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Nightwood
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Portrait of Djuna Barnes wearing a dark hat, polka dot scarf, and dark jacket, looking to the side against a plain background.
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Portrait of Djuna Barnes wearing a dark hat, polka dot scarf, and dark jacket, looking to the side against a plain background.
Djuna Barnes Djuna Barnes moved from the United States to Paris in 1920 and established herself as a notable figure in the city's literary scene during the 1920s and '30s. Her second novel, Nightwood (1936), is her masterpiece.

Nightwood

novel by Barnes
Written by
Drew Milne
Drew Milne is the Judith E. Wilson Lecturer in Drama and Poetry, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. He has edited Marxist Literary Theory and Modem Critical Thought. His novel is entitled...
Drew Milne
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History

Nightwood, novel by avant-garde American author Djuna Barnes that was first published in 1936. Often considered her masterpiece, it has been described as a classic of lesbian and of queer literature as well as of Modernist literature.

Set mostly in Paris and New York, the novel describes a cosmopolitan drift of bohemians and exiles in Europe. The story, which does not unfold in a linear fashion, begins with the birth in 1880 in Vienna of Felix Volkbein, whose father, Guido, is described as a Jew of Italian descent who pretends to be a wealthy baron. It then moves forward 30 years and to Paris, where Baron Felix Volkbein prefers to spend his time with theatrical and circus performers. Through a trapeze artist, Frau Mann, Volkbein meets Dr. Matthew O’Connor, a loquacious American transvestite with uncertain credentials, and Nora Flood. Later O’Connor introduces Volkbein to his somnambulistic patient, Robin Vote. Felix is taken with her and shortly afterward marries her, though it is clear that she cannot meet his expectations of her, and she often leaves for days at a time. She soon gives birth to a fragile and unhealthy son, Guido. After telling Felix she did not want the child, she leaves, returning months later in the company of Nora.

Nora and Robin have a long dreamlike relationship in which each is changed, but Robin continues to wander away. Nora longs for Robin when she is gone. Eventually, Robin takes up with Jenny Petheridge, a thrice-widowed and inauthentic woman, and this leads to the end of Robin’s relationship with Nora. Nora goes in anguish to see O’Connor.

Robin, who more or less ruins her husband, their child, and the two women who love her, is at the center of the novel. Counterbalancing her destructive allure, O’Connor administers the healing power of distractingly outlandish monologues. What at first seem like windy exercises in rhetoric are gradually revealed as humane deflections of the suffering otherwise threatening to break out.

Nightwood was partially edited by T.S. Eliot, who said that it “would appeal primarily to readers of poetry.” The prose style of the book is indeed remarkable, possessing varieties of urbane wit and a kind of modernist baroque seemingly schooled in Jacobean dramatic poetry. A pioneering representation of love between women, Nightwood makes uncomfortable reading for anyone looking for positive images of lesbian identity, but however troubling, this is an extraordinary and haunting book.

Drew Milne