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 good mans hands and become a mother, or if I shall become wanton and go out in the world and slang 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 immature girl named Olga, ponders her destiny on the occasion of her fourteenth birthday should she marry, decrease down, and have tiddlerren or become a wanton, independent woman? During the occupy of the story, however, the same young girl seduces her sisters fianc, plans to dominate him using a whip, that has her plan spoiled when her mother disguises herself as the fianc and arrives at the proposed midnight rendezvous. The youth therefore decides to become neither a maternal wife nor an independent roll out instead, Olga decides to run away and become a boy (Diary 94). identical many of her primaeval books, this Barnes story ultimately problematizes the unrelenting sexuality and equal apathy of the babe vampire Olga and the traditional view that women have barely two mutually exclusive lots in life that of the national and that of the worldly. What differentiates this female vampire from other literary examples of her type is her age and the issues consistent to it. Although disciplined in the end by her mother, Olga is but a child herself yet comes close to luring the unsuspecting fianc into her game of sexual supremacy. Because literature and review article lack a solid tradition concerning vampires and children, particularly a mixing of the two, one must pursue other sources as contextual avenues into this sort in Barness early works.In its mixture of the domestic (baby/child/adolescent) and the insensible (vampire) and the dangerous appeal that fusion entails, the child vampire in Barness writings and illustrations symbolizes the ambivalence that American society o f the Modernist period had about newly acquired freedoms for women. This constitution explores a kind of perilous yet unwavering 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 refinement 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.