative perspective outside the narrative, as it is a blasphemy of symbolized reproduction between two female beings who elude a physical, painful motherhood and birth (such as that of Robin for her real baby, Guido). The doll is the object of desire shared between two women, two times in the text.
18Dr. O’Connor picks up on the doll as an invert symbol and explains how it is an image of the third sex:
Have not girls done as much for the doll?—the doll—yes, target of things past and to come? The last doll, given to age, is the girl who should have been a boy, and the boy who should have been a girl! The love of that last doll was foreshadowed in that love of the first. The doll and the immature have something right about them, the doll because it resembles but does not contain life, and the third sex because it contains life but resembles the doll. The blessed face! It should be seen only in profile, otherwise it is observed to be the conjunction of the identical cleaved halves of sexless misgiving!42
19This passage is situated in the text after the point where Nora has claimed the doll as the symbolic child of a lesbian relationship. The doll is the target of past and future desires and relationships. Loving the sexless doll will result in loving an invert, or a sexually reversed person, as in Nightwood, it is the invert or bisexual being of Robin that inspires love on Nora’s and Jenny’s parts for the sexless doll (both the doll given by Robin and Robin as a doll herself). There are occasions, however, where it is a human character that occupies the invert position. Robin Vote is frustrated at denying her own physical sexuality just to occupy a safer position that lets her control her destiny, and finds this invert position as unacceptable as that of the doll and trapeze artist.
20Finally, the doll is paralleled with Robin’s real human baby, Guido, to portray the image of a mother who denies her maternity and wishes to escape it: “One night, Felix, having come in unheard, found her standing in the center of the floor holding the child high in her hand as if she were about to dash it down, but she brought it down gently.”43 Robin either had the intention to hurt the child or seemed to have the intention to hurt the child—either of which are not signs of maternal uprightness. Nonetheless, it is not only her physical child, the result of her heterosexual relationship, which Robin wishes to kill and escape—she also destroys the doll that represents her lesbian relationship with Nora:
Sometimes, if she got tight by evening, I would find her standing in the middle of the room, in boy’s clothes, rocking from foot to foot, holding the doll she had given us—“our child”—high above her head, as if she would cast it down, a look of fury on her face. And one time, about three in the morning when she came in, she was angry because for once I had not been there all the time, waiting. She picked up the doll and hurled it to the floor and put her foot on it, crushing her heel into it; and then, as I came crying behind her, she kicked it, its china head all in dust, its skirt shivering and stiff, whirling over and over across the floor, its blue bow now over, now under.44
21The violence of this scene surpassing that of the birth scene earlier in the text,45 Robin has decapitated her symbolic child with fervor. The doll is “shattered,” and it now exists as multiple surfaces. Much like the gesture she adopted with Guido, she holds the doll up high before smashing it down. Barnes’s imagery here is remarkable, as readers imagine the headless doll rolling over the floor, still humanized through the personification of its “shivering skirt.” This representation demonstrates how Robin is unwilling to be anchored through a real child, or a symbolic one, to a relationship she no longer wants. When the desire behind the doll is no longer there, there is no reason for the doll to “live.” These three types of doll symbolisms—the invert, the symbolic child, and anti-maternal angst—parallel Jane Marcus’s description of how the themes of the text converge: “circus performer = doll = lesbian.”46 This simple formula summarizes the female-gendered, non-penetrable objects of desire in the novel.
22After this identification and analysis of the dolls in Nightwood, readers need to understand how they go beyond symbols to contribute to the economy of desire in the text. The dolls, in addition to other intimate objects accumulating in the “museum of their encounter,”47 are used to mark territory by creating landmarks of daily life and keep a jealous lover’s eye on Nora. Among the many particularities that make up Robin’s character, she is a flâneuse: she travels all across Paris and Europe in an effort to escape imposed societal norms and heteronormativity, while at the same time “repeating her wish for a home.”48 By purchasing an apartment in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, Nora does her best to anchor Robin by her side, and she uses the objects they have collected together that “attested to their mutual love, the combining of their humours”49 in an effort to mark out Robin’s territory and keep her in place:
When the time came that Nora was alone most of the night and part of the day, she suffered from the personality of the house, the punishment of those who collect their lives together. Unconsciously at first, she went about disturbing nothing; then she became aware that her soft and careful movements were the outcome of an unreasoning fear—if she disarranged anything Robin might become confused—might lose the scent of home.50
23By alluding to the “scent of home,” this passage foreshadows Robin’s eventual metamorphosis into a dog-like being at the end of the text, underscoring her animalistic nature.51 Just as an animal might “mark” territory with a scent, the intimate objects shared between the two women symbolizing their relationship are used to set up a perimeter for Robin; however, this ordering of objects as a security measure to keep Robin at home and not wandering about is unsuccessful.
