Djuna Barnes, History’s Elsewhere, and the Transgender

This essay seeks to give an account of how myth functions in Djuna Barnes’s work through transgendered failures beyond conventional history. By manipulating older expressive modes, Barnes creates stylistically indeterminate and therefore temporally ambiguous linguistic landscapes situated outside the bounds of patriarchal history — history’s elsewhere. History’s elsewhere and its inhabitants fail to be unequivocally affirmative in a queer-feminist sense, however, rendering Barnes’s texts difficult to absorb into recuperative critical projects: an Aphroditus, Dame Musset triumphantly initiates women into same-sex desire but dies without fathoming all of its secrets in Ladies Almanack; Ryder’s Dr. O’Connor exists as a crippled Tiresias unable to smite the Minotaur-like Wendell. Each expresses the historical impossibility of queer being in terms of failure, that is, a failure of self-knowledge and of social acceptance. Ryder and Ladies Almanack are hence united by their interest in mythical transgenderism, but the transgender effects no radical inversion of the queer status quo.