Notes
— Notes — introduction 1. Elizabeth Grosz in Volatile Bodies concurs, “I would contend that without some acknowledgment of the formative role of experience in the establishment of knowledges, feminism has no grounds from which to dispute patriarchal norms” (94). The act of drawing upon personal experience and personal observations validates otherwise foreclosed or unacknowledged identities and experiences while enhancing knowledge and enlarging understanding of different identities and different kinds of experiences. Grosz refrains from “bracketing off” experience and setting it aside (95). In this way personal experience becomes political. 2. Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds is certainly in need of critical attention. Barnes’s Nightwood is not typically written about as a war novel, although I am not the only one to assert that it does, indeed, treat World War I trauma and World War II anxiety. H.D.’s Trilogy is receiving increasing attention and is probably the most read and taught work under examination here. 3. There are exceptions within the last ten years, although the number of anthologies that do not include war writing by women is staggering. Please see the following for in-print anthologies that include a selection of primary work by American women war writers: Lorrie Goldensohn’s American War Poetry: An Anthology (Columbia UP, 2006); George Clarke’s A Treasury of War Poetry: British and American Poems of the World War, 1914–1919 (Kessinger, 2005); James Meredith’s Understanding the Literature of World War II: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents (Greenwood, 1999); Clare Tylee’s War Plays by Women: An International Anthology (Routledge, 1999); Jon Silkin’s revised The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (Penguin, 1997); and Trudi Tate’s Women, Men, and the Great War: An Anthology of Short Stories (Manchester UP, 1996). chapter 1: circumventing the circumscription of marginalization 1. I take my definitions of the adjective perverse from the Oxford English Dictionary. Specifically , I am referencing the following definitions: in regard to a deviant identity or deviant behavior , 1. a. “Of a person, action, etc.: going or disposed to go against what is reasonable, logical, expected, or required; contrary, fickle, irrational”; and in regard to a corrupted society (and to war later in the chapter), 2. a. “Contrary to what is morally right or good; wicked, evil, debased.” 2. This scene is found in the “Drafts” section of Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts. I use the drafts as an extension of the original text because the publication of the facsimile edition includes the related drafts as parts of the original text. Any citation for Nightwood after p. 139 comes from the supplemental material found in the facsimile edition. 144 notes to pages 31–51 3. The major exceptions are discussions by Margaret Bockting, Erin Carlston, and Jane Marcus. Bockting positions Nightwood as a war novel, with Barnes as a female author examining binary constructions in war in connection to O’Connor as soldier. Carlston traces the trope of fascism through the novel, arguing that Nightwood “mimics many of fascism’s favorite tropes”—two of which, decadence and decline, can be discerned in the style of the novel (43). Marcus discusses identities of alterity and correlates these othered identities to the political climate that would engender World War II. 4. See the facsimile edition of Nightwood for these scenes. 5. Barnes considered “Bow Down” as a title for what became Nightwood. Instead, the first chapter was given that title. Such a title resonates with fascist ideology, subservience, and extermination. This interpretation is especially significant in that chap. 1 details Felix’s “disqualification” and his need to bow “low enough” so “the great past might mend a little” (Barnes 9). 6. See pp. 130–36 in the chapter “Go Down, Matthew” for the bar scene in which a drunk, angry, and hysteric O’Connor confronts the public with its persecution of difference and its bloodshed. He predicts “the end—mark my words—now nothing, but wrath and weeping !” (136). 7. Responding to Felix’s preoccupation with immortality, convention, and habit, O’Connor responds, “We heap reproaches on the person who breaks it [habit], saying that in so doing he has broken the image—of our safety” (94). 8. Ironically, Barnes once felt no shame about harboring a lesbian (or heterosexual) identity. According to Antonia White, “Djuna told me she had no feeling of guilt whatever about sex, about going to bed with any man or woman she wanted, but that she felt extremely guilty and ashamed...
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