Exhibiting domesticity: The home, the museum, and queer space in American literature, 1914--1937

Historical and theoretical considerations of queer space and modernism generally exclude the domestic in favor of public scenes as the site of challenges to bourgeois normative culture. Three lesbian modernists, however, located such challenges in a restructured domesticity that disrupts easy distinctions between public and private space, particularly the notion that private space is overwhelmingly traditional and non-political. Using the figure of the museum/home, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, and Djuna Barnes portray same-sex domesticity not as invisible, apolitical space, but as hybrid public/private space that engages with the problems that visibility posed for homosexuals in the first half of the century. Stein, who lived in a museum/home, saw in this figure the uselessness that she associated with art, and with which she characterized her own same-sex relationship. In Tender Buttons, as in the physical space she shared with Alice B. Toklas, she challenges the usefulness of standard private space as a representation of social and sexual relationships. Cather, in The Professor's House, rejects the museum/home as too tied to institutional and political control over the individual. Thus, while the text idealizes spaces that seem to join private desires and public work in the shape of a museum/home, these spaces fail precisely because of the appeal to the public that is bound up in their gestures toward the museum. In Nightwood and in her early journalism, Barnes's homosexual characters attempt to reconfigure domestic life---expressed in the metaphor of the museum/home---so that it is visible and yet safe from outside attack. This reconfiguration makes private space into a particular kind of public arena. The museum's flexible space becomes a figure of the strange relationship between public and private created by the closet and extensively analyzed in Nightwood by the character Doctor Matthew O'Connor. While each of these authors portrays varying degrees of success in the museum/home as a model for queer space, they all see the potential that figure has to disrupt the standard gender and sexual assumptions that were part of the popular image of domesticity. These assumptions were also challenged on the level of material culture, particularly in an exhibit of mass-produced industrial and domestic objects displayed by the Museum of Modern Art in 1934, titled "Machine Art." In a final chapter, I explore this exhibit as an embodiment of the queer potential arising from the mingling of domestic and museum space, and public and private objects.