The Intertextual, Sexually-Coded Rue Jacob: A Geocritical Approach to Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney, and Radclyffe Hall

Abstract

Using geographic sites, words, and codes to express what they cannot say in explicit sexual terms, from New York and London onto Paris and the rue Jacob with its temple and garden, Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney, and Radclyffe Hall exploit space as a writing strategy, a geo-parler femme. The intersections between characters' behaviors, authors' lived experiences, real and imaginary Parisian locations, and the written page create for readers hidden yet shared messages of female sexuality. These women go beyond just creating a space within Paris; they create a new Paris on the whole—a Paris where women can write, publish, have public sexual relations with other women (and/or other men), and dance naked in their gardens. The female Paris captured in the pages of these texts is written to both celebrate literary and sexual freedom and create a space in which the activities can take place. On one hand, it overthrows rigid gendered spatial structures while existing simultaneously to male-centered Parisian geographies. A geocritical approach which problematizes female literary and sexual spaces, analyzes the cycle of space—literature—space, and considers how authors create their own female cities enables readers and critics to "locate" and map these messages, because after all, "Can one say by what Path, under what Bush, beside what Ditch, beneath what Mountain, through what Manlabour and Slaveswork, Man came upon the Burrows of Wisdom, and sometimes upon the skin of her herself?" In Ladies Almanack and The Well of Loneliness, it is by the path that leads to the intertextual, sexually-coded rue Jacob that women find female-based sexual wisdom and communicate that wisdom to others. Readers must be willing to pursue the paths of meanings available in these and other expatriate women's writings in order to share the context of the meanings floating between the texts of the female expatriate community.