Displacing Castration: "Nightwood, Ladies Almanack", and Feminine Writing Author(s): Frann Michel Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol.

30, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), pp. 33-58 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208423 Accessed: 22/03/2010 06:54
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DISPLACING CASTRATION: NIGHTWOOD, LADIES ALMANACK, AND FEMININE WRITING Frann Michel

The very Condition of Woman is so subject to Hazard, so complex, and so grievous, that to place her at one Moment is but to displace her at the next. -Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack In "woman" I see something that cannot be represented, something that is not said, something above and beyond nomenclatures and ideologies. -Julia Kristeva, "Woman Can Never Be Defined"

Djuna Barnes's "place"in literary history is, with a perverse appropriateness, as equivocal as her writings. In 1928 her novel Ryder was, briefly, a best seller, but like her other work, it is now unfamiliar to the public. Her 1936 novel Nightwood, boosted by an introduction by T. S. Eliot, has achieved some critical recognition, chiefly for its remarkable style, but has found no home in the academic curriculum. And although in recentyears many feminist criticshave begun to accord Barnes increasingattention, remarkablylittle has been said of her intricate explorations of gender, particularly notable in Nightwood and the more obscure 1928 work Ladies Almanack. Thus while Barnes's style has been sporadically praised, her critique of gender has been largely ignored, and the connections between them have been persistently neglected.1
'Publication information on Barnes's workscan be foundin Messerli; on Ladies see 3-7; on Nightwood, see 12-15.Recentfeminist to the critical Almanack, exceptions workincludeBenstockand Broe, both of whoseworkscameto neglectof Barnes's availablestudiesof my attentionafter this essaywas completed.Othernoteworthy areFrank's formalist Allen's andSinger's rhetoriNightwood reading, stylistic analysis, cal study. Plumb providesan evenhanded readingof LadiesAlmanack,90-102. I
0010-7484/89/0001-0033 $1.50/0 Contemporary Literature XXX, 1 ?1989 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

The variousformalismsby whichone may decipherthe stylistic of Barnes'sworkstend to bracketquestionsof cultural peculiarities issuesof gender.But Barnes's of gender content,including inscriptions and sexualitybecome more accessiblewhen one notices that Barnes that writerson the femininethe assertion shareswithpoststructuralist Womanhas no single,stableplacebut ratheris multiple,indefinable, and thought. outside or beyond orderedsystemsof representation Helene Cixous notes that the dominantmodes of symbolicdiscourseare organizedby binaryoppositions:active/passive,culture/ nature,logos/pathos,Man/Woman ("Sorties" 90-91).As AliceJardine of an imitation the "confirms itself observes,representation possibility basedon the dichotomyof presenceand absence" (60). For (mimesis) all of thesecouples,the firsttermis valorized.Thusthoughtin patriarchalsociety is focused throughsameness:becausethe opposition difference Man/WomandefinesWomanonly as not-Man,Woman's elsewhere. Cixoussuggeststhat masculine/feminine remainsradically is the foundingcouplein the dominant symbolicorder,whichcanthus be designatedmasculine. For Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray,order itselfso thatthe feminine coherence, unity,identity-is codedas masculine, is not anotheridentitybut nonidentity.With the authorityof unity the feminine becomesnonauthoritative, and ordercodedas masculine, Since Woman functions in the or of disruptive authority mastery. masculinesocioculturaleconomy as the gift, and she who is given, a stableplace,cannotfullybe accommocannotbe assigned exchanged, to the masculine datedor assimilated economy,sheis seenas disruptive term for all that is disruptive becomes the indeed of, orderedand of, of orderingsystems, includingsystems gender.2 in their work, Despite numerousand significantdissimilarities Kristeva,Irigaray,and Cixoussharethe view that the feminine'sdisruption, disordering,of a repressiveand oppressiveorder is potenCixousnotesthat psychoanalytic theoryprovidesthe tiallyliberating. alibi for the founding of the dominantorder of symbolicdiscourse in the couplemasculine/feminine theory 93). Psychoanalytic ("Sorties"
am substantially in agreement with Lanser's excellent essay, though the focus of my essay differs from that of hers. For a brief discussion of Nightwood and Ladies Almanack in the context of a history of lesbian literature,see Faderman364-65. Barnes has found a place in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women; the editors observe in the headnote to the selection that critics have found Barnes's work "elusive" (Gilbert and Gubar 1569). 2On woman's function as the gift, see Rubin 173-77; Irigaray, "Women on the Market," in This Sex 170-91, and "'Goods"' passim; and Derrida, Spurs 121.

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depends for the security of this foundation on the notion of woman as a castrated man (or as lacking the lack, the phallic passkey to language: for Lacan, The Woman does not exist). The inadequacy and consequent instability of this definition of Woman thus puts her in a subversively exterior relation to the system it supports. In this view, syntactical, ordered, representational writings, that is, most, if not all, extant writings, are masculine. In naming a writing "feminine," we would call attention to the ways it inscribes Woman's exteriority and continue its implicit project of subverting existing systems of signification, the phallogocentrism they signify, and the patriarchythat phallogocentrismsupports.3In such a spirit I will argue that Ladies Almanack and Nightwood inscribe and foreground the contradictionsof gender definitions, questioningthe myth and the symbolic structure of castration and displacing masculine language with a woman's writing. Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristevadiffer on just how feminine writing would inscribe Woman's exteriority. Cixous stresses the importance of releasing from the masculine economy the heretofore repressed female unconscious by writing female sexual pleasure.4 Irigaray, too, focuses on the masculine sociocultural economy, with its structure of sameness and singleness and consequent exclusion of the multiplicity of specifically female sexuality. She suggests that the disruption of this phallogocentric system is to be achieved from within, by the feminine entering it through a "playful repetition," a kind of parodic or ironic mimesis (This Sex 76). According to Kristeva, the feminine occurs in language in the semiotic, which becomes apparent when discourse is guided by the sound values of words rather than by their logical, symbolic signification in the order of the sentence. The eruption of the semiotic into the symbolic would subvertexisting systems of signification;by disrupting syntax, logical system, and the practiceof representation,such feminine writing would disrupt the patriarchal order of phallogocentrism. Thus while Cixous implies the possibility of a feminine affirmation, Kristeva sees writing the feminine as an inherently negative practice, a rejection of "everythingfinite, definite, structured, loaded with meaning, in the existing state of society," a continual process of
3Certainly, nonlinear, disruptive, fragmentary, experimental texts can be made to support reactionary, patriarchal politics; one would not designate such writing "feminine."In this essay, I am concerned with the ways a woman writer makes formal dislocations emphatically feminine by using them to explore conceptual disruptions. 4Cixous, "Laugh,"e.g., 256. Cixous also places particularemphasis on the importance of body, a concern which is outside the scope of this essay.

