Nightwood
by Djuna Barnes
Summary
In 1920s Paris, Felix Volkbein, a man obsessed with a claim to noble ancestry he cannot fully prove, meets Robin Vote through the loquacious, gender bending Dr. Matthew O'Connor and marries her despite recognizing early on that she cannot settle into any life he offers her. They have a son together, but Robin soon leaves both husband and child for Nora Flood, an American woman who runs a Paris salon, and the two build an intense, consuming relationship that Nora experiences as total devotion and Robin experiences as one more thing to eventually wander away from. A wealthy widow named Jenny Petherbridge maneuvers her way into Robin's affections and pulls her away from Nora as well, taking her to America. The novel ends on Nora's estate, where she finds Robin sleeping in a chapel; Nora's dog discovers her there, and in the novel's famous, disorienting final image, Robin begins imitating the animal's barking and motion until both collapse, Robin weeping and the dog spent beside her.
Barnes writes in a dense, ornate prose closer to Jacobean tragedy than to any conventional twentieth century novel, packing long, aphoristic monologues, mostly Dr. O'Connor's, around a plot that moves by suggestion rather than by scene. It reads slowly and strangely even by modernist standards, more interested in O'Connor's tumbling meditations on gender, grief and the night itself than in resolving anything about Robin, and readers who love it tend to love it for exactly the difficulty that puts other readers off entirely.
T. S. Eliot, working as an editor at Faber and Faber, championed the manuscript into print and wrote its introduction, though he also softened some of its language around sexuality and religion before publication, cuts a 1995 restored edition later reversed. Barnes drew her characters closely from life: Nora stands in for Barnes herself, and Robin combines her real life lover Thelma Wood with the eccentric Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven.
Historical Context & Significance
Faber and Faber published Nightwood in Britain in 1936, with Harcourt Brace following in the United States in 1937; no literary prize marked a novel this openly about lesbian relationships in an era when such a book struggled even to find a publisher willing to print it at all. It sold poorly on release and drifted in and out of print for years afterward.
Its reputation grew almost entirely through other writers rather than critics or prizes. Dylan Thomas called it one of the three great prose books ever written by a woman, and William S. Burroughs later named it one of the great books of the century. The Publishing Triangle placed it twelfth on its list of the hundred best gay and lesbian novels in 1999, and it now stands among the small number of novels written before the war that treated queer lives as neither scandal nor case study.