The events in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood all revolve around one character: Robin Vote. Robin is something of an enigma—she seems to be attracted to both men and women, she constantly straddles the line between femininity and masculinity, she yearns for other people to understand her but rarely expresses herself clearly, and instead of sleeping at night she wanders through the streets and bars of 1920s Paris. Robin has three major relationships: her marriage to Felix Volkbein, her “Boson Marriage” relationship with Nora Flood, and her tumultuous affair with Jenny Petherbridge. Felix, Nora, and Jenny all become obsessed with Robin’s mysterious life and devote a lot of mental energy to trying to understand her after she breaks their hearts (she leaves Felix, cheats on Nora, and leaves Jenny). Through the others’ fixation on Robin, Barnes illustrates how an unhealthy obsession can ruin a person’s life, ultimately leading to loneliness and despair.
Felix was attracted to Robin from the day he met her, and it didn’t take long for her to casually agree to marry him. Felix desperately wanted a son to carry on the family name (as it happens, Felix’s surname and aristocratic title were made up by his father), but Robin never wanted a son, and so she leaves the family after their son, Guido, is born. Felix tells Dr. Matthew O’Connor that his marriage to Robin “has placed [him] in the dark for the rest of [his] life.” However, this isn’t because the marriage itself was so miserable—rather, Felix is obsessed with the question of why Robin married him in the first place. After Robin leaves him, Felix tries to get away from her memory by taking their son to Vienna and traveling around Europe. Unfortunately, he’s still haunted by Robin’s memory and he turns to alcoholism. The last time Felix is seen in Nightwood, “his monocle [is] dimmed by the heat of the room, perfectly correct and drunk, trying not to look for what he had always sought, the son of a once great house.” Tormented by thoughts of Robin and what his life was supposed to look like, Felix can’t even find joy in the one thing he really wanted: a son.
Shortly after meeting Robin, Nora invests all of her energy, heart, and a substantial amount of her money into giving Robin a happy home. Nora invests so much in the relationship that she becomes obsessed with Robin and is unable to move on after Robin runs away to America with Jenny. When Robin started leaving her shared home with Nora to wander around Paris by night, Nora was torn between her fear of driving Robin away by being too overbearing and her desire to possess Robin so she couldn’t get away. Nora’s thoughts took a decidedly dark turn when she almost began wishing for Robin to die because “In death Robin would belong to her,” which highlights Nora’s obsession with possessing Robin. After Robin leaves, Nora tells Matthew, “I have been loved […] by something strange, and it has forgotten me.” Nora, however, has not forgotten, and she obsessively writes Robin letters and discusses the relationship with Matthew before setting sail to America in the hope of finding Robin. Nora notes that she loves Robin so much that love has overwhelmed her sense of self; it “rots [her] away.” This illustrates Barnes’s belief that obsession creates pain and despair, and that an obsessed person can lose all sense of self (at least as long as their obsession lasts).
Jenny wanted to possess Robin because she was impressed by how much Nora loved Robin. Jenny, too, becomes obsessed with Robin because she sees Robin as her last chance to have a great love affair, and she loses her mental balance when the relationship fails. Jenny and Robin go to America together, but the relationship quickly turns sour. Word gets back to Matthew that Jenny’s obsessive love for Robin “rots her sleep,” which echoes Nora’s statement about “rot[ting] away” after Robin leaves her. Barnes notes that when Robin began wandering the streets at night, “Jenny became hysterical.” In the 1920s, some doctors still considered hysteria a legitimate mental illness that predominately affected women, so this description could indicate that Jenny begins to unravel and lose her mind when she realizes that her relationship with Robin is crumbling. In the final description of Jenny after Robin leaves her, Barnes says that she’s “walk[ing] up and down her darkened hotel room, crying and stumbling.” Jenny is devastated when Robin leaves because Jenny invested her last scraps of love and hope into her desire to possess Robin the way Nora did. Jenny, like Felix and Nora, loses much of her sense of self when she loses Robin—and this, Barnes indicates, is the inevitable, tragic result of harboring an unhealthy obsession.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Obsession and Despair ThemeTracker
Obsession and Despair 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.
“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.
Thus the body of Robin could never be unloved, corrupt or put away. Robin was now beyond timely changes, except in the blood that animated her. That she could be spilled of this fixed the walking image of Robin in appalling apprehension on Nora’s mind—Robin alone, crossing streets, in danger. Her mind became so transfixed that, by the agency of her fear, Robin seemed enormous and polarized, all catastrophes ran toward her, the magnetized predicament; and crying out, Nora would wake from sleep, going back through the tide of dreams into which her anxiety had thrown her[.]
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.
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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“You never loved anyone before, and you’ll never love anyone again, as you love Robin. Very well—what is this love we have for the invert, boy or girl? It was they who were spoken of in every romance that we ever read. The girl lost, what is she but the Prince found? The Prince on the white horse that we have always been seeking. And the pretty lad who is a girl, what but the prince-princess in point lace—neither one and half the other, the painting on the fan!”
“Sometimes, if she got tight by evening, I would find her standing in the middle of the room in boy’s clothes, rocking from foot to foot, holding the doll she had given us—‘our child’—high above her head, as if she would cast it down, a look of fury on her face.”
“Robin can go anywhere, do anything,” Nora continued, “because she forgets, and I nowhere because I remember.” She came toward him. “Matthew,” she said, “you think I have always been like this. Once I was remorseless, but this is another love—it goes everywhere; there is no place for it to stop—it rots me away.”
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!”
“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.”
