Carnivorous Flowers and Poisoned Webs

This chapter examines the hotel bedroom as an experimental setting in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) and Anaïs Nin’s House of Incest (1936). I argue that both writers use this space to experiment with surrealist aesthetics in their writing. In Nightwood, the bedroom becomes an unconscious space where Barnes subverts surrealist ideas about gender and sexuality. In House of Incest, the hotel bedroom reflects the psychological turmoil of the narrator via violent imagery. In both texts the hotel bedroom becomes a space where sexuality, otherness, and transgression are explored.