Djuna Barnes Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Susan Edmunds

SOURCE: "Narratives of a Virgin's Violation: The Critique of Middle-Class Reformism in Djuna Barnes's Ryder," in Novel, Vol. 30, No. 2, Winter, 1997, pp. 218-36.

In the following essay, Edmunds asserts in a discussion of Barnes's Ryder, that "Barnes makes repeated, figurative use of the narrative of a virgin's violation to foreground the ultimate complicity between middle-class reformers and the structures of oppression they would reform, while eschewing the scandalous appeal to fact on which such projects depend."

In her first novel, Ryder (1928), Djuna Barnes recasts her own family history as the story of the freewheeling Ryder family, whose outrageous actions at once parody and overturn the conventions of middle-class domestic fiction. Embracing the maverick ideals of polygamy, idleness, and freethinking, the Ryders not only fail to exemplify dominant norms of domestic conduct; they actively dispute the social mandate to uphold such norms. This dispute largely takes place in...
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