SOURCE: "'This Is Obscene': Female Voyeurism, Sexual Abuse, and Maternal Power in The Dove," in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 13, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 117-39.

[In the following essay, Dalton discusses the role of incest and child abuse in Barnes's work, especially in her play, The Dove.]

In 1963 when she was seventy-one, Djuna Barnes referred to herself as "the most famous unknown of the century."¹ By old age, Barnes was profoundly aware that while she had been respected decades earlier as an innovative modernist writer, her work remained largely unread. Worse still, when it was read, it typically provoked a mixture of admiration and bafflement or outright rejection. One critic stated that her writing "suffers from that most irritating offense of difficult writing—the mysterioso effect that hides no mystery, the locked box with nothing in it."² I would argue that Barnes's work is more like Pandora's box: once one manages to open it, the contents stream out irrepressibly. Yet the long-standing critical confusion makes sense since Barnes focused on exploring the position of daughters within incestuous families. Until the past decade, such discursive terrain has remained mostly uncharted, in keeping with the social taboos barring discussion of both the subject of childhood sexual abuse and the vulnerability of daughters within patriarchal structures.

Barnes's work seems to have been all the more mystifying because she was remarkably ambitious in her exploration of the forms and effects of incest. While portraying incidents of father-daughter incest and their aftereffects throughout her oeuvre, she also explored how every member of a dysfunctional family can become implicated in and/or vulnerable to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. In the course of this lifelong examination, Barnes's scrutiny of mother-daughter relationships and grandmother-granddaughter incest was particularly perceptive and critically confounding.

In The Antiphon, the last play that Barnes published, the daughter, Miranda, describes herself as a stunned insect saved up for fodder to articulate the effects that the father's incestuous abuse, and the mother's collusion with him, had upon her. Unlike her namesake in Shakespeare's last drama, whose mother is long lost, this Miranda exhorts her mother to hear her and nurture her in spite of their long estrangement:

     Hear me:
     And if you hear, when you hear
     The infinitely distant, pining voice
     Of any creature punished in the web
     ............................
     Find her, if you find her, turn her;
     Stroke out misfortune's fortune.

³

Like "the creature punished in the web," the daughters in many of Barnes's earlier texts feel that they are inseparably linked to maternal figures by the traumatic past, even as they are estranged by the older women's denial of it. When Miranda says these lines, she could speak them on behalf of the many abused children and young women Barnes depicts throughout her works.

I will first analyze the nexus of abuse Barnes herself experienced as a child and young woman and then focus on her early drama The Dove, which has received little critical attention.⁴ This play is crucial to examine because in it Barnes began to explore the ties and estrangements between daughters and maternal figures within dysfunctional households. By delving into the meaning of domestic violence, repressed lesbian desire, voyeurism, sexual exploitation, and maternal collusion in The Dove, Barnes began to investigate the issues that would preoccupy her throughout her literary career.⁵

Writing the Best-Kept Secret

Djuna Barnes's father, Wald, was both bizarre and abusive.⁶ Both Andrew Field and Mary Lynn Broe have written about some of the violence Barnes confronted while young. Field suggests that Djuna's mother, Elizabeth Chappell Barnes, divorced Wald in 1912 after (and partially because) he had given Djuna as a sexual sacrifice to Percy Faulkner, his mistress's brother.⁷ Broe refers to a constellation of traumatic events, including "the father's attempted rape, his 'virginal sacrifice' of the daughter, then his brutal barter of his daughter-bride" to Faulkner.⁸ All of these events most likely occurred when Barnes was between sixteen and eighteen, and Barnes was to grapple with their aftereffects throughout her life, depicting versions of them and the trauma they engendered in her major works, Ryder (1928), Nightwood (1936), and The Antiphon (1958). The central father figures within these texts are violently destructive, and in keeping with these fictionalized portrayals, the few descriptions of Barnes's father that exist in her letters also characterize him as persistently invasive.⁹

During his marriage to Djuna's mother, Wald had at least one long-term mistress who, along with her children fathered by him, lived in the family's Cornwall-on-Hudson household. Wald's mother, Zadel Barnes, was also a permanent member of first the Cornwall and then the Long Island farm household. Zadel Barnes was a powerful member of the family, providing much of the financial support and the bulk of material necessities for the household during Djuna's childhood. She also supervised Djuna's education. However, Zadel most often used her power not to protect the children from her son's abusive practices but to shore up his authority within the polygynous household, and to wield her own.¹⁰

Barnes was intensely affected by her family members during her childhood, in part because her father isolated her and the other children from outside influences, including public schooling. At the same time, Barnes's father, mother, and paternal grandmother had a wide range of artistic interests and they encouraged the children to write, draw, and study music; to some extent, these activities may have served as a creative release in face of the abuse within the family. Responsible for a range of farm work, Barnes also labored hard during these years, since "What Wald Barnes didn't or wouldn't do, his women and his children did for him. As a young girl Miss Barnes not only sewed and baked, but also planted and plowed fields" (Field 184).

The evidence in the family papers suggests that Barnes's mother colluded with Wald during Djuna's childhood, perhaps out of a sense of her own powerlessness and out of fear of losing her already tenuous position in the polygynous household. Like many mothers in dysfunctional families, for years Elizabeth Chappell Barnes was apparently willing to sacrifice the welfare of her children to maintain her relationship with her husband. Elizabeth's letters to Djuna (her only daughter), written after the breakup of her relationship with Wald, are punctuated by covert displays of her envy at her daughter's artistic success and by manipulative and detailed reports of her own suffering, sacrifice, and hopelessness.

