Nightwood: Analysis of Major Characters
"Nightwood: Analysis of Major Characters" delves into the complexities of key figures in Djuna Barnes' novel, highlighting their intertwined lives and emotional landscapes during the tumultuous 1920s. Central to this exploration is Robin Vote, a thirty-year-old American expatriate whose quest for fulfillment leads her through a series of relationships, including a marriage to Felix Volkbein and liaisons with Nora Flood and Jenny Petherbridge. Robin is characterized by her instinctive nature and rootlessness, ultimately finding solace in the pastoral life of rural New York. Felix serves as a contrasting figure, a rootless aristocrat who embodies the myth of the Wandering Jew, grappling with his son Guido's future amidst his own social aspirations. Matthew O'Connor functions as a detached observer and confidant, offering insight into the characters' journeys while symbolizing the liminal space between innocence and experience. Nora Flood, with her balance of nature and refinement, attempts to ground Robin but ultimately cannot contain her free spirit. The narrative also touches on Jenny’s possessiveness, which disrupts her bond with Robin, and introduces Guido as a symbol of enduring innocence amidst societal decay. Through these characters, Barnes crafts a poignant commentary on identity, belonging, and the search for personal truth.
Nightwood: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Djuna Barnes
First published: 1936
Genre: Novel
Locale: Paris, France, and Vienna, Austria
Plot: Psychological realism
Time: The 1920's
Robin Vote, who is twenty-nine years of age when the novel begins, an expatriate American attempting to find fulfillment in Europe during the heady age of the 1920's. She marries Felix Volkbein, who claims aristocratic heritage, and gives birth to their son, Guido. She is nature's child and prepares for her pregnancy with a stubborn, cataleptic calm. The author's symbolic character of American innocence abroad, Robin maintains an animal naturalness as she moves among society in European salons. She moves easily from her marriage with Felix to liaisons with others, in particular, two women, Nora and Jenny, both of whom she also leaves in accordance with her natural instincts. Her departures are quick, uncomplicated, clean, and unquestioning. Corrupted only in her contacts with civilization, she is described by Matthew O'Connor as “a wild thing caught in a woman's skin.” Neither Felix nor Nora nor Jenny can understand her rootlessness, but the doctor can. In the end, her natural state triumphs in her return to rural New York, as she runs on all fours in the direction of Nora's home, with Nora's barking dog as her running companion. She escapes from Nightwood, her mythical embodiment of Dante's Inferno.
Matthew O'Connor, an unlicensed physician who has never married. He is an expatriate from the Barbary Coast, San Francisco, and, in fact, an expatriate from life. He is the detached observer of the characters and events in the novel, sometimes functioning as a mover of events and at other times holding court when sought for advice. He meets Felix at a Berlin soiree and sometime later introduces Felix to Robin. At still another point, he serves as confidant to Nora, who comes to him for advice. He is a mythical character, a Tiresias figure (he enjoys dressing in women's clothing) and a Cassandra (he predicts Robin's eventual salvation by Nora). He inhabits the limbo between innocence and experience, having outlived his emotional and sexual needs. Most important, however, he is the Jamesian “central intelligence,” through whose consciousness the events and characters of the novel are filtered for the reader.
Felix Volkbein, an only child, born in Berlin to a Viennese Christian mother (at the age of forty-five) and a wealthy Jewish father of Italian descent whom he never meets. A fraudulent aristocrat, he devotes his life to perpetuating the image of nobility, in his case, the nobility consisting of the circus and the theater. He embodies the myth of the Wandering Jew and is, in his social journeying, as rootless as Robin is in her naturalness. Concerned for his son, Felix spends time with Guido and, during one of a number of meetings with O'Connor at a café, discusses Guido's future. The boy will remain forever innocent, and for him Felix sees the priesthood as the only possible vocation.
Nora Flood, an American, in her late twenties at her first appearance, who owns a forlorn, overgrown estate in New York, conducts a strange salon, and meets Robin at a circus performance. They fall almost wordlessly into a natural acquaintance. Robin leaves Felix and Guido for Nora, but even Nora, who possesses an equilibrium of nature, a balance of the savage and refined, cannot hold the freedom-loving Robin. Absences from each other grow more frequent, until Nora seeks out O'Connor for an explanation of Robin's behavior.
Jenny Petherbridge, a middle-aged widow whose four husbands have “wasted away and died.” She and Robin meet during one of the latter's absences from Nora. Their friendship develops until Jenny's possessiveness and acquisitiveness drive them apart. Jenny serves as yet another corrupting influence on the innocence of Robin.
Guido Volkbein, Felix's and Robin's son, a minor character important as a contrast with the decadent, socially aspiring, acquisitive, and aimless society into which he was born. In his emotionally unstable and mentally deficient nature, he will always be a passive innocent, just as his mother, despite corruption by European salons in Paris, Munich, Vienna, and Budapest, forever retains a vestige of her innocence and in the end returns to the New York countryside and Nora.
Sylvia, a child who stays with Jenny for a time and whose attraction to Robin causes Jenny to be jealous.
Frau Mann, the Duchess of Broadback, a drinking companion of Felix.
An English woman, yet another woman whose attention to bisexual Robin causes Jenny's jealousy.