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If you wish to use this paper for any reason (research, etc.), that's
fine with me. All I ask is that you give me credit for my work and that
you email me. Gender and the Erotica of Anaïs Nin
As with all writers, Anaïs Nin's gender is integral to her style
of writing. This is especially true in relation to her erotica (which
is also called pornography by some critics). Although Nin is a lesser
known author, she has gained a strong following among critics in recent
years, due to her innovative approach and the fact that she was the
first woman to truly write erotica from a female perspective (as opposed
to merely emulating a masculine style).
In Nin's opinion, "It seemed like a Dantesque punishment to condemn Henry to write erotica at a dollar a page" (D3, 33). Unbeknownst to the collector, Nin decided to take the job at Henry's request (Brennan, 67), engaging in what she would later term "literary prostitution." She was not comfortable with the prospect of authoring sexually-oriented works. In fact, she was concerned about what such behavior (writing pornography, that is) would do to her reputation as a literary writer. She felt she had "put aside her 'real writing' when she 'set out in search of the erotic.'" In this statement, Nin's "latent anxiety [is made] quite obvious." (Kamboureli, 146) However, she returned to the erotic writing whenever Miller suggested she do so, usually because he needed her to finance his travel expenses (D3, 57). To help alleviate some of the stigma she had attached to this type of writing, Nin would discuss possible plots with her artist friends in the cafes of Paris. She used the famous names of her collaborators, Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell for example, in order to preserve her own reputation as a serious female writer. In this manner, Nin was able to protect her image from being marred by pornography. However, because of this group contribution, it is almost impossible to tell which stories were actually the ideas of Nin herself and which she borrowed at the suggestions of other people (Brennan, 75). Eventually, Nin becomes comfortable with the manner of writing erotica. Although demands are constantly thrust upon her (the collector's incessant "less poetry and more sex" and Henry's constant entreaties for more money), her writing manages to maintain an air of delight and freedom. Nin begins to view herself, not as a whore, but a "madame in a literary house of prostitution" (Brennan, 67). She realized that, in her writings, she is the one in control; she is not a prostitute without any authority. Anaïs Nin "balanced the two worlds earth and imagination[and] began to produce almost a book a year." Later in life, she admitted that all her works "diary and fiction, the poetry and earth, [were] in harmony." ("Being," 24). Societal pressures were no longer a major concern in her life. Throughout her career, Anaïs Nin's approach to her erotica changes. Part of the problem she encountered in defining her approach is author gender. She finds that she must decide whether to write from a male, female, neutral perspective, or from what she terms her own man-womanhood or androgynous perspective. As she learned from Baudelaire, "in each one of us there is a man, a woman, and a child" ("New," 13). The conventional mode of sexual writing is from a male point of view, writing from the experiences and language of a man. From the traditional male perspective, the sexual act is something physical; woman is merely an instrument by which to achieve gratification. Male writers tend to divorce sex and love ("Eroticism", 3). The Marquis de Sade, for instance holds this belief 2, and Miller's novels with their crude, scathing caricatures of sex and women (his wife, June, for instance) seem to do this as well. In her essay "Eroticism in Women," Nin asserts that, when writing about sexual acts, women "will have to shed their imitation of Henry Miller" because "explicit barracks or clinical language is not exciting to most women" (5, 7). Nin also tried to disregard gender when writing, striving to create a neutral viewpoint. However, she found this an impossible task. During this period, one sees that
Through experimentation, Nin finally settled on the female perspective. She felt that it was the only way she could combine love and physical pleasure in her erotic writings. Unlike men, Nin asserts that women "need the words [...]the gestures which make the sensual act a particular one, not anonymous and purely sexual "("Eroticism," 3). In her opinion, it is women that will have to create an erotic genre in which sex is "linked to emotions to love, to a selection of a certain person" (8-9). This is exactly what Nin endeavored to accomplish: she wanted "to show all the relationships and establish fluid connections beyond sex...[to] reach the instinctive and intuitive connections" (Karsten, 39). In the style of the female writer, Nin's language is a discourse of emotion, her subject is that of relationships (Hoy, 60). 3 Nin understood that language has not focused (or been used) enough in the realm of "feminine sensuality and sexuality," and therefore cannot fully express the feminine viewpoint. Luckily, Nin had a male precedent to follow. As she offers in an interview,
In her erotica, Nin was able to combine man's animal lust and woman's need for emotional bonds. She could have very easily continued following the examples of male writers such as Henry Miller, but she made a conscious decision to "strength[en] and reveal the pattern of women" in the area of creativeness, which was considered a male domain (Karsten, 38). In this, one sees the notion of what Nin often called her "man-woman"ness. Anaïs Nin was able to combine her anima and animus without sacrificing one half or the other. She felt that people need to realize that both genders exist within them:
Such concern for intimacy in relationships is prevalent in all of Nin's works. For example, Sabina, from A Spy in the House of Love, wants to have more than merely "sexual intimacy with the men in her life," she wants to have serious intimate relationships based on equality outside of sex (Karsten, 38). Nin asserts in "The New Woman" that "when [she] wrote the diary and when [she] wrote fiction, [she] was trying to say that we need both intimacy and a deep knowledge of a few human beings" (18). In "The Veiled Woman," Nin explore s male-female intimacy from another angle. Instead of the female character being the one to hope for intimacy beyond sex, it is the male character, George, who wishes for it. At first, George is excited by the idea of a woman who is only interested in a sexual relationship. However, after the encounter has begun, he wonders, "Could it be he might find the secret to her nature and possess her more than once? (Delta, 91)" Physical sex is no longer the of the ultimate importance. After the sexual relationship has ended and he finds that men pay to watch her have sex, he feels betrayed by a relationship that he realized was purely physical to begin with, yet in which he yearned for more.