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saying "that'snot it" and "that'sstill not it" ("Oscillation" 166; "Woman" 137). While Cixous stressesthe importance for women of "the 'mother' as nonname and as source of goods" ("Laugh"251), Kristeva states:
If the archetype of the belief in a good and pure substance, that of utopias, is the belief in the omnipotence of an archaic, full, total, englobing mother with no frustration, no separation, with no break-producingsymbolism (with no castration, in other words), then it becomes evident that we will never be able to defuse the violences mobilized through the counterinvestmentnecessary to carrying out this phantasm, unless one challenges precisely this myth of the archaic mother. ("Women's Time" 29)5

Where Cixous sees a possibility of reuniting word and object and, like Irigaray, rejects the notion of castration (which both consider in a primarily physical sense), Kristeva emphasizes the need to refute the possibility of such a reunion, to accept the notion of the symbolic or metaphorical castration of all subjects. Designating as "castration" this split that marks entry into the symbolic both stabilizesthe symbolic and calls attention to Woman's exclusion from it (since, in Lacan's view, women lack the lack). Kristeva'sview, as well as Cixous's and Irigaray's,postulates feminine writing as distinct or distinguishable from masculine writing. Yet deconstructive theory and practice demonstrate that order, the coherence of system, is always illusory. Any text, examined closely enough, will reveal an uncertainty, an undecidability, an aporia. If feminine writing displays this uncertainty more readily than does masculine writing, still the difference is not qualitative; it depends ratherupon how far one is, so to speak, standing from the text. Appropriately, then, any possible example of feminine writing must be questionable, must be resistant to categorization even as feminine writing. An examination of the idea of feminine writing thus betrays both the hegemony of sameness and the fluidity of determinate boundaries. Nonetheless, some writing seems more readily to undercut its own authority, to challenge the idea of order and the order of its own language. Feminine writing, with its disruptions of conventional or expected order, its word play, parody, attention to language and the materiality of language, sounds like what is usually described as modernist writing or the writing of modernity. The frequency with which Joyce, for instance, is cited as an example would seem to confirm
5Irigaraywrites, "forgive me, mother, I prefer a woman," suggesting that the mother is part of, rather than a way out of, the masculine economy (This Sex 209).

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that feminineand modernistwritingare, if not synonymousterms, in the workof Mikhail at least overlapping categories.Alternatively, orders(specifically of genre Bakhtin,that whichdisruptshierarchical but also, by implication,any hierarchical systemin writing), ordering that whichis multiple,undefinable,parodicis the novel or novelized and "modernist" can be usefulterms:each Both "novelized" writing.6 linked a is to a particular code;eachraises particular complexof issues. Thus in a literary-historical study, one mightreferto such writingas in a genre study or a study of the languagesof a work "modernist"; The term or works, one mightdesignatesuch writingas "novelized." of "feminine the problematic issues genderand writing" foregrounds sexuality,examiningthem throughthe matrixof language. But whilethe ideas of the feminineand femininewritingmay be criticallyuseful, theirusefulnessfor feministcriticismis not initially evident. Naming that which subvertsthe conceptualcouple Man/ or "the feminine"retains Womanor masculine/feminine"Woman" the terminology andthus muchof the forceof the binaryordercalled masculine.ThoughWoman,the feminine,is not to be confusedwith women,femalehumanbeings,thereis, for instance,as Irigaray points in discourse, the valuesrecognized andthose between out, a "complicity admittedfor sexuality.Thesevaluesare, in fact, the same"("Women's of discoursewhichrepresses Womanhas its Exile"66). The structure in is out the structure of the sociocultural indeed, played counterpart, economywhichoppresseswomen. In valorizingWomanas the figure radical of disorder, andreinnonidentity, alterity,one risksreasserting associations whichhave fundedpatriarchy and forcingthe traditional have been used as justificationsfor the oppressionof women, since a merereversalof value can only "repeat the traditionalscheme,""in which the hierarchyof duality is always reconstituted" (Derrida, 71; see also Jardine64). Radicallyto changethis, "Choreographies" or generaldeformato Derrida,requires "atransformation according tion of logic" ("Choreographies" Deconstructive 72). activity can deformlogic,ordering but nonetheless it cannotfullyextirpate systems, thesesystems;as RolandBarthesnotes, "acode cannotbe destroyed, that work on only 'playedoff" ("Death" 144). Cixousacknowledges and of the femininehas just begun;she looks toward"another time whenthe "general (in two or threehundred years?)" logic of difference
6See Bakhtin's "Epic and Novel." One might also note Roland Barthes's categories of the text of pleasure and the text of bliss, discussed in The Pleasure of the Text 19, 21-22.

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would no longerfit into the oppositionthat still dominates," but she does note that "we are still flounderingabout-with certainexceptions-in the Old order"("Sorties" 96, 97). Withinthis old order,the distinction between Womanandwomen itself poses a problemfor feministcriticsand thinkers.Despite the thatthe repression of Womanoppresses women,the terms implication because the feminine has beenrepressed, cannotbe conflated,precisely on the femiwhilefemales,by most accounts,do exist.Thoughwriters nine at times suggestthat womenare closerto the femininethan men in masculinediscourse, are,7womenare also, as subjectsconstructed at leastpotentially masculine. Thus, Cixousasserts,"tobe signedwith a woman'snamedoesn'tnecessarily makea pieceof writingfeminine" opposi("Castration" 52). Since,however,the schemeof hierarchical tion still dominates,divorcingthe genderof the text from the gender of of the authorimplicitlysanctionshistory's neglectand devaluation writingby women. Indeed, many of the writersmost often cited as havingproducedfemininetexts (for example,Joyce, Artaud,Genet) are male.8 conClearly,then, ideasof femininewritingdo not in themselves stitute a feminist criticism.Femininewriting has not yet liberated Cixousrefers the "exceptions" womenandmen fromphallogocentrism; withinthe old order. MaryJacobusnotes that to are contextualized "tolabela textas thatof a woman,andto writeaboutit for thatreason, makes vividlylegible what the criticalinstitutionhas eitherignored or acknowledged only underthe sign of inferiority.Weneedthe term 'women'swriting'if only to remindus of the social conditionsunder whichwomenwroteand still write"(39). The Womanhas no essence, no essential nature,but womendo occupyparticularized placeswithin the social structure.Womencan write as women withoutwritingas Woman. Yetthe systemof thoughtfoundedon the dualismof masculine/ feminineexertsgreatpower.For instance,the notionthatWomanhas no place in languagemay be a symbolicor theoreticalexpressionof the forcesthat also give riseto whatSandraGilbertand SusanGubar have calledwomen's"anxietyof authorship" 49). Con(Madwoman
7See, for example, Cixous: "woman must write woman" ("Laugh" 247); and Kristeva: "in social, sexual, and symbolic experiences, being a woman has always provided a means to another end, to becoming something else: a subject-in-the-making, a subject on trial" ("Oscillation" 167). 8See, for example, Kristeva, "Woman"138; and Cixous, "Sorties"98 and "Laugh" 249 n. 3 and 255-56.

