Gender And Power

Djuna Barnes(1892 ～ 1982) was an unfamiliar American writer before the 1950s. However, her status in the history of world literature and her contribution to modern literature have been gradually recognized since the 1960s. Her master work Nightwood is distinctively modern not only in its subject and form, but in its consideration of what our concepts of masculine and feminine imply. In fact, its exploration of man, woman, and sexual differences is not confined to the field of gender but has great contribution to recognizing the living state of human beings, both in the West and all over the world. It exceeds time limitation and puts forward challenges towards feminism and gender study which appears tens of years later after its publication.This thesis consists of six parts.The introduction part is mainly concerned with Djuna Barnes's life, her writing style, her status in the history of literature, the background of the novel Nightwood and the researches carried on by some feminist critics on this novel.Chapter one focuses on the relationship between men and women. Traditional patriarchal culture believes that masculine represents autonomy, reason, power, speech, culture, etc.; and it labels feminine as passivity, emotion, silence, nature, etc. So masculine is the first sex superior to feminine while feminine is the second sex inferior to masculine. In Nightwood, Barnes criticizes ironically the concepts of man and woman in patriarchal culture through contrasting the love stories in the novel with the fairy tales of "prince and princess". The masculine images of Guido and his son Felix are widely divergent from...