Nightwood

“Early in life Felix had insinuated himself into the pageantry of the circus and the theatre. In some way they linked his emotions to the higher and unattainable pageantry of kings and queens. The more amiable actresses of Prague, Vienna, Hungary, Germany, France and Italy, the acrobats and sword-swallowers, had at one time or another allowed him their dressing rooms—sham salons in which he aped his heart. Here he had neither to be capable or alien. He became for a little while a part of their splendid and reeking falsification.” 

Felix feels at home with circus and theater people because they are adept at moving through the world in their alter egos in a similar way that he does. Just like Felix, they assume false titles of nobility like princess and duchess. However, the performers are forthcoming about their fanciful stage names and do not have the same societal pressure as Felix to maintain their facade at all times.

“The circus was a loved thing that he could never touch, therefore never know. The people of the theatre and the ring were for him as dramatic and as monstrous as a consignment on which he could never bid.”

Felix’s love for the artifice of the circus in many ways foreshadows his love for Robin. The physical aspect of his courtship of Robin is stilted, and in her physically and her personality, he cannot touch her and can never fully know her. Paralleling the circus, Robin presents herself at times as both dramatic and monstrous. 

“[...] he is fond of impossible people, so we are invited—” 

During a visit to Berlin Frau Mann takes Felix to a party at the home of a so-called count, joking that they received an invitation because the count likes “impossible people.” This line takes on two interpretations through a play on words: that Felix and Frau Mann are “impossible” because they are not who they say they are, and also that they are “impossible” because they have difficult personalities. 

“—every nation with a sense of humor is a lost nation, and every woman with a sense of humor is a lost woman.” 

The nonsensical tone of this quote is an example of the type of drunken ramblings passed off as absolute truths by the doctor. At the same time, it scratches the surface of two ideas explored at length in the novel: the role of nationality in shaping one’s identity, and the essential spirit of a woman.

“‘You know what man really desires?’ Inquired the doctor, grinning into the immobile face of the Baron. ‘One of two things: to find someone who is so stupid that he can lie to her, or to love someone so much that she can lie to him.’”  

During his first conversation with Felix, the doctor shares his pseudo-psychology theory about the genuine desire of man, effectively predicting the dynamic of Felix and Robin’s relationship before the two even meet. However, the relationship between Felix and Robin exemplifies not one but both of the desires the doctor describes; each of them deceives the other.

“There is no pure sorrow. Why? It is bedfellow to lungs, lights, bones, guts and gall! There are only confusions; about that you are quite right, Nora, my child, confusions and defeated anxieties—there you have us, one and all.” 

Due to his medical knowledge and his history of tribulations, O’Connor feels justified in identifying himself as an expert on sorrow. He lectures Nora that sorrow does not exist on its own in any pure form; instead, it is a product of a person’s perception of the world—their “confusions” and “defeated anxieties.” 

“Am I what I say? Are you? Is the doctor?” 

When Felix asks Frau Mann if the host of the party they are attending is a real member of aristocracy, she replies with this quote, which uses rhetorical questions to imply that their host is not who he says he is. Her response points out the hypocrisy in Felix’s question and develops the novel’s theme of alter egos.

“[…] she seemed to lie in a jungle trapped in a drawing room (in the apprehension of which the walls have made their escape), thrown in among the carnivorous flowers as their ration […]” 

The first time the reader meets Robin, she is unconscious in a hotel room filled with plants, establishing her as a creature more suited to a home in the wilderness than in a domestic setting. The use of metaphor heightens the power of the jungle image as a symbol for untamed desires, making it so powerful that the walls must escape its force. While Robin may be a creature of the wilderness, the detail of “carnivorous flowers” implies that she is not safe from being devoured by the forces of desire.

“Experiencing a double confusion, Felix now saw the doctor, partially hidden by the screen beside the bed, make the movements common to the ‘dumbfounder,’ or man of magic; the gestures of one who, in preparing the audience for a miracle, must pretend that there is nothing to hide; the whole purpose that of making the back and elbows move in a series of ‘honesties,’ while in reality the most flagrant part of the hoax is being prepared.” 

While spying on the doctor using Robin’s cosmetics, Felix likens him to a magician who overemphasizes his honesty to an audience while preparing to deceive them. In this instance, the doctor is simply a small-time thief, but in a broader sense, the technique of pulling off a hoax described here applies to how characters in this novel present themselves to the world as someone they are not. 

“‘The American,’ the Baron answered instantly. ‘With an American anything can be done.’” 

Without hesitation, Felix tells the doctor that he would choose an American as a wife, implying that Americans have a cultural openness to fantasy and self-reinvention—something necessary if Felix is to continue perpetuating the narrative of his aristocratic lineage. 

“To pay homage to our past is the only gesture that also includes the future.”

When considering fathering a son, Felix's reason is almost exclusively so that his child will appreciate and honor the rich history of Vienna. True to his nature, Felix is wholly sincere in his statement, even though it points out the contradictory nature of history: its existence necessitates the perpetual creation of a future to guarantee its survival.

“She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in man’s image is a figure of doom.” 