As is often the case in recent research concerning mothers in incestuous households,¹¹ Barnes characterizes the maternal figures throughout Ryder, Nightwood, and The Antiphon as women who choose to deny and repress their memories of the past, and who feel threatened by the daughter's desire to remember and exorcise the trauma engendered by the family. In keeping with these dynamics, the letters Barnes received from her mother reveal similar tensions: "No! I do not have any wish to go back into the past to recover any of the memories I have and am trying [to] put behind me. And even if I did do so, the best facts are enof [sic]. Uppermost I have forgotten so much. What I do remember is not worth the trouble to put on paper and then too, I do not feel after Ryder, that I want anymore of me exploited" (Elizabeth Chappell Barnes to Djuna Barnes, 30 April 1941. McKeldin). Like Augusta, the mother in The Antiphon, Elizabeth seems to have been an expert at repression. Since Djuna had what Emily Coleman called "a fearful tie"¹² to her mother, it is not surprising that she found her mother's denial alienating and destructive. As is often the case with abused children grown to adulthood, the mother's subsequent denial of past trauma could easily constitute another betrayal, intensifying the effects of the original ones.¹³

The children in Barnes's natal household confronted a powerful nexus of abuse; the father isolated them from outside influences, intensifying the effect of his self-aggrandizement as prophet, his physical and sexual abuse, and both parents' inability to provide material security. The mother's acquiescence in face of these dynamics, and the grandmother's sanctioning of the father's practices through her economic and emotional support of him, left the children remarkably vulnerable to the father's power. The fact that Barnes struggled for decades to portray the father's sexual abuse, and the ways in which her mother and paternal grandmother colluded with him, suggests the profound degree to which these events traumatized her. At a much earlier point in her career, however, Barnes was able to depict, albeit in masked form, the sexual abuse to which her grandmother Zadel subjected her, as well as her mother's collusive role in these transgressions.

Although father-daughter incest is a problem of epidemic proportions, and mothers and other female relatives often collude with the fathers' transgressions, cases of mother-daughter or grandmother-granddaughter incest seem to be relatively rare (see Russell 71-74). In their groundbreaking analysis of father-daughter incest, Herman and Hirshman offer an explanation for this disparity:

It is the refraction of the incest taboo through the institutions of male supremacy and the sexual division of labor which results in the asymmetrical application of the taboo to men and women….

The greater the domination of the father, and the more the caretaking is relegated to the mother, the greater the likelihood of father-daughter incest. The more democratic the family and the less rigid the sexual division of labor, the less likely that fathers will abuse their daughters. (62-63)

Barnes's post-1927 work illustrates and supports many of the issues discussed by feminist theorists writing about father-daughter incest. However, Barnes's earlier portrayals can serve as a reminder that victim disclosure rates in cases of incest perpetrated by female relatives could be quite low.

Disclosure in cases of father-daughter incest has increased dramatically in recent years, in part due to the increased support for victims stemming from social and legal reform (Russell 76-84). But with the culturally ingrained resistance to acknowledging childhood sexual abuse, and the idealization of maternal figures in Western culture, it is possible that even if a child reported incestuous abuse by a female relative, the disclosures might not register. Of course, the difficulty of indicting maternal figures¹⁴ itself could also be prohibitive.¹⁵ In Barnes's case, most critics seem not to have registered the indictments of either her grandmother or her father that she made in her fiction and plays.¹⁶

The distinct record through letters of Barnes's abuse by her grandmother is unusual in cases of incest; although only one letter from Djuna to Zadel is currently in the collection, many letters from Zadel to Djuna are available.¹⁷ Written over a period of eighteen years, from the time Djuna was six to twenty-four, the letters reveal the grandmother's conflated efforts to nurture and exploit her granddaughter. Zadel's letters are a peculiar mélange—of advice to Djuna on how she should eat, exercise, study, and subordinate her will to ensure the well-being of the family; of practical advice on groceries and chores; of lavish endearments that seem carefully designed to manipulate; and of a regressive, highly euphemistic language that expresses her erotic desire for her granddaughter, referring in detail to past sexual encounters between them. As early as 1903, when Barnes was eleven and when she and her grandmother shared the same bed, Zadel referred to sexual interactions between them and expressed the erotic nature of her desire for Djuna.¹⁸ Not only do the letters reveal the way in which Zadel colonized Djuna to serve her sexual needs, but they also provide evidence that the other adults in the family had a matter-of-fact attitude towards this abuse.

Zadel Barnes's sexual discourse in letters addressed to Djuna is often preceded or followed by instructions Djuna was asked to pass on to her mother and father about household matters. The juxtaposition implies that the letters to Djuna may have been read by her parents. At times, Zadel would send messages for the other children in the letters to Djuna-which reinforces the impression that the letters were shared with others. The fact that the parents, Wald and Elizabeth, mention in their own letters one of the nicknames, "Flitch" (a euphemism for genitalia), that Zadel used for herself when writing to Djuna, further suggests that they were aware of the grandmother's transgressions.

The letters are especially jarring because of the ways in which Zadel would juxtapose practical instructions about such matters as supplies she was sending to the farm household with passages about her own breasts, erotic pleasure, and her desire for access to Djuna's body. Zadel often illustrated her letters with drawings of disembodied breasts to express her desire; she also used a range of euphemisms to refer to her own and Djuna's breasts-at times calling them "Misriss Pink Tops" or "Quick Tops," while referring to her aroused nipples as "pebblums on the beachums."

In one letter, sent when Djuna was seventeen, Zadel writes:

Oh Misriss! When I sees your sweet hands a huggin' your own P.T.'s [Pink Tops]—I is just crazy and I jumps on oo! X like dis-(Zadel to Djuna Barnes, 4 March 1909, McKeldin)

The first drawing shows a pair of disembodied breasts approaching a thin female figure sitting upright in a chair, and the second shows the young girl and the chair knocked flat on the ground, the figure's arms spread downward as if she has no means to resist the disembodied breasts looming above her. The cartoonish drawings depict the granddaughter as she is overwhelmed by a force she cannot resist while the grandmother's regressive prose masks her authority in the exchange (cf. Broe 1989, 42).

Although Zadel's erotic discourse was mostly breast-centered, she used a whole panoply of sexual euphemisms, especially in the closing of her letters. To give just one example, she closed a letter dated 1 October 1908 to Djuna by writing, "Bless my Sexes … Dorations, Snickerterbitz—Corkerdit-Pink Tops and your own loving thatch of Bacon Cakes." The reference to the "thatch of Bacon Cakes" is easier to decode than some of the others; thatch refers to the granddaughter's pubic hair, while "Bacon Cakes" is a metaphor for the girl's labia, likening them to strips of pork.

Zadel's letters to Djuna show that she conditioned the child to serve her own erotic needs at a young age; they also suggest the means by which Zadel may have done so. For example, while Barnes was growing up, Zadel was intermittently away from the family, and often during these periods, she would arrange for food stuffs to be delivered to the Cornwall-on-Hudson household. Zadel's letters show that she used her power as the family's provider of groceries to purchase special foods for Djuna (see also Broe 1989, 42). Mention of treats often precedes the erotic passages, and the juxtapositions suggest that Zadel used her power as provider to bribe Djuna into acquiescing to the sexual abuse.

