A Nose-Length into the Matter

In 1928, while her lover Thelma Wood lay convalescing in a Paris hospital, Djuna Barnes began work on Ladies Almanack. Organized according to the months of the year and accompanied by twenty-six original pen and ink drawings, the book presents the adventures of Dame Evangeline Musset and her circle of acquaintances, interspersed with parables, songs, poems, and discourse on the joys and pitfalls of love. Proclaimed the one book all ladies should carry about with them, the Almanack is a satiric tribute to the women who frequented Natalie Barney's Paris salon in the 1920s.' The Almanack was not originally intended for publication although Barnes eventually agreed to have 1,050 copies privately printed. The original book was distributed among an intimate group of associates, dealt boldly with sexuality, and is remarkable for its opposition to the fixed classifications of gender advanced by the new science of sexology. This paper examines how the fixed and gender-specific categories of sexology were challenged by Barnes's interpretation of desire in the Ladies Almanack as thoroughly multiple, shifting, and contradictory, every Law of Love and Desire ... long ago ... mixed as a Contortion of Traffic (38). Barnes wrote her linguistically dazzling LadiesAlmanack in a climate of newly valorized heterosexual comradeship and romance. As an intervention into medical codifications of normalcy, the Almanack directly engages sexological formulations of gender, identity, and desire through the central character of the Almanack, Dame Evangeline Musset, who parodies the era's most pervasive model for homosexual desire, the sexual invert. The idea of inversion has its source in Havelock Ellis's 1897 work by the same name, one of the earliest comprehensive treatments of human sexuality in English, which exhaustively treats the genesis, development, and deportment of homosexuals. The works

Art · Human sexuality · Lesbian · Psychoanalysis · Sexology · Sociology · American and British Literature Analysis · Cultural History and Identity Formation · Gender Studies · German Literature and Culture Studies · Psychology

• The Great Djuna

  Open Access•Cathryn Setz•Literature Compass•2014

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• Modernism and Sexology

  Open Access•Debra A Moddelmog•Literature Compass•2014

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