Wild and Unnatural: Ideologies of Nature and the Paradox of Sapphic Modernities in Elsa Gidlow’s On a Grey Thread and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, the homosexual identity category was born amid modernity’s rapid urbanization. With the scientific categorization of the ‘sexual invert,’ queerness was naturalized as a degenerate fact of biology, opposing the prevailing mindset that homosexuality was unnatural and sinful. This historical shift gives rise to a nature paradox: How could the modern homosexual simultaneously be too unnatural and too natural? In this thesis, I trace the thread of queerness and nature in two modernist works of literature published at the same time as the ‘lesbian’ and ‘Nature’ emerged as polarized cultural categories. When read together, Elsa Gidlow’s poetry collection On a Grey Thread (1923) and Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1936) form a queer response to the allegations that homosexuality was both too wild and too unnatural to belong to the new era. I apply queer ecology to the modernist narrative and modernist free verse to illustrate how Gidlow and Barnes destabilize the nature paradox and reclaim the role of nature in the lives of sapphic modernities. Drawing on Leo Marx’s notion of the pastoral design and Neil Smith’s scrutiny of Nature as ideology, I argue that notions of queer time and space rewrite the concept of nature as we know it. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the emergence of a queer counter-canon in modernism that encourages us to envision queer ways of living and queer futures that lie outside the binary, more aligned with boundary-breaking, nonlinear cycles of nature and rebirth.