In Nightwood, Djuna Barnes uses night to represent the hidden parts of Robin Vote’s personality. The other four primary characters—Felix Volkbein, Nora Flood, Jenny Petherbridge, and Dr. Matthew O’Connor—struggle to understand Robin because there’s so much about herself that she doesn’t say or share with others; one might argue that not even Robin understands herself, as she often seems to simply follow her impulses and drives. Among these impulses is the one to go out at night and wander the streets of Paris or even the woods in America, once she moves there. Although Robin doesn’t explicitly tell her partners not to follow her, they all get the distinct sense that they’re not wanted (in fact, Nora tries to go out with Robin for a while but couldn’t stand feeling like she was unwanted, so she started staying home). Robin feels most like her true self at night. Under cover of darkness, she can drink as much as she wants, act however she wants, and make love to whoever catches her eye. It is at night that Felix walks in on Robin holding their newborn son Guido high in the air “as if she were about to dash [him] down,” and nighttime again when she is finally able to come clean about the fact that she never wanted to have a baby. Night, then, allows Robin to express things that she struggles to articulate during the day. As Nora explains it, Robin “wanted […] to throw a shadow over what she was powerless to alter—her dissolute life, her life at night.” Robin returns to her home at dawn and sleeps during the day. She’s only comfortable with the night because by night her “dissolute life” doesn’t seem so dark or unnatural—she finds acceptance, freedom, and even herself in the darkness.
Night Quotes in Nightwood
The doctor, seeing Nora out walking alone, said to himself, as the tall black-caped figure passed ahead of him under the lamps, “There goes the dismantled—Love has fallen off her wall. A religious woman,” he thought to himself, “without the joy and safety of the Catholic faith, which at a pinch covers up the spots on the wall when the family portraits take a slide; take that safety from a woman,” he said to himself, quickening his step to follow her, “and love gets loose and into the rafters. She sees her everywhere,” he added, glancing at Nora as she passed into the dark. “Out looking for what she’s afraid to find—Robin. There goes mother of mischief, running about, trying to get the world home.”
“Have I not shut my eyes with the added shutter of the night and put my hand out? And it’s the same with girls,” he said, “those who turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, the drunken and that most miserable, the lover who watches all night long in fear and anguish. These can never again live the life of the day. When one meets them at high noon they give off, as if it were a protective emanation, something dark and muted. The light does not become them any longer. They begin to have an unrecorded look. It is as if they were being tried by the continual blows of an unseen adversary.”
“Time isn’t long enough,” she said, striking the table. “It isn’t long enough to live down her nights. God,” she cried, “what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn’t tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that? Everything we can’t bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.”
She began to walk again. “I have been loved,” she said, “by something strange, and it has forgotten me.” Her eyes were fixed and she seemed to be talking to herself. “It was me [who] made her hair stand on end because I loved her. She turned bitter because I made her fate colossal. She wanted darkness in her mind—to throw a shadow over what she was powerless to alter—her dissolute life, her life at night; and I, I dashed it down.”
“May they all be damned! The people in my life who have made my life miserable, coming to me to learn of degradation and the night. Nora, beating her head against her heart, sprung over, her mind closing her life up like a heel on a fan, rotten to the bone for love of Robin. My God, how that woman hold on to an idea! And that old sandpiper, Jenny! Oh, it’s a grand bad story, and who says I’m a betrayer? I say, tell the story of the world to the world!”
Night Symbol Timeline in Nightwood
