Djuna Barnes - Ladies Almanack

If Dame Musset provides one philosophical pole around which Ladies Almanack is organized, at the other stands Patience Scalpel, who begins as the book’s staunchest heterosexual, the fictional counterpart to Barnes’s close friend, the poet Mina Loy. She is introduced, pointedly, in “cold January” as one who “could not understand Women and their Ways” (11): here, in a slippage common in Ladies Almanack , “Woman” substitutes for the censored “Lesbian” and in the process universalizes women into lesbians. Like her name, Patience Scalpel’s voice is “as cutting in its derision as a surgical instrument,” and its sharp proclamation is that “my daughters shall go a’marrying”(13).

While Musset and Scalpel represent the extremes of a sexual politics, several other characters also engage in quasiserious ideological debates. “March,” for example, introduces Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall as Lady Buck-and-Balk, who “sported a Monocle and believed in Spirits” and Tillie Tweed-in-Blood, who “sported a Stetson, and believed in Marriage” (18), and involves them in questions about sexual fidelity and the protections of law. The discussion goes on to reverse the Thomistic inquiry (“Whether Women Should Have Been Made in the First Production of Things”) by asking whether women need men. One woman would “do away with Man altogether” while another finds them useful for “carrying of Coals” and “lifting of Beams.” Patience, however, wishes one of “the dears” were “hereabouts” and insists that were it not for men, lesbianism would be less enticing, since “Delight is always a little running of the Blood in Channels astray!” (24). Dame Musset presents her own sexual behavior as a triumph over the “impersonal Tragedy” of patriarchal violence: remembering that as “a Child of ten” she “was deflowered by the Hand of a Surgeon!” she claims with glee that “saving” women is her “Revenge” (26).

The story of the surgeon-rapist makes Patience Scalpel seem patriarchal indeed, but as the chronicle continues, the fixed poles of lesbian and heterosexual begin to dissolve in a new conception of lesbian identity and Scalpel’s voice begins to lose its cutting edge. In “May” she still holds forth, but in “the Voice of one whose Ankles are nibbled by the Cherubs” as she looks on in dismay while “amid the Rugs Dame Musset brought Doll Furious [Dolly Wilde] to a certainty” (30). Patience is still wondering what “you women see in each other” (31) while Dame Musset, for her part, is complaining that lesbianism has become all too popular: ‘"In my day I was a Pioneer and a Menace, it was not then as it is now, chic and pointless to a degree, but as daring as a Crusade” (34). These mock-laments at the blurring of lines between “woman” and “lesbian,” a blurring that Adrienne Rich has called (to considerable controversy) a “lesbian continuum,” 29serve a serious purpose: they refuse the ideology of novels like The Well of Loneliness and Sodom and Gomorrah that represent homosexuals as a “third sex” or as “hommes-femmes.”

The “August” section marks a climactic point in this convergence of sex and sexuality as Patience Scalpel herself begins to yield. Dryly the narrator reveals that “though it is sadly against me to report it … yet did she … hint, then aver, and finally boast that she herself, though all Thumbs at the business and an Amateur, never having gone so much as a Nose-length into the Matter, could mean as much to a Woman as another” (50). And by “November” Dame Musset has sealed the heterosexual/lesbian rift by recruiting women who have “gone a’marrying”: although at first most of them ignore her, Musset can finally boast that “ten Girls I had tried vainly for but a Month gone, were all tearing at my shutters” (78–79). It is moments such as these that surely account for the elderly Barnes’s anxious protests about not wanting to “make a lot of little lesbians.”

As Musset’s proselytizing promenade brings more and more women into the lesbian fold, there comes also an increased attention to the oppression of all women. In the broadly political “September” section the narrator echoes Ryder’s complaint that woman’s “very Condition” is “so subject to Hazard, so complex, and so grievous” (55) that by middle age her body has been distorted and her mind “corrupt with the Cash of a pick-thank existence” (56). In this light, lesbianism becomes a rejection of patriarchal roles. In “Lists and Likelihoods” virtually every woman is named as a potential lesbian: vixens, hussies, athletes, virgins, even

The Queen, who in the Night turned down

The spikës of her Husband’s Crown

Therein to sit her Wench of Bliss. (60)

The very universe gets delineated as a female Anatomy, with sisterhood the cosmic choice: even the “Planets, Stars and Zones / Run girlish to their Marrow-bones!” (60).

In writing its lesbian cosmology Ladies Almanack writes the female body as well. Some of its terms — furrow, nook, whorl, crevice, conch shell — while drawing on the sexual discourse of the Restoration and eighteenth century, would also be at home in a contemporary work like Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères and seem to me designed to counteract notions of phallic supremacy and female insufficiency. Sexual innuendo pervades the text: when the “July” section claims that lesbian love-language is “more dripping, more lush, more lavender, more mid-mauve, more honeyed, more Flower-casting” than the narrator dare say, she has of course managed to say it anyway (45). When “a woman snaps Grace in twain with a bragging Tongue” (48), she is engaging in an act both verbal and sexual.

Indeed, the Almanack revises not only language but Western culture, creating alternatives to patriarchal ritual, dogma, and myth. “February” presents an outsized icon of Dame Musset with a list of the reasons why she has been “Sainted”—including what I see as another spoof on The Well of Loneliness in which Stephen Gordon’s love for a maid with housemaid’s knee is turned into the young Evangline’s learning “how the Knee termed Housemaid’s is come by, when the Slavy was bedridden at the turn of the scullery and needed a kneeling-to” (15). “June” recounts the “Fourth Great Moment of History”—revising the “three great moments” Matthew O’Connor posits in chapter 49 of Ryder and recasting the Bible to unite the Queen of Sheba and Jezebel (41). And the “March” discussion about men that reverses Thomas Aquinas’s inquiry in the Summa Theologica is sealed by a gynocentric creation myth in which mother-angels, gathered “so close that they were not recognizable, one from the other,” produce nine months later “the first Woman born with a Difference” (24–26). Here and elsewhere one sees the kind of discourse currently associated with “French feminists” like Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous and with the notion of écriture féminine , the “Difference” a matter not of gender in itself but of psychosexual identity.

All of these audacious and subversive stories prepare the way for Ladies Almanack’s final entry: the religious parody that recounts Dame Musset’s death and funeral. Dying virtually from her success (“she had blossomed on Sap’s need, and when need’s Sap found such easy flowing in the year of our Lord 19-what more was there for her to do?” [81]), Dame Musset asks her followers “of many Races and many Tempers” to honor her death each in her own way as each “loved me differently in Life” (82). Joined by “Women who had not told their Husbands everything” (83), Musset’s disciples witness the Pentecostal miracle that proves her sanctity: