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

She prayed, and her prayer was monstrous, because in it there was no margin left for damnation or forgiveness, for praise or for blame — those who cannot conceive a bargain cannot be saved or damned. She could not offer herself up, she only told of herself, in a preoccupation that was its own predicament (43). Religion, operating with binaries as well through the continuous attribution of the categories of innocence and sin, cannot conceive of good and evil as nonexistent/One, just like Robin cannot be one thing, only neither. The third polarity that Nightwood is preoccupied with is that of masculine/feminine, and the characters who seek consolidation of this opposite within themselves mainly employ clothing as the agent of repossessing the far end of the binary. Matthew himself is like a modern sorcerer, a shaman, wearing his night gown like a wizard's cloak; he is engaged in the kind of ritual transvestism through which shamans recaptured the female energies for a wholeness of experience. In the doctor's room one may find "perfume bottles, ... pomades, creams, rouges, powder boxes and puffs... . laces, ribands, stockings, ladies' underclothing and an abdominal brace" (68), "yet this room was also muscular, a cross between a chambre ä coucher and a boxer's training camp" (69). When Nora appears in his apartment in the middle of the night, she finds him "in a woman's flannel night gown ... [his] head ... framed in the golden semi-circle of a wig with long pendent curls that touched his shoulders, ... heavily rouged and his lashes painted" (69). He aims at equilibrium between male and female when he refers to God in the feminine, saying that "[personally I call her 'she' because of the way she made me; it somehow balances the mistake." Once he calls himself the "bearded lady" (84), an allusion to the famed performer/'freak' of the old participatory circus. Robin, too, dresses in clothes culturally assigned for the 'opposite sex.' She is "a tall girl with the body of a boy ... [with] broad shoulders ... [and] her feet large" (43), wearing men's clothes (122, 139), and her walk also exposes her as 'unwomanly' by virtue of her movements which are "slightly headlong and sideways; slow, clumsy and yet graceful, the ample gait of the night watch" (39). It is her clothes that define her as an invert; the significance of clothing is primary. Although Nora is also a lesbian, she is not a crossdresser as society sees it. Her costume does not give away her 81