In light of this breast-centered sexual abuse, it seems especially significant that Zadel's and Wald's letters reveal that Djuna had an eating disorder during her childhood and young adulthood. It may be that Barnes tried symbolically to protest her grandmother's use of her body for oral gratification by curtailing her own oral consumption. Many of Zadel's and Wald's letters instruct Djuna on the importance of eating sufficient amounts of food, implying that she would not eat if they did not remind her. Barnes's eating problems make sense, since during her childhood she was figuratively and literally treated as a commodity to be consumed by the adults in her family.

Barnes's eating disorder is also in keeping with some of the lifelong aftereffects typically suffered by survivors of incest (Blume 151-56). As is the case for many survivors, it seems that when Barnes felt she was losing control of her life, she would try to impose a sense of order by strictly limiting her food intake. In both her young adulthood and old age when she was living on insufficient funds, Barnes would try to "manage" the financial difficulties by eating less.

One of Barnes's first professional assignments casts further light on the dynamics concerning orality, consumption, and power at work in her relationship to her family and her writing. During the first years after she left the household headed by Wald and Zadel, Barnes allowed herself to be force-fed as research for writing a newspaper article "in simulation of the force-feedings which the English suffragists were then undergoing" (Field 53). The fact that Barnes underwent the procedure and wrote the article suggests that she may have been more successful at describing and locating the forces that control women than at protecting herself from them. By participating in the force-feeding, Barnes was engaged in a destructive, yet revealing, form of acting out. Barnes's position in the "voluntary simulation" was a symbol of her former position in her family—in which the father and grandmother conflated nurture and violence in their violation of her bodily integrity. Physicians force-fed suffragists ostensibly "for their own good," but also to break their spirit; the dynamics in this oral-centered form of ritual rape reverberate with the oral dynamics involved in Zadel's use of her role as family provider to coerce Djuna into submitting to her breast-centered sexual abuse.

By participating in the simulation, then writing an account of it for publication, Barnes publicly exposed a form of abuse that was remarkably similar to what she had suffered as a child and adolescent. However, Barnes's public exposure of the horror of force-feeding is an extreme contrast to the silencing she experienced in her family. By participating in the "simulation," Barnes may have been covertly testing her family members to see if they would recognize the parallels between the two forms of abuse. We can only speculate on what Barnes's reaction may have been when she received a letter from her father in which he congratulated her on the article, paternalistically expressed concern for her, and wrote that he wished he could beat up the physicians who force-fed her, seemingly oblivious to the parallels between the doctors' actions and his own (Wald Barnes to Djuna Barnes, 12 September 1914, McKeldin).

In most families in which there is incestuous abuse, children face a range of silencing forces; molesters may threaten to kill their victims or condition children to believe they will be to blame for the breakup of the family if they disclose the abuse. Often, sexual abusers can silence children by suggesting that they will lose the adult's love if they do not behave as required.¹⁹ Many of the letters Zadel wrote to Djuna during her childhood show that the grandmother used similar tactics to condition her to subordinate her interests to maintain the status quo in the family. Highlighting this dynamic, one letter from Zadel instructs Djuna to be silent about family problems even if they directly affect her. She then explains that through such silence Djuna will not only "be happier," but also more fully loved.

You will please me very much … if you will take yourself strongly in hand, not to "butt in" in anything that is not really your very own business and not even then, unless it is very important. If you overcome this bad habit, you will escape a lot of trouble—prevent a lot of trouble,—you will be happier and be really a much nicer girl and be more beloved. Try hard my darling × I believe you can do anything you really resolve to. (Zadel to Djuna Barnes, 20 February 1906, McKeldin)

It is not clear how Barnes felt about her grandmother's sexual abuse while she was a child and teenager living in the Cornwall and then the Long Island households. But by the time Barnes published The Dove in 1923, she had written several works that portray relationships between older women who are maternal figures and young women or children.²⁰ These fictional accounts suggest that Barnes felt profoundly ambivalent about her grandmother's molestation, and that, at least at times, she felt overwhelming rage as a result of the trauma.

There is one piece of direct biographical evidence, dating back to the period of Zadel's sexual abuse, showing Barnes's response to her grandmother's demands…. Zadel's letters frequently urged Djuna and other family members to write more often when she was away from the household on business. On one occasion, she complained bitterly:

Imagine my emotion this morning when the morning mail brought nothing from you! And after spending nearly all day Sunday writing to you and "ma" and "pa" and Fanny [Wald's live-in mistress]! If that is to be the effect of such devotion. I'll hang my pen on the willow tree, and I'll off to the deuce again—the writer's life has no charms for me. (Zadel to Djuna Barnes, 23 February 1909, McKeldin)

Djuna's response was deeply conflicted, marked by a mixture of rage, despair, and fear; her immediate retraction of her expression of hatred suggests that she could not bear the consequences of expressing her anger to Zadel. The letter also demonstrates a form of "splitting off" common among incest survivors (Bass 42-43), as Djuna addresses Zadel both as "Grandmother" and through metonymic references to her nipples and breasts.

Dear Pink Top Pebblums and Grandmother:

Imagine my feelings when the mail brought nothing from you, for me!!! This is the way I looked immediately, You is a nasty Pink Tops and Grandmother Flitch and I hate you—oh no I don't I love yer! ha! ha! Now really wouldn't that give you a "pain"? (Djuna Barnes to Zadel Barnes, 26 February 1909, McKeldin)

Barnes's letters to and from family and friends repeatedly show that she was caught in a matrix of forces—pressured not to protest the transgressions within the family, threatened with loss of love if she did not behave as her father and grandmother willed, and conditioned by the adults to serve the sexual needs of the father and grandmother. Since many survivors of childhood sexual abuse struggle throughout their lives to remember what they have suffered, it is not surprising that it took Barnes decades to tell the story of her father's sexual abuse in Ryder, Nightwood, and The Antiphon. What is surprising is that as early as 1923 she was able to explore the meaning of Zadel's sexual abuse and her deeply conflicted relation to her grandmother and mother in her play The Dove.

