Robin Vote is a young American woman living in Europe who at her core is nomadic and untamed. She is restless by nature and is prone to excess, whether it be in her drinking habits, the number of her lovers, or the extent of her emotional outbursts. When the reader first meets Robin, she is unconscious in a hotel room full of plants, making the suite resemble a forest and signifying that Robin is most at home in the wilderness (that is, outside of status quo, human civilization). Her body even gives off the odor of damp earth, and her flesh has the “texture of plant life” (38).

Robin embodies many contradictions; her movements are “clumsy and yet graceful,” and her husband Felix finds her presence “painful, and yet a happiness” (45). Physically, she is “a tall girl with the body of a boy” (50). Following her marriage, she is depicted in several scenes wearing boys or men’s clothing, alluding to the how she may grapple with issues of her sexual and gender identity in ways similar to O’Connor. Her identity struggles climax as she tries and fails to acclimate to motherhood. Untethered and aloof even before Felix pressures her into having a child with him, Robin further disconnects after giving birth, feeling “lost, as if she had done something irreparable” (52).