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sequently,becauseof this power, becauseof the complicitybetween systems of discursiverepressionand systems of social oppression, women writersare likely to engagewith the order of discoursethat excludesthem. In Nightwood, Barnesengageswith the view of The a possible Womanas nonexistentwithinthe symbolicby representing Womanwithin that order. As it is in Kristeva's view, castrationin Nightwood is symbolicor metaphorical,an expressionof the sharp definitionaldivision that marks entry into the masculinesymbolic. LadiesAlmanack, however,like the works of Cixous and Irigaray, as a physical"fact,"as a reference engageswiththe mythof castration to the idea that the female body is a mutilatedversion of the male body, and thus that Womanis simplyan inadequateversionof Man (Freud253). Barnes'sengagementwith the order of discoursethat would excludethe woman writerplaces her both inside that order, to the extentthat she confrontsits termsand myths, and outside it, would in the act of engagement to the extentthatherpositionas subject be impossiblewithin such an order. The contradictory positioningof the woman writerboth inside in the "place" of femifindsa correlative and outsidephallogocentrism and "thefeminine"are terms for that which nine writing."Woman" is excludedfrom the symbolicorder;yet they functionas termsand ideas within that order. Examiningthe femininein the works of a canthusrevealthe effectsof the womanwriter's womanwriter engagement with a masculine-oriented language. Both Ladies Almanackand Nightwood are stylisticallyunconas femininity. Thoughboth ventional,andwe canreadtheirmodernity extheir works are to some extent representational, representations issuesof genderdefinitionby dealingwithhomoplicitlyproblematize LadiesAlmanackparodiesseveralgenresof mascusexualcharacters. line languageand severaldefinitionsof Woman, thus undermining the notion of the masculine and masculine meaning as singular. withthe mythof physicalcastration, Further,throughits engagement the notion of sexual differenceas a the work blatantlyundermines singulardifference.In contrast,Nightwoodmore subtlyundermines and the notions of a singlesexualdifferenceand of a simple"inside" BecauseNightwoodexploitsratherthan "outside" of representation. and practicesof linearnarrative activelydisruptsmasculine-oriented we can read the work both as a novel and as a kind representation, of allegory of the feminine. The indeterminacyof that allegory, of the feminineas the feminine, however, enables a representation to the masculineorder. unassimilated

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The two works' differing relations to the masculine-orientedviews they engage may help account for the differing critical reactions they have evoked. Ladies Almanack more fully disrupts the masculineoriented views it engages, as its multiple forms more fully disrupt readerly expectations of order. Nightwood's greater stylistic consistency and use of linear plot mirror its greater complicity with masculine-dominated views: Barnes's style challenges conventional modes of representation, but she representsthe constrictions of a system that would exclude Woman from the symbolic. While Ladies Almanack has been dismissed by many critics, Nightwood has been praised even by the conservative T. S. Eliot. Nightwood appears masculine in style, and with its "unity" and "intensesinglemindedness" is consideredBarnes'smasterpiece(Kannenstine 86). Though the resonance of the prose calls attention to nonsymbolic aspects of language, that prose forms a (symbolic) narrative, apparently representational and essentially linear. This structural disjunction from the feminine both reflects an understanding and allows for an exploration of the problematic relation between the feminine and the female. The narrator'sdiscourse, though baroque (even rococo) and given to a certain black humor, seems nonetheless quite masterful; yet it eschews mastery (authorization or rejection) of the lying discourse of the novel's most loquacious character, and thus the text undermines narrative's traditional narrator/character hierarchy of authority. Nightwood not only inscribes the feminine but also accomplishes the "impossible" task of describing it through the figure of Robin Vote-simultaneously underwriting and unwriting the practice of representation. The complexity of what might seem the simple duality of sexual difference appears in the figures of Robin Vote and Dr. Matthew O'Connor. As Sandra Gilbert has noted, Robin and the doctor are thematically paired figures; both are homosexuals, members of the "third sex" ("Costumes" 214). Robin, a "tall girl with the body of a boy" (46), frequently dresses in "boy'sclothes" (147). The doctor, "the other woman that God forgot" (143), is also a transvestite and longs for "a womb as big as the king's kettle, and a bosom as high as the bowsprit of a fishing schooner"(91). But their sexual ambiguityis never as radical as it might be: Robin has a baby and the doctor has Tiny O'Toole (his penis). Further, the differences between Robin and the doctor cannot be attributed simply to "biology," and indeed go beyond such distinctions. The doctor's location on the male side of any male/female

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mappingof genderis highlightednot only by his very longing for a female body but by his fetishisticfigurationof this desirethrough is perhaps maleactivities. The "king's kettle" analogywithtraditionally a reference to the caldronof Branwen,fromwhichthe bodiesof dead warriors wouldemerge alivebutunableto speak(Mabinogion 71, 170). The masculinechildren/loversthe doctor wishes for thus appearas silent objects, while the doctor is a subject capable of voluminous of the novel,the doctor's discourse, speech.Fromthe openingchapters with its nonsequential its negationsand oxymora,and juxtapositions, its extendedmetaphorswhose vehicles seem at times to drive away withouttheir tenors, readsas a heightenedversionof the narrator's discourse.That the doctor speaksindicateshis masculinity; how he speaks calls this into question. Yetthe doctor'squestionable genderseemsto fall withinmasculine boundaries.He is located as a presencein la place St. Sulpice, "bounded on the one sideby the churchand on the otherby the court" (29), enclosedby the systemsof masculinereligionand law. Robin, in contrast,is evoked as a negativepresence;we are more often told what she is not than what she is, and she is located as an absence, "anamputation that Nora could not renounce" (59). Alwaysmoving from cafe to cafe and continentto continent,Robin is placelessand "unknowable" (136). Robin is distinguishable not only from the somewhatfeminine the but the somewhat also from masculine male, doctor, female,Nora Flood, one of Robin'slovers. Nora's first linguisticacts in the book are a requestfor clarificationand a statementof self-identification (18). Nora is the female subjectconstructedin masculinediscourse, in evenintensified whileRobinis not simplyfemalebutexhibits, degree, some of the attributesof Woman,and indeedfunctionsas a kind of walkingfeminine.For instance,Robinis notably"silent" (41). Insofar as the feminineis the excluded,is that whichis repressed by discourse, any expressionof it, any inclusionof it, is its appropriation by the masculine: whenthe unconscious erupts,it becomesconscious.Robin's silenceconsequentlymarksher exclusionfrom the masculineof discourse, signals her femininity. In creating Robinas the Womanexcluded frommasculine system, Barnesthus distinguishes the femininefrom both the femaleand the Herdifference is moreradical thaneitherof these. differently gendered. Of the dreamworldof Robin, La Somnambule, the doctorsays, "Let a manlay himselfdownin the GreatBed andhis 'identity' is no longer
his own. . . . His distress is wild and anonymous" (81). Though both

