Repulsive Women: Djuna Barnes and Others in the American Periodical Press, 1900–1915

The experimental fiction of Djuna Barnes seems radically removed from the world of comic art. Her early career working in the yellow press is frequently dismissed as the by-product of an understandable if unseemly attraction for mass culture; Barnes, after all, was just a teenager at the time and had just moved to New York City. Others rationalize her early career as hack work done simply to ingratiate herself in New York’s social-intellectual scene and to pay the bills. Barnes’s biographer Phillip Herring writes that these works simply “gave readers what they wanted.”[1] The fact remains, however, that Barnes was not the only modern woman with artistic aspirations to plunge into the murky world of newsprint, and the fact that she “gave readers what they wanted” indicates her ability to characterize modern subjectivities in mass media forms as much as in experimental fiction.

For a writer known for using obscure diction and complex syntax, Barnes’s engagement with the early twentieth-century cultural scene was surprisingly sensual and embodied. Her best-known piece of journalism, “How It Feels to be Forcibly Fed” (1914) was accompanied by a series of lurid photos of the young Barnes subjecting herself willingly to force-feeding, the treatment suffered by recalcitrant suffragettes when they embarked on hunger strikes in prison. In the early 1910s, she interviewed dancers, actors, and celebrities in backstage dressing rooms or at home en deshabille, and even produced a single-panel comic, “Types Found in Odd Corners Around About Brooklyn,” for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1913 (fig. 1).

As discordant as these activities might be with the rest of Barnes’s career, in and of themselves they were not unusual. Her work very clearly follows in the footsteps of other enterprising women artists who emerged during the first decade of the twentieth century. Here, I situate Barnes alongside Marjorie Organ, who was almost certainly the first female staff comic-strip artist at William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, and Kate Carew, comic-strip artist, caricaturist, and celebrity interviewer for the New York World and the New-York Tribune. The works of these and other early female comics artists lay the groundwork for Barnes’s early work as well as her first book publication, The Book of Repulsive Women (1915). In all of these women’s works, grotesque transformations of bodies, especially female ones, seemed required by patriarchal modernity: women were expected to project themselves as hypersexualized objects of desire while simultaneously conforming to a sleek, affectless machine-age aesthetic. Taken collectively, we can see how these women indulged and resisted these expectations, adopting the imagery of modern femininity while simultaneously undermining it through the use of the comic form.[2]

Predecessors: Marjorie Organ and Kate Carew

Marjorie Organ and Kate Carew were active more than a decade before Barnes landed on the scene. Organ was born in 1886 in Ireland and immigrated to the US in her early teens and was hired at Hearst’s New York Journal before she turned twenty. The art department of the Journal at this time was no place for a teenage girl. All the other artists were men, who filled the offices with smoke from cigars, pipes, and cigarettes, and molten lead dripped through the cracks between the floorboards from the linotype department upstairs. Organ must have endured these conditions with great forbearance. Yet for nearly four years, she produced both daily and Sunday strips that appeared in the Journal and nationwide through the Hearst newspaper syndicate.

Organ’s strips highlighted the anxious conventionality of modern men and women and the means by which patriarchy transformed women into grotesques. In the appropriately titled The Wrangle Sisters, she depicted the perfectly coiffed, stylishly dressed sisters Jess and Bess exchanging petty insults and engaging in other undignified behavior as they competed for male attention.[3] Elsewhere, Organ’s exaggeration of bosom and bustle exemplified the distortions wrought by modernity on female behavior. In strips such as Strange What a Difference a Mere Man Makes (1905) and “The Man-Hater’s Club” (1907), she repeatedly depicted groups of women who contort themselves en masse in their desperation to attract the approval of “mere men.”[4] Their twisted poses, learned, one assumes, from the pages of mass-market magazines and from advertisements, grotesquely exaggerate female physiological markers—breasts, buttocks, and lips—that ostensibly would attract the male target. While many of Organ’s drawings mimic the effervescent and unapologetic femininity of contemporary advertisements and women’s pages, their appearance on the comics pages resituates them as satire and critique. Both “The Man-Haters’ Club” and another Organ single-panel strip, titled “At the Horse Show,” which sardonically recasts Richard III’s famous call for “A horse! A horse!” from the perspective of ambitious young women at one of the premier events of the New York City social calendar, were published on the same page of the comics section, and their ironic intent—gentle as it might be—is underscored by their appearance alongside an installment of Gus Mager’s Knocko the Monk where Knocko’s snide remarks about Mrs. Knocko’s new outfit are neutralized when he is presented with the bill (fig. 2).

