In her consideration of Anaïs Nin’s prolific body of work, Lynette Felber calls to attention Nin’s vexed relationship with Modernist feminism: “Nin has often been denigrated by late second-wave feminists for [...] her effort to dish up a creation that would please men. Her complicity with male desire and language leads her to create for herself an ultra-feminine persona that has been detrimental to her reception” (321). To feminist critics of her time, Nin’s literary fiction purportedly validates phallocentric and misogynistic fantasies through a language that problematically valorises a hyper-feminine ideal. Nin’s erotica, of which several works are posthumously published in Delta of Venus, may seem to confirm this charge of anti-feminism. In the preface, Nin concedes that her erotica is a commodity produced for an anonymous male patron identified only as “the old man”; this transactional relationship installs Nin as “madam of [a] snobbish literary house of prostitution” (9). Nin further confesses to reluctantly complying with the collector’s demand to “leave out the poetry and descriptions of anything but sex” (7), thus repressing “[her] own aphrodisiac —poetry” (9).
Nin thus appears to qualify Delta as pornographic rather than erotic—if “desire [in the pornographic text] is over-determined [...] according to a formula which is concretely mapped out [insofar as] nothing is withheld” (Swichtenberg 27)—the apparent excision of an erotic/poetic “fusion of sexuality and feeling, sensuality and emotion” (Nin 10) in Delta implies this vulgar libidinal fulfilment. Yet, despite Nin’s proclamation, the careful reader is nevertheless alerted to the resolutely aesthetic dimensions of Delta. Indeed, Nin declares the (re)discovery of a poetics antithetical to the patriarchal lexicon: “I had a feeling that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of woman’s sensuality, so different from man’s and for which man’s language was inadequate... [The erotica] shows the beginning efforts of a woman in a world that had been the domain of men” (12-13). This artistic vision prefigures Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray’s feminist project of écriture féminine. [1] Irigaray’s manifesto establishes the connection between female libido and language that Nin earlier intuits: “Woman’s desire would not be expected to speak the same language as man’s; woman’s desire has doubtless been submerged” (23). In that sense, Nin’s poetics thus mobilises eros as politics, recovering a historically suppressed female desire. In this paper, I argue that beneath the haupttext of sexual explicitness in Nin’s Delta of Venus lies a nebentext [2] of subterfuge, which simultaneously recognises women’s sexual imprisonment in a phallogocentric order and proffers the promise of gender subversion through redeeming female desire.
For Edmund Miller, Nin’s writing demonstrates, “in ways that make [sexual] engagement difficult”, the artistic failure of her erotica. Miller further speculates that this is imparted by her “feminine misunderstanding of what works to arouse men” (166). Yet, a feminist reevaluation of Nin’s calculated strategy of forestalling sexual arousal situates Delta in a radical field of feminist erotics, confronting Miller’s recourse to phallocentric/pornographic narrativisation that “arouse[s] men”. “Mathilde” exemplifies Delta’s refusal to titillate by culminating in a nightmarish conclusion: Mathilde is almost maimed by her lover, “the man who had so often slashed at the sexual opening of the whores [...] [from a] morbid attraction to what he called “woman’s little wound”, which he was so violently tempted to enlarge” with a penknife (Nin 33). Nin’s destruction of erotic arousal is innovatively twofold: on the one hand, for the mainstream reader, Nin’s grotesque revelation produces horror instead of pleasure; on the other hand, even the reader accustomed to pathological inclinations is likewise prohibited from sexual climax. Nin’s deus ex machina, the police’s timely intervention, interrupts the anticipated mutilation. Under the pretext of writing erotica for her male patron, Nin incisively introduces a nebentext that documents the misogynistic violence enacted upon women’s bodies in a phallogocentric economy.
Earlier in “Mathilde”, Mathilde subconsciously intuits and interrogates the objectification of women in a patriarchal order. After an opium-induced orgy, the protagonist discovers the repeated denial of her sexual satisfaction—“[S]he rarely had an orgasm. She would only become aware of this fact after the men had left” (25). Drugged, Mathilde enters a phallocentric sexual economy where her sexuality is confiscated insofar as her body is appropriated as a means for the phallus(es) to derive pleasure. Martinez, one of her lovers, dreamily envisions her in disembodied images: “distended, headless, a woman with the breasts of a Balinese woman, the belly of an African woman, the high buttocks of a Negress; all this confounded itself into an image of a mobile flesh [...] that seemed to be made of elastic” (25). The composite figure is a hyper- sexualised object that illustrates the androcentric fixation with female pliability. Mathilde further recognises her resemblance to a literally inanimate object—a lifelike doll “beautifully made [...] so that every aperture could satisfy” the desires of male sailors onboard a ship (28). However, Nin’s comic revelation – “But in spite of her innocence, her pliant good nature, her generosity, her silence, in spite of her faithfulness to her sailors, she gave them all syphilis”—dislodges the patriarchal fantasy of the submissive female chattel (28). Though Mathilde “laughed” at this disclosure, Nin’s reference to a venereal disease tellingly sabotages the erotic potential of the narrative for Nin’s patron. Such a phallocentric myth is, after all, nothing save “a perfect illusion” (28).
