The presence of violence in a work of literature centering around the queer experience exposes the inherent violence within the heteronormative culture it is responding to. In Djuna Barnes’ Sapphic modernist novel Nightwood, Barnes portrays violence as fundamental to the phallogocentric reality that the culture of heteronormativity tries to constrict queerness with. The language Barnes uses when portraying Nora’s perspective on Robin becomes explicit in its violence, illuminating the fear-based reality that Nora, representing queerness that has taken on heteronormativity, wants to pull Robin into.

Before the introduction of violent language in her chapter, Nora, one of Robin’s lovers in the story, makes it a point to cast Robin in an otherworldly light, seeing her as someone in need of bringing down to reality. However, what this perspective actually does is further alienate Robin in an attempt to validate the violent language that she will later use towards her. In the chapter where we meet Nora, we see this happen explicitly: “Her mind became so transfixed that, by the agency of her fear, Robin seemed enormous and polarized, all catastrophes ran toward her, the magnetized predicament” (Barnes 62). Nora’s fear develops an agency of its own, portraying Robin as both dangerous and in danger. This fear is a crucial element that informs Nora’s mindset, especially when it comes to Robin. One of the ways heteronormativity instills itself as an ideology is by utilizing fear of the other as a weapon against queerness. It is Nora who, within Barnes’ novel, embodies this force, trying desperately to keep Robin in her constructed phallocentric reality:

Robin would make some movement, use a peculiar turn of phrase not habitual to her, innocent of the betrayal, by which Nora was informed that Robin had come from a world to which she would return. To keep her (in Robin there was this tragic longing to be kept, knowing herself astray) Nora knew now that there was no way but death. In death Robin would belong to her. (63)

Nora realizes that Robin is not a part of this world of heteronormative paradigms, that she will always inhabit a different world that is outside this reality, and this infuriates her to the point of wanting Robin dead. In order for her to validate this violent thought, she even constructs a different Robin, one who has a longing to be kept, which is further from the truth. Nora knows how free Robin is in her queerness, and so creates her own version of Robin in her head in order to give substance to this idea. This quote portrays how damaging it is to try to construct queerness within heteronormative paradigms, something that leads her to believe there is no other way for them to be together than in death.

Toward the latter half of the novel, Barnes expands on just how deep within heteronormativity Nora has steeped herself, thereby explaining the reason Robin keeps leaving her. After Robin leaves her, Nora’s fear becomes more manifest as she tries to confide in Dr. Matthew about her troubles. In this section, she reveals having given a doll to Robin, explaining that “when a woman gives [a doll] to a woman, it is the life they cannot have, it is their child, sacred and profane” (151). Here she is already playing out her fantasies of a heterosexual relationship with children. Nora stifles any queerness from within their relationship, becoming afraid of what would portray it as anything other than conventional. Yet, when Robin tries to show her the uniqueness and purity of queer love, Nora becomes frightened “of the moment when [Robin] would turn her words, making them something between us that nobody else could possibly share” (152). This moment illustrates that Nora has never wanted Robin as her own queer self, but rather as a means of replaying her own heterosexual fantasies. Nora is afraid of Robin showing her the pure queerness that expands beyond the heteronormative reality she wants to embody. This also makes it clear that Robin had tried to construct a queer relationship with Nora, but that Nora’s fear of it developing into something outside the bounds of the reality she embodied would keep her in perpetual fear of Robin. We see Robin leave this situation only to get with Jenny, who ends up regarding her in a similar way: “[Jenny] did not understand anything Robin felt or did, which was more unendurable than her absence” (177). It is almost as an act of cruelty that the novel hands Robin over to Jenny, a woman who takes things and people from others, but doesn’t take good care of them. She ends up echoing Nora’s earlier sentiments about Robin, regarding her as someone from another realm, not trying to understand her. One realizes that it is Robin’s female lovers who alienate her, thus enacting the very actions against her queerness that heterosexual society would have done. It is this sentiment that sends Robin back to Nora at the end of the novel.

The final chapter titled “The Possessed” embodies all the violence laden in the previous chapters, in which the one purely queer character succumbs to the phallogocentric possession. In it, Robin seems to succumb to nature, fighting a dog, forming a portrait of animalistic violence. The final sentence we are left with is this: “He ran this way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she grinning and crying with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she gave up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees” (180). If the rest of the novel has a slow avalanche of heteronormative violence set to paper, then this final scene is when it runs Robin over. Through the conflation of violence and nature, Barnes illustrates the inherent violence of the heterosexual story, of its purported origins within nature itself via the Garden of Eden, and how the construction of heteronormativity has subjugated queer subjects. The novel ends with Robin giving up, laying out, baring herself to us with her hands at her sides, her face turned away and weeping.

Barnes shows how heteronormativity aims to possess and stifle queerness, and can play out through a queer subject such as Nora. While Robin goes off and wanders in her search for the queer ideal, Nora tries to keep her within the confines of the heteronormative paradigms of marriage and parenthood. As the novel tries to possess her, Robin remains aloof until the very end, when she gives up in her fight against these hegemonic forces. Barnes utilizes violent language in order to portray that there is no ideal queer reality within the confines of a heteronormative society, that it will work to bring down these queer subjectivities into the realm of phallogocentrism, thus relegating them to the outskirts of society.