Djuna Barnes

In Nightwood, Ryder and The Book of Repulsive Women, Djuna Barnes employs strange, obscene and sometimes disturbing bodily imagery, featuring human-animal hybrids and unconventional outsider figures which destabilise the distinction between desire and disgust in a way that resists linear narrative and ‘wholeness.’ Barnes uses the naturalistic world of animals and plants to produce female bodies opposed to civilised norms and urban reality. Barnes’s natural bodies are disguised with masks and makeup, rendered mindless sleepwalkers and turned into statues, to embody the power-dynamics that constitute civilised, modernist desire. Through masks and clothing, the dirty, original reality of the body is disguised and turned into a commodity to make it acceptable and profitable to society. By turning expressions of individuality into physical objects, Barnes reveals how capitalism mediates all forms of bodily self-expression, denying any individuality that lies outside profitable demographics. Barnes puts bodily imagery to new uses in order to free the abjected, female body from patriarchal (and capitalist) structures of control. Her work is an appropriate end to a discussion of the modernist grotesque, as she reminds us that there can be no conclusive end to either modernism or the grotesque.