"The Creature Punished in the Web": Domesticity, Maternal Power, Voyeurism, and Sexual Abuse in The Dove

Although Barnes published The Dove in 1923 as part of A Book, the play was first staged at Smith College in 1926. The characters within the play are two sisters, Amelia and Vera Burgson, and a young woman whom the sisters name "The Dove" after they meet her in the park and invite her to live with them (148-50). The highly charged name appropriately signals The Dove's situation in the older women's household. The Christian tradition associates doves with peace, holiness, and purity. However, Barnes may also have had another meaning in mind. During the pre-Christian era, the dove "was a primary symbol for female sexuality. In India, the name of the dove-goddess meant 'lust.'"²¹ These connotations are appropriate, since The Dove is the object of desire for the two sisters. As is often the case with Barnes, it is an obscure meaning of the word that proves the most revealing. In keeping with the Christian imagery, "dove" can be a term for a "gentle, innocent, or loving woman or child."²² This definition may have been uppermost in Barnes's mind, much as it was in Tennyson's, when he wrote, "O somewhere, meek unconscious dove / … Poor child, that waitest for thy love!"²³ The polysemic associations generated by the young woman's name contribute to sexualizing her, while also stressing her purity and vulnerability, foreshadowing the tensions at work when the Burgson sisters attempt forcibly to incorporate her into their erotic practices. The description of The Dove, an accurate one for the playwright herself, signals that the character is Barnes's fictionalized representative: "a slight delicate girl … as delicate as china with almost dangerously transparent skin. Her nose is high-bridged and thin, her hands and feet are also very long and delicate. She has red hair, very elegantly coiffured" (148).²⁴ The stage directions also suggest that The Dove expects danger at any moment: "When she moves [seldom] the slightest line runs between her legs, giving her the expectant waiting air of a deer" (148).

The opening dialogue indicates that the two Burgson sisters are significantly older than The Dove. Although the sisters are not related to the younger woman, the age difference, coupled with the fact that they take her in, casts them as her adopted maternal figures. Throughout Barnes's writing, as in folktales about child theft, adoption by pseudomaternal figures often proves ominous.²⁵ Certainly, in this case, the way in which the older women "mother" the girl seems sinister at best.²⁶

The stage directions indicate that as soon as the curtain rises, the set reveals some of the major tensions within and among the characters.

The decoration is garish, dealing heavily in reds and pinks. There is an evident attempt to make the place look luxuriously sensual. The furniture is all of the reclining type.

The walls are covered with a striped paper in red and white. Only two pictures are evident, one of the Madonna and child, and one of an early English tandem race.

There are firearms everywhere. Many groups of swords, ancient and modern, are secured to the walls. A pistol or two lie in chairs, etc. There is only one door, which leads out into the back hall directly back centre. (147)

Symbolically, the set seems to be a perverse womb—one which conflates the relations among sensuality, violence, and mothering.²⁷ As the play opens, Vera and The Dove are talking while The Dove polishes "the blade of an immense sword." The dialogue reveals that Amelia had asked the girl to clean "blood stains" off of it. Although Vera's comments suggest that Amelia had imagined the stains and would in fact be afraid to use the sword, the exchange implies that someone may have been abused before the action of the play began.

Vera's speeches reveal that the two older women are extremely repressed voyeurs, at once obsessed with sexuality and violence and with denying their obsession. In fact, Vera's speech reveals that their "entire education" has consisted of a discourse on sexual expression, perversion, violence, domesticity, and repression. In spite of their obsession with sexuality, the passage makes clear that both women do not engage in any active form of sexual practice except for the voyeuristic. The final image in the paragraph suggests that Amelia's violence is linked to repressed lesbian desire:

"[W]e collect knives and pistols, but we only shoot our buttons off with the guns and cut our darning cotton with the knives, and we'll never, never be perverse though our entire education has been about knees and garters and pinches on hindquarters—elegantly bestowed—and we keep a few animals—very badly—hoping to see something first-hand—and our beds are as full of yellow pages and French jokes as a bird's nest is full of feathers—… It's wicked! She keeps an enormous blunderbuss in the corner of her room, but when I make up her bed, all I find is some Parisienne bathing girl's picture stuck full of pin holes." (151, 153)

When Vera questions The Dove about why she remains in the peculiar household, the young woman's comments about her "unnatural" life with family members on a farm echoes Barnes's own rural childhood—again signaling that The Dove is a fictionalized representative for the author. During the course of this exchange between Vera and The Dove, while Amelia is out on an errand, Vera recounts a dream, one similar in content to passages from Barnes's other works in which a mother speaks to a daughter about sexuality and danger: "I dreamt I was a Dresden doll and that I had been blown down by the wind and that I broke all to pieces—that is, my arms and my head broke all to pieces—but then I was surprised to find that my china skirt had become flexible, as if it were made of chiffon and lace" (153).

Although the play condemns the older women's voyeurism, this dream suggests that a range of forces beyond their control may have alienated the women from themselves and from their own desire. The dream reveals that Vera's subjectivity has been undercut to such an extent that she sees herself as a doll, a thing without feelings and without the power to control its body. Rather than suggesting that the women have imposed "restrictions upon themselves" (Scott 57), such passages imply that a range of forces outside the domestic situation have affected the psyches of the sisters and The Dove. In the dream, the wind seems to be a metaphor for an overwhelming erotic force, one which blows the doll down and breaks it "all to pieces" (153). As the head and the arms of the doll break, symbolizing the destruction of the woman's identity and means of resistance, the china skirt becomes "flexible," implying that it could then be manipulated by others.

Vera's dream reverberates most fully with a story Julie's mother in Ryder tells her daughter about two sister-dolls who die after they are molested. This thinly veiled (and often prophetic) terrorism under the guise of instruction is emblematic of the relations between all the maternal and daughter figures throughout Barnes's work. In Ryder, the mother's bedtime story is a frightening cautionary fable about the dangers of girlhood and of aspiring to feminine ideals. She describes an eerie process of biological and cultural destruction in which two sisters become more perfectly feminine and doll-like until both are dead.

Felice had little hands, Alix had smaller; Felice had a tiny waist and two breasts as delicate as the first setting of blanc mange. Alix's waist was only a hand's span and her bosom was no greater than two tears set low. Felice had golden hair, Alix's was fine and thin and curling.

