Modernist Women Writers and War

Trauma and the Female Body in Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein

Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780807146613
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Modernist Women Writers and War, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick examines important avant-garde writings by three American women authors and shows that during World Wars I and II a new kind of war literature emerged—one in which feminist investigation of war and trauma effectively counters the paradigmatic war experience long narrated by men.In the past, Goodspeed-Chadwick explains, scholars have not considered writings by women as part of war literature. They have limited "war writing" to works by men, such as William Butler Yeats's poem "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" (1919), which relies on a male perspective: a pilot contemplates his forthcoming flight, his duty to his country, and his life in combat. But works by Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein set in wartime reveal experiences and views of war markedly different from those of male writers. They write women and their bodies into their texts, thus creating space for female war writing, insisting on female presence in wartime, and, perhaps most significantly, critiquing war and patriarchal politics, often in devastating fashion.Goodspeed-Chadwick begins with Barnes, who in her surrealist novel Nightwood (1936) emphasizes the actual perversity of war by placing it in contrast to the purported perverse and deviant behavior of her main characters. In her epic poem Trilogy (1944–1946), H.D. validates female suffering and projects a feminist, spiritual worldview that fosters healing from the ravages of war. Stein, for her part, in her experimental novel Mrs. Reynolds (1952) and her long love poem Lifting Belly (1953), captures her experience of the everyday reality of war on the home front, within the domestic economy of her household.In these works, the female body stands as the primary textual marker or symbol of female identity—an insistence on women's presence in both the text and in the world outside the book. The strategies employed by Barnes, H.D., and Stein in these texts serve to produce a new kind of writing, Goodspeed-Chadwick reveals, one that ineluctably constructs a female identity within, and authorship of, the war narrative.

CHAPTER 1

Circumventing the Circumscription of Marginalization

Implicit Critiques of War and Trauma in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

Djuna Barnes is unable to position war directly within the experience of female characters in her literary output because she did not experience World War I or World War II in the ways that H.D. or Gertrude Stein did and thus could not bear witness like they could in their work. Barnes spent World War I and the majority of World War II in the United States. She left Paris on October 24, 1939 (Barnes, “War in Paris” 269). And yet she captures her horror of the world in the aftermath of World War I in Nightwood (published in 1936 in England and 1937 in the United States) by rendering war, with its aims of injuring and destroying, as a perversion of civilization. When Barnes represents women in connection with war or war-related trauma, she does so by proxies, by analogies, and through allusions. Although she is unable to insert women fully into war episodes or give them agency to talk about war or trauma, Barnes is able to ascribe war knowledge and experience to feminized bodies, mainly in the forms of a homosexual man and various animals.

Nightwood communicates the political problems facing characters who harbor marginal (e.g., homosexual) identities during the years between World War I and World War II. The novel foregrounds the rhetoric of the extermination of difference that would ultimately shape the rhetoric of World War II in regard to homosexual and Jewish identity. These characters suffer from disenfranchisement and trauma, and this interconnected affliction is often couched in war-related terms, metaphors, or stories. In Nightwood Barnes casts war rhetoric and ideology as perverse in their insistence on forming marginal subjects, making them into scapegoats, and rendering them silent. I posit that Nightwood investigates identity politics within the framework of war and war tropes in order to politicize the traumas encountered in the modern world by embodied feminized subjects. The novel positions traumatic episodes within the experience of various subjects that stand in for women. In other words, trauma is experienced by feminized subjects; those subjects are effeminate men, female animals, and an artifact that is inscribed by or points to performances of femininity (i.e., the doll baby). Nightwood offers an embodied response to trauma that can profitably be read through a feminist, poststructuralist lens because Barnes critiques the perverse phallogocentric world that breeds world wars and persecutes and erases difference. A poststructuralist analysis brings this critical subtext of war and trauma to the surface by examining the language constituting textual representations and performances of identity.

