Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is full of characters who seem to want to be something other than what they are—a circus full of people who adopt false titles (such as Duchess or Prince), mysteriously wealthy characters who claim to be counts or barons, and even a lonely older woman who decorates her home with stolen objects to cover up her own unremarkable life. These characters are not alone. In the years after World War I, millions of disillusioned people desperately tried to find a place for themselves in a world that no longer made any sense. Felix Volkbein, Jenny Petherbridge, and Robin Vote are three lost souls looking to find or create their ideal identities: Felix wants greatness, Jenny wants to be interesting, and Robin simply wants to understand herself. The primary goal of these characters is to create an identity for themselves, but they do this by lying, stealing, and hurting those around them. In Nightwood, Barnes illustrates how people who try to create a new identity for themselves typically have such a specific idea of what kind of person that they want to be that they sabotage their own chances for happiness by failing to recognize or appreciate the good already present in their lives.
Felix’s identity is something of a mystery even to him—his mother died in childbirth and his father (a habitual liar who tried to pass himself off as an Austrian baron) died before he was born. Like his father, Felix wants to achieve greatness by being a member of the aristocracy, but his efforts are repeatedly foiled by his inability to control the world (and people) around him. Barnes writes that Felix “clung to his title,” but the title itself was fraudulent—it was something his father made up to gain entry into the upper classes. Felix is so determined to live up to his ideal image of a baron that he actually comes off as ridiculous; his lies don’t really fool anyone. As part of his quest for greatness, Felix marries Robin. Through her, Felix hopes to have a son who will revere the past and nobility like he does, but he finds that he’s “not sufficient to make her what he had hoped.” In other words, Robin won’t play the part of “Baronin” that he wants her to, thus thwarting his plan to have a perfectly aristocratic family. Felix believes having a son will somehow legitimize his claims to aristocracy and thus make him happy. However, after Robin leaves him and Guido (their son, named after Felix’s father), Felix becomes a miserable alcoholic instead of finding joy, leading Dr. Matthew O’Connor to comment that “a man never knows when he has found what he has always been looking for.”
More than anything else, Jenny wants to be interesting, to have stories to tell everyone, to be talked about. The problem is that she tries to do this by living a second-hand life and stealing truly interesting people’s belongings. Barnes writes of Jenny’s house that “Her walls, her cupboards, her bureaux, were teeming with second-hand dealings with life.” Jenny steals things from people she thinks are interesting in the hope that other people will think the same about her. Jenny’s thefts are not limited to material objects, though: “she appropriated the most passionate love she knew, Nora’s for Robin.” In other words, Jenny convinces herself to love and seduce Robin because she thinks it will make her as unusually passionate and interesting as Nora. Unfortunately, all of this is for naught: “She defiled the very meaning of personality in her passion to be a person.” Jenny thinks that stealing interesting things (or even relationships) is a clever shortcut to becoming interesting herself, but in doing so she, like Felix, only appears ridiculous to other people.
Of all the characters, Robin is the least sure of herself. She knows she wants secure relationships, but as soon as she gets them, she finds that she can’t fit in with the identity she’s expected to have. Felix believes that Robin is “always looking for someone to tell her that she [is] innocent.” This means that, at least on some level, Robin knows that she does bad things sometimes, but because she’s only following her nature she believes she’s innocent of being malicious, and she desperately wants other people to validate that feeling. Robin carries with her a “wish for a home,” meaning she wants safety, security, stability, and love. Unfortunately, Robin is self-destructive and when she finds people who think she’s innocent, she victimizes them by carrying on affairs. Likewise, when she is offered a home and security, she becomes overwhelmed by the desire to not be kept in it and so spends her nights roaming the streets of Paris.
In Nightwood, most of the characters are their own worst enemies. Robin, Jenny, and Felix all have very specific images of the kind of people they want to be, but this creates a problem because they are so specific about what they want that they self-sabotage by trying too hard to live up to that image. Felix is unable to appreciate his son because he’s preoccupied with his failed marriage; Jenny tries to make herself original and interesting by collecting other people’s interesting things, thus making herself unoriginal; and Robin destroys all the stable homes people offer her because she can’t let go of her attraction to the unpredictable nightlife in Paris. In this way each character destroys the very identity they’re trying so hard to create, undermining the idea that it’s possible to create a perfect identity simply through individual effort.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Identity ThemeTracker
Identity Quotes in Nightwood
Childless at fifty-nine, Guido had prepared out of his own heart for his coming child a heart, fashioned on his own preoccupation, the remorseless homage to nobility, the genuflexion the hunted body makes from muscular contraction, going down before the impending and inaccessible, as before a great heat. It had made Guido, as it was to make his son, heavy with impermissible blood.
He was usually seen walking or driving alone, dressed as if expecting to participate in some great event, though there was no function in the world for which he could be said to be properly garbed; wishing to be correct at any moment, he was tailored in part for the evening and in part for the day.
