Love on the Spectrum: Djuna Barnes’s Case Against Categorization in Nightwood

Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is a challenging and beautiful text that continues to confound readers almost 100 years after its original publication. Though the text is often read as a “lesbian” novel, I consider the possibilities available when we read this text instead with a more open queerness in mind. By looking at the novel’s treatment of image, time, history, gender, sexuality, and identity, a new way of reading is revealed which rejects moves of taxonomization and categorization. This thesis explores how Barnes challenges dominant modes of representation and understanding, not to be a simple contrarian, but to present a new form of affective realism which challenges readers’ understanding of the world and those within it as clearly defined. Through Nightwood, Barnes rejects stability and finality and instead presents a text with ever-shifting meaning and identities which can serve as a guide to reading and living queerly.