Djuna Barnes Essays
The Façade of Gender and Identity in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood College
Nightwood
In Nightwood, Djuna Barnes investigates the thin separation between love and obsession and their tendency to become one. With a narrative primarily carried through the ramblings of Doctor Matthew O’Connor, the novel explores relationships (between...
The Tragedy of Permanence in "Nightwood" College
Nightwood
In the chapter “Go Down, Matthew” of Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, Dr. Matthew O’Connor, speaking to an ex-priest at the Café de la Mairie du Vie after an extensive and exhausting session of consoling a lamenting Nora Flood, relates himself and the...
Doctor O'Connor in His Labyrinth: Unreliable Narrators in Nightwood College
Nightwood
In response to the horrors of World War I, the modernism movement rose and rejected previous movements like romanticism. Alienation, fragmentation, and shell shock influenced modernist writers to create complex characters, stream of consciousness,...
The Mother and the Self: Rejection of Motherhood in Barnes’s Nightwood & Plath’s The Bell Jar College
Nightwood
The female or female-identifying writer must often acknowledge motherhood in her writing, as men often project and expect women to act like their mothers even in sexual relationships. No matter what wave of feminism, motherhood is still seen as...