I am going to paste different paragraphs that I’ve written. I want you to analyze and learn writing style and tone.                                                                                               "In 1989, Jane Marcus referred to Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) as “strangely canonized and largely unread.”Footnote1 “Nightwood,” she argues, “is problematic for the woman reader and unusual for modernism because it is such a tightly closed text, and the narration is so distant and detached.”Footnote2 Marcus’s essay, which analyses Nightwood as a study in abject identities, links the lack of readership with the novel’s failure to function as either a canonical feminist or modernist text. Nightwood lacks “the intimacy of a Colette or Woolf novel” in its resistance to meaning.Footnote3 Nearly twenty years later, Teresa de Lauretis, in her analysis of Nightwood as a meditation on Freud’s sex and death drives, admits to having a similar issue:

I approached this text several times over the years, but it was not until I read Barthes that I understood why I could not go on reading Nightwood: the narrative anchorage eluded me, was too weak or too dispersed; the chain of signifiers would not halt, would not find a resting point where meaning could temporarily congeal.Footnote4

Despite the historical gap and the accumulation of feminist scholarship (roughly 100 book- and journal-articles in the past two decades), the difficulty of giving the novel a feminist meaning remains a challenge for feminist scholarship. In “Melancholic Remedies: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as Narrative Theory,” Katherine A. Fama argues that feminist studies like those of Marcus and de Lauretis, celebrating Nightwood’s abject identities and appropriating earlier structural models, “are problematized by Barnes’s own pronounced hostility to identity politics.”Footnote5 Moreover, I would add that such readings fail to address the ways in which Barnes’s novel “bucks narrative, revealing our compulsions to retell, read, and know.”Footnote6 Marcus’s and de Lauretis’s similar difficulties with Nightwood suggest to me that the problem is not just with the novel but with feminist critique itself. Why, I wonder, do feminists persist in trying to locate meaning in narrative where it does not exist?
The answer to this question is best highlighted through Jean Baudrillard’s theory of seduction – admittedly the bête noire of feminism – which helps to underscore some feminists’ reliance on what Baudrillard terms the ideology of production in our readings of novels and history.Footnote7 In Seduction (1979), Baudrillard argues that society is structured through production: our various systems for meaning that rely heavily upon verifiable facts and reality in order to maintain the boundaries of class, race, and gender. The ideology of production includes Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxist economics, and Saussurian linguistics – discourses which reinforce the primacy of sex, work, and language as social values. For Baudrillard, as long as production continues to structure society, hierarchy will inevitably follow. However, Baudrillard also provides a challenge to productive discourse in the form of “seduction”: seduction has the potential to overturn hierarchical powers of production. Although the term is traditionally defined as sexual manipulation, Baudrillard locates seduction in spectacle and artifice. And nowhere does seduction produce meaning.

Everything from cosmetics to animals, from transvestites to actresses, from masquerade to finery falls under Baudrillard’s theory of seduction because, in each case, what appears is all there is. In Seduction, Baudrillard myopically criticizes feminists for going in the direction of the system that oppresses them by searching for both meaning and truth, rather than issuing a challenge to productive ideology:

There is a strange fierce complicity between the feminist movement and the order of truth … In one stroke the immense privilege of the feminine is effaced: the privilege of having never acceded to truth or meaning, and of having remained absolute master of the realm of appearances. The capacity immanent to seduction to deny things their truth and turn it into a game, the pure play of appearances, and thereby foil all systems of power and meaning with a mere turn of the hand.Footnote8

For Baudrillard, feminism, in its perpetuation of terms like women’s subjectivity, sexuality, and language, only preserves the hierarchies inherent in these terms. Seduction, on the other hand, “the pure play of appearances,” issues a challenge to such ideologies by highlighting the weakness of meaning-making systems. In this article, I argue that the literary use of the circus creates a social space of seduction which challenges the supremacy of production by actively resisting meaning through the persistent display of the spectacle. Foregrounding the obvious, yet critically unacknowledged, similarities between Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), I read the circus in Nightwood as a feminist tool of resistance to productive meaning. In many ways, Carter’s Nights at the Circus can be understood as a postmodern retelling of the modernist Nightwood, and thus key to our understanding of Barnes’s feminism.
Many feminist readings of both Nightwood and Nights at the Circus tend, justifiably, to center around alternative, non-oppressive formulations for subjectivity, sexuality, and desire. For example, in Djuna Barnes’ Consuming Fictions (2008), Diane Warren argues that the central concern of Barnes’s novel is “the cultural construction of identity” and “the limits of subversion.”Footnote9 Warren reads Barnes’s character Robin Vote as a symbol of “a more complex and fluid interpretation of identity construction” who pronounces “her own subjectivity by emblematizing the divergent aspects of her identity.”Footnote10 Similarly, scholars of Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus analyze the text to elucidate more inclusive forms of gender and sexuality. In “Freak Show Femininities: Intersectional Spectacles In Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus” (2014), Erin Douglas argues that Carter’s main character, Fevvers, problematizes identity categories by moving between binaries. But far from exposing Carter’s challenge to philosophical discourse on identity, Douglas concludes that the female characters in Carter’s novel “resist heteronormative ideas of femininity and normalcy thereby offering queer performativity and creating narratives of non-normative genders and sexualities.”Footnote11 While celebrating marginalized classifications for identity and sexuality in feminist scholarship on Barnes and Carter is warranted, I argue that these alternative formulations for subjectivity and sexuality actually reinforce the concepts of power systems that feminists aim to challenge. Instead, both Barnes and Carter, by setting their novels in the circus with its culture of seduction, present a more radical position by fixing their critique on the problems inherent in these terms, implementing a feminist challenge to what Baudrillardian feminist Victoria Grace calls the “subjectifying impulse.”Footnote12 Reading these novels together foregrounds this challenge. Besides the obvious link in titles, the circus backdrop, the “living museums,” and the physical traversing of three countries, Carter even adapts one of Barnes’s minor circus characters, “King Buffo,” morphing him into “Buffo the Clown.” And while “King Buffo” has no speaking part in Nightwood, Buffo the Clown’s words in Nights at the Circus offer an important clue to the feminism deployed by both Carter and Barnes: specifically, a feminism that posits the artifice of the circus against prevalent feminist and philosophical notions of subjectivity.