Felice had a little skeleton as chipped of angles as a Ming, and as light as ash. Alix's flesh covered her bones as thinly as ice on a tree. Felice's ankles were faultless, Alix's were as weightless as cuttlebone and as fragile. (155)

As in Vera's dream, the story implies that the production of women is a process of systematic destruction. The story in Ryder seems especially gruesome because it is told to the daughter by her mother, who is being systematically destroyed by her husband's demands. Much as in Vera's dream in which her head is broken "all to pieces," symbolizing the loss of her identity, the molestation of the two sisters also results in their erasure, since the story leads to their death. By saying "And that's the end of the two little sisters, thank God," after their molestation leads to their simultaneous pregnancies and destruction, the mother in Ryder implies that she finds the sisters in her story shameful because they were abused:

Felice cried for a tiny doll, Alix got a smaller. They sat together in bed and the two dolls sat up before them….

The manager called and took Felice in his right arm and Alix in his left. He pinched them both at once and equally, and they both kissed him at the same moment, and he put them back to bed.

Felice said:

"At twenty minutes past ten, on April fourth, I shall be a mother."

Alix said:

"At twenty-one minutes past ten, on April fourth, I shall be a mother."…

They had four little circles under their four blue eyes.

And on April fourth, at twenty minutes past ten, Felice died.

One minute later Alix died. (155-56)

Amelia's fantastical report of the abuse of the sisters connects imagistically with Vera's description of herself as the shattered Dresden doll. When the mother describes the sisters as becoming increasingly doll-like and then reduces the impregnating events to the manager's "pinch" and his "put[ting] them back to bed," her rendering implies that the sisters are helpless to resist their manipulation and that their bodies can betray them without Alix and Felice comprehending the significance of what has transpired. When the two sisters die after their molestation, their fate ironically predicts that of Julie, the daughter in Ryder, who dreams repeatedly of her death after she is molested by her father.²⁸ The maternal figures' revelations in both the novel and the play are followed by a symbolic reenactment of the abuse of the daughter figures.

In The Dove, soon after Vera describes her dream, Amelia returns from errands. She then tries to draw The Dove and Vera into participating in her voyeuristic habits by inviting them to look at her reproduction of Carpaccio's Deux Courtisanes Vénitiennes, but she fails to do so. Just as lines earlier in the play reveal that Amelia displaces her desire for an interactive sexual practice by staring at "farm animals" and playing in bed with "some Parisienne girl's picture," in this scene, gazing at the portrait functions as a substitute for erotic encounters in which her power, particularly her controlling gaze, might be compromised. Of course, by drawing attention to the way Amelia gazes at the portrait, attempting to derive erotic pleasure from the spectacle, Barnes also makes an implicit and sly comment on her audience's position, gazing upon the spectacle of the play as a whole.

Carpaccio's Deux Courtisanes Vénitiennes functions as a key element in The Dove in other ways as well. Barnes's imagination seems to have been fired by its conflation of domestic, violent, and erotic symbols, and by the central figures' attention to an eerily unrepresented drama. The original painting was cut on both the right and left sides some time before the nineteenth century,²⁹ and what remains of it, with its strikingly absent sections is structurally similar not only to The Dove, but to Barnes's many renderings of her family history in which central elements are obscured, edited out, or only metaphorically represented. Like The Dove, the painting has three central figures: two middle-aged women who appear to be related dominate the canvas, while near the left edge is a young boy who might be a page. Commentary on the two women in the painting is remarkably similar to some of the first critical commentary on Vera and Amelia; one art historian noted that "Their vacant, apathetic faces, devoid of any spiritual animation and individuality, possess a strange fascination for the modern onlooker; the mask of studied indifference seems to hide vice and perversion."³⁰ Animals fill the scene: doves on the balustrade, dogs in the foreground, and a peacock and a dark crowlike bird near the left center; yet the two women are oddly detached from the animals that surround them. In much the same way, The Dove's references to animals highlight the fact that Amelia's and Vera's lives are marked by repressions as they are at once obsessed with and surrounded by, yet separate from, creatures within the world around them. Deep maroonish reds and pinks dominate Carpaccio's canvas, most likely inspiring Barnes's comment that such colors should "heavily" mark The Dove's setting. Carpaccio's use of the deep red tones contributes to the painting's sexually laden atmosphere and forms a jarring contrast to the apparent boredom and apathy of the two female figures. By having one of the female figures tug on a crop or whip clenched in the teeth of a feral dog, while both of the women gaze fixedly past this spectacle, Carpaccio reinforces the feeling that a violent or visually arresting event is taking place beyond the edge of the canvas. But ultimately, because the painting is truncated, the nature of this central, yet unfigured, drama is impossible to decipher.

At points throughout The Dove, Vera and Amelia refer to the painting's place in their entryway, but it is not until the final moments of the action that Amelia brings it onstage. Then, in much the same manner as the figures' and the viewers' gaze reaches beyond the limits of the canvas, transfixed by some action that is not represented, the audience's gaze in The Dove is directed beyond the limits of the stage by The Dove's unrepresented and mysterious final acts.

The end of the play is like a vision from a dream. Instead of resolving tension, the climax serves as a summarizing symbol defining the conflicts within and among the women. In the course of the final action, The Dove confesses to Vera that she loves Amelia; the girl's attraction to the woman who asks her to polish enormous swords and who sticks pins in pictures of Parisienne bathing girls reveals that she has been conditioned into desiring her own victimization. As the three women talk, Amelia becomes agitated and eventually begins a long speech in which she expresses her rage and her narcissism: "I'm in an excellent humour—I could talk for hours, all about myself—to myself, for myself. God! I'd like to tear out all the wires in the house! Destroy all the tunnels in the city, leave nothing underground, or hidden, or useful …" (162). Amelia's speech leads to the final events on stage; she insists that The Dove give her the sword and her frantic demands imply that she intends to use it on herself or on The Dove. As she attempts to find the sword, she instead grasps The Dove's hand, and "clutches it convulsively." Slowly, The Dove "bares Amelia's left shoulder and breast and leaning down, sets her teeth in. Amelia gives a slight, short stifled cry…. The Dove stands up swiftly, holding a pistol. She turns in the doorway hastily vacated by Vera." A moment later, The Dove shouts out, "For the house of Burgson!" and fires the pistol offstage. Amelia runs out, presumably to see if The Dove has killed herself, leaving Vera alone onstage. Amelia reappears "in the doorway with the picture of the Venetian courtesans, through which there is a bullet hole" (163). Responding to Vera's question, "What has she done?", Amelia refers to the picture, then says, "This is obscene" (168).