Within a few years, Organ left the chaos of the newspaper office and took up painting under the instruction of Robert Henri, leader of the so-called Ashcan School painters, and married him in 1908. A talented painter in her own right, she exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show, but she eventually became better known as Henri’s model. In paintings such as Lady in Black with Scarf (1910), with her striking red hair and strawberries-and-cream complexion, she appeared glamorous and desirable, both a model of modern womanhood and tightly controlled by the male gaze (fig. 3). As a model, usually clothed but sometimes not, she is subsumed in what art historian Griselda Pollock describes as the sites of sexual exchange “across which men artists claim their modernity and compete for leadership of the avant-garde”: cafés, brothels, and artists’ studios. [5] This image belies the more even partnership that actually existed between Marjorie and her much older husband. Henri, who championed “progress, freedom, experiment,” and individuality in his teaching, exhibited with Organ and encouraged her along with other women artists throughout his career; he included numerous women artists, for example, in the anti-establishment Exhibition of Independent Artists he organized in New York in 1910, and exhibited alongside Marjorie throughout their marriage.[6]

If Organ established an important precedent for Barnes, Kate Carew (1869–1961) provides a model. Born in Oakland, California, her work came under the eye of Ambrose Bierce while she was a student at the San Francisco School of Design. Bierce got her a place at the San Francisco Examiner in 1889, and in 1900, she relocated to New York City, where she published her first caricature in the New York World in the same year.[7] This was the start of a long and prolific career as a caricaturist, comic strip artist, and celebrity interviewer on both sides of the Atlantic.

Carew interviewed figures including Mark Twain, William Butler Yeats, and Sarah Bernhardt in a snappy, yet self-deprecatory style. She also developed a visual brand in her interview features that included caricatures of herself with huge owlish glasses, an enormous, wide-brimmed hat with a question-mark-shaped ostrich feather perched on top, and a large portfolio, in which she ostensibly took down copious notes and visual impressions that she transformed into her full-page feature interviews (fig. 4a–b). In these interviews, her negotiations with her subject are as much the attraction as the prospect of learning private details about public figures. In one example, she pitched her own witty volubility against that of actor and playwright Charles Rann Kennedy. Going in, she was determined to discuss socialism with Kennedy, and planned “to begin with the Old Testament patriarchal system, steeplechase through the early and middle ages down to our troublous times, where coal and wood, butter and eggs, spring lamb and green peas and strikes are of daily occurrence, the result of a heinous economic system which either should or should not be abolished.” These efforts to control the discussion utterly failed: “it soon began to rain words, sentences, phrases, paragraphs, books, libraries, British museums. Sometimes they spluttered, sometimes splashed, sometimes merely rippled.” Beating a fast retreat, Carew wryly wrote that “[b]eside his Niagara of eloquence the thin, purling line of talk of the usual interview is as a tiny brook to a mighty river, bred in mountain fastnesses, fed by roaring streams, bursting all limitations of space and strength.[8]

While Carew acquiesces to Kennedy in their war of words, she nevertheless prevails with her pen. The images appearing with her interview effectively skewer Kennedy, representing him in a series of poses, talking, talking, talking, while seated, while standing, while smoking, in silhouette. The symmetrical arrangement of the poses in the shape of a crucifix enhances the irony, but it’s not clear whether Carew or an editor at the World would have been responsible for that masterstroke of newspaper page design. Meanwhile, the solitary figure of Carew remains seated, sketching; the question mark implied by the feather in her hat broadcasts her skepticism rather than awe of her subject. And the flourish of her signature in the center of the page, finally, marks her ownership: of the images, of the page, and of Kennedy himself.

Carew’s drawings function as what Charles Hatfield, in Alternative Comics, calls synchronistic images, which convey the passage of time and narrative sequence.[9] And while the newspaper interview is obviously different in many ways from what we might think of as a comic, it shares many of its characteristics—in particular in the way it is read. As we see in this instance, the accompanying images are not simply illustrations, nor are they portraits of the interview subject. They participate interactively with the written text to produce the story of the interview, which in the case of Carew, was repeated serially, with a different subject from week to week but consistent in its narrative trajectory. One might even call it a repeating gag: Awkward Woman Reporter Faces Vaunted Celebrity—and Comes Out on Top.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Carew also published a semi-regular comic strip called The Angel Child, which was published in the World’s Sunday comics supplement at roughly the same time that Marjorie Organ was publishing her strips in the Journal. While Organ’s strips focused on the absurd situations facing women in the marriage market, Carew’s revealed the grotesque realities of modern family life. Her “Angel Child” is an oversized toddler who unwittingly upends the lives of the rest of her family, especially her mother, who is resigned to having to punish her with a spanking at the end of every strip—a distinct contrast with more customarily sentimental depictions of maternal love (fig. 5).

