Whitehead, Djuna Barnes, and Freud's Dora: Introduction to Two Treatments

Whitehead wrote two film treatments, Dora and Cassation, in 1978 or 1979, but they never went further than this preliminary stage. Nevertheless, they are interesting in and of themselves. I think both projects could have yielded fascinating films, as they broach highly feminist subjects in which Whitehead locates personal themes—themes revealed directly in the choice of these motifs and indirectly through what was included or excluded from the original sources. The first, Dora, Sigmund Freud's notorious case, is a famous, much discussed, analyzed, and reinterpreted topic that has been part of feminist discourse from the early 1970s to today;¹ and the second, Cassation, is an esoteric 1929 story by a little-known but cult figure—the literary beacon, Djuna Barnes. In both circumstances, there is a relationship with a young woman and an older, domineering mentor figure—a woman in Cassation, a man (Freud) in Dora. There is tension, sexual and authoritative, between the two. There is sex implied between a parental figure and the young woman—in Dora's case, she becomes ill from the libidinous pressures of her father and his friends. In Cassation, the older woman possibly sleeps with the girl and wants to mother her with a voracious, almost carnal closeness. In both, there is a parting between the two that leaves uncertain exactly who has authority and of what that authority is actually composed. Themes of sexual domination and the subversion of that domination—of incest, control, and alienation—are evident in Whitehead's work. In the two treatments, he links these issues—and the Dora case and Cassation themselves—through Djuna Barnes's 1936 novel, Nightwood, most especially through its lead character, Nora Flood.

Whitehead has a complex relationship with Barnes's writing. He tried to buy the rights for Nightwood from New Directions, as others had done and failed.² He named his youngest daughter Robin³ after the character of Robin Vote in Nightwood.⁴ He has likened himself to Dr. Matthew O'Connor, Nightwood's most extreme character.⁵ He felt that his 1990 novel Nora and ... was the one he "most loved—felt to be close to me," and the one most "heavily influenced, albeit tangentially, by Nightwood. NOT in style ... but it was NORA ... in Paris, May 1968 ... my love of Paris ..."⁶ Whitehead's novel is set in Vienna, but for him the city evokes Nora Flood, Nightwood's protagonist, lover of Robin⁷ and friend of the doctor, who wanders through 1930s Paris. Somehow, Nora's life there reminds Whitehead of his life in the rioting Parisian streets in 1968. To connect Nightwood's Nora to a moment so important to Whitehead's politics suggests that he feels a deep identification with the character. He sees his own Nora as a "shadowy reflection" of "a Nora Flood"⁸ and feels very strongly about Barnes's work. "I see my novel [Nora and ... ] as much more in the style of the Spillway short stories. Not NWood ... but still that other Djuna Barnes territory. I think it is my most serious and accomplished novel. Female sexuality, Paris 1968, the Warsaw Ghetto ... on the Warsaw Ghetto film. The young girl digging in the mud ... looking for food."⁹

Nightwood centers on Nora, an expatriate American living in Paris, whom Barnes depicts as a strong archetypal figure of contradictory traits—intense, detached, thoughtful, unconscious, stalwart, fragile, worldly, and provincial.¹⁰ But when she becomes involved with a beautiful, unfaithful, animalistic, unreachable woman, Robin Vote, who then leaves her, Nora is unable to function. The novel ends with a catastrophic meeting between the estranged, star-crossed lovers, where both seem to psychologically disintegrate. Spillway and Other Stories, Barnes's 1920s collection, which includes Cassation, is written less baroquely than Nightwood, but follows similar themes of disconnection, passion, homosexuality, and a disappearing Eu ro pe an grand or affected manner. Cassation¹¹ is sketchy, a short monologue spoken by a nineteen-year-old Russian dancer to a character, "Madame" (who is never explained and does not feel present), of her love for and...