The meaning of the scene is multilayered and ambiguous. The young woman's action of baring and biting the older woman's breast suggests that she craves nurture from the maternal figure, while also expressing The Dove's anger at Amelia for having threatened her with the sword (and perhaps for other abuses as well).

After attacking Amelia, The Dove may leave with the pistol because she intends to commit suicide, but it remains uncertain at the end of the scene whether or not The Dove has either injured or killed herself. In fact, as Amelia rejoins Vera onstage during the final moment of the play, The Dove's continued absence suggests a wide range of possibilities. She may have shot the picture and left the house-hold, perhaps permanently; she may have simply shot the picture and remained near the entry, just out of the audience's view; or she may have injured or killed herself at the same time the bullet punctured the picture.

Amelia's final line, "This is obscene!", is also polysemic. In one sense, Amelia's comment suggests that she may have realized the obscene nature of her own voyeurism; but the fact that The Dove does not appear on stage again implies that Amelia may have had her realization at the cost of the young woman's life. Even if we interpret the final events on stage in the most positive manner possible, they still seem to signify disaster for The Dove.

If Amelia's final line does mean that she has realized the implications of her voyeurism, and if we conclude that The Dove did not shoot herself, but only the picture, the end of the play still indicates that Amelia's actions have had tragic consequences. Even if The Dove has left the household after the gunshot, ultimately, The Dove's violent exit suggests that she may not be able to escape from the patterns of violence and displacement learned from the sisters.

On a symbolic level, by having The Dove shoot the picture, Barnes shows the young girl adopting the older woman's role, but in a more extreme form. Instead of ending Amelia's voyeurism, The Dove's gesture recalls the older woman's habit of sticking pins in and putting holes through "some Parisienne bathing girl's picture." Not only is The Dove's act of shooting the gun psychosexually charged with phallic implications, but so is the description of Amelia "sticking pins in and putting holes through" to express her lesbian desire. Of course, the imagery concerning Amelia's voyeurism also seems jarringly domestic—as it calls to mind crewelwork or the process of tatting. The descriptions suggest that in the world of the play, Amelia's, as well as The Dove's, lesbian desire can only be expressed in a form that merges the conventionally phallic, the domestic, and the perversely destructive. The use of the phallic images also hints at the patriarchal regulation that forms the bedrock supporting domestic abuse.

A far more dire reading is also possible; in this case, The Dove's absence at the end of the play signals that she has killed herself, puncturing the picture in the process. Then, Amelia's exclamation, "This is obscene!", made after seeing the girl's body, would show her more concerned with the picture than with the dead girl. In finding the damaged representation, rather than the girl's corpse, "obscene," Amelia would be revealing the profound degree of her repression and peculiar voyeuristic fixation. In spite of the ambiguity of the ending, The Dove as a whole nonetheless shows that for Amelia the symbols are more important than the things themselves. She is perversely fixated on something once removed from reality like a traumatized patient obsessed with a symbolic screen memory that occludes the true source of trauma.

It seems especially fitting that Barnes transgressed injunctions against disclosing incestuous abuse through the creation of what amounts to a dramatic reenactment. Indeed, in light of the biographical evidence about Zadel Barnes's sexual abuse of Djuna, it is impossible not to see The Dove's final biting of Amelia's breast as a sign of Barnes's fury at her grandmother, and, of course, The Dove's ambiguous exit suggests the disruption of subjectivity Djuna, the child, might have experienced as a result of Zadel's sexual colonization. By writing and publishing The Dove as an adult, Barnes responded to her grandmother's attempts to manipulate her into lifelong silence. Describing The Dove's destruction may have enabled Barnes to begin unearthing her buried grief and rage resulting from incest.

The Critical Key to the Locked Box

The Dove can encourage critics not only to reread Barnes, but also to raise questions about the significance fictionalized portrayals of childhood and young adulthood might have in understanding modernist texts as well as contemporary incest theory. What Barnes's work suggests is that the roles of maternal figures (both as molesters and as those who collude with them) may be more complex than previous analyses have shown. Barnes's life and work also offer support for recent developments in psychological theory that argue that incest is a sign of a dysfunctional structure within the family as a whole and not just a dynamic between the molester and the victim. Barnes's oeuvre confirms and yet also adds a caveat to the arguments of some recent social scientists concerning "mother blame," a phrase used in describing the fact that female incest victims tend to direct blame and hostility at their mothers for their victimization by their fathers. Janet Jacobs argues that

In the case of incest victims, the need for separation becomes crucial because the daughter has internalized her mother's sense of powerlessness…. Anger at the mother provides a means through which separation and individuation can be facilitated, with rage and rejection acting as a source of empowerment for the victimized child…. The mother-directed rage represents a first stage in coping with the intense feelings engendered by the abuse. A later stage, in which anger is appropriately focused on the perpetrator, is more likely to occur once the daughter acknowledges and understands her initial reaction to the mother's perceived role.³²

Since Barnes was molested by her father and her grandmother, some might attribute the antimaternal hostility in The Dove, in keeping with Jacobs's argument, to her first stage of coping. However, both the biographical evidence and the complexity of the dynamics in The Dove suggest that such an explanation cannot adequately account for the hostility. The dynamics in Barnes's family and in The Dove suggest that we should interpret the hostility in more concrete terms—as anger towards someone who was, in fact, guilty of collusion with a molester and/or guilty of molestation itself. In other words, although ascribing antimaternal feelings to the process of separation described in ego psychology may often be useful, Barnes's writing and life can remind us that, in some cases, mother blame, or grandmother blame, is an appropriate response to actual transgressions by women.

