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...