Philosophy

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Woman lives in cage at the Bronx Zoo with Gorilla cellmate.



Djuna Barnes: A Daring Young Woman


                       The Girl and the Gorilla from New York World Magazine, October 18, 1914.


As a young journalist during the 1910s, Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) proved herself fearless. 

In 1914, she spent time in a cage at the Bronx Zoo with a young gorilla named Dinah.

Barnes knew how to turn her phrases to a radical deviation from the normal and she executed her aphorisms like leaps from a trapeze with no safety net beneath her. What saved her articles from superficiality was something that now sounds old-fashioned. Barnes had a tragic sense and although she applied wit to her chosen subjects, they also constitute a catalog of potential misfortunes.



Images: from the exhibition Newspaper Fiction: The New York Journalism of Djuna Barnes, 1913-1919, on view until August 19, 2012 at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art.



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