Working Final Paper on Freud's unconscious in Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

Robin Vote, in Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, represents the bazaar unconscious that remains misunderstood in a separate language of images. She appears mostly at night where she wanders through the streets in search of no one, while Nora is trying to catch or connect with her. However, like the unconscious, she is unattainable and only an image of one’s mind. She is not filled with words, like the Doctor, Mathew O’Connor, but filled with deeper meaning of her actions. She does not use valuable words of comfort, like the Doctor, but she reveals alarming secrets or shocking truths. Robin attracts people with her primitive innocence and her horrid strangeness. The last scene of Nightwood sets up the unconscious to communicate with Nora’s dog. Through sounds and movements the goal of communication is won from Robin to Nora. With Robin’s openness to lesbian relationships of her own, and her willingness to abandon her son, as well as her cross-dressing to abandon gender lines, she rejects all norms set to society. Not only does she reject the norms, but she also rejects the day, the rituals that are planned and structured. She rejects language and communication with others and above all she rejects the will to love any other than herself. Therefore, the last scene of the novel is able to conclude Robin Vote as the unconscious, her actions, her lack of speech, her presence only at night and her primitive innocence to share communication with Nora’s dog.
I am going to explore Robin’s minimal relationships with others that grow in love and attached to her by her strangeness and innocence that she projects. Then I will begin to explore her sleepwalking and her interactions with the night and the people that are awake as well. After, I will make a connection with the night in which the unconscious appears and the savages in people are revealed or feared, which Robin represents. When I have made this connection between the night and the darkness that unravels, I will use the last scene to show how all aspects of the Freudian unconscious are present. Robin’s behavior, her attire, the setting and time, as well as the uncertain meaning of the novels ending all lead to the equation to how the unconscious is revealed and identified. The unconscious mind, as well as Robin, is bazaar, dark, indescribable, and unwilling to be constrained or confounded by the world. My ending point of this paper will be that Robin, as the unconscious, cannot love because it sets limitations to herself. Even Nora looses capability to love Robin, because she is incapable of loving the ambiguous. Since she cannot see Robin, only images of her, the love is lost or never attained. Love then becomes a narcissist event, in which the lover creates images of the beloved and beauty is no longer a miracle to the mind, but its own creation.

The Madwoman in the film, Obsessed

In the movie Obsessed Beyonce’s character turns into a demon in order to protect her family from the psychotic woman that is tearing them apart. This ties into Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s article, “The Madwoman in the Attic”. “All women were inexorably and inescapably monstrous, in the flesh as well as in the spirit”. Although Beyonce’s character is represented as the “angel” in the movie, she brings out her monstrous side to kill the woman that is obsessed with her family. Therefore her character’s possesses attributes of both angel and monster, because she must step in as the protector, but by doing so she must kill the other woman that is coming between her and her family.

Viewing Disney through Said's lense of the Orient

Disney portrays Said’s “other” in many ways. In Lady of the Tramp the Siamese cats possess qualities of the Eastern stereotype. They are being categorized as sneaky and deceptive creatures.



In Aladdin they describe Arabia in the song as “barbaric, but hey, it’s home”. They create a world that is not only different then the western world, but savage. Aladdin’s only way of survival is to lie and cheat his way through life. The bum tends to be viewed as the most civil and caring from all the others, and it is his uniqueness of caring that makes him the “Diamond in the Rough”, a character that the West can identify with and want to see as the hero.
Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place
Where the caravan camels roam
Where it's flat and immense
And the heat is intense
It's barbaric, but hey, it's home
When the wind's from the east
And the sun's from the west
And the sand in the glass is right
Come on down
Stop on by
Hop a carpet and fly
To another Arabian night

Arabian nights
Like Arabian days
More often than not
Are hotter than hot
In a lot of good ways

Arabian nights
'Neath Arabian moons
A fool off his guard
Could fall and fall hard
Out there on the dunes

Factory Scene from Modern Times

At the end of Chapter 13 in Upton Sinclair’s Jungle it states, “for the woman worked so fast that the eye could literally not follow her, and there was only a mist of motion, and tangle after tangle of sausages appearing. In the midst of the mist, however, the visitor would suddenly notice the tense set face, with the two wrinkle graven in the forehead, and the ghastly pallor of the cheeks; and then he would suddenly recollect that it was time he was going on. The woman did not go on; she stayed right there—hour after hour, day after day, year after year, twisting sausage links and racing with death. It was piecework. And she was apt to have a family to keep alive; and stern and ruthless economic laws had arranged it that she could only do this by working just as she did, with all her soul upon her work, and with never an instant for a glance at the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who came to stare at her, as at some wild beast in a menagerie”.



This scene greatly reminded me of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, where he is stuck in the factory doing monotonous work. They expect him to be like the machine in order to keep up with the machine. And just as the machine, he will not be able to stop his work. Then salesmen come into the factory to sell an idea to remove “lunch time”, so that more work can be done. It is all about efficiency and the largest profit margin and there is no consideration taken into the fact that they are only human. Industrialization and Capitalism create a world for the working class of not only survival solely through labor, but just like the machine if they cannot work they are replaced.