Related to male-female intimacy, another curious aspect in Nin's stories is the reversal and ambiguity of genders. "The Veiled Woman" is a good example of this element as well. As Brennan states, the woman is
In A Spy in the House of Love, Sabina strives to cross the gender boundary. She has been called a nymphomaniac by some critics because she attempted to view sex as unemotional and, therefore, from a masculine point of view. Nin claims that it is man's ability to divorce sex and emotion that differentiates him from woman; "Woman has not made the separation between love and sensuality which man has made" ("Eroticism," 3). Nin acknowledges that Spy was "the first study of a woman who tries to separate love from sensuality as man does, to seek sensual freedom" (5). The inclusion of gender relationships in Nin's works most likely stems from relationship experiences in her personal life. Although she had many lovers, Anaïs Nin had few lovers of importance in her life: Hugo, her husband, who adored her to the point of believing she could do no wrong; Eduardo, one of her earliest lovers, who was impassioned over her sex and beauty and was neurotic without her; Henry Miller, her literary friend and lover, who loved her and also loved the intercourse they shared; June, Henry Miller's wife, who represented freedom and the world of the forbidden. Of them all, Nin only acknowledged a true, abiding love for Hugo; the rest were her lovers, but not her loves. In the writer's marriage to Hugo, one sees the stereotypical "Love Between a Man and a Woman"the kind of love in which two people grow up together, fall in love ad get married. In Nin's relationship with her husband, however, the situation was not as mutually blissful as it outwardly appeared. Just as the Veiled Woman conquers George through her mysteriousness, Anaïs Nin controlled Hugo by means of her exotic and distant mien. Hugo blindly adored his wife, and still she kept many lovers. She did admit that she could never tell Hugo about any of the men because it would have destroyed him and she loved him too much to bear that. In Henry and June, Nin expounded her reasoning behind keeping Hugo ignorant,
Nin's relationship with Eduardo was one-sided (he needed her), and yet it lasted several years. However, after she had started sleeping with Henry Miller, she tried to break off the relationship. Nin was not in love with Eduardo per se, but mostly just loved his beauty. He was blind to this though and, when she tried to leave him, he confessed all his anxieties about her to his psychoanalyst, Dr. Allendy, who was a close friend of Nin's:
Because she did not appreciate being cast into the masculine role, Anaïs Nin gravitated to Henry Miller. Miller was an aggressive, bluntly sexual manas she says, "a more animal man" (HJ, 114). He allowed her to assume the passive, feminine role in the relationship. Until her affair with John Erskine, Nin had preferred indecisive and weak men (HJ, 50). Miller provided the change from timidity that she needed. Characters with demeanors similar to Miller in Delta of Venus include the Baron ("The Hungarian Adventurer"), Antonio ("Mathilde"), and Millard ("Artists and Models"). However, Nin does not love Miller as she does her husband. When Miller tells her, "I love you madly. You've got me, you've got me. I'm crazy about you," he suddenly becomes self-conscious and asks, "It isn't only the fucking is it? You do love me?" Nin lies to him and says she loves him so as not to hurt his feelings, but it is not love she feels for him. It is only that "his body [had] a way of arousing [hers], of answering [hers]." (109) 4 Here, Anaïs Nin exemplifies what she considers to be the masculine separation of sex and lovea theme commonly broached in her erotic stories, such as "The Veiled Woman." June was another important lover of Nin's. June Miller represented to Anaïs Nin everything that she found exciting and exotic about life. Henry Miller's wife was a free spirit, often on drugs or drunk, always flirting and using her sex to her advantage, and Nin was passionate about her. In June, Nin saw the forbidden, which she was afraid to possess but wanted to own:
Interestingly enough, Anaïs Nin became a role model for the women's liberation movement and continues to be influential in today's feminism. Nin's writings (especially her diaries) are in a sense narcissistic, but the observations made in them are less self- absorbed than they are "interrogations on the human condition over and above self-consciousness about sexual differences" (Balakian, 28). It is this attention to motivational differences between the genders that the feminist movement, in part, wishes to acknowledge. Because the personalities of women have been ignored for so long, women tend to become mere extensions of the male personality (and relegated, as I mentioned previously, to the roles of wife and mother). Nin was not exempt from the societal expectations:
The fact that Nin wrote erotica does not diminish her worth for most feminists. Female erotica allows women to retranslate their role in the sexual arena. As she states, "Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge" ("Being," 22). Nin was quite aware of the stigma attached to the sexual for a woman and did not blithely ignore it, but confronted it
