“There's something evil in me that loves evil and degradation - purity's black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar's door?”
Through her characters, Djuna Barnes muses on the secret, private pleasure humans truly can take in pain, humiliation, and wickedness. She demonstrates this desire for immorality through the story, having protagonist Nora Floods fall for Robin Vote, a wandering, unprincipled woman, and subsequently be devastated by the breakup.
“We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery. Life, the pastures in which the night feeds and prunes the cud that nourishes us to despair. Life, the permission to know death. We were created that the earth might be made sensible of her inhuman taste; and love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it. Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery should look well around, doubting everything seen, done, spoken, precisely because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy.”
Here, Djuna Barnes mourns the fate of humanity: to remain in an endless cycle of misery throughout our lifespan, trapped in a mortal body of fat and tissue. She describes life as "the permission to know death", or rather, the permission to know the true peace that death brings after a lifetime of suffering.
"I never asked better than to boil some good man's potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine months."
Here, Dr. O'Conner is confessing to his lifelong secret desire: to be a woman. He admits that he would like nothing better than to be married to a man, cook for him like an ordinary housewife, and bear his children. It's a rather peculiar and jarring fantasy, the image of feminine submission, and only adds to the bizarreness of his character's psyche.