24As much as Nora tries to control Robin with the ordering of material objects and a mutual shared desire for them, Robin also expresses her desire for Nora through a possessive jealousy. Indeed, in one of Nora’s confessions to Dr. O’Connor, readers learn that Nora is equated with Robin’s other “playthings” and closely watched:
“Sometimes,” Nora said, “she would sit at home all day, looking out of the window or playing with her toys, trains, and animals and cars to wind up, and dolls and marbles and soldiers. But all the time she was watching me, to see that no one called, that the bell did not ring, that I got no mail, nor anyone hallooing in the court, though she knew that none of these things could happen. My life was hers.”52
25The list of toys is striking in this passage—making it possible to see Robin as a child, yet readers are well aware of her violent nature and ability to manipulate. The types of toys mentioned underscore Robin’s androgyny: in addition to dolls, there are also toys associated with boys, like cars and soldiers. By playing with her objects while watching Nora with a jealous eye, there is a transfer of the desire to own, possess, and handle from the toys to Nora. At the same time, Nora portrays herself as the victim of Robin’s jealousy, acquiescing in the end that “my life was hers”—indicating that in order to possess Robin herself, she agreed to let Robin possess her. In this way, each lover seems to be objectified by the other, becoming one of the objects of desire in the closed economy of Nightwood’s Parisian lesbian love triangle.
26Dolls are not trivial toys for either the Modernist movement or Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. Like many other Modernist writers and artists, Barnes is testing out theories of different sexualities and gendered positions through the use of a personal object. Although the precise details of the acquisition of her own poupée may never be discovered, the doll imagery in the novel provides a means for evoking the desire for inverts, symbolic exchanges between non-reproductive couples, and a means of escape from imposed heteronormative maternity. If Barnes is following a literary trope from the end of the 19th century through to the Modernist period, she is also transposing multiple layers of female-based desire onto the doll. In this way, she has taken the Modernist doll to a new level of meaning that goes beyond its representation of sexual potential of penetration by a male. By relying on the ordering of objects within a domestic space to maintain desire within a couple, Nora and Robin demonstrate the setting up of a lesbian household, based on the one established by Djuna and Thelma in the mid-1920s. This short period would be the only one of domestic co-habitation for Barnes. She lived the last forty years of her life alone and in isolation, an arrangement that Shari Benstock has described as a choice on Barnes’s part, “a self-imposed censorship of sexuality and speech.”53 Following Barnes’s Spanish poupée in her life and letters from Rue Saint-Romain (Paris) to Patchin Place (New York), has made it possible for readers to understand the expression of alternative female sexualities through this object of desire.
Notes de bas de page
1 Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Fonds Natalie Barney.
2 Barnes, D., Nightwood [1936], New York, New Directions Press, 1961, p. 142.
3 Benstock, S., Women of the Left Bank, Austin, Texas UP, 1986, p. 260.
4 From the very introduction of Nightwood, T. S. Eliot also refers to the concept of the “dummy” as a fake person in contrast to a real one: “Indeed, such a character as Doctor O’Connor could not be real alone in a gallery of dummies: such a character needs other real, if less conscious, people in order to realize his own reality. I cannot think of any character in the book who has not gone living in my mind” (xiv, emphasis added). Feminist critics have pursued the “dummy” image as it refers to non-penetrable female symbols.
5 Kock, S., “‘Nightwood’ and the legend of Djuna Barnes”, The Washington Post, June 12, 1983, n.p.
6 Herring, P., Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes, New York, Penguin, 1995, p. 255. See Gillespie, M., “‘The Triumph of the Epicene Style’: Nightwood and Camp,” Miranda, no. 12, 2016, https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/8634, consulted 15 June 2020, for further analysis on Dr. O’Connor and camp.
7 O’Neal, H., “Life is Painful, Nasty & Short...In my Case it has only Been Painful & Nasty”: Djuna Barnes 1978-1981, New York, Paragon House, 1990, p. x.
8 Herring, P., op. cit., p. 162.
9 Barnes, D., op. cit., p. xii.
10 Pender, E., and Setz C. (eds.), Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes’s Modernism (Refiguring Modernism), University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020, p. 16.
11 Béranger, É., “‘Nightwood’ ou du sexe d’une belle indifférente,” Revue française d’études américaines, novembre 1986, no. 30, Les femmes écrivains aux États-Unis /American Women Writers, p. 437-448.
