As a young journalist during the 1910s, Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) proved herself fearless. For a woman to break into the profession - and in New York City - she had to be. Within the space of two months in 1914, she persuaded a doctor to force feed her like jailed women's suffragists were, spent time in a cage at the Bronx Zoo with a young gorilla named Dinah, and offered herself as a volunteer damsel-in-distress to firefighters in training at the Sixty-Seventh Street Recruit Center.
Barnes knew how to turn her phrases to a radical deviation from the normal and she executed her aphorisms like leaps from a trapeze with no safety net beneath her. What saved her articles from superficiality was something that now sounds old-fashioned. Barnes had a tragic sense and although she applied wit to her chosen subjects, they also constitute a catalog of potential misfortunes.
Barnes knew how to turn her phrases to a radical deviation from the normal and she executed her aphorisms like leaps from a trapeze with no safety net beneath her. What saved her articles from superficiality was something that now sounds old-fashioned. Barnes had a tragic sense and although she applied wit to her chosen subjects, they also constitute a catalog of potential misfortunes.
How it Feels to be Forcibly Fed from New York World Magazine, September 6, 1914.
The Girl and the Gorilla from New York World Magazine, October 18, 1914.
My Adventures Being Rescued from New York World magazine, November 15, 1914.
You may also be interested in Some Hard Captious Star: Djuna Barnes posted here August 26, 2011.
2 comments:
Force fed? Oh my gosh, that would gag me. I guess if I want to find out why she would like that done I'll have to read more about her. You are a true educator, Jane.
Jeanne, I hope you do. Barnes is a very stylish writer of fiction and poetry,too. Ahead of her time in her feminism and much else. Two collections of her journalism "New York" and Interviews" were published a few years ago by Sun & Moon Press.
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