Anaïs Nin is an inspiration to all women desiring to be accepted in a male dominated society because, although she was censored, society did not make her an outcast. Many women who dared to expand the boundaries of women's roles have been shunned and "remained virginal, unmarried, childless, defeminized" (Hoy, 52). Yet, Nin was married, experienced in matters of sexual intercourse (as her diaries attest), and never lost her femininity after she realized that she had denied it and regained possession of it. She is now often viewed as "femininity incarnate[...]living proof one could live out one's dreams" (52). None of this is to say that Nin did not suffer the wrath of a patriarchal society. She felt compelled to move from New York to Paris because the French city's atmosphere was more conducive to artists and other unusual individuals at the time. While she was alive, she found it quite difficult to get published. (Stuhlmann, 120) Her diaries were severely edited to conform to the sensibilities of the age and most publication houses refused to take responsibility for her erotica. It was not until after World War II that Nin got more than passing attention in literary circles. It was also then that she came to be known as an "'American' writer, whatever that identification entailed." Before then, she had an underground reputation and following, but people had not read much of her writing. In fact, much of her work was only known as rumor, her diary for instance. (Stuhlmann, 121) It is an interesting aspect of Western culture that its tastes and values change as often as they do. Nin's erotica, as is the case with works by other authors, had been condemned while she was writing it. Yet, as happened with the pornography of the nineteenth century, it later became accepted as decent and readableand even came to be seen as "literature by [some] cultural elites, including primary journalists, literary critics, and novelists" (Dean, 64). Just as minority potency disturbs the idea of white male centrality, women who write openly of sex are are considered to be a threat (Roof, 120). Nin's continuing work with the sexual and the erotic was threatening to the moral sensibilities of the men of the age who considered sexuality in women to be of concern. This was a major reason that she found resistance in trying to publish her writings. If, as she told Dr. Allendy in her diary, she truly "[didn't] want to become normal, average, standard" (by the standards of her day) and instead wanted "to develop even more original and more unconventional traits," then writing about sex was the perfect option (D1, 112). At the time she was writing, people did not discuss sex (unless they were artists, who were considered slightly left of being upstanding citizens). Women most certainly were not supposed to be candid about sexual matters. End Notes
Works CitedBair, Deidre. "Writing as a Woman: Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, and Anaïs Nin in the Villa Seurat." Anaïs, 12 (1994): 31-38. Balakian, Anna. "Anaïs Nin and Feminism." Anaïs, Art and Artists, a Collection of Essays. Ed. Sharon Spencer. Greenwood, FL: Penkevill, 1986. 23-33. Brennan, Karen. "Anaïs Nin: author(iz)ing the Erotic Body." Genders, 14 (fall 1992): 66-86. Dean, Carolyn. "Pornography, Literature, and the Redemption of Virility in France, 1880-1930." Differences, 5:2 (Summer 1993): 61-91. Hoy, Nancy Jo. "The Poetry of Experience: How to be a Woman and an Artist." Anaïs, 4 (1986): 52-66. Kamboureli, Smaro. "Discourse and Intercourse, Design and Desire in the Erotica of Anaïs Nin." Journal of Modern Literature, 11:1 (1984): 143-158. Karsten, Julie A. "Self-Realization and Intimacy: the influence of D.H. Lawrence on Anaïs Nin." Anaïs, 4 (1986): 36-42. McHugh, Patrick. "Metaphysics and Sexual Politics in Lawrence's Novels." College Literature, 20:2 (June 1993): 83-97. McMahon, Lynne. "The Sexual Swamp: female erotics and the masculine art." The Southern Review, 28:2 (Spring 1992): 333- 353. Nin, Anaïs. "Anaïs Nin Talks About Being a Woman: an Interview." In Favor of the Sensitive Man Papachristou, , Sophia. "The Body in the Diary: on Anaïs Nin's first erotica writings." Anaïs, 9 (1991): 58-66. Roof, Judith. "The Erotic Travelogue: the scopophilic pleasure of race vs. gender." The Arizona Quarterly, 47:4 (Winter 1991): 119- 135. Schwichtenberg, Cathy. "The Semey Side of Semiotics." Sub-Stance, 32 (1981): 26-38. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Gender Criticism." Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Studies. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. NY: Modern Language Association of America, 1992; 271-302. Stimpson, Catharine R. "Feminist Criticism." Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Studies. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. NY: Modern Language Association of America, 1992; 251-70. Stuhlmann, Gunther. "Into Another Language: Some Notes on Anaïs Nin's Work in translation." Anaïs, 1 (1983): 120-136. Go to Jen Maher-Bontrager's
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