Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is set in 1920s Paris—the same Paris that saw the rise of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce. But underneath the bright, glittering world that these writers lived in and wrote about was a different Paris, a dark Paris full of outcasts and social deviants. This Paris only emerged at night, flocking to the bars to drink and to enjoy just being around other people who couldn’t be themselves during the day. Many of these people, including two key characters in Barnes’s novel, were gay or identified as what was then termed an invert (someone whose gender identity did not match their biological sex). Dr. Matthew O’Connor presents as male but yearns to be a woman (although he shares this with another character, he does not come out to everyone and uses he/him pronouns), and Robin Vote (who uses she/her pronouns) defies all labels but does not conform to heteronormative standards of either sexuality or gender. Both Matthew and Robin suffer because they don’t fit in with what society says they should be: straight, cisgender, and monogamous. Through Matthew and Robin, Barnes illustrates the emotional toll of gender and/or sexual nonconformity in a society that demands heteronormativity.
Matthew is an unlicensed gynecologist who is forced to dress and act in traditionally masculine ways during the day, which prevents him from finding happiness or fulfillment because he secretly believes he was supposed to be a woman. Matthew describes himself as “the girl that God forgot,” meaning that he believes he is female in some essential way. However, because “God forgot,” Matthew is biologically male and must abide by traditional standards of masculinity during the day. Matthew tells Nora, “I never asked better than to boil some good man’s potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine months.” Matthew wants to have a traditionally feminine role—cooking, cleaning, marrying “a good man[],” and having lots of children to care for. Aside from the impossibility of a biological man conceiving and having babies in the 1920s, Matthew is barred from having the kind of relationship he desires or even presenting as female, because society both refuses to acknowledge gender nonconformity and persecutes those who deviate from strictly heteronormative behavior. Instead, he explains that he uses talking as an outlet for his anger and sorrow: “I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.”
Robin is something of an enigma, even to herself. In her quest to understand herself better and follow her inclinations, she wreaks havoc in the lives of those who fall in love with her. Matthew describes Robin as “a wild thing caught in a woman’s skin.” This shows that Robin is indecipherable to those around her, although the fact that Matthew calls her “wild” indicates that they at least recognize that she doesn’t quite fit in with most of society. Barnes writes that “in Robin there was this tragic longing to be kept, knowing herself astray.” Robin yearns for security (“to be kept”), but security isn’t afforded to those who go against the social mores that define acceptable gender identities and sexualities. When Robin does try to find security, it inevitably fails because she’s unable to tame the “wild thing” inside of her: her heterosexual marriage to Felix Volkbein unravels when she gives birth to their son and is confronted with the realization that she will have to play the part of feminine mother if she stays; her same-sex relationship with Nora Flood crumbles because Robin struggles with monogamy; and her same-sex relationship with Jenny Petherbridge ironically ends because Robin yearns for the security of life with Nora. Felix, Nora, and Jenny are all devastated by Robin’s actions, but Robin herself is just trying to find her place in a world that doesn’t make much room for women like her.
Neither Matthew nor Robin find real happiness or fulfillment by the end of the novel—nobody in the book gets a happy ending, really. This, however, is the point Barnes is trying to make: so long as society demands total conformity to prescribed heteronormative standards, untold numbers of innocent people of all genders will be forced to live dark, miserable, and unfulfilling lives. In one of Matthew’s final monologues, he discusses the combined misery of Robin’s, Felix’s, Nora’s, and Jenny’s stories (all of whom talk to Matthew about their misery at some point). Matthew makes clear that the misery in these stories isn’t limited to one small group; actually, this small group is part of a much larger community that society either overtly condemns or tries to oppress by refusing to acknowledge them. Matthew declares, “I say, tell the story of the world to the world!” The stories of Robin, Felix, Nora, and Jenny (and Matthew himself) are also the story of the world and the misery it creates for itself by not being more accepting of those who can’t fit in and won’t conform to society’s heteronormative standards.
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Sexuality, Gender, and Nonconformity Quotes in Nightwood
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.
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.”
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.”
“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.”
