Speaking in Tongues: "Ladies Almanack" and the Language of Celebration

Abstract

What does it mean for lesbians to laugh, to rejoice, to celebrate? When the celebration is textual (public and verbal), what linguistic/aesthetic forms permit this profoundly radical act? What do patterns of humor and celebration, and the relationship between the two, tell us about the community? How has celebration changed during the past fifty years; do the artifacts of our foremothers nurture us or simply confuse? Is the humor of an alternative culture necessarily double-edged? And when we confront an ambiguous text, how can we be sure, to paraphrase Adrienne Rich, that it is the us, and not the dutiful daughter, who laughs?[l] These are some questions I bring to and from my readings of Djuna Barnes' Ladies Almanack. Published 1928, which Jeannette Foster calls a peak year for literature (not only Barnes, but Radclyffe Hall, Colette, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein were all writing that year), this cryptic and fascinating volume is, the words of Bertha Harris, in its way and for its time, a document of revolution[2] and one of the most celebratory artifacts of the First Wave. Yet not everyone reads it as such-and few are willing to read it at all-so dense and obscure are its perspective and its prose. Like its more famous sister-text of the same year, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Ladies Almanack raises some troubling questions for lesbian-feminist criticism: when is a a lesbian text or its writer a lesbian writer? When i linguistic complexity an invitation to explore rather than a barrier to surmount? What are the implications of a work so ambiguous that some (male) critics have read it as anti-lesbian? Can satire be a vehicle for validation? Can an elusive and inaccessible teach and please ways that a conventionally clear discourse cannot?