The novel follows in surrealistic fashion the lives of several characters and the interactions among them in Paris: Felix Volkbein, Matthew O’Connor, Nora Flood, Robin Vote, and Jenny Petherbridge. Instead of a linear plot progression, Nightwood is mainly made up of stories, confidences, and observations that the characters relate to each other. The first main character introduced is the Jewish Felix, who is an outsider because of his ethnic heritage and his deceitful claim to aristocracy. He is neither a Christian nor a baron, although he purports to be both. The novel opens with Felix spending time in the company of other marginalized people, namely circus performers, O’Connor, and Nora.

O’Connor is a fraudulent gynecologist who assumes the position of confidant for Felix and Nora. He is a World War I veteran, and he is representative of both the subtext and main focus of the novel: war and homosexuality. Nora catches O’Connor dressed in drag in bed, clothed in a nightgown with his face made up and wearing a wig, presumably waiting for sexual services. From that point on there are no barriers between O’Connor and Nora, and they establish a solid friendship, allowing Nora to confide in O’Connor on several occasions. Nora’s confessions to O’Connor constitute therapy: “I’m so miserable, Matthew, I don’t know how to talk, and I’ve got to. I’ve got to talk to somebody. I can’t live this way” (109). To be sure, O’Connor breaks down under the burden of serving as confidant to Felix and Nora: he may not be personally experiencing their trauma, but he empathizes with their pain. Nora’s suffering is a result of her romantic involvement with Robin; she becomes unwittingly and unhappily involved in a love triangle concerning herself, Robin, and Jenny, the details of which become an obsession for Nora and thus the primary subject matter of her conversations and thoughts.

As for Robin, she is a sleepwalker; her trauma is tied to the nightmarish qualities in the chapter titled after her, “La Somnambule,” but the source of her trauma is not stated explicitly, as is the practice of the narrative technique of Nightwood as a whole. Inferences can be made, and critiques are always implicit rather than explicit in the novel. Robin refrains from confiding in anyone, and she is depicted as traumatized (Nora claims that “in her [Robin’s] death . . . she [Robin] has forgotten me” [109]) and metaphorically lost (O’Connor rhetorically asks, “Isn’t it bitter enough for Robin that she is lost somewhere . . . ?” [105]). She wanders the streets at night, self-medicating through sex and alcohol, while Nora waits at their shared home for her to return. Robin seems incapable of healing; she appears damned to wander aimlessly, needlessly hurting her lovers and herself. The novel closes with Robin suffering a breakdown and devolving into an animalistic state, with Nora watching helplessly. Before her breakdown, Robin is briefly married to Felix; she gives birth to their son, Guido, and abandons them both for a relationship with Nora. Robin also has an affair with Jenny, who is referred to as a squatter; Jenny wrongfully moves in on Nora’s girlfriend because she wants what other people have, but she is also obsessed with Robin although hurt by her.

Everyone suffers in Nightwood, and the suffering is invoked by war references and metaphors. World War I is the subtext and context by which the trauma of marginal characters is expressed; war is construed as perverse through the descriptions of battle, casualties, and the subsequent effects on effeminate soldiers (O’Connor and MacClusky) and a female civilian (Robin). Additionally, although Barnes could not have realized the degree to which marginalized people would be persecuted and excised from society during World War II, each character in Nightwood possesses an identity that is already a liability due to racist and homophobic notions that circumscribe the identities of people such as Felix, O’Connor, Robin, Nora, and Jenny. Due to their outsider status, these characters, especially O’Connor and Nora, band together and attempt to work through war and non-war-related trauma in the aftermath of World War I, while Robin, as the shell-shocked civilian, inhabits a world that does not acknowledge her pain and renders her trauma inarticulate for the most part. As such, war is the subtext that frames and informs the representations of trauma in Nightwood.

