Our panel investigates the city of Paris as a site of sexual and artistic exploration, liberation, and confrontation for both French and expatriate writers of the interwar period. We focus on three authors: Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Djuna Barnes, and Jean Rhys, whose novels probe modern notions of sexuality and identity by examining the embodied and material experiences of marginalized (queer, trans, prostitute, non-binary) characters. The three authors’ commitment to articulating the realities of human encounters, desires, fears, and traumas, we argue, is further illuminated by the backdrop of Paris—a city often associated with spectacle, luxury, and hedonism. Our three speakers will investigate the dialectical relationship between the city and its inhabitants, how Paris reveals its own multiple identities and manifestations through the authors’ works, and how the three authors write their heroines into existence against the backdrop of the living city.
Working with Grace Lavery’s argument that “trans women and femmes do not understand realness as...performance but as...embodiment,” Chris Coffman argues in her paper “Queer and Trans Femininity in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood” that what Lavery calls “trans realism” is pivotal to Nightwood’s sideways narrative (Lavery, “Trans Realism,” 2020: 721-22). Following a psychoanalytic concept of “reality” as “a felt dimension of psychic life” that “can only enter into psychic space...obliquely,” Coffman tracks a thread within Nightwood that—turning on the emotional fallout of Robin Vote’s and Nora Flood’s failed relationship—takes readers first to transfeminine Dr. O’Connor (who serves as Nora’s confessor / psychoanalyst) and then to lesbian high femme Jenny Petherbridge (whose role as Robin’s new lover makes her the object of Nora’s derision) (Lavery 2020: 726). But whereas Emma Heaney stresses the “commonality of feeling between the suffering female” (Nora) “and the suffering trans female” (O’Connor), Coffman emphasizes the way Jenny both embodies and is punished for her queer femininity (Heaney 2017: 137).
In “Charting (Queer) Love in Jean Rhys’s Paris,” Adele Kudish examines the way that Paris appears as a distinctive character in Rhys’s fiction, and specifically one that invites a reappraisal of cisgender embodiment in the Caribbean author’s work. Rhys’s novels and short stories treat Paris as a lived-in space, one of proletariat life and queer life, beyond the rigid “Montparnos’” patriarchal, expat fantasies. Rhys’s queer Paris allows (if only temporarily) her heroines to transcend the suffering and trauma of their lives as they are circumscribed by domineering men, through intimate panoramas and snapshots of the life really being lived in the City of Light, including those of queer and nonbinary bodies.
In the final presentation, entitled “Playing with Paris: Hermaphroditic Musings in Lucie Delarue-Mardrus’s L’ange et les pervers,” Adeline Soldin will interrogate the author’s presentation of the French capital as a fitting refuge to conceal the main character’s fluid identity. Presenting as a man in gay male spaces and as a woman in lesbian circles, Marion remains suspicious of Paris’s superficial, decadent culture, and therefore refuses to expose their true self to anyone. Behind their various disguises, however, they support and enable Parisians’ love of theater and whimsical drama. Through this perspective of a hermaphrodite struggling to find their place, Soldin argues that Delarue-Mardrus questions our ability to attain self-fulfillment when we are unable to articulate openly our needs and desires.
These three papers investigate the works of three authors from three different parts of the world (the United States, Domenica, and France) who all lived in Paris at roughly the same time and attended the same salons. Our comparative panel thus provides a unique opportunity to place these writers and their shared intellectual and theoretical interests into conversation, and to explore their various portrayals of the City of Light and its inhabitants.