From the mingled passions that made up his past, out of a diversity of bloods, from the crux of a thousand impossible situations, Felix had become the accumulated and single—the embarrassed.
A Jew’s undoing is never his own, it is God’s; his rehabilitation is never his own, it is a Christian’s. The Christian traffic in retribution has made the Jew’s history a commodity; it is the medium through which he receives, at the necessary moment, the serum of his own past that he may offer it again as his blood. In this manner the Jew participates in the two conditions; and in like manner Felix took the breast of this wet nurse whose milk was his being but which could never be his birthright.
“The last muscle of aristocracy is madness—remember that”—the doctor leaned forward—“the last child born to aristocracy is sometimes an idiot, out of respect—we go up—but we come down.
And as he spoke Felix laboured under the weight of his own remorseless recreation of the great, generals and statesmen and emperors. His chest was as heavy as if it were supporting the combined weight of their apparel and their destiny. Looking up after an interminable flow of fact and fancy, he saw Robin sitting with her legs thrust out, her head thrown back against the embossed cushion of the chair, sleeping, one arm fallen over the chair’s side, the hand somehow older and wiser than her body; and looking at her he knew that he was not sufficient to make her what he had hoped; it would require more than his own argument.
There was something pathetic in the spectacle. Felix reiterating the tragedy of his father. Attired like some haphazard in the mind of a tailor, again in the ambit of his father’s futile attempt to encompass the rhythm of his wife’s stride, Felix, with tightly held monocle, walked beside Robin, talking to her, drawing her attention to this and that, wrecking himself and his peace of mind in an effort to acquaint her with the destiny for which he had chosen her—that she might bear sons who would recognize and honour the past.
She stayed with Nora until the mid-winter. Two spirits were working in her, love and anonymity. Yet they were so “haunted” of each other that separation was impossible.
Nora closed her house. They travelled from Munich, Vienna and Budapest into Paris. Robin told only a little of her life, but she kept repeating in one way or another her wish for a home, as if she were afraid she would be lost again, as if she were aware, without conscious knowledge, that she belonged to Nora, and that if Nora did not make it permanent by her own strength, she would forget.
To keep her (in Robin there was this tragic longing to be kept, knowing herself astray) Nora knew now that there was no way but death. In death Robin would belong to her.
She was nervous about the future; it made her indelicate. She was one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time—because she could not let her time alone, and yet could never be a part of it. She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing. She had the fluency of tongue and action meted out by divine providence to those who cannot think for themselves.
When she fell in love it was with a perfect fury of accumulated dishonesty; she became instantly a dealer in second-hand and therefore incalculable emotions. As from the solid archives of usage, she had stolen or appropriated the dignity of speech, so she appropriated the most passionate love that she knew, Nora’s for Robin. She was a “squatter” by instinct.
We go to our Houses by our nature—and our nature, no matter how it is, we all have to stand—as for me, so God has made me, my house is the pissing port. Am I to blame if I’ve been summoned before and this my last and oddest call? In the old days I was possibly a girl in Marseilles thumping the dock with a sailor, and perhaps it’s that memory that haunts me. The wise men say that the remembrance of things past is all that we have for a future, and am I to blame if I’ve turned up this time as I shouldn’t have been, when it was a high soprano I wanted, and deep corn curls to my bum, with a womb as big as the king’s kettle, and a bosom as high as the bowsprit of a fishing schooner? And what do I get a but a face on me like an old child’s bottom—is that a happiness, do you think?
“And do I know my Sodomites?” the doctor said unhappily, “and what the heart goes bang up against if it loves one of them, especially if it’s a woman loving one of them. What do they find then, that this lover has committed the unpardonable error of not being able to exist—and they come down with a dummy in their arms.”
“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.”
“Guido is not damned,” he said, and the Baron turned away quickly. “Guido,” the doctor went on, “is blessed—he is peace of mind—he is what you have always been looking for—Aristocracy,” he said, smiling, “is a condition of the mind of the people when they try to think of something else and better—funny,” he added sharply, “that a man never knows when he has found what he has always wanted.”
“One has, I am now certain, to be a little mad to see into the past or the future, to be a little abridged of life to know life, the obscure life—darkly seen, the condition my son lives in; it may also be the errand on which the Baronin is going.”
“Listen,” the doctor said, putting down his glass. “My war brought me many things; let yours bring you as much. Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself. No one will be much or little except in someone else’s mind, so be careful of the minds you get into, and remember Lady Macbeth, who had her mind in her hand. We can’t all be as safe as that.”
“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!”
“God, take my hand and get me up out of this great argument—the more you go against your nature, the more you will know of it—hear me, Heaven! I’ve done and been everything that I didn’t want to be or do—Lord, put the light out—so I stand here, beaten up and mauled and weeping, knowing I am not what I thought I was, a good man doing wrong, but the wrong man doing nothing much, and I wouldn’t been telling you about it if I weren’t talking to myself. I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.”
