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The Nightingale
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Symbols & Motifs
The Nightingale
Nightingales are a common symbol in Western literature often associated with female sacrifice and lost or unrequited love. The significance of this shines throughout the novel, starting with Isabelle and Vianne’s family name: Rossignol is French for “nightingale.” By choosing “the Nightingale” as Isabelle’s code name, Hannah ensures Isabelle’s story is seen as one of sacrifice. After longing for love her entire life, Isabelle finally finds it with Gaëtan, but their work for the resistance keeps them apart, culminating in Isabelle dying in his arms after the war ends.
Vianne and her father Julien’s stories also draw on the nightingale’s symbolism. By serving in WWI, Julien effectively forfeits his chance at personal happiness with his wife and family, and years later, he gives his own life to save Isabelle. Vianne makes numerous sacrifices to shield those she loves, including killing Beck and allowing her father to die without knowing about her attempts to save Jewish children because she did not want to worry him. Most notably, she allows Von Richter to repeatedly rape her to protect Ari, even though this abuse introduces a permanently bittersweet note into her relationship with Antoine:
She could tell him about Beck, even that she’d killed him, but she could never tell Antoine she’d been raped. This child in her belly would be born early […] She couldn’t help wondering if this secret would destroy them either way (507).
Vianne’s Apple Tree
When Vianne first learns that Antoine was taken prisoner, she ties a piece of yarn from one of his sweaters around the branch of an apple tree in her yard:
The burgundy color stood out against the green and brown. Now, each day in her garden and when she walked to her gate and when she picked apples, she would pass this branch and see this bit of yarn and think of Antoine (144).
For both Vianne and the reader, the tree functions as a symbol of Vianne’s lost loved ones. As the novel goes on, she adds more yarn or fabric to commemorate Sarah (shot at a checkpoint), Rachel (deported to Auschwitz), Beck (killed by Isabelle and Vianne), and her father (executed in Isabelle’s place). By the time Vianne adds a piece of her father’s cuff to the branch, the tree—unlike all the others in the yard—has died, further underscoring the irreparable losses war has brought. Of all those represented on the tree, Antoine is the only one to survive, and when he returns, he is physically and mentally scarred to the point of being a stranger to Vianne.
Edith Cavell
Edith Cavell is a real historical figure: a British nurse during WWI who saved hundreds of lives not only through her medical work but also by helping British, French, and Belgian soldiers and civilians escape from German-occupied Belgium. In The Nightingale, she is Isabelle’s hero and a symbol of female patriotism and courage. Her story heavily foreshadows Isabelle’s own; after “[saving] the lives of hundreds of Allied airmen during the Great War” (72), Cavell was captured and killed by the Germans.
Le Jardin
Le Jardin is the ancestral home of Isabelle and Vianne’s family, which at one point controlled much of the surrounding land. Although the family’s holdings are much more modest when the story begins, the country house itself is still an idyllic place:
On this beautiful summer morning in the Loire Valley, everything was in bloom. White sheets flapped in the breeze and roses tumbled like laughter along the ancient stone wall that hid [Vianne’s] property from the road. A pair of industrious bees buzzed long the blooms; from far away, she heard the chugging purr of a train and then the sweet sound of a little girl’s laughter (6).
The house’s name, which translates to “The Garden,” frames it as a kind of paradise by linking it to the Garden of Eden. The gradual deterioration of the house and its gardens as the novel progresses parallels the characters’ lost innocence.
The Steamer Trunk
The steamer trunk that the elderly Vianne keeps in her attic symbolizes her relationship to her past. It contains mementoes of her family and their experiences during the war—Isabelle’s false ID papers, a “packet of aged postcards” that are presumably those Vianne sent to Antoine during his imprisonment, etc.—but these objects are hidden beneath a tray of “baby memorabilia” (3), and Vianne notes that she hasn’t even opened the box in 30 years. She treated the physical reminders of her past the same way as her actual memories: covering them up with happier recollections and locking them away. Likewise, the fact that she returns to the trunk as the novel opens (and insists that it be brought with her to the nursing home) signals her increasing willingness to revisit her past and, ultimately, share it with her son.
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By Kristin Hannah
