Nightwood introduces us first to Hedvig Volkbein then to her husband, Guido. While Guido follows Hedvig, he is the character who leads us into the novel’s themes (“Guido” = “I lead,” “I guide”). Guido is Jewish and “of Italian descent”; his ancestry will be detailed in a separate post.
Some readers suggest that the first chapter’s emphasis on the Volkbeins (as well as its discussion of Judaism/ Christianity) is Barnes’s attempt to obscure gay and lesbian content (Abraham 199). [1] However, evidence suggests that Barnes developed Nightwood from a proposed work of historical fiction about a Viennese “Court Jew.” In late 1930, Barnes applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship in order “To visit Austria, Vienna, to make a study of pre-war conditions, intrigues, and relations then existing between the Jews and the Court, tracing the interweaving between the two, for a book in progress whose chief figure is an Austrian Jew” (qtd. in Trubowitz 311, Plumb vii-viii).
Side note: Although Guido has married an Austrian woman, in 1880, the time of the novel’s opening, Viennese law forbade marriages between Jews and Christians: “for a mixed couple to marry, one of the partners had to convert either to the religion of the other or to the neutral category, Konfessionslos, ‘without religious affiliation’” (Rozenblit 128).
[1] Jane Marcus, for example, asserts that “the ‘political unconscious’ of Nightwood is located in its supposedly irrelevant first chapter, meant to disguise its existence as a lesbian novel” (229).
JACQUELINE A. POLLARD 