Carew became known as “the World’s caricaturist” in both senses of the word: her interviews and comic strips, like the work of her colleague R. F. Outcault (creator of the Yellow Kid comic strip), were proprietary to the World but also became known worldwide. In 1911, she was lured away from the World to London, where her interviews appeared in publications including the Tattler, as well as continuing to publish stateside, under the masthead of the New-York Tribune.

Enter the Ingénue: Djuna Barnes

When Djuna Barnes was brought on board the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1913, Carew would have served as a shining exemplar. Like her, it was likely that Barnes was hired as much for the fact that she was a woman as she was for her qualifications as either an artist or a journalist. Hiring an attractive young woman to engage in the world of rough-and-tumble yellow journalism created endless opportunities to tantalize readers with voyeuristic accounts of scenes otherwise barred from upstanding members of the female sex: actors’ living rooms, yes, and also betting parlors, sporting events, court proceedings and political rallies.

Barnes’s work was featured on the sports or “sporting” pages, where she covered local events such as football games and bicycle races. She eventually found her métier during this early period as a celebrity interviewer and as a stunt girl reporter in the mold of Nellie Bly, not only subjecting herself to force feeding, but also dangling from a building to be rescued by firemen, playing with a baby gorilla, and the like.[10] As Jean Marie Lutes writes, as was the case with other female “stunt reporters,” Barnes’s journalism involved “turning herself into an object of her own commentary, stressing her personal performance, narrating the process of her own objectification,” but unlike them, she undertook actual risks of injury and bodily violation.[11]

As the interviewer and caricaturist for the Press, Barnes published an interview about once every other week between December 1913 and August 1914, and she continued to publish interviews throughout her career. Among international and local celebrities such as Lillian Russell, Mother Jones, Flo Ziegfield, Billy Sunday, and Diamond Jim Brady, she also interviewed Charles Rann Kennedy, and a comparison between her interview and Kate Carew’s reveals many parallels (fig. 6).[12] Like Carew, Barnes notes Kennedy’s penchant for eloquence, and she too remains unintimidated. “Kennedy is human, even terribly human,” Barnes writes. “Sometimes reaching for an epigram he picks a plum; sometimes reaching for a plum his wide, sweeping hands grow amazed at the emptiness. And yet Kennedy says things.” Earlier in the interview, she had remarked, “It is the usual and natural thing, the cornering of a man: the pelting with impertinent questions, of going away and telling the world that he raises his feet and rests them easily upon the fender of fame . . .  And easy, too, it is to say, that he is an all-around good-tempered, good-looking fellow—which same no one on this earth is wholly— and gets away with it.”[13]

Barnes’s imagery might be less conventional, her diction more startling, than Carew’s; Barnes’s editor Alyce Barry, for one, remarked upon “the fantastical statements and musings” that “resound . . . strikingly off the ear and, so often, off the soul as well.”[14] But this retroactive view would have been inaccessible to Barnes’s readers. A present-day reader engaging in a side-by-side comparison of the two writers might easily identify a more fantastical strain in Barnes, or a more cynical, languid affect on her part in contrast with the bright cleverness of Carew. A casual reader of the daily newspaper, however, would read these interviews generically. If anything, they likely would have interpreted Barnes as simply derivative of Carew, since Carew’s work was widely known and had been for over a decade before Barnes entered the scene.

For a brief period, Barnes also produced a newspaper comic titled “Types Found in Odd Corners Around About Brooklyn,” a dozen or so installments of which appeared in the weekday paper in the latter half of 1913. Barnes scholars have paid little note to this short-lived series, and have never read them as comics. They appeared on the front page of the feature section (which was rather cheekily subtitled, alternately, “Pictures and Sporting” or “Pictures and Sermons”), appearing in one of the bottom corners of the first page, underneath an image-dominated feature that frequently highlighted local goings-on in Brooklyn, “Current Events As Seen By  Clever Cartoonists,” and so on (fig. 7).[15] The bottom corners of the page featured a variety of humorous image-based content, including single-panel newspaper comics and captioned photographs, indicating that the Daily Eagle’s editor classified “Types” as being generically aligned with them.