The fact that many critics found Barnes's texts to be "the locked box" ultimately reveals more about cultural conditioning—and the unspoken injunctions against discussing or even perceiving the prevalence of incest or its aftereffects—than it does about Barnes's writing. In this sense, Barnes's dramatization of incest, which has been culturally unspeakable, created a text which was culturally unreadable. Only recently, with the proliferation of scholarship and popular works dealing with sexual abuse, has the cultural climate permitted rereadings of texts like Barnes's. As Louise DeSalvo's recent book on Virginia Woolf and the effects of childhood sexual abuse eloquently shows, scholars need to confront the meaning of critical silences and rechart the patterns within turn-of-the-century families if we are to account for the ways in which childhood experience shaped the lives of modernist writers and had enduring effects on the texts they produced.³³

Ironically, the very factors responsible for the critics' misreading or inability to read Barnes's texts may account for why she was able to write about grandmother-granddaughter incest at an early point in her career; this particular form of sexual abuse was so culturally unimaginable that it did not fit into any extant category of taboo, and thus was practically invisible. For Barnes, such "invisibility" created a situation in which she could dramatize an incident based on personal trauma, and yet deny it at the same time, because the latent content would have been indecipherable to her audience. On the other hand, perhaps it took Barnes longer to write about father-daughter incest because of the strong and explicit cultural injunctions both against this form of sexual abuse and against indicting the father.³⁴

The lesbian relationships in Barnes's work contrast with the more celebratory (albeit often coded) portrayals by Stein, H. D., and Woolf. Perhaps feminists have been slow to investigate the meaning of Barnes's work, in contrast to the feminist reevaluation of other modernist women's texts that has taken place during the past decade, because of this difference. Barnes's repeated portrayals of sexual violence in lesbian relationships can be mystifying unless we keep in mind that they are often examining some aspect of the grand-mother-mother-daughter constellation of her childhood. For example, Nightwood, in the course of telling the story of the lovers Robin and Nora, explores the complex dynamics of repetition compulsions stemming from childhood abuse. Nora projects the repressed elements of her family trauma onto Robin, reexperiencing her molestation by her father and grandmother through her. Just as Amelia, in The Dove, is a symbol for Barnes's abusive grandmother, Nora's key dream in Nightwood, of the leering grandmother figure in a billycock and corked mustache, further explores the effects of incestuous abuse and the resulting longing for maternal nurture.³⁵

In cases of father-daughter incest, "focusing anger on the mother allows the daughter to externalize her feelings" (Jacobs 512). The Dove, with its role-playing elements, dramatized, and in a sense actualized, Barnes's repressed feelings about both her grandmother's and mother's betrayals. Paradoxically, depicting the destruction of The Dove thus constituted the first stage of what was to become Barnes's lifelong writing cure.

Like a seed crystal that starts the formation of an intricate structure, this articulation of the mother's and grandmother's role in her family constellation enabled Barnes to write about the father's molestation and its aftereffects later in her career. In fact, Barnes's oeuvre constitutes a progressive investigation of incest trauma. Following the thinly veiled representations of the grandmother-mother-daughter relationship, Ryder tells the story of Barnes's childhood, presenting fictionalized versions of each of her family members. Through dream sequences and euphemistic language, the novel shows a young girl unconsciously grappling with the effects of father-daughter incest and maternal collusion. In Nightwood, Nora, an adult survivor of incest, explores on both the conscious and unconscious levels the lifelong effects of her grandmother's and father's molestation. Finally, The Antiphon is Barnes's most explicit rendering of the family dynamics involved in incest trauma. The play summarizes all the issues that Barnes grappled with throughout her literary career; it refers both explicitly and symbolically to the incest traumas in Barnes's own life as well as those she had presented in masked form in earlier texts. By portraying a "family reunion" and stylized reenactments of incestuous abuse, Barnes writes the abused daughter's therapy.

Although critics such as Broe and DeSalvo have begun to address the issue of critical misreadings and silence regarding Barnes's treatment of incest, further work remains. Perhaps only by assessing the relationships among Barnes's cross-textual portrayals of incest and its aftereffects may the import and intricacies of her oeuvre become clear—that her works as a whole constitute one of the most compelling explorations of the lifelong effects of childhood trauma in all of modern literature. Throughout her career Barnes created works that scrutinize the meaning of silences, repressions, and denials within families and especially within those abused by their families. With The Dove, Barnes began to reveal her vast knowledge of the many meanings of what one dare not tell, as well as the many meanings and tremendous power of silence.

notes

1. Djuna Barnes to Natalie Barney, 31 June 1963, Correspondence of Djuna Barnes, Special Collections, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland, College Park: hereafter designated as McKeldin. Unpublished material used by permission of Herbert Mitgang of the Authors League Fund and University of Maryland, College Park.

2. Review of Djuna Barnes's Selected Works, Time, 20 April 1962, 108.

3. Djuna Barnes, The Antiphon (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 79-80.

4. There are brief discussions of The Dove in Louis Kannenstine, The Art of Djuna Barnes (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 135-37; James Scott, Djuna Barnes (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976), 56-59; Cheryl Plumb, Fancy's Craft: Art and Identity in the Early Works of Djuna Barnes (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1986), 35, 40, 45-48. In Mary Lynn Broe's Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). Ann Larabee (37, 40, 42-44) and Joan Retallack (48-49) also comment on The Dove in essays on Barnes's early plays.

5. The Dove appears in A Book (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923). Further references to this edition are noted parenthetically in the text.

6. Unless otherwise indicated, the description of conflicts within Barnes's natal family is informed by my reading of the Djuna Barnes Papers at the University of Maryland, particularly letters to and from Djuna Barnes and her immediate family members.

7. Andrew Field, Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 43; hereafter cited parenthetically.

8. Mary Lynn Broe, "My Art Belongs to Daddy: Incest as Exile, The Textual Economics of Hayford Hall," in Women's Writing in Exile, ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 56. Further citations noted parenthetically as Broe 1989.

9. For example, in a letter to Emily Coleman written in adulthood, Barnes made an oblique reference to her father's physical abuse. Her use of the word naturally suggests that such behavior was probably commonplace, while her use of the endearment is typical of her irony when describing family trauma: "[S]till its [sic] the way the rope went out in a long leaping line and the open loop at the end taking the quarter you had decided on that was fun. [N]aturally, my dear dad caught me and the rest of the children in loops with his, and dragged us about" (25 June 1939, McKeldin).