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Nora and Robin are female, and both the doctor and Robin are of ambiguousgender, it is the woman Robin who lives constantlythe wild and identitylesslife of the unconscious. But the tripartitestructuresuggestedby the doctor, Nora, and Robin and by the idea of a "thirdsex"also exists withinthe dualism of Man/Womanthat locates differenceon the side of Woman.The doctor'sstatements revealthe tensionbetweenthe idea of the homothird sex and the possibilityof sexualas undefinable,multiplicitous betweenmale and femalehomosexuals,thus undercutdistinguishing difference of the thirdtermandreassimilating tingthe radicaldisorder In one sense, but still binarystructure. into a complex,asymmetrical, of gender.The "invert," the binarystructure the "invert" boy disrupts one and half the other"(136).The or girl, is, the doctorsays, "neither invertis neitherboy nor girl; neitherthe male nor the female invert is "one,"singular,unified, definable;the girl who is neithergirl nor boy is half boy; the boy who is neitherboy nor girl is half girl; they arenot whattheyareandarepartwhattheyarenot; eachis halfindefitheinvert andalterity, of negativity ("neither") composed nitely"other"; different.In anothersense,however,the invertfits within is radically the binary structureof gender. The doctor goes on to distinguish betweenthe compositionof male and female inverts. His figure for both is the prince, "theywho were spoken of in everyromancethat we ever read"(136); but "in the girl it is the prince, and in the boy it is the girl that makes a princea prince"(137). The female invert containsthe differencethat she is, while the boy becomesan invert by containingthe differenceof the feminine. The narrativediscoursethus skews the differenceof the invert towardthe differenceof the feminineand situatesthe roots of inverto thematernal. in therelation sionin "childhood" (136)and, implicitly, Imagesof a geographyof the past, often suggestiveof the terrainof the mother'sbody, recur throughoutthe novel: there is a country on ratherthan residedin," a land one may be "nourished "devoured but cannot inherit"(7). Such imagesare often connectedto Robin: she "hascomefromsomeplacethatwe haveforgottenandwouldgive our life to recall"(118); when pregnant,she is "awareof some lost landin herself' (45). This desirefor a locationof the past, along with of the invertwiththe child,recallsthe unmediated the association preoedipalrelationbetweenmotherandchildpriorto the child'sentrance world of language.The emphasison into the sexuallydifferentiated entrance of castration, theimportance callsinto question the preoedipal into the symbolic.

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Lesbian relations, insofar as they repeat the original motherdaughterbond, figurewomen'scontinuingequivocalrelationto the symbolic."Loveof womanfor woman,"commentsthe doctor, "what insanepassionfor unmitigated anguishand motherhood broughtthat into the mind?" are"unmitigated," (75). The anguishand motherhood not lessened or moderated; the doctordoesnot say, for example,"complete,"but ratheruses a word that suggeststhe absenceof an intervening, mediatingthird term. Nora identifiesRobin with the figure in her own dreamof her grandmother,"dressedas a man, wearing a billycock"(63), the figureof the grand,preoedipalmotherwho is, the phallicwoman,the womanwho has not been casretrospectively, trated, who has not enteredthe symbolic. This archaicmotheris not simplythe "goodand puresubstance" of which Kristevaspeaks in her discussion of the fantasy of the motheras a denial of the break-producing omnipotent,uncastrated symbolismof castration.Rather,the far-from-omnipotent figureof Robinchallenges thismythby enacting it. If Robinis priorto thebreakproducingsymbolismof castration,then she is priorto determinate sexualityand in an immediaterelationwith the world. But she is also subsequentto castration,both becauseshe is female, gendered,and becauseshe is excludedfrom the world by being "lost"(48), beyond of knowledge, structures beyondthe symbolic,muchas the preoedipal relationis lost, forgotten, repressedwith the intervenmother-child tion of the name-of-the-father, withoutwhichone is lost to the symbolic orderof language.The doctorcommentsthat "ourfaultyracial memoryis fatheredby fear. Destiny and historyare untidy;we fear memoryof that disorder.Robin did not" (118). BecauseRobin has not forgotten, she retainsdisorderand loses herself. This patternof a partialloss determining order and preventing total loss, the pattern,that is, of symbolicor metaphorical castration, in is appearsrepeatedly Nightwood."Legend unexpurgated," saysthe doctor,"buthistory,becauseof its actors,is deflowered-everynation witha senseof humouris a lost nation, and everywomanwitha sense of humouris a lost woman"(15). An archaicmeaningof deflower is "to cull or excerptfrom (a book, etc.) its choice or most valuable parts"(OED 3). To expurgateis "to purify or amend (a book, etc.) whatis thoughtobjectionable" tradiby removing (OED2). Inverting tionalmoralcategories, the doctorsuggests thatwhatis thoughtobjectionable is what is most valuable. Nations become lost by retaining the valuable,objectionable,funny, disruptive partsof the past; they become lost (to) themselvesby holding on to everything,while they

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retain themselves by losing part of their past. The traditional "lost" woman is she who is deflowered, who has given up what is considered most valuable. But, since defloration "places" a woman within the economy of heterosexual exchange, the "lost"woman here is she who has given up nothing, nothing objectionable, nothing valuable, no part of the past, no disorder, she who, like Robin, has not been subjected to the paternal order "fathered by fear." "Man has no foothold that is not also a bargain,"says the doctor (32); stability, order, is achieved through a tradeoff. The tradeoff that initiates the symbolic economy of the masculine is perpetuated throughout the discourse of the novel in the language of bargain, exchange, property. Barnes's description of Robin's role as Woman in this economy partially confirms that She does not exist, that the feminine is the excluded. Robin is incapable of acting as an agent in the economy of exchange; stripped as she is of "all transactions with knowledge" (134), she "cannot conceive a bargain" (47). Not possessing herself, she "could not offer herself up" (47). If Robin were simply the female object who functions in the masculine economy as the gift, the possession exchanged between subjects, her own failure to trade would be appropriate. But Robin cannot be an object of exchange because she is no more possessed by any of the other characters in the novel than she is by herself, though she longs to be "kept" (58) and Nora wants her to be "mine forever" (145). Since she can neither exchange nor be exchanged, she seems to be entirely excluded from this economy. Yet Barnes'sengagement with this economy demonstratesthat the feminine is not simply excluded but is equivocally placed. Woman's complete nonexistence would make her not the pas-tout but the toutpas. The Woman may not exist, but "woman" necessarily functions as a placeholder within the masculine symbolic economy. Thus the character inscribed within the text is possessed by language, as Robin is possessed by an undefined other. When we first encounter her, she is framed in "the set, the property of an unseen dompteur, half lord, half promoter" (35); by the last chapter of the novel she is "The Possessed." Both possessed and lost, both inside and outside the economy of exchange, the system of property, Robin figures the undecidability of possession, propriation. Her place in the economy of symbolic language, the possibility of representingher, mediating through language any perception of her, is denied in statements that she is "unknowable" (136). Yet "Robin" functions as part of this symbolic economy, and preciselybecause she can be denied, replacedwith another signifier.