The characters Barnes presents in Nightwood are all subjects outside of dominant discourses, subjects who befriend each other because of their outsider status. The identities associated with alterity—lesbian, Jewish, transvestite—are perverse (deviant) only in their relation to a truly perverse (corrupt) society that is preoccupied with war and the extermination of difference.¹

A Study in Perversion: War, Trauma, and Exclusionary Politics in Nightwood

Writing to Barnes about Nightwood, T. R. Smith, Barnes’s editor at Boni and Liveright, comments, “It is obvious to me that you tried to do an honest study of perversion but I am afraid you got lost in your studies” (qtd. in Herring 222–23). Nightwood’s “abnormal” style correlates to the grotesque realities encountered by deviant characters in the aftermath of a world war (Carlston 50). The abnormal treatment mimics the subtexts embedded in the novel: the perversity of war and the perversion of exclusionary politics and practices that aim to marginalize, erase, and exterminate difference and feminized responses to trauma.

War constitutes a perverted act in that its aim is to remake a socialized and law-abiding male citizen into a killing machine, as discussed in Elaine Scarry’s criticism. The point that I want to make here, however, is my understanding of war rhetoric and activity as perverse in the insistence on gendered behavior in Nightwood: women are the outsiders, the subjects of alterity who are not allowed to speak about war or articulate war trauma because they are not fully interpellated into texts or discourse communities. They are not acknowledged as subjects who experienced war. Women could not participate in World War I in the way men could because of the gender binaries that divided men from women and prevented the blurring of boundaries pertaining to sexual identity. The realities of war were frightening enough without having sexual identities come completely unhinged: military service “was a male preserve. Women in military uniform were described as ‘aping’ men, which was not encouraged” (Goldman, Gledhill, and Hattaway 16). As a result, women were denied space in war narratives, and their suffering cannot be represented or legitimized in traditional patriarchal war narrative because, while women lived through a war, they did not go to war. Broadly, Nightwood exposes binary oppositions as based in exclusionary politics that are grounded in assumptions about gender and performances of it. Rather than reverse the binary relationships at play in discourses on war and identity, Barnes creates scenes that subtly erode the legitimacy of a simple binary construction to explain or enforce gendered behavior and speech in relation to war.

War informs Nightwood, a novel written between two world wars, to such an extent that I classify it as a war novel. It is very much a novel about trauma, trauma informed by and set against the backdrop of war. When a character asks O’Connor what will happen in the next few years, he replies: “Nothing . . . as always. We all go down in battle and we all come home” (274).² O’Connor may reference soldiers in his use of we, but he also alludes to others like himself: outsiders, people who are made to feel that they do not belong. Among those who are outsiders in Nightwood are O’Connor, a combat veteran who is a transvestite and fraudulent gynecologist (and only went to war to prove his suspect manhood); a shell-shocked lesbian civilian; and displaced Jewish characters. War and alterity are inextricably linked.

Barnes considers war in relation to women in her notes toward her memoir, which was never completed. She ponders the trauma of war on the home front in much the same elliptical fashion that she figures it in Nightwood in relation to Robin and O’Connor’s animal stories. She begins, “It started with a high fever, and it ended with a war” (263). I read the subject as sickness, both personal sickness and a global sickness that manifested war and its perversities. Barnes equates her World War II experience in retrospect with terror, sickness, and entrapment. She contributes an observation concerning women on the home front: “Shaking silently as dogs shake for something that is coming to pass a long way off, knowing the horror of its vibration without exact knowledge of its location. There was not one who had not someone at the front, brother, lover, husband. It was almost impossible to get a doctor, food was said to be guarded against hoarders, matches were giving out, and maids, left in charge of their mistresses’ empty houses, stood without hope at the darkened windows” (“War in Paris” 266). Barnes insists on the presence of women during wartime: suffering and terror-stricken, women continue to manage the domestic economy, even with virtually no resources. As a result, Barnes legitimizes her knowledge of and perspective on war, a move that has been traditionally foreclosed in literary accounts and war memoirs. Expounding upon the gender divide during wartime in a memorable illustration, Barnes paints a picture of hundreds and hundreds of cars in grid-locked traffic: women in cars driving away from Paris and the threat of immediate war and men in cars heading to Paris and war (267). Life on the home front in the prelude to war is validated by Barnes’s personal, albeit limited, witnessing of it, which lends credibility to her gendered account of what war entails for women.

