The author Djuna Barnes takes her time to describe women as she reveals their sexual and psychological state. Barnes says “the woman who presents herself to the spectator as a “picture” forever arranged is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger.(p41)” This is pretty hard to understand since the meaning of picture is not made clear. However, she describes woman as most dangerous in this sentence in order give a sense of women going out of control. Also the arrangement of this sentence requires a lot of connection with the use of comma. It is also critical to understand what Djuna means by “racial memory” in the sentence “such a person’s every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mi— rage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory; ” In order to make sense out of this sentence I connected it to the previous line because women who are dangerous and goes out of their comfort zone are just a mirage meaning that they do not live in the reality where women are supposed to be with husband and family. Also the line ”as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear” helped me to create a connection between women who are dangerous and women who are in a “bridal veil.” This sort of gave me the idea that society expects to see women in a veil rather than being challenging and outgoing.

-Farzana Akther