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Barnesfurther indicates the equivocalpositioning of the feminine of relation to the third sex. Robinsignals an account Robin's through her disruption of a potentially triadicbut still orderedsystem(mascuthe imageof the invert,the doll line/feminine/third sex)by destroying she has givenNora. According to the doctor,the invertis or resembles the doll: "Thelast doll, givento age, is the girlwho shouldhavebeen
a boy, and the boy who should have been a girl. . . . The doll and

the immaturehave somethingright about them, the doll becauseit but does not containlife, and the thirdsex becauseit conresembles tains life but resembles the doll"(148). The thirdsex hereis described as resembling thatresembles thethirdsex, described something by being put into circulation,by beingmadepartof an exchangeof signifiers. In destroying the doll, Robinrejectsplacement in the economyof definition, the system of propertyand propermeaning. This seems in accordwith Kristeva's view that "woman" is "something that is not said."But becauseRobin'srejection of placement is placedin the text, becauseshe is said, her positioninginsideor outsidethe economyof the symbolic("aboveand beyond nomenclatures and ideologies")is undecidable. Yetthe undecidable, too, falls outsidethe systemof definition. Thus Robin is a femininethat is femininebecauseit is and is not the feminine,is inside and outsidethe economyof definition, is divided by it. Nora tries and fails to know and possess Robin, to mediateher relationwith Robin, firstby investingRobinwiththe statusof phallic into woman,outsidethe symbolic,laterby insertingherselfas "echo" "the space between the human and the holy head" (145, 157), by mediatingthe relationwithin Robin. Fully to mediatethis relation withinRobinwouldbe to stabilizethe undecidability of Robin'sposition both insideand outsidethe possibilityof representation, to make knowntheunknowable andthereby eraseit. Thatis, as a femalesubject in masculine constructed Noraoccupies a masculine discourse, position in relationto Robin'sfemininity. Nora'sattempts to possessandknow Robin are, effectively,attemptsto bringRobin into the (masculine) symbolic and thus to obliterateher femininity."Shewould kill the worldto get at herselfif the worldwerein the way,"saysNora, "and it is in the way"(155). Robinis both insideand outsidethe symbolic, and her relationwith it, like her relationwith Nora, is carriedout throughviolence.BetweenRobinthe femaleandthe undefinable holy other of Robincome Nora, language,the world;betweenthe female that subjectandthe femininecomesthe masculine systemof discourse the feminine.ThusNora finds that her attemptsto mediate represses

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her relation with Robin only enforce the women's separation. The doctor tells Nora: "Thereis no truth, and you have set it between you; you have been unwise enough to make a formula; you have dressed the unknowable in the garments of the known" (136). But while this process of dressingthe unknowable in the garments of the known does not work for Nora, it does work for Barnes. The very possibility of readingNightwood as a kind of allegory of the feminine indicates that its author exploits rather than actively disrupts the practices of linear narrative and representation. Yet the allegory is as indeterminate, as undecidable, as the story's central figure, and by this exploitation Nightwood manages to represent the unrepresentable-or rather, its unrepresentability. In his 1937 introduction to the novel, T. S. Eliot states that Robin is the "most puzzling" of the characters "becausewe find her quite real without quite understandingthe means by which the author has made her so" (xiv). Eliot cites as a description of Robin the portion of the following passage here emphasized: willreduce Sucha person's to an imageof a forgotten experieverymovement ence; a mirageof an eternalweddingcast on the racialmemory;as insupportablea joy as would be the vision of an eland comingdown an aisle of trees, chapletedwith orangeblossomsand bridalveil, a hoof raisedin the
economy of fear.... (37)

This vision of the wild eland dressedin the garmentsof the well-known ritual of a woman's insertion into the heterosexual property structure-an image of radically divided identity quite appropriate to Robin-is not grammaticallya descriptionof Robin. The simple subject of the sentence is not "Robin" or even "a person" but "movement." The "vision of an eland" is equated with a "joy," which is equated with a "mirage,"which is equated with an "image,"which is the object of the preposition "to," which follows the main verb "reduce,"which functions here metaphorically (movements do not literally reduce to images). The connection here between image ("thevision of an eland") and implied referent (Robin) is complex and oblique. Such indirect evocation of Robin puts her at a distance from the reader; she remains absent from the sentences that present her.9 It is often only via synecdoche that Robin becomes the subject of the sentences that create her. We find her as subject through "Her legs,"
9Allen also notes Barnes'suse of indirection to evoke ratherthan directly describe Robin. Though my focus in this essay differs from hers, I have found her discussion of Barnes's style illuminating.

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"Her hands," "Her flesh," and "The perfume that her body exhaled" (34); her "movements" and "smile" (41); her "fingers," "skirts," and "clothes" (42); her "pose" and "veins" (169). Descriptions of aspects of Robin ratherthan of Robin per se emphasize her lack of self-identity and deflect the reader'sattention from Robin to that which surrounds her. Barnes's focus on that which surrounds Robin disrupts notions of representation based on the dichotomy of presence and absence: "About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorus glowing about the circumference of a body of water - as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations-the troubling structure of the born somnambule, who lives in two worlds-meet of child and desperado" (34-35). The oppositional pairing of the "two worlds" of "child and desperado" and the separation of "herlife" from "her"suggest the impossibility of assimilating Robin to an economy of sameness. The phrase "her life lay through her" not only implies Robin's lack of singular identity and her passivity (lack of agency in the symbolic economy); it also, by virtue of its impossible predication, indicates the impossibility of comprehending Robin through a logic of representation-as-mimesis. Even when Robin is the subject of a sentence, Barnesuses extended analogies in which the subject is dwarfed by the description: "She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in man's image is a figure of doom" (41). By avoiding nominal emphasis and factual description, Barnes upsets the binary balance of the notion of representation. Robin remains remarkably absent from the sentencesthat seem to representher. Thus Robin seems "real"because Barnes's representation of her as Woman accords with the "real" of the feminine, both inside and outside representation. Barnes'suse of implied ratherthan logical reference, her emphasis on description rather than nomination, distances us from Robin, because Robin is not quite re-presented, is not so much presented as evoked. This narrative overdressing of the feminine in the assorted garments that are the known signifiers of the known and the unknown is the inscription of that sexuality which, in Kristeva's words, "is precisely the possibility to explore all the sources of signification, that which posits a meaning as well as that which multiplies, pulverizes, and finally revives it" ("Oscillation" 165). In naming Robin, Barnes posits a meaning for the feminine; in referring to her through synecdoche and extended description, she multiplies that meaning; in
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grammatically absenting Robin from sentences that seem to be about her, Barnes pulverizes that meaning. The cumulative effect of such tactics is to create a revived and more complex notion of the feminine. The language of Nightwood revives the masculine language of representation in order to represent the feminine as the femininewithout assimilating it to the masculine order. Barnes's style in Nightwood dispels the illusion of a single "break-producing symbolism," the metaphorical castration of which Kristeva speaks. (The absent A is represented by the corresponding sign "A.") Instead, Barnes multiplies and emphasizes this break. (The absent A is alluded to through "B," "C," "D," "X," "Y,"and "Z.") Rather than the one, stabilizing instance of castration that would place the castrated subject (the Man who has the lack) within the symbolic or would exclude the noncastrated (the Woman who lacks the lack) from the symbolic, there are in Barnes's language multiple "castrations," functioning as does what Derrida calls "the hymen's graphic," which, "without itself being reduced to it, inscribes castration's effect within itself" (Spurs 99). In thus disrupting castration's re-presentational symbolic order, Barnes disrupts the notion of Woman's exclusion from it, and so disrupts, too, the correlative notion of women's exclusion from the practice of writing. Nightwood both demonstrates the possibility of inscribing the feminine in a language that is not overtly disruptive and dramatizes the difficulty women have in coping with the unknowable feminine in themselvesand in an apparentlymasculineworld. Though the novel's discourse subtly disrupts the masculine symbolic order, the appeal the book holds for so conservative a spokesman for traditional culture as T. S. Eliot suggests the price of the story's engagement with that order. Robin's collapse at the end of the novel signals a kind of defeat of the feminine by the masculine order, the feminine'sinability to overcome or persistentlycoexist with the masculine. The doctor's discourse, so similar to the narrator's yet given to a male (albeit ambiguously male) character, has signaled that the narrator/writer enters language through the (ambiguously) masculine. The doctor's discourse has even had, after all, a certain teleology: he has become a liar by trying to distract others from their misery (135). Yet this is a feminine teleology, consisting not simply in what it signifies but also in that it signifies, and it is this kind of significance we can find in the novel's feminine writing. The breakdown of the doctor's discourse in the penultimate chapter figures the failure of feminine discourse bounded by mascu-

