Centered Fluidity and the Horizons of Continuity in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood

• Main Author: Sepulveda, Maria C
• Format: Others
• Published: FIU Digital Commons 2012
• Subjects: Djuna Barnes; androgyny; Derrida; Deconstruction; Modernism; Nightwood; sex; gender; feminism; queer theory
• Online Access: http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/746; http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1856&context=etd

Modern writers like Djuna Barnes allow for the post-modern fluidity and explosion of sex and gender without finalizing either in a fixed form. Whereas the classical, archetypal androgyne is made up of two halves, one man and one woman; the deconstructed androgynous figure is not constituted of oppositional terms which would reflect an essential and unimpeachable truth. I reveal the way Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood not only thematizes the fluid androgyne, but also cleverly verbalizes David Wood’s perpetual and un-dischargable “debt” to extra-discursivity while poetically critiquing gender “appropriateness,” societal constraints, and the constitution of identity. Barnes presents a decentralized, ungrounded and non-prescribed world in Nightwood not only through her cross-dressing and androgynous characters, but also in her poetics, her assertion of the open-ended quality of language, and a strong imperative to negotiate our physical existence in a world of fluid gender and sexual boundaries.