Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction Broken Hearts and Bleeding Wounds – Traumatic Modernism?
- 1 ‘The Excellent Arrangement of Catastrophe’: Witnessing and Performance in The Antiphon
- 2 Djuna Barnes Beside Herself: Mixed Feelings, Sentimental Modernism and Ryder
- 3 ‘The Infected Carrier of the Past’: Nightwood, Shame and Modernism
- 4 ‘That Magic Reiteration’: Ladies Almanack and Happiness
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - ‘That Magic Reiteration’: Ladies Almanack and Happiness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction Broken Hearts and Bleeding Wounds – Traumatic Modernism?
- 1 ‘The Excellent Arrangement of Catastrophe’: Witnessing and Performance in The Antiphon
- 2 Djuna Barnes Beside Herself: Mixed Feelings, Sentimental Modernism and Ryder
- 3 ‘The Infected Carrier of the Past’: Nightwood, Shame and Modernism
- 4 ‘That Magic Reiteration’: Ladies Almanack and Happiness
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Virgin with the Partridge Call,
Stepping her rolling azure Ball,
The Queen, who in the Night turned down
The spikës of her Husband's Crown
Therein to sit her Wench of Bliss
The whole long Year will be like this!
For all the Planets, Stars and Zones
Run girlish to their Marrow-bones!
And all the Tides prognosticate
Not much of any other State!
(Ladies Almanack, 60)No ‘thesis’ on the pleasure of the text is possible; barely an inspection (an introspection) that falls short. Eppure si gaude! And yet, against and in spite of everything, the text gives me bliss.
(Barthes, 1975: 34)From the wider cosmos to street level, from ‘Planets, Stars and Zones’, to ‘Petticoat Lane, just off Breach-String-Alley’, the ladies of Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack inhabit a world defined by joyful ebullience and bodily pleasure (76). The geographical emphasis is important: bliss is not ‘atopic’ as Roland Barthes claims in The Pleasure of the Text (1975), but rather Barnes suggests that happiness is ‘here’ within the very pages of her Almanack (23). Understood as a tribute to the lesbian community of 1920s expatriate Paris, a sapphic roman à clef depicting Natalie Barney and the women who attended her salons at 20 rue Jacob, Barnes's work playfully adopts and adapts the form of an early modern astrological almanac. The Almanack recounts the lifelong exploits of Dame Evangeline Musset – a rakish adventuress generally understood to be based on Barney – but also serves as a mock treatise on lesbian sexuality and woman's pleasure.
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- Information
- Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism , pp. 145 - 181Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2012