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line system to alter those boundaries, even though it can articulate them. The conclusion of the novel seems to confirm Sandra Gilbert's observation that the rules of culture "make it possible for a woman to speak but. . . oblige her to speak of her own powerlessness" ("Empty Pack" 358). There is, of course, a power in women's speech; the feminine in writing thus allows woman to speak her power, yet, while the masculine order maintains its illusion of mastery, does not of itself allow woman to speak of her power. But Ladies Almanack engages not with the (Lacanian)symbolic castrationthat would exclude Woman from language but instead with the (Freudian) notion of physical castration that would exclude woman by placing her as a failed version of man, and the book begins to transmute the power of woman's language into a language of woman's power. Long out of print, long neglected, Ladies Almanack has been consideredby criticsto be a minor work. 10Privatelyprintedand circulated, the book falls, even in the circumstances of its publication, between the masculine economy and Irigaray's utopian vision of "Exchange without identifiable terms of trade, without accounts, without end. . . Where use and exchange would mingle" when the "goods" get together ("'Goods"' 110). Similarly, in form and content Ladies Almanack "takes place" in the feminine no man's land between the masculine and the feminine, takes its place by being unplaceable and by simultaneously rejecting what it also appropriates. The work maintains gender opposition by excluding the male but traverses sexual differentiation by celebrating a feminine that can include the masculine. This plotless book deals with a lesbian community, a world in which the "goods" have gotten together. The "central"figure is Saint Evangeline Musset, a "missionary"(34) who has "learned on the Bodies of all Women" (35). Her feminine realm escapes the masculine system within which it is also contextualized. What might be called the world outside the "Sect"(31) is acknowledged but is depicted only marginally, in an introductory chapter involving Dame Musset's youth. Even the boundary between inside and outside, however, is left undrawn:though all the figures in the book are women, not all are followers of Dame Musset, and one recurring figure is heterosexual. Though the work is not really an almanac, names of months
I?See, for example, Field 124, Kannenstine 33, Frank 26, and Pochoda 179.

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supply chapter headings. Dame Musset dies in "December," but the book is not the synchronized compression of a life into a year, for she is already fifty in "January."A brief, stylized compression of this sort appears, however, in "February." Thus the book distorts the sense of duration and both asserts and compromises the ordered progression of time. Much of the text represents conversations and incidents involving Dame Musset and/or other women, but the book also includes rewritingsof history, new versions of myths, and nonnarrative meditations upon the conditions of women and relations between women. The style of Ladies Almanack is parodic; mock-heroic, mock lamentation, it is inflated, deflative, ironic, and whimsical. The book also contains verse, music, and illustrations and in places uses double columns of text. Thus Ladies Almanack, since it is structured and to some extent representational, is, like Nightwood, not an example of a feminine writing entirely unlike any writing we have known; indeed it challenges the notion of a completely alien feminine. The book's representations are stylized, its structuresarbitraryratherthan definitive; a modernist work, the book calls attention to its own artificiality. Because Barnes uses potentially feminine aspects of writing to write female sexual pleasure and to interrogate masculine representations of Woman and desire between women, calling the book feminine allows us to foreground its engagements with this masculine order. The style and form of Ladies Almanack, multiple, parodic, of indefinite genre, allow Barnes to displace masculine writing to make way for her own, to explore and disrupt definitions of Woman. By including the masculine, feminine writing can undermine and perhaps escape it. As Irigaray, among (many) others, has pointed out, the ideas of Woman generated by masculine systems, ideas of Woman as castrated man and of the lesbian as masculine woman, are clearly worse than inadequate. Such ideas can account for relations between women only "by affirming that as soon as she desires (herself), as soon as she speaks (herself, to herself), the woman is a man"("'Goods"' 108). Yet a simple rejection or negation of these ideas would leave them in place. While Nightwood implicitly examines the ramifications of metaphorical castration, Ladies Almanack explicitly disrupts the myth of biological castration. In the opening section of Ladies Almanack, the narrator reports that Evangeline says:
"Never . . . has that Greek Mystery occurred to me, which is known as the Dashing out of the Testicles, and all that goes with it!" Which is said to have

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happened to a Byzantine Baggage of the Trojan Period, more to her Surprise than her Pleasure. Yet it is an agreeable Circumstance that the Ages thought fit to hand down this Miracle, for Hope springs eternal in the human Breast. (7)

