"Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the 'findings' in a tomb. [...] In Nora's heart lay the fossil of Robin" (61).
Throughout Nightwood, love is a brutalization and a curse. Even the deeply-felt love between Nora and Robin becomes a stew of hate, disgust, and fear, and the depiction of the "fossilized" Robin within Nora's heart echoes the connection between love and death that is continually being referenced in the novel. Nora finds that she longs for Robin's death, feeling as though only "in death Robin would belong to her" (63). In one instance Nora comments that "we give death to a child when we give it a doll," corrupting ideas of childhood and comfort and turning the maternal instincts a doll evokes into something irrevocably sinister. There is a decomposition of order and representation in the language that mirrors the decay of relationships in the events of the narrative. Can a connection be drawn between this inescapable sense of decay and the role as outcast that the characters of the novel are forced to inhabit? There is something about these characters that makes it impossible for them to exist within the traditional social sphere. How does this sense of "otherness" contribute to their inability to create or sustain any form of love that isn't reliant upon death, fear, or hate? How do the interactions in the novel become twisted by the elliptic identities of these characters, leading to "nothing but wrath and weeping"? (175)
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