Likewise, in “The Basque and Bijou”, Bijou is introduced to misogynistic sadism both within and beyond the household – her aspirations to “make a distinction between her life in the whorehouse and her life as a companion and model of an artist” end in failure (180). Indeed, as Nin’s narrator reveals, “the Basque was only intent on making one distinction, merely in the matter of possession” (180; italics mine). Although the Basque initially exhibits “gallant [behaviour by] comparing her skin to satin, her hair to moss, her odor to the scent of precious woods”, he subsequently displays a hitherto-undetected brutality towards Bijou (171). In one instance, a collection of flower-vulva paintings inspires the Basque to dehumanise Bijou, “shaving her pubic hair [..] [so that] now she looks like the paintings” (179). This exercise in objectification is enacted in the presence of the Basque’s fellow artists; their collective gaze furthers her humiliation. In yet another horrifying episode, the Basque, with “a cruel expression in his eyes”, forces bestiality upon Bijou by way of a stray dog – “she was terrified and struggled violently” (200). Bijou’s extramarital encounters further confirm the totality of patriarchal violence. Her similarly “tantalizing and cruel” African lover, with whom she begins an affair in order to recover the sexual desires since repressed by the Basque, develops an “obsess[ion] with the idea of piercing [Bijou’s vaginal] lips as if they were ear lobes and hanging on them a small gold earring” (191-2). This pathological desire to circumcise and mutilate the female body parallels “Mathilde,” confirming the persistence of a misogynistic masochism in Nin’s writing.
Diane Richard-Allerdyce claims that Nin’s erotica enables and encourages “multiple identifications among reader, narrator, voyeur, object, author, and critic [...] to call into question the exclusionary, objectivising perspective that perpetuates exploitation and sexual injustice” (19- 20). Nin’s democratisation of narrative perspectives occurs most clearly in Delta—certain stories are framed through a first-person narrator while others are communicated via a third-person omniscient voice without any discernible pattern or regulated order. As “Mathilde” and “The Basque and Bijou” further demonstrate, Delta explores the disempowered position of the objectified female by portraying misogynistic and masochistic relationships that foreground and interrogate the twin forces of female objectification and amputation of female desire. Also by revising the active subject/ passive object binary system in Delta’s nebentext, Nin signals a subversion of the dominant male gaze.
“Manuel” typifies Nin’s creative synthesis of the subject/object relationship by caricaturing the titular character’s voyeurism: “If they looked at him for any time at all, then he would fall into a trance, his face would become ecstatic, and soon he would be rolling on the floor in a crisis of orgasm” (229). The narrator exhibits an indirect autoeroticism—he is sexually stimulated by how women react to his own body. This autoeroticism is expressed as absurd in the hyperbolic connection of the sacred (“trance”, “ecstatic”) and the arguably profane (“crisis of orgasm”). That Manuel enters into a professional relationship with a housewife—completing her household chores in exchange for her false admiration of his phallus that leads to his convulsive climax—further enriches the comic value and parodic overtones of the narrative: “Then the trembling would turn unto undulation and he would fall on the floor and roll himself into a ball as he came, sometimes all over his own face” (230). By ejaculating onto himself, Nin’s protagonist engages in comic self-objectification. Here Nin parodies male narcissism in order to interrogate and critique the elevation of the phallus in a phallogocentric economy, a strategy that deliberately and ironically sabotages the (phallo-)erotic energies of the narrative: “since [Manuel’s] penis did not seem to belong to the austere face and body, it acquired a greater prominence – as it were, an apartness” (Nin 230). Nin simultaneously disrupts the patriarchal valorisation of the disembodied phallus as the ultimate signifier of pleasure and illustrates the damaging consequences of a phallocentric ideology that separates the phallus from the male body (Nin 230).
Just as a patriarchal sexual economy disembodies and amputates the female body and the female subject’s libidinal energies, the hyper-libido afforded to the phallus is registered as self- destructive throughout Delta. In “The Hungarian Adventurer” the Baron’s insatiable “desire was tormenting him”, and his surrender to the sexual demands of the phallus reduces him to a “madman [...] now frenzied, aging” who eventually commits incest and pedophilia (20, italics mine). In a work of erotica designed for a male patron, Nin introduces a subtext that ironically and deliberately sabotages the sexual energies of the phallus itself.