10. Throughout her writing, Barnes explores the complicated allegiances of paternal grandmothers—to their son's authority and desires, to the grandchildren's well-being, to their own erotic desires and will to power, and to daughters-in-law. As was the case in Barnes's own life, in Ryder and Nightwood there is a notable conflation of paternal authority and maternal presence whenever paternal grandmother figures appear. Zadel's correspondence suggests that she cast herself as a maternal figure, both within the Barnes household and without, in order to manipulate others to her will, much as does Sophia, the paternal grandmother in Ryder.

11. For example, see Sue E. Blume, Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and Its Aftereffects in Women (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1990); Judith Lewis Herman and Lisa Hirschman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); and Diana Russell, The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

12. Emily Coleman to Djuna Barnes, 16 November 1935, McKeldin.

13. Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 133-48.

14. The use of the term "maternal" is meant broadly, connoting any older female figure (not necessarily a relative) who casts herself in a nurturing, protective, or caretaking role in relation to a younger woman. It is in this sense that Barnes's paternal grandmother, and the characters Barnes based upon her, may be defined as "maternal figures."

15. Russell discusses the many reasons why reported cases of incest only comprise "the tip of the iceberg" (85). She also discusses a range of factors that affect incest disclosure rates (31-37).

16. Lynda Curry's 'Tom Take Mercy': Djuna Barnes' Drafts of The Antiphon" and Louise DeSalvo's "'To Make Her Mutton at Sixteen': Rape, Incest, and Child Abuse in The Antiphon" in Broe's Silence and Power discuss Barnes's treatment of incest in The Antiphon, Barnes's most explicit and final published work on the subject. My own forthcoming analysis The Book of Repulsive Women: Childhood Sexual Abuse in the Work of Djuna Barnes also addresses this critical silence.

17. I am grateful to Jane Marcus for bringing the Zadel Barnes letters to my attention and for Mary Lynn Broe's "My Art Belongs to Daddy," the first essay to assess the relations between Antonia White, Emily Coleman, and Djuna Barnes at Hayford Hall, and the Zadel—Djuna Barnes correspondence.

18. Broe sketches the range of abuse Barnes experienced in her natal household and points out a range of aftereffects that Djuna may have experienced as a result. However, she offers an optimistic assessment of the meaning and effects of the erotic correspondence between Zadel and Djuna Barnes. Broe argues that it formed "a purification ritual of sorts within the family, a matriarchal text in the margins outside time. Their only syntax is that of the eternal present where a mythical world of breasts merges with breasts in the fullness of puissance feminine. Zadel and Djuna are empowered to triumph imaginatively over all outside threats. Temporarily safe from the violations of the patriarchal household, Zadel and Djuna played in their symbolic, marginalized world, a queendom of 'nanophilia'" (1989, 53).

19. See Bass and Davis, and Blume, for multiple examples of these dynamics.

20. A range of Barnes's short stories, most notably "Cassation" and "The Grande Malade," use a narrative frame in which a younger woman is recounting her experiences to an older woman. These works are similar to The Dove in their thematic emphasis on voyeurism, explorations of sexual and emotional violence, veiled attention to incest dynamics, and scrutiny of relationships between young women and pseudomaternal figures. See Carolyn Allen's "Writing Towards Nightwood: Djuna Barnes' Seduction Stories" in Silence and Power, 54-65, for the most thorough discussion of these dynamics to date.

21. Barbara Walker, The Women's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 399.

22. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 621. See also Plumb (48) for her comments on the Christian symbolism.

23. In Memoriam 6: 25-28.

24. See Field, 37, 103, and 119 and Shari Benstock, The Women of the Left Bank (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 234, 239, and 253-54 for their descriptions of Barnes's appearance.

25. As I refer to Amelia and Vera of The Dove as maternal figures, it is important to remember that in Barnes's oeuvre maternal figures are not simply nurturing, older women, but symbols that include their own opposites, often to a perverse degree. Such contradictory and polysemic associations were strikingly apparent in Zadel Barnes's behavior, as she simultaneously cast herself as her granddaughter's spiritual and intellectual mentor, loving protector, provider, and authority figure, while also molesting her and manipulating her into silence about abuses within the family.

26. Amelia's voyeuristic fixation on a set range of images, her attraction to instruments of violence, and her use of them as decorations in the domestic setting cast her as a figure parallel to Sophia, the paternal grandmother in Ryder, Barnes's most straightforwardly biographical work. One of the oddest details relating to Sophia concerns the pictures she displays on her walls: "There were prints of all she abhorred, the rack, the filling of the belly, known as the Extreme Agony, the electric chair, the woman-who-died-of-fright, the woman-who-could-no-longer-endure-it, the man-with-the-knife-in-his-heart …" (Ryder [Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990], 13; hereafter cited parenthetically).

27. I am using the term "perverse" as defined by Kaja Silverman in "Masochism and Male Subjectivity," Camera Obscura 17 (1988): 31-66. As she notes, "Perversion also subverts many of the binary oppositions upon which the social order rests; it crosses the boundary separating food from excrement (coprophilia); human from animal (bestiality); life from death (necrophilia); adult from child (pederasty); and pleasure from pain (masochism)" (33).

28. For further exploration of these dynamics, see my "Escaping from Eden: Djuna Barnes' Revision of Psychoanalytic Theory and Her Treatment of Father-Daughter Incest in Ryder," Women's Studies 22.2 (1993): 163-80.

29. Jan Lauts, Carpaccio: Paintings and Drawings, trans. Erica Millman and Marguerite Kay (London: Phaidon Press, 1962), 251.

30. Lauts 28; Scott 57-58.

31. I am indebted to Morton Levitt for suggesting this interpretation.

32. Janet Jacobs, "Reassessing Mother Blame in Incest," Signs 15.3 (Spring 1990): 512. Additional citations are noted parenthetically as Jacobs.

33. Louise DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990).

34. The very fact that Zadel Barnes expressed her sexual desire for her granddaughter through letters may also help explain why Barnes was able to fictionalize the grandmother-granddaughter relationship at an earlier point than she could the father-daughter dynamics. Unlike many incest survivors who doubt the validity of their memories of abuse and are left desiring proof after they leave their families, Barnes had proof: Zadel's letters functioned as a form of concrete testimony to her past experience. Also, through the letters, Zadel had transgressed cultural injunctions against textualizing incest; although these were limited disclosures directed only to her granddaughter, they may have nonetheless provided Barnes with a sense that it was possible to transgress family and cultural injunctions against disclosing the grandmother's incestuous abuse.

35. Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1961), 63.