As a roman à clef, the novel features a thinly veiled portrait of Barnes in the character of Nora Flood, whereas Nora's lover Robin Vote is a composite of Thelma Wood and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Jenny Petherbridge is Henriette Alice McCrea-Metcalf, and Felix Volkbein is derived from Frederick Philip Grove.
In 1920, he lives in Paris, keeping two servants for their physical resemblances to royalty, insinuating himself among the actresses and circus performers of Europe in their salons, who have taken on titles too, but for different purposes.
Matthew lives on the rue Servandoni, close to the church of Saint-Sulpice, and frequents the neighborhood place, its environs, and a local café.
He is often seen walking alone, going to Mass, where he uses the holy water liberally, and sometimes, late at night, before entering the cafe, gazing up at the towers of the church and the fountain in the place.
Felix then sees Matthew make a series of dissembling movements with his hands; this is to embellish his face with perfume, powder, and rouge.
They spend much time in museums in the days following, and Felix is surprised to learn that Robin has a taste not just for the excellent but also for the debased and decadent.
Returning to Paris, he sees Robin as an enigma, but places his faith in her Christian proclivities, though her attention seems to be taken by something not yet extant.
Felix returns that night to find Robin having falling asleep reading the memoirs of the Marquis de Sade, one line being underlined.
Nora Flood is introduced as a native of western America, Christian by temperament, and proprietor of a salon in which outcasts of all sorts gathered.
Matthew, seeing Nora walking, notes her as a religious woman without the refuge of the faith, looking for Robin, who she is afraid to find.
Nora wakes, and resumes walking, and looks out into the garden, seeing the light of Robin's eyes emerge from shadow, gazes at her.
She has an obsession with theater, gives the impression of erudition, though she has read sparely, and absorbs other people's facts in her passion to be a person to such a degree that she cannot think for herself.
Fates are discussed, palms read, and mention of Robin's special circumstances are made, whereupon Jenny calls for a carriage ride, confusing the doctor.
The doctor rants about life for a bit, then asks Nora to think of the night and day as the French do, and also to be like them in more general aspects.
Felix then facilitates Guido's desires as much as he can, researching litanies and monasteries and even writing to the Pope about difference in religious practice among the French and the Italians, and their relationship to time.
On the way there, the doctor dreams of what he shall have for dinner—poverty has restricted his diet, and all he can think of are drinks evoking ancestral memory—before realizing that Felix is speaking to him of Robin.
She had spoken of the doctor, referencing his daily habits and practices as an abortionist, and was there ostensibly to buy a painting of Felix's grandmother, with which he could not part.
One evening, he spies someone who appears to be Grand Duke Alexander, and, despite self-restraint, bows to him, and retreats to his carriage, rubbing oil into Guido's hands.
The doctor speaks of Jenny's vacillation between past and present, nostalgia, and the self-destructive effects of Nora's idolization of Robin.
She is experiencing an “inbreeding of pain”, he says, and follows up with an anecdote about happening upon a sexual encounter between a prostitute and her client under London Bridge.
He had walked straight up to the purgatory box to demonstrate his sins, and then retreated to a corner to converse with his penis—Tiny O’Toole—and question his sexuality before the Lord.
During all this time, Nora remains adamant that she must continue writing to Robin, occasionally slipping in a sentence or two between the doctor's rants.
The doctor picks up on the line of children, telling of a young tenor from Beirut and how he abandoned his sick son to watch the fleet in Venice.
After an interlude of notes on gender and love, Nora recalls a night in Montparnasse where she had been called to pick up Robin, who was too drunk to get home.
He returns to complaining about Jenny, Robin, and Nora, and breaks down, asking the audience to let him go, the end now nothing but wrath and weeping.
Nora, having since returned from Europe, notices the same barking, lets out the dog, and follows him until she sees the chapel, whereupon she begins to run, cursing and crying, until she plunges into the jamb of the door.
Barnes worked on Nightwood, then known as Bow Down, in the summer of 1932, while at Peggy Guggenheim's country manor, Hayford Hall, in Devonshire.
[8] Roger Austen notes that "the best known, most deeply felt, and generally best written expatriate novel of the 1930s dealing with gay themes was Djuna Barnes' Nightwood".
[1] Austen goes on to advance the notion that Barnes's depiction of Dr. O'Connor probably confounded a number of American readers because he was neither a "scamp or a monster" nor does he pay a "suitable penalty" for leading a "life of depravity".
[11] Anthony Slide, a modern scholar, lists Nightwood as an example of one of the most well-known gay novels of the first half of the 20th century in the English language, alongside Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar, Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms.