Robin Vote
The young American woman the whole novel follows: she marries, has a child, leaves, is loved by two women in turn, and never explains herself to anyone.
A home, and the freedom to leave it every night. Living with Nora Flood she keeps repeating her wish for a home, as if she were afraid she would be lost again, and then goes out into the city after dark and does not come back until morning.
The book
At a glance
- The woman the other four principals organise their lives around
- About twenty when Felix meets her, in the doctor's estimate
- Mademoiselle Robin Vote at the hotel; the Baronin after her marriage
- Baron Felix Volkbein, briefly, in Paris
- A son, Guido, who is frail from birth
- Nora Flood in the rue du Cherche-Midi, then Jenny Petherbridge in America
- Thelma Wood · 1901–1970 · St. Louis, Missouri
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeRobin Vote is the woman at the centre of Nightwood, the 1936 novel by the American writer Djuna Barnes. She is American, in her twenties, and she first appears unconscious. A hotel page runs into a Paris café to fetch a doctor, and Doctor Matthew O'Connor and Baron Felix Volkbein climb the stairs to a room full of potted palms, cut flowers and caged birds, where a young woman in white flannel trousers has fainted across a bed. The doctor throws a handful of water in her face and she opens her eyes.
She is tall, broad-shouldered, with short pale hair, and she wears heavy old gowns that Felix cannot place until he sees her in an antique shop buying one. She says almost nothing. She marries Felix within weeks, goes with him to Vienna, sleeps in a chair while he talks about emperors, bears him a son and tells him she never wanted the child. Then she leaves.
What she does instead is walk. She takes trains to other cities without saying where she is going, kneels in churches she has no faith in, and stays out until dawn in bars where other people put their hands on her. Two women build their lives around her: Nora Flood, who meets her at a circus in New York, and Jenny Petherbridge, who takes her from Nora. Neither of them ever gets an account of her, because she does not seem to have one to give.
How the book draws them
- The first sight of herUnconscious on a hotel bed among palms and cut flowers, her legs in white flannel trousers spread as in a dance, thick lacquered pumps still on her feet. When the doctor brings her round she tries to stand, says that she was all right, and falls back.
- Her eyesFelix looks into them because of their shocking blue and finds, behind the lids, what Barnes calls the long unqualified range in the iris of wild beasts who have not tamed the focus down to meet the human eye. Nearly every description of Robin in the book reaches for an animal.
- The clothesHeavy silks and skirts wider and longer than other women's, feathers flattened to the face like the ones Felix's mother wore. He works out where they come from when he sees her reflected in the back room of an antique shop on the Seine, in a stained and split brocade gown with yards of cloth left to refashion.
- The marriageFelix Volkbein proposes without planning to and is startled to be accepted. He takes her to Vienna for ten days and walks her past every palace and statue in the city. In the hotel room, in the middle of his account of the Emperor Francis Joseph, he looks up and finds her asleep in the chair.
- The disappearancesShe takes to going out and coming back hours or days later, uninterested in explaining. Once she is gone for three days and walks in at night to say she had been half-way to Berlin. This starts before the child is born and never stops.
- The childShe prepares for the birth with what Barnes calls a stubborn cataleptic calm. The delivery goes badly; she curses through it and rises on her elbow in a bloody gown as if she had lost something. A week later Felix comes home to find her holding the baby high above her head, and she brings it down gently.
- How Nora Flood meets herAt the Denckman circus in New York in the autumn of 1923, sitting side by side. Every animal in the ring turns its eyes on Robin, and a lioness comes to the bars opposite her and goes down with her paws through them, crying. Robin stands straight up and says, "Let's get out of here!" In the lobby she gives her name and adds, "I don't want to be here."
- The churchesShe takes the Catholic vow and then wanders into St. Julien le Pauvre, St. Germain des Prés, the Russian church where there is nowhere to sit. She kneels among the nuns of the convent in the rue Picpus and finds that she is worrying about her height. She is never shown believing anything.
- What the doctor says about herTrying to get Nora to stop writing letters, he tells her that Robin is not in her life but that she is in Robin's dream, and will never get out of it. He also says he did not like her, and that she was beautiful.