The Eccentric Work of Djuna Barnes :: Biography Arts

The Eccentric Work of Djuna BarnesIt is precisely Barness relation to literary tradition that so troubles assessments of her work readers do not know where to place her. . . . Although well prize by her contemporaries, Barness work has fallen prey to the same set of certain notions that until very recently informed studies of Gertrude Stein some(prenominal) women have been chastised for universe significantly divers(prenominal) from their Paris colleagues and for failing to master the Modernist enterprise. (Benstock 242-3) It only seems suppress that I begin with this quotation from Shari Benstocks Women of the Left Bank because it immediately situates the unfavourable problem that my own project hopes to illuminate how to begin to approach Barness casing work within a historical context and how to make intellect of the implications of such anomalousities given that context. Her work, even within the diverse body of eccentric modernist texts, stands apart in its uniqueness. Like many modernist texts (i.e. Toomers Cane, Joyces Finnegans Wake, and much of Steins work), Barness work is tough to categorize. Unlike other modernist texts, however, Barness work challenges genre through its mixing of both linguistic and visual image. For example, in texts such as Ladies Almanack and The Book of lewd Women, Barnes uses both text and drawings to depict female sexuality. It is this shifting betwixt modes of representation that will be the emphasis of my project. Through an examination of both her textual and visual art forms, I will argue that Barnes was experimenting in different ways than her contemporaries, ways that radically challenged understandings of gender, identity, and sexuality by suggesting that these categories are unstable, ever-shifting entities. unrivalled of the most important elements in this experimentation was her performance through her shifts between forms and genres, Barnes mimics and performs the very instabilities that she represen ts in those art forms. Much like the fin-de-sicle Decadents with whom she is often linked, Barnes makes aboriginal the trope of transition in her shifts between genres. Indeed, Djuna Barness work is grounded in decadence, and a brief examination of this tradition will help situate her work. French and English fin-de-sicle writers and artists such as Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Max Beerbohm, and Aubrey Beardsley all apply a decadent style in their works. Though many critics pane to the difficulty in defining decadence, they do agree that the style has distinguishing characteristics