Nightwood Study Guide

Djuna Barnes was born in a log cabin in New York State on June 12, 1892. She was the second child of Wald and Elizabeth Barnes. Wald Barnes believed in polygamy, and so he brought his mistress, Fanny Clark, to live with the family. Wald was a failed composer and artist, so his mother, Zadel Barnes, kept the growing family financially afloat. When Djuna Barnes was 18, her father and grandmother pressured her into marrying Fanny Clark’s brother, Percy Faulkner, who was 52 at the time. The marriage was extremely short-lived (it lasted no more than two months by many accounts) and Barnes moved to New York City with her mother and three brothers in 1912, after Wald and Elizabeth divorced. Barnes briefly studied art at the Pratt Institute and the Art Students League of New York, but eventually took a job as a reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Barnes quickly gained a following for her unusual articles and willingness to go into traditionally male spaces for a story (such as diving into the world of boxing). In 1921, Barnes went to Paris on an assignment and made it her home for the next few years. Barnes was a fixture on the Left Bank, which was also home to notable writers like Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. While there, Barnes met Thelma Wood (a sculptor from Kansas) and by 1922 the two were in love and living together in Paris. Barnes continued writing articles for newspapers until 1928, when she began writing novels. Her first novel, Ryder, proved a success when it was published in 1928. That same year, Barnes and Wood broke up. Over the next few years, Barnes moved around, eventually moving into Peggy Guggenheim’s English manor. This is where she wrote the semi-autobiographical Nightwood. Barnes also developed a drinking habit that culminated in a suicide attempt in 1939. Guggenheim sent Barnes back to Barnes’ mother in New York, and her mother sent Barnes to a sanatorium to get sober. Barnes then moved into her own apartment in Greenwich Village where she struggled to earn a living. Barnes wrote The Antiphon (a scathing criticism of her family thinly veiled as a tragedy in verse) in 1958 as well as a few poems, but she didn’t publish any more fiction after that. Barnes became a notorious recluse and rarely left her apartment until her death. She was voted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961 and given a senior fellowship in the National Endowment for the Arts in 1981. Barnes died in her apartment six days after her 90th birthday in 1982.

Djuna Barnes was active as a journalist and fiction writer during a period of immense sociocultural change and upheaval. In the years after World War I, millions of young people found themselves struggling to make sense of the world after such unprecedented violence and bloodshed changed the European landscape. At the same time, women’s movements all over the Western world were taking place as women protested for the right to vote and other feminist issues (notably for prohibition in America and wage equality in England). Barnes herself was an active advocate for women’s rights, particularly in support of reproductive rights and for the elimination of double standards that condemn women for sexual behavior that men are free to engage in. During the 1920s, Barnes was one of many writers who settled in Paris to enjoy the bohemian atmosphere and company of some of the biggest names in literature. This atmosphere and the general excitement people felt at the end of World War I led to greater social tolerance of certain groups, including the LGBTQ population. During Barnes’s time in Paris, there were a number of salons set up by lesbians where novelists, poets, artists, and musicians (of any gender) would congregate to chat and network. One of the most popular was Gertrude Stein’s salon on the Rue de Fleurus, and Barnes herself spent a lot of time at Natalie Barney’s salon on the Rue Jacob. This had a huge influence on Barnes’s writing and she based many of her characters on the people she met at Barney’s salon.

Barnes lived in Paris in the 1920s, when writers and artists from all over the world flocked to the famous Left Bank to socialize, write, party, and enjoy the bohemian atmosphere of the Latin Quarter. Ernest Hemingway famously describes this period in his memoir A Moveable Feast, which was published after his death. Barnes initially went to Paris to interview James Joyce, one of the most important voices of the Modernist movement. Barnes was particularly inspired by Joyce’s seminal work, Ulysses. Barnes was just one of a large group of LGBTQ people who enjoyed the freedom of life in the Latin Quarter. Like Barnes, Radclyffe Hall drew upon her own experience of being in a same-sex relationship in 1920s Paris—and the dark side of the notorious LGBTQ bars and clubs on the Left Bank—for her novel The Well of Loneliness. For a more modern portrayal of same-sex relationships in a big city, try Rita Mae Brown’s famous coming-of-age novel Rubyfruit Jungle, which traces the experiences of Molly Bolt as she grows up and struggles to make a name for herself as a filmmaker in New York City and find acceptance as a lesbian in the late 20th century. Like Nightwood, Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair examines the way infidelity destroys relationships and leaves the participants scarred and miserable. Additionally, numerous authors have cited Djuna Barnes as an inspiration for their own work, including Truman Capote, who wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s about an independent young woman who, like Robin Vote (the protagonist of Nightwood), defies traditional definitions of femininity.