Robin's similarity to a weathered statue hints at the hardships of life she may have endured earlier in her life but which are not explicit in any of the novel's exposition. Furthermore, it describes her fixed, aloof nature: remaining still while the elements of life wear her down. The inclusion of the word "though" is vital to revealing Robin's almost intra-human nature, insinuating that even though she is a human, she is also something else pre-human, something that invites doom. 

“[...] Felix, with tightly held monocle, walked beside Robin, talking to her, drawing her attention to this and that, wrecking himself and his peace of mind in an effort to acquaint her with the destiny for which he had chosen her—that she might bear sons who would recognize and honor the past. For without such love, the past as he understood it, would die away from the world.”

Felix’s obsession with controlling the path of the future—mainly grooming the type of woman he will marry and preparing for exactly how he will raise a son—clouds his vision in the present and leaves him unable to see Robin for whom she is. His fear of how the past might “die away from the world” thwarts his ability to make authentic connections in the present. 

“She wandered to thoughts of women, women that she had come to connect with women.” 

The novel firmly establishes that Robin is physically restless, wandering for long distances, but her mind is also restless and wandering. While in church, her thoughts drift from prayer to famous women in history and literature. Notably, while Robin is feeling powerless at the prospect of becoming a mother and thereby being further entrenched in a passionless marriage, she is daydreaming of famous female rulers of state and characters in literature who take risks in the pursuit of true love. 

“People were uneasy when she spoke to them; confronted with a catastrophe that had yet no beginning.” 

Robin’s unease with her identity and her dissatisfaction with the circumstances of her life are so intense that the people she encounters pick up on it, perhaps understanding the severity of her discomfort more clearly than she does. The logical impossibility of confronting a catastrophe which “had yet no beginning” equates Robin with the archetype of the timeless and eternally-tortured woman. 

“There is a gap in ‘world pain’ through which the singular falls continually and forever; a body falling in observable space, deprived of the privacy of disappearance; as if privacy, moving relentlessly away, by the very sustaining power of its withdrawal kept the body eternally moving downward, but in one place, and perpetually before the eye. Such a singular was Nora. There was some derangement in her equilibrium that kept her immune from her own descent.” 

This early passage describes Nora as a fundamentally-optimistic and innocent soul, partially influenced by Christian ideology. This personality allows her to move through life less troubled by “world pain” than others. While she experiences overwhelming heartbreak when her relationship with Robin fails, she does not descend into it as deeply as Felix, who turns to alcohol, or O’Connor, who goes mad. 

“In Nora’s heart lay the fossil of Robin, intaglio of her identity, and about it for its maintenance ran Nora’s blood.” 

Nora is a giving and devoted partner who loves Robin and worries about her long after Robin spurns her. She keeps her dedication to Robin in her heart for so long that it has time to fossilize. 

“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.” 

Established as having no personality of her own, and as someone who instead collects the items and experiences of other people’s lives, Jenny is so deeply inauthentic that even her dishonesty is “accumulated” from other sources. The excess of emotions she has appropriated from others, and the note of them being “second-hand,” insinuates that they are cheap. 

“Love of woman for woman, what insane passion for unmitigated anguish...’” 

O’Connor makes a distinction between the level of heartbreak and passion inherent in romantic relationships between two women versus that of relationships between men and women, saying that the first is vastly more intense. The details of the entanglement of Robin, Nora, and Jenny prove the doctor’s theory. In contrast, Felix is not as tormented by Robin ending their marriage and is more worried about the anguish it will cause his son. 

“[...] by his own peculiar perversity God has made me a liar—” 

In addressing his early experiences as a young closeted transgender person entering the army, the doctor reveals the conflicts he has experienced between spirituality, morality, and identity. O’Connor is a churchgoer, and the irony of God placing him in a moral dilemma—assigning him the wrong sex at birth during a period in history intolerant of transgender identity—is not lost on him.

"[…] you’ll all be locked together, like the poor beasts that get their antlers mixed and are found dead that way, their heads fattened with a knowledge of each other, head-on and eye to eye, until death; well, that will be you and Jenny and Robin.” 

The doctor finds himself in “a lather of misery” when thinking about the love triangle that Nora has found herself in with Jenny and Robin (107). Comparing the three women to “poor beasts” who get their antlers locked deepens the novel’s theme of animal instinct and desire while illustrating how stubbornness in such a situation can lead to death, whether spiritually or physically.

“It may be considered ‘depraved’ by our generation, but our generation does not know everything.”

In discussing Robin’s same-sex love affair with Nora Flood, Felix admits to the doctor that before Nora, Robin had been “always searching in the wrong direction” (125). The doctor reminds Felix that how Robin gave herself permission to follow her passion and live her life may be deemed taboo and “depraved” by the current social norms of their culture, but that the current societal views are not always right. More importantly, the doctor implies that the current social standards may not be maintained from one generation to the next—a concept at odds with Felix’s investment in the past. 

“Robin was outside the ‘human type’—a wild thing caught in a woman’s skin, monstrously alone, monstrously vain...” 

Robin’s actions emotionally wound many people, but her description as a “wild thing caught” evokes the way wild animals caught in a trap can become violent when they are hurt or scared. In this case, the fact of being born a woman is what ensnares Robin.