THE DIARY FORM AND GENDER AS SUBVERSIVE CATEGORIES IN DJUNA BARNES`S THE LYDIA STEPTOE STORIES

Authors : Yeşim İPEKÇİ

Pages : 455-473

Doi:10.33171/dtcfjournal.2023.63.1.19

View : 78 | Download : 38

Publication Date : 2023-06-20

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :The American-English writer Djuna Barnes insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(1892-1982); has been an influential figure in the English modernist fiction. Her works challenge the conventional approaches to sex/gender categories through experimentation on the level of both context and form. Barnes’s tendency to uncover the fluidity of subjectivity and disrupt the Cartesian understanding of the stable Self particularly shows itself in her problematization of genre categories. In other words, she offers a radical critique of “naturalized” gender/sex categories in her works by re-formulating a wide range of genres. Reading her three short stories, written under the pseudonym Lydia Steptoe, this study aims to explore how she plays with the diary form and why she locates it within the genre of short story. It argues that Barnes’s “The Diary of a Dangerous Child” insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(1922);, “The Diary of a Small Boy” insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(1923);, and “Madame Grows Older: A Journal at the Dangerous Age” insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(1924); shed light on the feminist/poststructuralist notion of the subject-in-the-making through the re-appropriation of the diary form within the genre of short story. Her experimentation on the genre functions to lay bare the production and destabilisation of gender boundaries, and thus, presents diary writing as part of storytelling as a subversive act witnessing and/or contributing to the ontological becoming of subjects.
Keywords : Djuna Barnes, Lydia Steptoe Öyküleri, Günlük, Tür, Edimlilik, Öznellik

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