Djuna Barness The Diary of a Dangerous Child :: Djuna Barnes Diary Dangerous Child Essays

Djuna Barness The Diary of a Dangerous ChildBy this I mean that I am debating with myself whether I shall place myself in some good mans hands and sprain a mformer(a), or if I shall become wanton and go step up in the world and make a place for myself. -Olga, The Diary of a Dangerous ChildIn Djuna Barness short story The Diary of a Dangerous Child (1922), the narrator, an adolescent girl named Olga, ponders her destiny on the social occasion of her fourteenth birthday should she marry, settle down, and have electric razorren or become a wanton, independent woman? During the rest of the story, however, the same young girl seduces her sisters fianc, plans to rule him using a whip, til now has her plan spoiled when her mother disguises herself as the fianc and arrives at the proposed midnight rendezvous. The youth consequently decides to become neither a motherlike wife nor an independent tramp instead, Olga decides to run away and become a boy (Diary 94). Like many of h er early writings, this Barnes story ultimately problematizes the unrelenting sexuality and corresponding apathy of the child coquetryire Olga and the tralatitious view that women have only two mutually exclusive separate in life that of the domestic and that of the worldly. What differentiates this female vampire from other literary examples of her type is her age and the issues pursuant to it. Although disciplined in the end by her mother, Olga is but a child herself yet comes close to luring the unsuspecting fianc into her play of sexual supremacy. Because literature and criticism lack a solid impost concerning vampires and children, particularly a admixture of the two, one must pursue other sources as contextual avenues into this figure in Barness early works.In its mixture of the domestic (baby/child/adolescent) and the sensual (vampire) and the dangerous appeal that fusion entails, the child vampire in Barness writings and illustrations symbolizes the ambivalence that A merican society of the Modernist pointedness had about newly acquired freedoms for women. This paper explores a kind of perilous yet unwavering attraction that the child vampire epitomizes. In pursuing a contextual, interpretive framework that provides a path into Barness use of the child vampire, I turn to visual culture of the period, focusing upon the tradition of the screen vamp and the use of children in early American cinema as sign sources of these conflicting feelings.