Many of the strips convey a warmly humorous gaze. In “To-morrow Assured,” a windblown-looking man is depicted with arms full of books and packages of bread—intimating that despite the buffets of fortune, he has all he really needs for sustenance. But not all of Barnes’s comics were amusing. “The Pay” (July 28, 1913) depicts a raggedly dressed woman, her face downcast and obscured by an unkempt mass of hair, with hand outstretched as if seeking alms (fig. 8a–b). Taken as a whole, the impression given by “Types” is that of a critical, but loving observer of Brooklyn street life. Their placement in this section of the Eagle and the comic tone of surrounding elements indicates that the Daily’s editorship, as well as the newspaper’s readership, read “Types Found in Odd Corners Around About Brooklyn” as a comic feature, analogous to contemporary single-panel strips such as The Far Side and Dennis the Menace. While “Types” lacks the speech bubbles and dialogue that we identify with later examples of the single-panel strip, it shares a number of its characteristics. Both “To-Morrow Assured” and “The Pay” establish a setting that launches a narrative in the reader’s mind. The man carrying bread and books, juxtaposed with the caption, defines a character with an optimistic outlook and an intellectual bent, sustained not just by bread but ideas, and working to assure the existence of both. The story behind “The Pay” is less clearly defined. The woman, who is presented as a “type” encountered in an “odd corner” of Brooklyn, is dressed in rags, but also adopts the iconography of blind Justice: the hair obscuring her face could be read as a blindfold— and the position of her outstretched hand echoes that of Justice holding out her scale. Is the woman demanding justice in the form of alms? Or is she actually expecting “pay,” as indicated by the caption? And if the latter, payment for what? Reparation for past injustices, or perhaps, something more sordid—payment for an illicit sort of “services rendered”? Barnes leaves these questions unanswered, in a brilliant example of what might be called comic synchronism.

The visual style of Barnes’s early work is expressionistic and fluid, and it’s perhaps unsurprising that her journalistic features frequently focused on actors and dancers. She was especially fascinated by the tango, a dance that took both Europe and the United States by storm in the 1910s. An exotic, aggressive, probably exhilaratingly improper dance form, tango provided a distinct contrast to the sleek, coolly impenetrable forms of modern femininity exemplified in Barnes’s Nightwood character Nora Vote. The “‘audaciously’ physical dimension” of the dance, as Kristina Köhler has described it, appealed to the sexually venturesome Barnes. She stresses its fluid, mobile forms in several drawings of the time, and in one of her first short stories, “The Terrible Peacock,” which was published a few months after the Charles Rand Kennedy interview in All Story Cavalier Weekly, she described one such dancer as “light and sinuous as a wreath of green mist,”  “the very poetry of motion,” whose “close-fitting, silken dress . . . undulated like troubled, weed-filled water as she moved” (fig. 9).[16] Sexual and social fluidity unified all of her work from the period, regardless of where it was published. Daniela Caselli writes that even Barnes’s earliest work is governed by a “still unacknowledged poetics of impropriety” that eventually “permeates all aspects of her work and her figure as a modernist author.”[17] This poetics of impropriety was not the purview of Barnes alone. The works of all three women I have treated here—Barnes, Carew, and Organ—are consistent with a mode I describe elsewhere as the “comic grotesque”: the use of caricature, exaggeration, and depictions of the grotesque and even the repulsive to elicit sympathetic, common feeling.[18] It is a modern—and I would argue, modernist—form of the old Bakhtinian carnivalesque, where class, gender, and racial identities are reversed and masqueraded as a communal recognition of shared frustration or shared desire.[19] In a generic sense, here it also applies to these women’s experiments with language, subject matter, and media forms as apparently divergent as newspaper journalism, illustration, the comic strip, and the novel, a cross-fertilization of popular forms that was a hallmark of vernacular modernism.

