The twentieth century tragic slut : abjection and the reclamation of femme and queer bodies in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood

Abstract

At the turn of the century, the Nineteenth Century’s values and notions of love and romance stood at the brink of collapse. With the Twentieth Century came the First World War, and in its aftermath the beginnings of a group of discontented writers later known as the modernists. At the core of the modernist movement was a need to express their experiences and new forms of identities bound to the restless exploration of shifting inner worlds. The modernists prioritized pushing the boundaries of language and literary form to break away from the fixed forms and ideas of the past Ninetieth Century’s Realism. In the midst of the world war, women in all their complexities progressed toward a moment of crisis, a decisive point in their role in society. Women had previously mostly taken up the vacant spaces men as workers had left behind to go to war. This historical phenomenon placed certain women, as Black women were always already working, at the avant-garde of the labor force, changing the public perception of women and shifting ideas of sex and gender. Thus, this event allowed a shift in the perception of women more broadly in the workplace and the ways in which they took up space in the world. When men came back from the war and stepped out to gaze at their new world, in front of them was what appeared to be an uncanny landscape of the city that once was and the women that had once lived in it. Laying on top of the remains of the past, like two broken pillars at the entrance of a temple, now displaced and destroyed, appeared the new modern woman.