Evangeline asserts that she has never experienced castration, perhaps never thought of it. Yet her very negation suggests that she does think of it, and the narratorcertainlydoes. The displeasureof the "Byzantine Baggage"might seem to imply that what lesbians (or women in general) want is to be men. But the exaggerated tone of the passage is clearly ironic. Castration here is not simply the loss of the singular male member; the penis is a mere adjunct to the testicles. The nature of the hope that the story of this mystery supplies is not entirely unequivocal. Is it women's hope that they may become male? Or men's hope that they may become female? Or women's hope that men may become female? Rather than simply ignore or reject the myth of penis envy and the Woman as castrated Man, Barnes undermines it with mockery, exposing its absurdity. Later, the myth of Woman as variant or deviant male is given a further twist, when one character comments:
what have These Scriveners said of her but that she must have had a Testes of sorts, however wried and awander;that indeed she was called forth a Man, and when answering, by some Mischance, or monstrous Fury of Fate, stumbled over a Womb, and was damned then and forever to drag it about, like a Prisoner his Ball and Chain, whether she would nor no. (53)

Thus the myth of castration is reversed: the "man"becomes a woman not by loss but by addition. Even this version of how Woman came to be Woman is described as the construct of male writers. The speaker's companion concurs that "they cannot let her be. . . but will admit her to sense through the masculine Door only" but points out, "near to a Man or far from a Man, she will not be of him!" (53). In addition to these undercuttings and rejections of the idea of castration or Woman as variant of Man, Barnes displaces the myth of castration, of Woman as made from Man, by replacing it with her own account of Woman's genesis:
This is the part about Heaven that has never been told. After the fall of Satan ... all the Angels . . . gathered together, so close that they were not recognizable, one from the other. And not nine Months later, there was heard under the Dome of Heaven a great Crowing, and from the Midst, an Egg, as incredible as a thing forgotten, fell to Earth, and striking, split and

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hatched, and from out of it stepped one saying "Pardonme, I must be going!" And this was the first Woman born with a Difference.... After this the Angels parted, and on the Face of each was the Mother look. Why was that? (24, 26)

Postdating the Miltonic account of Satan's fall, this biblical parody nonetheless escapes masculine theology by inscribing it within itself. Far from being exclusively fathered (by God and Adam), this "Eve" is exclusively, and multiply, mothered. This account, printed in a column to one side of the "main"text but accorded a full-page illustration, graphically indicates that though marginalizedby a dominant discourse, the force of the feminine asserts itself elsewhere. Barnes'stactics for dealing with the issue of castration here again accord with Derrida's description of the hymen's graphic, a graphic of the undecidable associated with Woman, "whichdescribes a margin where the control over meaning or code is without recourse" (Spurs 99). Barnes'sstyles make possible her affirmation of Woman, the affirmation beyond negation in which, as Derrida writes, "la castration n'a pas lieu" (Spurs 96). Ideas of castration are included within Ladies Almanack but are undermined; castration does not "have place," has no determinate place, because it is only part of a feminine play of style. The idea cannot simply be negated, for women do have to deal with its effects (for instance, the objectionable and limiting ideas of male writers), but it is not finally definitive: it does not define Woman, and, when explored, it begins to point to the impossibility of defining Woman. According to Derrida, "had it ever taken place, castration will have been a sort of syntax which, in its annulmentand equalization of any discourse in the mode of pro et contra, would have stabilized its undecidable" (Spurs 63). The illusion of castration is what makes possible the simple opposition Man/Woman; but Ladies Almanack's inscription of the destabilizationof castration marks the undecidability of the definition of Woman. Woman is not, therefore, simply undefined; rather, as Irigaray observes, she "renders any definition inadequate" ("'Goods"' 101). Ladies Almanack displaces masculine definitions of woman by giving place to such definitions, by allowing them to displace each other. It includes, for instance, the notion of the lesbian as masculine woman: Evangeline Musset "had been developed in the Womb of her most gentle Mother to be a Boy, when therefore, she came forth an Inch or so less than this, she paid no Heed to the Error" (7). Gender here is defined not by physiology but by sexual orientation. But while the lesbian is a woman who is a man, she is not an inadequateman; the lack

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of such a little thing as a penis is less than an inconvenience. Yet the lesbian is also defined not as man but as woman. The heterosexual Patience Scalpel "could not understand Women"(11), and the women she cannot understand are lesbians. Here it is the female who enters into heterosexual relations, into the hom(m)osexual sociocultural economy, who is not a woman (for Woman does not exist within that system). 11If the lesbian is distinguished from other women by being the woman who is a (castrated) man, she is not a woman, and Woman is not a castrated man. If, however, the lesbian is the woman with a difference, who originates outside the phallogocentric system, then heterosexual women are not women but castrated men. Either way (and the either/or structure is neither comprehensive nor conclusive), Woman both participates in the masculine system of definition and escapes it, indeed, escapes it by participating in it. But where Woman has been repressed,excluded from participating in the system of definition, women have not escaped its effects: Whatthey havein theirHeads, Hearts,Stomachs,Pockets,Flaps,Tabsand Plackets,have one and all been some and severallycommentedon, by way of hintor harshHarangue, blamed,epicked,poemedandpastoraled, praised, and for every sort of pushed, made a Spring-board pamphleted,prodded bad and indifferent. Conjecturewhatsoever,good, (47-48) Woman is thus already singularly multiple even within masculine writing, which, however, thus dismembers and objectifies her. She provides "material"for the masculine text, to which she herself nonetheless always remains exterior. Within the masculine sociocultural economy, each single definition can impinge upon women, shaping their ideas of themselves and their relations with each other. For instance, one couple in Ladies Almanack wants to legitimize lesbian relations on the model of heterosexual marriage (19). Irigaray states that her critique of Freud's account of female homosexuality does not mean "that what Freud describes does not fit a certain 'reality,'or that his commentaries or explanations are simply 'wrong.' Many homosexual women can recognize themselves in this story or could at least try to find their bearings in it" (Speculum 101). The point is rather that masculine definitions are inadequate, that female desire also escapes these explanations, for in them, "nothing of the special nature of desire between women has been unveiled or stated. That a woman
1The term "hom(m)osexual"was coined by Irigaray, Speculum; see esp. 98-104. See also Irigaray, This Sex 171.

