ABSTRACT
Djuna Barnes was born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York State, in 1892, and died at Patchin Place, Greenwich Village, in 1982. Barnes is chiefly remembered for her novel Nightwood and for the increasingly reclusive lifestyle which has been represented as typifying her old age. Barnes' use of language, it will be argued here, deliberately inverts known devices from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thus allowing borders to be crossed. This chapter demonstrates how Barnes' use of language enables her to re-evaluate the almanac form in terms of gender. When Marianne Moore commented that 'reading Barnes is like reading a foreign language, which you understand', she outlined a vital part of Barnes' aesthetic. What I wish to suggest in this essay is that by using a language appropriated from old texts, frequently texts of a misogynistic nature, Barnes places the lesbian woman at the centre of the picture rather than at its margins.
