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The Nightingale follows sisters Vianne and Isabelle Rossignol as they take drastically different paths during the tumultuous years of the German occupation of France during the Second World War. Rather than focusing on military maneuvers on the battlefield or the major decisions made in the halls of government, this novel instead centers on both ordinary and extraordinary women in France and their distinct experiences of a war that transformed their world and affected every aspect of their lives. In this way, the novel highlights stories that are often neglected in historical accounts of the war, centering the wives, daughters, widows, and other women who fought their own battles far from the frontlines.
Read about Memory and Forgetting as theme in The Nightingale.
Fiery and bold, Isabelle bristles against social conventions from an early age. While the teachers at her boarding school instruct students on good etiquette and table-manners, preparing them to be wives and mothers, Isabelle feels that the girls of her generation must be taught to carve their own path through a rapidly changing world. She is a thoroughly modern young woman, embracing feminist ideas and the new opportunities available to women. Her hero is Edith Cavell, a British nurse who was executed by the German military after helping over 200 allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium during the first World War. For Isabelle, Cavell represents female strength and heroism, as her actions in the war prove that women can make a difference even if they are not permitted to serve as soldiers. From the very beginning of the novel, she strives to emulate Cavell and fight for her country.
Read an in-depth character analysis of Isabelle Rossignol.
Initially, she is idealistic and strong-willed but also somewhat naive, looking upon the war with a childish eagerness to prove herself and seriously underestimating the risks involved. Nevertheless, she matures quickly under the difficult pressures of the German occupation, proving herself to the French Resistance and aiding in their efforts despite the danger. Throughout the novel, she becomes increasingly bold in her actions, first distributing papers for the Resistance and later serving as a courier, moving critical documents across France and taking advantage of the fact that the Nazis underestimate her due to her age and gender. After she hides a stranded allied pilot in her father’s apartment in Paris, she finally finds a way to make a major difference in the war, establishing a complicated system of contacts, safe houses, and routes to lead stranded allied airmen across the Pyrenees mountains to the British consulate in Spain. Ultimately, her rescue efforts come at a great personal cost, as the Nazis, recognizing the importance of her work, commit to catching “The Nightingale,” Isabelle’s code name in the Resistance. Loosely based upon various true accounts of female heroism in the war, Isabelle’s story represents those women who fought against the Germans directly, risking and sometimes losing their lives in the process.
In contrast, heroism does not come naturally to Isabelle’s more cautious older sister, Vianne. The complicated relationship between these two very different women is central to the novel, which explores the different ways that people responded to the pressures of the occupation, from defiance to collaboration. After becoming a mother and wife at an early age, Vianne enjoys the domestic comforts of family life in the small, fictional village of Carriveau. When tidings of war first reach the village, she refuses to face this difficult reality and ignores them. Later, when her husband Antoine is conscripted into the army, she struggles to make decisions without him and believes that he will be able to fix everything when he returns. Vianne, then, embodies the more traditional femininity that Isabelle fiercely rejects, and the two sisters argue about whether to fight back against the German troops stationed in Carriveau.
Read an in-depth character analysis of Vianne Rossignol.
In the early years of the German occupation, Vianne’s obedient and careful nature helps her to stay out of trouble. However, in her attempts to maintain normalcy during the war, she occasionally makes choices that are cowardly, or even worse, come close to open collaboration with the Nazis. In this regard, Vianne represents the many people living in France who made difficult and sometimes even unethical decisions in order to maintain their quality of life and survive. As Vianne herself puts it, the war has left her and others with only “bad choices,” and the novel provides various examples of the tough decisions that everyday people had to make. When her daughter falls ill, Vianne receives medicine from Beck, a German soldier billeted at her home, in one of many instances in The Nightingale that blur the lines between accepting a favor and a bribe. At one critical moment in the novel, Vianne provides Beck with a list of the various teachers of Jewish descent working at her school, including her closest friend, Rachel. Vianne rationalizes this decision to herself, noting that Beck could easily obtain this information from anyone, but she cannot shake her own feelings of guilt and shame.
Read an in-depth character analysis of Wolfgang Beck.
Ultimately, Vianne’s attempts to keep her head down and maintain courteous relations with the Nazis are insufficient to keep her and her family safe. Though she has none of Isabelle’s natural courage, Vianne slowly redeems herself from her earlier cowardice and her betrayal of Rachel by taking risks to help others, despite her lingering sense of fear. Though she is the older of the two siblings, in the end it is Vianne who learns a good deal from her younger sister. When Rachel is deported to a concentration camp, Vianne takes in Rachel’s young son, Ari, as her own, meeting with members of the Resistance and forging fake identity documents for him. Later, she develops a scheme to hide Jewish children in an orphanage under false names at the risk of her own life. Her strong maternal instincts and love for children become both a weakness and a source of strength for Vianne. The sadistic Von Richter exploits her concern for the children in order to wield power over her, but the children also inspire her to be courageous and persevere despite Von Richter’s brutal abuse. Though Vianne never formally joins the French Resistance, she does become a hero in her own, quieter way.
Read about Sacrifice as motif in The Nightingale.
Through its portrayal of the interconnected lives of these two sisters, The Nightingale highlights the many women who resisted the Nazi occupation in different ways, sometimes making great personal sacrifices to protect their loved ones or aid in the war effort. Isabelle becomes, like Edith Cavell, a true war hero, crossing enemy lines and saving over 100 allied airmen. Though she dies shortly after being released from a concentration camp, the family members of those many pilots whom she saved travel to the passeurs reunion in Paris to honor her, reflecting the long legacy of her heroic sacrifice. Vianne, too, becomes a hero in her own right. Though she stays in Carriveau through most of the novel, far from the major action of the war, her story shows that the domestic arena of the home can also be a sort of battleground, offering occasions for both violence and heroism.
Read about the theme of Sexism and Female Heroism in The Nightingale.
