The Nightingale

The Nightingale is notable for being a war novel focused on women at a time when women did not serve widely in the armed forces. It is set during a period when Western society viewed women’s primary role as that of homemakers—women whose lives revolved around selflessly caring for their husbands and children. In wartime, the conventional attitude towards women was the one Vianne herself expresses near the beginning of the novel: “[W]e have a part to play, too; those of us left behind. We have to be brave and strong, too, and not believe the worst. We have to keep on with our lives so our fathers and brothers and…husbands have lives to come home to” (62).

The novel, of course, complicates and challenges this idea in various ways—most obviously through Isabelle, who insists from the start on taking a more active role in the conflict. Inspired by Edith Cavell—a British nurse who served in WWI—Isabelle chafes at the idea of “hiding out in the country while the Nazis destroy France” (79), threatens to kill the German officer billeted at Le Jardin, and eventually becomes involved in the resistance. Furthermore, the role she ultimately carves for herself—conveying Allied airmen and escaped POWs across the Pyrenees—is traditionally masculine due to its physically grueling and dangerous nature. Notably, what makes Isabelle so successful as “the Nightingale” is the very fact that these activities are so at odds with female gender norms. As she tells Paul Lévy when she first proposes the plan, “‘No one would suspect a pretty girl’” (251). In fact, Isabelle repeatedly twists sexist attitudes to her advantage.

Vianne, meanwhile, represents a different kind of wartime experience. Shyer and less self-assured than her sister, Vianne is happy as a mother and housewife and initially finds herself overwhelmed by the idea of stepping outside that role. When Antoine is imprisoned, it becomes clear that Vianne can’t simply wait for him to return; she must make difficult decisions in his absence, including how to provide for Sophie and whether to take a stand against the mounting injustice around her. While Vianne ultimately resists the German occupation, she does so in a vastly different way than her sister. More specifically, Vianne’s resistance is rooted in maternal feeling, with the death of her friend’s child, Sarah, proving a turning point. Horrified by the Nazi treatment of Jewish children, Vianne adopts Ari and later hides 18 other children in the local orphanage.

The parallels between the sisters’ actions are underscored when Hannah juxtaposes Isabelle’s torture with Von Richter raping Vianne for the first time. It is worth noting that The Nightingale does not depict one form of resistance as more honorable than the other—it simply highlights the fact that both Isabelle and Vianne’s wartimes experiences are inseparable from their experiences as women. As Vianne says at the end, “There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books” (561)—in other words, women’s contributions to the war were overlooked just like their everyday contributions to society. But, the novel implies that the inconspicuousness and self-sacrifice involved in women’s traditional roles make them uniquely suited to the kind of “shadow war” depicted (561), where all resistance is covert and dangerous.

Although they unfold 50 years apart, both the novel’s main narrative thread and the scenes set in 1995 end with the same realization: love is ultimately what matters most in life. While this might seem like a relatively uncontroversial claim, it takes on added weight in the context of everything Vianne and Isabelle experience. In fact, The Nightingale can be read as a coming-of-age story in which a relatively naive view of love evolves into something more mature and complex.

This is perhaps clearest in Isabelle’s relationship with Gaëtan. As a teen, Isabelle seems drawn more to the idea of romance than to any particular person: “She had read countless romantic novels in her life and she had dreamed of love forever” (411). While meeting Gaëtan changes Isabelle’s understanding of love, it takes her some time to realize that by rejecting her, he is trying to protect her (and himself). It is not until Isabelle becomes seriously involved in the resistance that she begins to see love as “probably the most dangerous choice” (287) she could make, presumably because of the vulnerability it entails. Given how precarious their lives are during the war, choosing to care for anyone means opening oneself up to the pain of losing them in the near future.

In other words, The Nightingale depicts love as inextricably linked to pain (in fact, the nightingale is a traditional symbol of lost love). This is true of the platonic and familial relationships in the novel as well. Both Vianne and Isabelle take their father’s treatment to mean he does not love them. Vianne, moreover, grows to believe she no longer feels anything for him: “She had tried to be loved by him; more important, she had tried to keep loving him, but in the end, one was as impossible as the other” (15). Eventually, she comes to understand that love can exist even in relationships that aren’t easy, happy, or straightforward: “Love had turned into loss and she’d pushed it away, but somehow, impossibly, a bit of that love had remained. A girl’s love for her father. Immutable. Unbearable but unbreakable” (473).

Despite all of this, The Nightingale concludes that love is “the beginning and end of everything, the foundation and the ceiling and the air in between” (551). As painful as love can be, Hannah suggests, it is also what inspires us to survive horrible circumstances and grow into better people. This is nowhere clearer than in Vianne’s response to the birth of her son, Julien—the product of rape. Vianne chooses to see Julien’s existence as a miracle and ultimately credits it with saving her and her family: “Julien brought me back. His birth was a miracle in the midst of despair. He made me and Antoine and Sophie a family again” (564).

Although the main characters are sisters, the relationship between parents and children is perhaps even more integral in driving The Nightingale’s plot. In fact, the age difference between Vianne and Isabelle often causes their relationship to more closely resemble a mother-daughter relationship rather than one between siblings. When the girls’ mother dies, Vianne’s father tells her that she “will be the adult now” (8). In the end, Vianne’s young age and the stress of a teenage pregnancy and miscarriage prevent her from serving as a parental substitute for Isabelle.

This reflects The Nightingale’s broader interest in strained parent-child relationships—the most obvious example being the one between Julien Rossignol and his daughters. Julien’s harsh and persistent refusal to act as a father has lasting negative consequences on each girl’s development. Vianne vividly remembers her father’s coldness in the wake of her mother’s death—particularly the moment when he responded to her pregnancy by “[slapping her] across the face and calling [her] a disgrace” (11)—and becomes more timid and withdrawn as a result. Isabelle, lacking these distinct memories, continues to recklessly “[hurl] herself at the cold wall of [her] father’s disinterest” (387), growing angrier and angrier when he refuses to relent. The years of rejection result in a seemingly irreparable relationship. Even after reconnecting with Isabelle in Paris, Julien’s relationship with his daughter is largely professional, one grounded in their work for the resistance. The only moment when he is able to love and protect her as a father is when he is executed in her place.

While Hannah does not gloss over the consequences of this kind of parental abandonment, she treats the challenges of parenthood sympathetically. Vianne takes her responsibilities as a mother extremely seriously. Virtually her only priority throughout the novel is to safeguard her daughter (and later Ari’s) survival, although the precise meaning of that survival shifts over the course of the story. Where Vianne initially thinks only of ensuring Sophie’s physical safety, she eventually recognizes the need to balance this against preserving Sophie’s moral character, saying she can’t “let her believe it’s all right to do nothing in times such as these” (424).

Though a parent’s primary responsibility is to protect their child, the novel suggests there are times when this is simply impossible—repeatedly underscored by the fact that the violence of the Nazi occupation extends even to children. This is most notable when Rachel is powerless to prevent her daughter’s death when attempting to flee France, and it proves equally impossible for Vianne to shield Sophie from the lifelong emotional effects of the occupation.

The novel also shows how children’s perceptions of their parents change as they grow up and see their parents as full, flawed human beings. In fact, this dynamic is at the heart of the novel’s frame story: Vianne has so effectively sheltered her son, Julien, from the harsher realities of life that he never saw her as anyone other than his mother and did not know about her bravery during WWII. At the novel’s end, Vianne promises to tell him more of her life story so he can know her more fully.