She continues her explanation of life on the home front in the following excerpt from her partially completed war memoir. This passage follows a brief comment on war’s perversities: “Certainly it [fear of death] is maladjustment, but why should a man be adjusted to horror, evil, war, and death? So, though, none of us caught in Paris had seen one dead body, or heard many guns, or suffered any personal attack, neither imprisonment nor loss of men, still the fear was there, and the nerves giving away” (“War in Paris” 268). Barnes emphasizes war as an unnatural business, entrenched in “evil” and exacting death, through her string of associated perversions to which people attempt to become adjusted: “horror, evil, war, and death.” She acknowledges that neither she nor her fellow female civilians have seen war battles, and yet the sheer fear of war’s effects unnerves Barnes to the point of breakdowns. This observation (people should not be adjusting to what is damaging) and acknowledgment (women on the home front/living in occupied Paris suffer from war too) underscore the activity and effects of war as unnatural and perverse. The topics named in the passage also highlight the themes of emotional suffering, mental instability, and fear in Nightwood, all of which mirror states in which Barnes found herself in 1939 while living in Paris.

War is repeatedly referenced in treatments of the othered, feminized characters in Nightwood, but trends in criticism on the novel have yet to embrace it fully as a sophisticated war novel or a novel treating war as subtext, with few exceptions.³ This chapter presents the first comprehensive study of Nightwood as a gendered response to trauma, namely the trauma induced by World War I and contextualized by the identity politics in the years between the two world wars.

Nightwood thus critiques war through its treatment of lives in the shadows of two world wars. But Margaret Bockting surmises that Barnes’s contributions have been excluded from “the war/feminism issue” because of the “sense that her concerns were more personal and private than political” (23). This prejudice resonates with that of sentimental bias: because Barnes locates war’s effects and trauma within the confines of personal female relationships and memories of war recounted by a feminized subject and couched in female models, her work is dismissed as “personal and private” and therefore not “political.” Such a judgment bespeaks ingrained and long-standing bias toward the female (war) writer and leaves no space for acceptance of works that contain traces of sentimentalism or have a woman-centered perspective. Certainly, Nightwood does not mimic the style of sentimentalism; its difficult surrealistic style positions it firmly within the modernist movement, and yet there are sentimental aspects present in Nightwood. The writer Emily Coleman commented about the novel in her diary in 1932: “Most of the book is sentimental shit of the worst kind (Thelma and Fitzie), then these wonderful truths” (qtd. in Barnes, Nightwood viii). Nevertheless, Nightwood makes the personal and private political, albeit in an avant-garde surrealistic manner, in much the same way that H.D.’s Trilogy does.

Nightwood is not only a novel about war and trauma; it also deals with exclusionary, patriarchal politics. Gender roles are attributed to a phallogocentric discourse community within the novel, and Barnes rejects essentialist gender roles, alternatively recognizing gendered behavior as performative. The performative aspects of sexual roles and gendered behavior undermine essentialism as a valid ideological platform in Nightwood because Barnes underscores the arbitrary distinctions inherent in gender roles. She refutes conventional ideas of sexuality and what it means to be a man or a woman. Instead, Barnes introduces main characters, lesbians and a transvestite, who function as commentators on war and trauma through interpersonal relationships. War serves as the extended metaphor for trauma and perversity within the novel. I argue that the purported perverse story of deviant characters engaging in deviant behavior places in relief the actual perversity and corruption of its subtext: war. My objective in examining Barnes’s Nightwood is to undertake an analysis and evaluation of female corporeality in connection with depictions of and responses to trauma in order to “represent women’s bodies from points of views and interests relevant to women themselves,” as Elizabeth Grosz advocates (14). Rather than engage in an essentialist examination, I will instead focus on how female corporeality and identity are represented and accessed by male and female characters and subjects in connection to war. Ultimately, war is construed as dangerous and perverse by the main characters in the novel.

