Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Enikő Bollobás: (De-) Gendering and (De-) Sexualizing Famale Subjectivities: Woman-Hating and Its Revisions in Literature and Painting
precious, the incommunicable past" (238), without nostalgia and sentimentalism because this Eden has not been lost, but rather inscribed upon the land as Antonia: she appears for Jim as text leaving images in the mind and firing the imagination. 2.3. Djuna Barnes: transgressions of gender and sexuality Djuna Barnes still remains one of the most enigmatic figures of female modernism. Her most important novel is Nightwood (1936), with a mesmerizing mystery for its protagonist, Robin Vote. A "tall girl with the body of a boy" (46), she is one of the most memorable androgynes in modernist fiction: both quester and desired other, autonomous yet produced in sexual relationships, she always transgresses whatever boundaries she encounters. As woman quester, seeker, and wanderer, she is after selfhood and knowledge that lie beyond the bounds of patriarchy; as the desired other, however, she fulfills the role cast for women in patriarchy. The reader's first encounter with Robin happens during a doctor's visit: "in white flannel trousers" and "in a moment of threatened consciousness [...] lay the young woman, heavy and disheveled" (34). The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earthflesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous, and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effluence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water —as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations —the troubling structure of the born somnambule, who lives in two worlds —meet of child and desperado. (34-5) She is indeed an unusual being: neither human nor beast really, she exhibits a plant-like existence and occupies a very peculiar dimension of consciousness. Being and not being at the same time, conscious and unconscious, in the elements of light, water, and earth, in the room as well as the jungle, predator as well as victim, Robin appears in all her contradictions. Not one cell of her body can be labeled as "feminine," yet Felix, who accompanies the doctor, immediately falls in love with 115
