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 ripe mans hands and become a mother, or if I shall become wanton and go out 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 join of her fourteenth birthday should she marry, settle down, and have tykeren or become a wanton, freelance woman? During the rest of the story, however, the same young girl seduces her sisters fianc, plans to dominate him victimisation a whip, yet 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 maternal wife nor an independent tramp instead, Olga decides to run away and become a boy (Diary 94). Like many of her early writings, this Ba rnes story ultimately problematizes the unrelenting sexuality and interchangeable apathy of the child vampire Olga and the traditional view that women have only two mutually exclusive lots in life that of the domestic and that of the worldly. What differentiates this womanish 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 virtually to luring the unsuspecting fianc into her game of sexual supremacy. Because literature and criticism lack a solid tradition concerning vampires and children, particularly a mixture of the two, one must trace 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 American society of the Moderni st period had about newly acquired freedoms for women. This paper explores a kind of perilous yet flat 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 initial sources of these conflicting feelings.