I offer two detailed examples concerning how war is construed as perverse in Nightwood through the perspective of feminized male subjects.⁴ (I discuss O’Connor’s femininity in section 3.) In both examples O’Connor casts war as a perversion of civilization when narrating his war experiences. In the first example O’Connor claims to have resigned himself to his absurd lot as a soldier and explains that he donned a shroud as a result. The other soldiers are appalled at what seems to them a blatant death wish. O’Connor remembers his entry into his regiment: “And out I walked, and would you have seen this regiment! and me perfectly happy smiling over the top of it, like a bird over a hedge. They said, Holy Mother of Mercy! its [sic] a shroud you’ve put on—and the luck of that is too awful to mention!” (270). By putting on a shroud, O’Connor foregrounds the actual objective of battle: injury. He showcases the actual business of war in wearing the shroud and in the process alarms the other soldiers. Yet the unnaturalness of his situation overwhelms him. Unable to fight, O’Connor sits down and cries, with bullets whizzing by him. As he fails in his duties as a soldier, he witnesses the death of a friend; his friend’s throat is ripped through by bullets. To illustrate the perversity of war further, O’Connor’s fellow infantryman lies in a grotesque position after being killed—almost lifelike but not quite. After being shot in the throat, he falls into a sitting position on a tree stump, but his head is thrown back too far, and thus a natural sitting position is only mimicked. It is at this point that O’Connor loses his shroud. Once war marks itself on another’s body, O’Connor no longer needs the shroud to protest the war. In relating his painful war experiences, O’Connor creates a record that indicates and speaks to a feminized body in pain as a result of war.

The second example that positions war as perverse and casts a feminized body in battle involves MacClusky, an effeminate dandy who serves in the same regiment as O’Connor. Barnes makes it clear that MacClusky, the sensitive performer who could act “the dying swan,” has no place in the masculine-coded project of war: he is there because “people got the idea that it would be nice to shoot the world up and take the starch out of a generation.” In his previous life MacClusky enjoys success as an artist performing femininity: smelling like a gardenia, he engages in lyrical dance (“the dying swan”) and circus acrobatics, leaping through hoops and “swishing into the air” (275). Sharing a homosexual identity and a repulsion for the actual work of war, MacClusky finds himself as out of place on the frontlines as O’Connor. Their sex does not translate automatically into masculine-coded behavior. Yet, while O’Connor is treated as a feminine character because he cannot actively participate in war, MacClusky succeeds in an ironic performance of masculinity. His performance is ironic in that he is celebrated as a soldier for his unpredictable feminine response in battle, behavior that ensures an advantage against the enemy:

He’d been standing in the middle of a bridge trying to think where the war was coming from when a douse of Germans loomed up, trying to make the bridge before MacClusky found out, and there he was, the poor frail, gone wild in the center of the pontoon, and instead of shooting—and why should he know one end of a gun from another—he just went all of a fluff, if you can call murder fluff, and swung the heft around and began banging their heads off, and they flew like crazy because even a war has certain calculable reactive processes and this wasn’t one of them, so off they flew, seeing what they thought was a wild man in their midst who had no respect whatsoever for the correct forms of slaughter. So he held the fort, as it were, swinging away with the butt of that thing. (276)

Although male, MacClusky—“the poor frail”—is completely unfit for masculine war business ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Circumventing the Circumscription of Marginalization: Implicit Critiques of War and Trauma in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood
• Chapter 2 Validating Female War Experience through Literary Witnessing: The Poetics of the Poet-Prophet and the Politics of Trauma and Healing in H.D.’s Trilogy
• Chapter 3 A War Heroine in the Domestic Economy: The Embodied Female Survivor in Gertrude Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index