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might desire a woman 'like' herself, someone of the 'same' sex . . . is simply incomprehensible to Freud, and indeed inadmissible"within phallogocentric thought (Speculum 101). Just as Ladies Almanack acknowledges(by mockery)masculineaccounts of the origin of Woman by castration and supplies its own account, it not only acknowledges but also supplements masculine accounts of desire between women; one character comments that love of woman for woman is "a Kiss in the Mirror"(23). Further, the text recognizes the quotation marks Irigarayplaces around like and same: a lesbian unhappy in love "tears her Shift for a Likeness in a Shift, and a Mystery that is lost to the proportion of Mystery" (57). Relations between women are precisely those which turn sameness into the difference of nonhierarchical likeness, into a mystery which, being lost to the proportioning of the masculine order, is all the more mysterious. The parodic styles of Ladies Almanack make possible, even inevitable, this indeterminate, mysterious nondefinition of Woman and relations between women. What Derrida calls the "vertiginous nonmastery"of parody can never be pinned down, and thus no definitive account of Woman can be found in the text (Spurs 101). But though the parodist or ironist works by undermining masculine mastery or authority, there is nonetheless a certain "authority" implicit in this activity:the nonlocatable authorityof the right to parody, the unknown (here unknowable) greater knowledge of the ironist. Ladies Almanack thus challengesthe notion of a feminine that would be entirelyexcluded from authority. To the extent that it is masculine(assertingthe authority to challenge), it is feminist (challengingthe masculine), though its feminism is made possible by its femininity (destabilizing/undermining authority), which also, in turn, challenges its feminism (because feminism asserts an authority): the femininity and feminism of the text both enable and question each other. Irony and parody generate a (feminine) surplus which cannot be fully reassimilated to any (masculine) system; but the direction of this surplus in Ladies Almanack seems primarily affirmative; it becomes a feminist feminine. The best example of this might be the chapterlong complaint about women's love letters to each other, which ends, "twittering so loud upon the Wire that one cannot hear the Message. And yet!" (46). The narrator's complaint implicitly includes the love letter of her own text; her own final message here is left unstated or incompletely stated, pushed to the edge or margin of the chapter by her virtuosic linguistic performance. But precisely because the signifier overwhelms the signified, the book's criticisms of women are never

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wholly criticisms; that "And yet!" points elsewhere. Further, the very excess of the praise of women (for instance, labeling EvangelineMusset "Saint") leaves a residue of real praise while protecting both praiser and praisedby pre-emptingthe extratextualparody to which they might otherwise be subject. The affirmative direction of the excess of Ladies Almanack seems to be confirmed in the text's feminist closure, which is itself made available by the masculine structure of the calendar. In "December," Evangeline Musset dies, and after multiple funeral services, multiple interments,and multiple ritualsof mourning (in keeping with the multiple natures of Woman), she is finally cremated. Her tongue, however, "would not suffer Ash" but "flickers to this day," "on the Altar in the Temple of Love" (84). Like Ladies Almanack as a whole, this final image symbolically links specifically female, lesbian passion and the power of women's language. Yet for all its symbolic affirmation, the image of the tongue remains troublingly ambiguous on a literal level: a tongue without a mouth may (and in the text does) give sexual pleasure(84), but it cannot speak. Similarly, Ladies Almanack inscribes women's sexual pleasure but can do so only equivocally. Male, heterosexual critics have read Ladies Almanack as antilesbian. Because the feminine is the difference between the masculine and the feminine, feminine writing leaves the reader, one way or another, on the boundary between the masculine and the feminine. Nightwood seems to pass a negative verdict on the prospects for the feminine, yet it does so by exploiting masculine narrative, extendingthe boundariesof representationto representthe feminine. Ladies Almanack can be read as profoundly affirmative, but its affirmation is dependent upon an unstable irony that also invokes the masculine: the text is inevitably compromised by that which it subverts. The transformational power of this feminine writing is thus a function of reading this full ambiguity: what is potentially revolutionary is not simply feminine writing but feminine reading. Through this heuristic lens, Barnes'sworks can be seen to explore and explode the illusive, exclusive hegemony of the masculine order, by encoding and inscribdisplacing its organization-through-castration in feminine the elusive language, replacing its decapitated Woman ing with a woman writing.12Barnes'sworks suggest that the value of ideas of the feminine and feminine writing consists less in their postulation
12Iallude, of course, to Cixous's "Castration or Decapitation?" in which she observes, "if masculinity is culturally ordered by the castration complex, it might be said that the backlash, the return, on women of this castration anxiety is its displacement as decapitation, execution, of woman, as loss of her head" to complete silence (43).

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of a new language or their call for a revolutionary future than in the possibilities they offer for new ways of thinking language, ways that recognize the subversiveand potentially revolutionaryelements already operative within the languages of the past and present. The postulate that all language is masculine and represses the feminine hypostatizes language, and itself represses the feminine that has been put into language, but it can help us recognize the power of the masculine in language as that through and against which the woman writer inscribes the feminine of her own text. The assumption that Woman is always outside language situates itself within the very system of binarythought it wishes to subvert, and thus it represses the multiplicity of the conditions of women; and yet it not only obscures but also alludes to the conditions of the woman writer'ssubversiveengagementwith language. University of California, Berkeley

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Eliot, T. S. Introduction. Nightwood. By Djuna Barnes. 1937. New York: New Directions, 1961. xi-xvi. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Womenfrom the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Morrow, 1981. Field, Andrew. Djuna: The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes. New York: Putnam, 1983. Frank, Joseph. "Spatial Form in Modern Literature." The WideningGyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1963. 25-49. Freud, Sigmund. "Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of SigmundFreud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. 19. London: Hogarth, 1961. 248-58. 24 vols. 1952-74. Gilbert, Sandra M. "Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in Modern Literature." Writingand Sexual Difference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 193-219. . "Life's Empty Pack: Notes toward a Literary Daughteronomy." Critical Inquiry 11 (1985): 355-84. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writerand the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. , eds. The Norton Anthology of Literatureby Women:The Traditionin English. New York: Norton, 1985. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. . This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. . "When the 'Goods' Get Together." Trans. Claudia Reeder. Marks and de Courtivron 107-10. ."Women's Exile: Interviewwith Luce Irigaray."With Diana Adlam and Couze Venn. Trans. Couze Venn. Ideology and Consciousness 1 (May 1977): 62-76. Jacobus, Mary. "The Question of Language: Men of Maxims and The Mill on the Floss." Writingand Sexual Difference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 37-52. Jardine, Alice. "Gynesis." Diacritics 12.2 (Summer 1982): 54-65. Kannenstine, Louis F. The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation. New York: New York UP, 1977. Kristeva, Julia. "Oscillation between Power and Denial." Trans. Marilyn A. August. Marks and de Courtivron 165-67. . "Woman Can Never Be Defined." Trans. Marilyn A. August. Marks and de Courtivron 137-41. . "Women's Time." Trans.Alice Jardineand Harry Blake. Signs 7 (1981): 13-35. Lanser, Susan Sniader. "Speaking in Tongues: Ladies Almanack and the Language of Celebration." Frontiers 4.3 (1979): 39-46. The Mabinogion. Trans. Jeffrey Gantz. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1976. Marks, Elaine, and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. New French Feminisms: An Anthology. New York: Schocken, 1981. Messerli, Douglas. Djuna Barnes: A Bibliography. Rhinebeck, NY: Lewis, 1975. Plumb, Cheryl J. Fancy's Craft: Art and Identity in the Early Worksof Djuna Barnes. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna UP, 1986.

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Pochoda, Elizabeth. "Style's Hoax: A Reading of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood." Twentieth Century Literature 22 (1976): 179-91. Rubin, Gayle. "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex." Towardan Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review, 1975. 157-210. Singer, Alan. "The Horse Who Knew Too Much: Metaphor and the Narrative of Discontinuity in Nightwood." Contemporary Literature 25 (1984): 66-87.

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CONTEMPORARY

LITERATURE