Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)
Studies - Szilvia Nagy: I Can Operate in the Dark—Bodies are Phosphorescent... Occult Modernism and Myth-Making in Djuna Barnes 's Nightwood
Robin's "beast turning human" evokes in the spectator images, feelings, senses, but never thoughts, as if something in connection with this creature were somehow inherently incompatible with the intellect. She does not even speak much, except to animals (137), which makes her akin to those people living long ago who, according to shamans, knew the language of the animals. The image of the unicorn, the white horse with a long horn, is reminiscent of a drawing by Barnes from her 1915 The Book of Repulsive Women , reprinted in Bonnie Kime Scott's essay: Scott imagines Robin's figure into this drawing, giving the following description: ... a female nude, kneeling on one leg with the back leg extended on a fragmentary brick wall, clutching two four-petalled flowers on straggling stems. The woman/creature's back leg dwindles without achieving a foot, an erect tail rises in a dotted line above her buttocks, and two feathers or ears top her head. Her facial features are masked or made up so that a larger than human grimace and a small horn appear... . [it] is ritualistically oriented toward the side of the picture where the dark background is cut away below by white vertical marks resembling sprouts, and above by a crescent shape (Scott 44-5). This transforming figure is by all means "outside the 'human type' —a wild thing caught in a woman's skin" (121), and mythic in its outer features, having both animal's and human's body parts. I agree with Scott that the horns have special importance: Nightwood's Robin is portrayed as having "temples like those of young beasts cutting horns" (113). It is also intriguing that as the doctor goes on elaborating the prominence of horns, he calls attention to old duchesses and asks, "Have you ever seen them go into a large assembly of any sort ... without feathers, flowers, sprigs of oat, or some other gadget nodding above their temples!" (113). The accessories that these women wear above their temples at once seem like horns: a remainder and reminder of the bestial past they are otherwise so much removed from. The careful placement in the cultural setting is important as well, as when Robin is first met with; she "seemed to lie in a jungle trapped in a drawing room" (34), surrounded by exotic plants and cut flowers, a mix of wild and domesticated. The whole episode is indeed much like it was staged: 78
