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ABSTRACT
Throughout much of her early journalism, Djuna Barnes reconstructs the roles that women hold in the modern city. I discuss Barnes’s articles that focus on leisure and entertainment, where she reworks the conversation surrounding women’s presence and mobility in public and normalizes the female urban experience. Barnes is subversive in her ability to locate women in new and emerging places of public mass entertainment and modern city life and her stories are grounded in the physically built environment, exposing the everyday scenes of the city to her readers. Barnes borrows techniques from flânerie throughout her journalism to document the changing urban geographies that resulted in women’s new agencies and mobilities within the modernist city. Women’s experience of the city is crucial to understanding how transformations associated with modernity occurred and reverberated across society and Barnes’s portrayal of women’s leisure and entertainment at the turn-of-the-century provides a rich account of the gendered aspects of modernity in urban settings.
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Notes
1 I draw biographical information from Phillip Herring’s Djuna: The Life and Works of Djuna Barnes and Andrew Field’s Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes.
2 Fahs, Out on Assignment, 4. Contemporary studies on the state of the newspaper business at the turn-of-the-century focus more on the gender divide in readership, never failing to note that with the advent of the department store in the 1880s and the increased prevalence of advertisements, newspapers began to cater increasingly to a female audience. Michael Schudson discusses a class divide in newspaper readership, stating that the educated middle class wanted to read newspapers that were information-based, while the middle and working classes tended to gravitate toward the story ideal (90–1). Nevertheless, I conclude that Barnes constructs a specific type of imagined female reader for her journalism. Speaking specifically to Barnes’s stunt articles, Nancy Bombaci writes that Barnes’s ideal female reader is “intelligent and sophisticated enough to discern and admire her act” (165).
3 Ibid., 6.
4 Ibid., 2.
5 See, for example, scholarship by Jean Marie Lutes, Barbara Green, Katherine Biers, Kate Ridinger Smorul and Rebecca Loncraine.
6 Writing to Dan Mahoney in 1950, Barnes stated that she considered her early journalistic prose “utterly wasteful.” (Plumb 19). Phillip Herring writes that Barnes called that majority of her journalism “rubbish” and herself discouraged interest in it (77–8). As a result, contemporary critics place significant value on her career as a journalist but only in regards to its influence on her later writing style. See Carl Herzig, “Roots of Night,” Katherine Biers, Virtual Modernism, Alex Goody, “Djuna Barnes on the Page,” and Phillip Herring’s Djuna.
7 Plumb, Fancy’s Craft, 13.
8 Williams, The Country and the City, 234.
9 Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 179.
10 McDowell, Gender, Identity, and Place, 12.
11 Rose, Feminism and Geography, 4.
12 Ibid., 133.
13 Ibid., 132–3.
14 Ibid., 134.
15 Sewell, Women and the Everyday City, 3–4.
16 Messerli, “Foreword,” 11.
17 Barnes, “My Sisters and I,” 168.
18 Ibid., 169.
19 Ibid., 169–71, 173.
20 Lutes, Front Page Girls, 147.
21 Levine, “‘Bringing Milkshakes to Bulldogs,’” 31–2.
22 Ridinger Smorul, “Of Marionettes, Boxers, and Suffragettes,” 56.
23 Fahs, 9–10.
24 The concept of the flâneur leaves out women’s urban experience and more recent debates have arisen as to the existence of a female urban stroller or flâneuse. See work by Griselda Pollock, Janet Wolff, Rita Felski, Deborah H. Parsons, Lauren Elkin, and Elizabeth Wilson.
25 See Dana Brand, Steve Pile, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Nedra Reynolds, and Keith Tester.
26 Fahs, 8.
27 Nancy Bombaci is the only critic who has adequately discussed Barnes in relation to flânerie by arguing that Barnes is successful in appropriating the role of the flâneur through her use of phallic wit in addition to combining and blurring the distinction between subject and object (169).
28 Rose, 133.
29 Barnes, “Seeing New York,” 325.
30 Ibid., 326.
31 Ibid., 332.
32 Barnes, “You Can Tango,” 14.
33 Plumb, 17.
34 The Progressive Era witnessed increased efforts at regulating dance hall behavior by reformers who voiced concerns about protecting the innocence of young women who frequented dance halls. The dangers of social dance differed for women and men: unleashing unrestrained sexual desire in women and emasculating men (dancing was seen as a primarily female social activity). With the advent of ragtime dancing in the 1910s, social reformers argued that such dancing, coupled with unchaperoned environments (as most dance halls were at the time) posed the danger of “compromising working-class women who already faced inequitable economic situations” (Cook 133–7).
35 Barnes, “You Can Tango,” 14.
36 Ibid., 14.
37 Ibid., 13.
38 Barnes’s journalism incorporated a reform angle during a time that witnessed an increase in the “cleaning up of vice, especially in relation to sexuality” (Chauncey 138). Urban zoning laws and spatial regulations coincided with the unprecedented expansion of commercial leisure activities, causing, in turn, a significant cultural panic and becoming a subject Barnes wrote on quite frequently (Heise 291).
39 Barnes, “You Can Tango,” 19.
40 Thiel-Stern, From the Dance Hall, 25.
41 Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 89.
42 Nasaw, Going Out, 104–5.
43 Nott, Going to the Palais, 162.
44 Mumford, Interzones, 29.
45 Studlar, “Valentino, ‘Optic Intoxication,’ and Dance,” 25.
46 Ibid., 27.
47 Barnes, “You Can Tango,” 15–16.
48 McDowell, 149.
49 Rose, 140.
50 Ibid., 136.
51 McDowell, 7.
52 Sewell, xiv–xv.
53 Ibid., xvi.
54 Thiel-Stern, 29.
55 Barnes, “You Can Tango,” 17–18.
56 Nott, 166.
57 Peiss, 106.
58 McBee, 95.
59 Barnes, “You Can Tango,” 18.
60 Gotfrit, “Women Dancing Back,” 174.
61 Ibid., 177.
62 Barnes, “You Can Tango,” 19.
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Kristina Chesaniuk
Kristina Chesaniuk received her PhD from Auburn University. Her research focuses on space/place theory, women and gender studies, and urban literature.