Modern Womanhood, Repulsively Defined

The embarrassed acknowledgment of Barnes within the canon of modernism may, in fact, be directly attributable to her embrace of the grotesque, which was not only unseemly for a woman but also, as stated in the introduction to this cluster, for critics and scholars invested in a high-art definition of modernism that is untainted by any hint of the popular. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Barnes’s first book publication, The Book of Repulsive Women. “If one truly cared for Djuna Barnes, one would say very little indeed about The Book of Repulsive Women,” writes biographer Herring, noting that it portrays lesbianism “in the most horribly negative terms imaginable” and “life in general as a dirty, mean trick” (Herring, Djuna Barnes, 88). Barnes herself disavowed this production later in her life, refusing to give permission for its republication and referring to it throughout the remainder of her life simply as “that book of repulsive women,” uncapitalized and untitled.[20] Yet in many ways it constitutes Barnes’s most direct expression of the comic grotesque, merging the forms of popular sentimental poetry and modern advertising style with the more discomfiting aspects of modern womanhood.

The book, published in Guido Bruno’s “Chap Books” series, consists of eight poems, or “rhythms,” followed by five black-and-white ink drawings. Meghan C. Fox notes that in its visual presentation, Bruno “insists on positioning Barnes’s artistic output in terms of decadent aesthetics”; in another instance, he credited her drawing “The Spring, the Poet, the Flower” to “Djuna Barnes, the American Beardsley” and published it alongside a poem by Charles Baudelaire.[21] It’s not clear if Barnes intended the Book’s drawings to illustrate the poems, or if she intended them to be published in separate sections, as they appeared.[22] To readers familiar with the conventional Sunday funnies page of panels separated by gutters with text bubbles, they might not seem much like comics at all, but as with the newspaper interviews we have examined, they function in analogous ways. Several of the poems correspond with individual drawings, and their simple “rhythms” echo one of many popular subgenres of the early newspaper comic strip, the “text comic,” which paired drawn panels with rhymed verse (several of Marjorie Organ’s comic strips, for example, took the form of the text comic).[23] In “Fifth Avenue Up,” for example, Barnes describes a woman “Naked—female—baby / In grimace. / With your belly bulging stately / Into space,” which corresponds closely to the third drawing (fig. 10). As one reads the entire Book of Repulsive Women, one is compelled to read the poetic rhythms against the drawings, animating both into a series of intertwined narratives of women in the modern city.

 Fox writes that Barnes’s Book “exposes the denigration of women’s bodies and forms of expression that appears within Western philosophy and the literary canon . . . by inverting these representations, transvaluing dominant accounts of perversity, and endorsing forms of radical alterity” (Fox, “Vivid and Repulsive”). Adopting the disguise of sentimental verse, Barnes depicts the dark side of modern female existence, ranging from the cabaret singer to the street walker to the suicide. The poems present an odd combination of clinical distance and tender sympathy. The contrast is most noticeable in the last of the eight poems, “Suicide.” In the first stanza, “Corpse A” is evocatively described as

. . . a shattered small

Cocoon,

With a little bruised body like

A startled moon;

And all the subtle symphonies of her

A twilight rune.[24]

Corpse B, in contrast, lays on the coroner’s slab “like some small mug / Of beer gone flat.” Despite the gruesomeness of the imagery, the Book of Repulsive Women also conveys more than a whiff of the ridiculous. To describe the body of a suicide victim as a “small mug / Of beer gone flat”—and to have these lines be the end of the book itself—transgresses the boundaries of good taste, in the same way that the comic highlighting of women’s foibles in the marriage market or the domestic sphere, or the grotesque assertions of poverty on the comics page transgressed the boundaries of acceptable female behavior. Barnes risks even more by asserting such an image as poetic.

The Book of Repulsive Women demonstrates that being a modern woman—a woman in modernity—was risky business. In the third poem, “Seen from the ‘L,’” Barnes writes:

“Still her clothing is less risky

Than her body in its prime,

. . .

Though her lips are vague as fancy

In her youth—

They bloom vivid and repulsive

As the truth.

Even vases in the making

           Are uncouth.[25]

Barnes, Carew, and Organ, in transgressing the boundaries of both Victorian femininity and what was considered feminine print culture, adopted uncouth, even grotesque positions as poets, artists, and writers. The interplay of text and image, use of synchronistic images, and the form of the comic strip itself in their work was no less aesthetically risky than avant-garde painting or Dadaist manifesto. And they used those forms to express vivid and perhaps even repulsive truths about women’s place and experience in modernity. As women, they subjected themselves to daily indignities and actual assaults on their womanhood—not to mention showers of molten lead and force-feeding. The grotesqueries of courtship, sex, and childbearing loomed persistent.  The indignities to which women were subjected were not simply to be borne, but became the material for their art.