ABSTRACT
It is tempting to explain Barnes’s critique of literary and ideological genealogy and filiation observed in Ladies Almanack and the poetry through the context of her family, around which all-American narratives of a Whitmanesque father championing free-love, anti-puritanism, autarchic educational theories, and bigamy have been circulated in the criticism, in spite of the author’s stubborn determination to discourage biographical readings of her oeuvre.2 According to Broe, for instance, ‘women and children of her father’s two families mirrored each other, subverting traditional notions of kinship and dissolving usual boundaries of power, age and intimacy while they encoded complex modes of eroticism for which we as yet have little theory.3 The ‘polygamist household’ of Barnes’s childhood is read as ‘a tarnished Eden’ and the legacy from her grandmother, head of this ‘nominal matriarchy’, is a ‘complex but empowering’ one, while her ‘father’s transgressions of bodily and spiritual taboos left their violent imprint on his two families’, accounting for how her texts ‘encode the sexual violations and erotic entanglements in the patriarchal family.’4
