Nightwood

Several weeks after they first met in Berlin, Felix and Dr. Matthew O’Connor (often referred to as the doctor) reacquaint themselves in Paris and visit O’Connor’s favorite evening haunt, the Cafe de la Marie du VI. Felix considers The doctor “undoubtedly [...] a great liar, but a valuable liar” (33). While carrying on a conversation about the various commonalities and differences of Irish and Jewish people, the two men are interrupted by the chasseur of a nearby hotel who is desperate for the doctor's assistance, as “a lady in twenty-nine ha[s] fainted” and [cannot] not be brought out of it" (37).

The doctor brings Felix along on this house call, which, although strange, is explained by the following: “None of the doctor’s methods being orthodox, Felix was not surprised at the invitation, but did as he was told” (37).

Once at the hotel, O’Connor and Felix arrive to find the character of Robin Vote “[o]n a bed, surrounded by a confusion of potted plants” (37). She is unconscious, giving off the scent of “earth-flesh, fungi” and giving the impression of being in decay, as if “her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations—the troubling structure of the born somnambule, who lives in two worlds—meet of child and desperado" (38).

The doctor momentarily rouses Robin Vote by slapping her wrists and flinging a handful of water on her face. She opens her eyes, insists that she’s okay, and then falls back “into the pose of her annihilation" (39).

While Robin Vote is unconscious, O’Connor takes the opportunity to swiftly use some of the items on her night table. What the doctor does not realize is that Felix sees him “snatching a few drops from a perfume bottle [...] dusting his darkly bristled chin with a puff, and drawing a line of rouge across his lips” (39).

The next day, perhaps prodded by the doctor's question as to whether he had “ever thought about women and marriage,” Felix calls on Robin Vote at her hotel (42). After a short and awkward romantic courtship, Felix proposes to Robin. Eventually, Felix pressures Robin into having a child and she prepares herself with “a stubborn cataleptic calm” (49). She is “strangely aware of some lost land in herself,” and she takes to “going out; wandering the countryside; to train travel, to other cities, alone and engrossed" (49). After the birth of her son, described as “small” and “sad,” Robin continues to feel lost (52). She finally leaves Felix and her son, disappearing for months after striking Felix across the face and exclaiming, “I didn’t want him!” (53).

When Robin re-emerges in Paris, she is accompanied by Nora Flood, whom she has presumably met while away in America. 

Nora Flood is introduced to the reader as having “the strangest ‘salon’ in America,” “a ‘paupers’ salon for poets, radicals, beggars, artists, and people in love; for Catholics, Protestants, Brahmins, dabblers in black magic and medicine” (55). While attending the circus, she meets Robin, who is seated beside her in the front row and also alone. During an act involving caged lions, Robin becomes frightened when a lioness approaches her. Nora comforts her, taking her hand and leading her to the lobby. From then on the two are inseparable. Nora closes her house in America and travels through Europe with Robin. She purchases an apartment in Paris, and the two establish a home together, decorating it over time with a collection of whimsical items like circus chairs, wooden horses, and music boxes that “attested to their mutual love” and acts as a “museum of their encounter” (61).

Over time Robin’s love for Nora wanes, and she begins to go out at night, visiting cafes and bars. Feeling tormented by this separation, Nora starts to go out on her own, in an attempt to trail Robin. However, Robin and her love for Nora are elusive, and Nora moves through the city at night desperate to find even “traces of Robin, influences in her life,” watching “every moving figure for some gesture that might turn up in the movements made by Robin” (66).

After returning home one “interminable” night, Nora dreams of her grandmother dressed as a man with a mustache (67). Upon waking in the early dawn, Nora sees Robin in their courtyard, in the embrace of another woman:

Standing motionless, straining her eyes, she saw emerge from the darkness the light of Robin’s eyes, the fear in them developing their luminosity until, by the intensity of their double regard, Robin’s eyes and hers met. So they gazed at each other. As if that light had power to bring what was dreaded into the zone of their catastrophe (69).

This chapter introduces Jenny Petherbridge, otherwise known as “the squatter,” as “a widow, a middle-aged woman who had been married four times" (71). She is also Robin Vote’s lover, and we can infer that she is the woman Nora spied Robin with at the end of the previous chapter. While Robin initially hides her relationship with Jenny from Nora, Jenny knows about Nora from the beginning because “to know Robin ten minutes was to know about Nora” (75).

Jenny and Robin often meet in the evenings at a restaurant or the opera. One autumn night, during one of these opera dates, a year after their first meeting in 1927, they bump into O’Connor on the promenade. To avoid gossip, Jenny must act as if it’s the first time she’s met Robin. She invites both O’Connor and Robin back to her house only to find “several actresses awaiting her, two gentlemen, and the Marchesa de Spada, a very old rheumatic woman (with an antique spaniel, which suffered from asthma), who believed in the stars” (76). The Marchesa de Spada reads everyone’s palms and subtly predicts that Robin “had come to the end of her existence and would return no more” (77). Shaken by this prediction, Jenny breaks up the fortune-telling by ordering carriages to take everyone out in the fresh air.

While on the carriage excursion, Jenny becomes increasingly jealous of the attention Robin is giving a young English woman and a child named Sylvia, who was inexplicably at the party. Jenny begins to sob and beat the carriage’s seat cushions until she is overcome and strikes Robin in the face, “scratching and tearing in hysteria, striking, clutching and crying” until blood runs down Robin’s cheeks (83). Robin jumps from the still-moving carriage and Jenny runs after her.

“Not long after,” Nora and Robin separate, and Jenny and Robin sail together to America (83).