12 Pender, E., and Setz, C., (eds.), op. cit.; Cuny, N., and Kalck, X., (eds.), Modernist Objects, Clemson, SC, Clemson University Press, “Seminal Modernisms,” 2020.
13 In “From Eggbeaters and Alcohol to Gryphons, Dolls, and Puppets: The Affective Mobilities of Djuna Barnes’s Objects,” Pavlina Radia focuses on how Barnes uses objects as affective spaces. She suggests readers not limit their interpretations of the work to purely biographical ones, but rather that they open up their understanding to include the modernist aesthetic of materiality. Radia privileges intertextual references with marketing texts contemporary to Barnes rather than a precise reading of objects such as the doll.
14 Letter from Djuna Barnes to Emily Coleman, November 8, 1935, cited in Pender and Setz (eds.), op. cit., p. 1.
15 See Wells, A., “Anti-Maternal Rewriting in Ryder: Djuna Barnes’s Feminist Twist on Chaucer,” in E. Épinoux and N. Martinière (eds.), Rewriting in the 20th–21st centuries: Aesthetic Choice or Political Act?, Paris, Michel Houdiard, 2015, p. 107-120.
16 Harris, A., Other Sexes: Rewriting Difference from Woolf to Winterson, New York, New York University Press, 2000, p. 65, p. 74. Rado, L., The Modern Androgyne Imagination: A Failed Sublime, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 2000, p. 13.
17 Krafft-Ebing, R., Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct [1886], trans. F. S. Klaf, New York, Arcade Publishing, 1998.
18 Ibid., p. 8.
19 Ibid., p. 263.
20 Ellis, H., and Symonds, J. A., Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition [1902], New York, Palgrave, 2008, p. 202.
21 Harris, A., op. cit., p. 64.
22 Barnes, D., op. cit., p. 79.
23 Irigaray, L., This Sex which is not One [1977], translated by C. Porter with C. Burke, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 171, p. 172. Original text: “La loi qui ordonne notre société, c’est la valorisation exclusive des besoins-désirs des hommes, et des échanges entre eux... L’échange des femmes comme biens accompagne et stimule les échanges d’autres ‘richesses’ entre les groupes d’hommes.” Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1977, p. 168-169.
24 Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Fonds Natalie Barney.
25 Loc. cit.
26 Barnes, D., op. cit., p. 148.
27 Sweettoy, “Musée des poupées Marín,” 7 April 2011, Piraita (photography website), https://piraita.com/el-museo-de-munecas-marin/. Consulted 20 avril 2022.
28 Herring, P., op. cit., p. xxv. Barnes’s trip to Tangiers ended in June 1933 when she had to return to Paris for an abortion. The doll could have even been purchased on the return trip, but there is no proof it has a direct relation to the abortion.
29 https://lenci-dolls.com/. Consulted 20 April 2022.
30 Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Fonds Natalie Barney.
31 Marcus, J., “Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic,” in M. L. Broe (ed.), Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1991, p. 240.
32 Hans Bellmer’s La Poupée is part of the Centre Pompidou collection and may be viewed at the museum website: https://www.centrepompidou.fr/cpv/resource/c7pGEXq/rajq76n. Consulted 15 June 2020.
33 Ferguson, A., The Sex Doll: A History, Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2010, Kindle edition, location 335.
34 Ibid., location 358-361.
35 The photographs taken in 1938 were re-released in a book published in 1966. The series may be viewed at the J. Getty Museum website: http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/33171/man-ray-resurrection-des-mannequins-american-1966/. Consulted 15 June 2020.
36 Burke, C., “‘Accidental Aloofness’: Barnes, Loy, and Modernism,” in M. L. Broe (ed.), op. cit., p. 68.
37 Ferguson, A., op. cit., location 144.
38 Barnes, D., op. cit., p. 13.
39 See Irigaray, L., op. cit., p. 168.
40 Barnes, D., op. cit., p. 140.
41 Ibid., p. 142.
42 Ibid., p. 148.
43 Ibid., p. 48.
44 Ibid., p. 148.
45 Ibid., p. 48.
46 Marcus, J., op. cit., p. 247.
47 Barnes, D., op. cit., p. 56.
48 Ibid., p. 55.
49 Loc. cit.
50 Ibid., p. 56.
51 Ibid., p. 169.
52 Ibid., p. 147.
53 Benstock, S., op. cit., p. 267.
Auteur
-
Amy D. Wells
Maître de conférences, université de Caen Normandie
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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