ABSTRACT
Djuna Barnes' journalism, Sophia Grieve Ryder and Ladies Almanack all explore a subversive and carnivalesque approach to the representation of identity, often overlayering discordant cultural archetypes, as they expose the mechanics of the cultural construction of identity. Nightwood participates in this process, and both destabilises and inverts boundaries in a carnivalesque manner. In keeping with modernist traditions, Nightwood is a novel of reflection, rather than a plot-based work. Nightwood uses polyphonic discourse to challenge the validity of a cultural framework built on binaries, and to destabilise the hierarchical conventions of the high and the low. Nightwood's suggestion that cultural memory can be encoded in the body shows the enduring consequences of persecution from the perspective of the persecuted, and crosses the nature/nurture boundary. Nightwood's close marks a shift in Barnes' oeuvre from a predominantly iconoclastic and humorous analysis of the symbolic markers of cultural constraint, to an admission of their resilient power.
