The Square Circle in the City: The Boxing Tale as Urban Genre

In the Ring: Gender, Spectatorship, and the Body

“…Kasia Boddy reproduces a photograph of London boxing, with gloves, with his second wife Charmian. 20 In fact modernist literary culture from the turn of the century was deeply fascinated by the agonistic, zero-sum contests of the boxing ring, and increasingly brings women not only into the scene of viewing, but into a state of heightened involvement with the contestants. Djuna Barnes's short piece 'My Sisters and I at a New York Prizefight', written in 1914, contrasts 'portly' men and 'frail' women as spectators: the men appreciate the muscular body and technical excellence of the boxer, the women appreciate his eyes and his beauty.…”

Lacing Up the Gloves

“…Thus Barnes anticipates the 1920s and 1930s, decades during which, as Kasia Boddy observes, '[b]oxers crop up as sex objects in the work of writers as diverse as Rosamund Lehmann, Jane Bowles and Zelda Fitzgerald'. 34 Yet Barnes also confronts the reader with 'the shock of clashing bodies', so intense it quickly numbs the spectators' sensibilities. It is the moment when the 'real' of the body in pain unravels identity and language itself, Barnes observing that 'he is no longer a fighter but a great and bewildered pain', reminding us of Elaine Scarry's eloquent argument that pain brings language to a halt, as extreme pain cannot be expressed in language beyond groans and cries.…”

“…Sports historians have established the sport's remarkable popularity among women during the era, Boddy noting that '2000 women were estimated to have attended the 1921 New Jersey fight [between Dempsey and Carpentier]'. 15 By engaging with boxing as practitioners and spectators, some used their own bodies as legible scripts for new identities -indeed scripting strength, agency and subversion into their musculature as a gendered narrative of modernity. By exhibiting muscular corporeality, the modern woman unscripted the traditional female body, which was codified in rigid opposition to the male body and inescapably tethered to her reproductive and domestic functions.…”