As an outspoken feminist and someone who openly engaged in a same-sex relationship in the early 20th century, Djuna Barnes knew firsthand what it was like to be the “other,” an outsider in society. It’s no surprise that the characters in Nightwood are also “others.” Guido Volkbein (senior) was an Italian Jew who was desperate to be accepted by society at a time when a lot of people looked down on all Jewish people. His solution was to make up a family history (supposedly he was descended from an illustrious Austrian family and was a baron) and strive to be more like the Christian aristocracy. His son Felix Volkbein inherited this hope. Dr. Matthew O’ Connor is an Irish-American unlicensed doctor who’s what was then called an invert (a person whose gender identity and biological sex did not match up). Matthew, too, wants to be accepted and so he chooses masculine careers that make it easier for him to find acceptance. Robin Vote defies all social understanding, according to the norms of her time—she seems to be bisexual, it’s difficult to pin down her gender identity, she struggles with monogamy, and she resents the idea of motherhood. Still, Robin tries to do the acceptable thing so that she’ll be accepted, but this is made difficult by the fact that she’s so fundamentally different from the kind of woman society says she’s supposed to be. In Nightwood, the characters are all “others” who yearn for social acceptance, but as Barnes shows, they are caught in a lose-lose situation—acceptance means denying their nature (their “otherness”), while embracing their nature means losing acceptance.
Guido was desperate to be a part of a world (the aristocracy) that he was shut out from because he was Jewish. He passed on this desire to Felix. Guido dedicated every waking moment of his life to paying “remorseless homage to nobility.” In other words, he was obsessed with rank and station and this made him pay far more deference than was necessary to anyone he believed was even tangentially connected to the aristocracy. Barnes writes that both Guido and Felix are “heavy with impermissible blood.” This means that both Guido and Felix are tormented by the knowledge that, try as they might, they can never be a part of the aristocracy that they are so obsessed with because of their Jewishness and lack of direct genealogical connection to a noble family. Guido died before Felix was born, but Felix inherited his obsession with passing himself off as an aristocrat and denying his true heritage. To that end, Felix does his best “to be correct at any moment” by wearing clothes that could pass for either evening or daytime clothes, wearing a monocle, and calling himself a baron.
Matthew is an invert, but because he can’t outwardly present as female in public, he tries to fulfill traditionally masculine roles so that other people will accept him. Matthew says that his father never really liked him, but “relented a little” when Matthew joined the army during World War I. Matthew, then, knew that doing traditionally masculine things would lead to society accepting him. Matthew calls himself a doctor, but he’s not actually licensed. Still, medicine was (at the time) considered a masculine career, which could explain why Matthew chooses to tell everyone that he is a doctor—it diverts suspicions about his gender identity or sexuality, making it easier for others to accept him. One day, Felix sees Matthew walking and notes that Matthew looks older than his years, but as soon as Felix calls him, Matthew “threw off his unobserved self, as one hides, hastily, a secret life.” This shows that Matthew makes a conscious effort to appear a certain way when he’s in public, and one of the primary reasons he does that is because he wants others to accept him.
Robin doesn’t quite fit in anywhere, but that doesn’t stop her from craving acceptance and love (as seen in the way she jumps from one relationship to the next). Robin’s primary struggle is in trying to both be exactly herself and exactly what society wants her to be. Speaking after Robin leaves her, Nora (Robin’s first major girlfriend) says that Robin “wanted darkness in her mind—to throw a shadow over what she was powerless to alter—her dissolute life, her life at night.” Robin wants to hide her true self away because she knows that others would scorn and insult her if they knew what she is really like. At the same time, Robin craves security and acceptance—her dearest wish is “for a home.” The word “home” evokes feelings of security, comfort, safety, and acceptance—all things that Robin craves, but to have a traditional home she would need to conform to traditional sex and gender roles, which goes against her nature. Nora says of Robin, “She would kill the world to get at herself if the world were in the way, and it is in the way.” In other words, Robin doesn’t just want acceptance; she wants to be totally free to really explore her inner nature, and she’s willing to break social mores to do it.
Matthew, Felix, and Robin are all “others,” and this keeps them from enjoying the security of being accepted by society in the 1920s even though they want to be. They are faced with a seemingly impossible choice: stifle or lie about who they are to win society’s acceptance, or risk social ostracization by being honest about themselves.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Otherness and the Search for Acceptance ThemeTracker
Otherness and the Search for Acceptance 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.
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.”
“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.”