If “Manuel” disrupts the subject/object binary logic by integrating the subject/object positions into a singular figure, “The Veiled Woman” positions the categories of “subject” and “object” as mobile, thus communicating the very instability of any subject/object binary. George’s vision of himself as the active subject is dismantled at the narrative’s close when he is established as the object gazed upon by his voyeuristic acquaintance instead. The duplicity of the subject/object dichotomy is foregrounded: “The glare of the entrance lights blind[ed] George completely. He could see nothing but brilliant lights and mirrors” (89). George’s self-satisfied autoerotic appraisal of himself through the bedroom of “mirrors, more mirrors,” in which he finds “repetitions of himself, infinite reproductions of a handsome man” (89), is self-devised to reassure his possession of the phallus. At the same time, it is precisely this series of reflections which multiplies the pleasure of the unseen voyeur, thus conversely reinstating George’s objectification. This dramatic irony further imprisons George within the location of the object while empowering his female partner—in full possession of the gaze and full awareness of the voyeur, she achieves sexual climax through “point[ing] at the mirror” (Nin 93). Indeed, “The Veiled Woman” concludes with George’s impotence that accompanies his trauma, comically imitating a cautionary narrative: “For months he was wary of women... He became obsessed with the idea that the women who invited him to their apartments were all hiding some spectator behind a curtain” (Nin 94).
The interplay of positions in Delta can be further discerned in the poetic justice that Nin executes as authorial agency—Bijou “fought [the Negro lover] off and fled” (192). Similarly, Bijou deserts the Basque, “wander[ing] off by herself all day, once again walking the streets” (Nin 201). The external intervention that invests Nin’s initially-victimised characters with the strength to resist oppression likewise terminates the incestuous/pedophilic abuse that the titular character of “The Hungarian Adventurer” indulges in. At the narrative’s close, the children’s “rebellion against their father’s folly mounted, and they abandoned the now frenzied, aging Baron” (20). That this authorial intrusion is a strategy to empower the female characters in Delta is evidenced in “Lilith”, where Nin redeems the protagonist’s absence of sexual desire and thus fortifies her against the patriarchal injunction to produce requisite somatic responses for phallic libido.
Akin to the other short fiction of Delta, “Lilith” illustrates the confiscation of female sexuality in a phallogocentric order—Lilith’s husband drives her to a near-hysterical state: “He refused to enter this emotional arena with her and respond to her need of jealousies, of fears of battles [...] he was like some bland sky looking down at her” (69-70). He denies her a potential prelude to her possible sexual fulfillment insofar as Lilith is dehumanised into “a wild animal in an absolute desert” (69-70). While his trick of pretending to substitute Lilith’s sugar with Spanish fly to induce her submissive desire for the phallus is a variation of Nin’s confrontation of phallogocentric masochism in Delta, Nin extends this theme further by redeeming Lilith. Her very lack of sexual desire for the phallus is celebrated as a means of resisting subjugation in a patriarchal domestic space: “His excitement and his enjoyment that she did not share were rather repulsive to her” (74). Lilith eventually progresses from self-interrogation and self-damnation – “What a cold woman she was [...] what a monster she was”—to embracing an alternative form of lesbian/non-phallogocentric desire (74). This desire, divested from the phallus, is registered in conversely sensual and erotically tactile language: “She had sometimes thought to herself how marvelous it must be to caress a woman, the roundness of the ass, the softness of the belly, that particularly soft skin between the legs” (72). Likewise, Lilith’s husband’s inhumane trick ironically enables Lilith to discover a radical anti-phallogocentric configuration of sexual desire at the narrative’s conclusion. Lilith fantasises about an aphrodisiac that complements the female body, “causing a titillation much more exciting than that of the penis” (75; italics mine). That Lilith ultimately withholds the existence of her libido from her husband further confirms her eventual empowerment. The name Lilith [3] is also significant in its connotation of her Biblical namesake: the recalcitrant woman who resists assimilation into the heteronormative order. Likewise, “Lilith” centers on a protagonist that is immediately introduced as “sexually cold” (Nin 69), interrupting the promised flow of sexual energies of Nin’s erotica. Read in its metafictional dimensions, it appears that Nin asserts her agency by denying her commissioner’s call to “concentrate on sex” (7).
Indeed, the metafictive qualities of Nin’s erotica constitute the nebentext of subterfuge that underscores Delta. This is clearly discerned in the preface of the text. Smaro Kamboureli points out that “it is not conventional to find literary prefaces to pornographic stories or novels, first, because they cause a confusion of the pornographic genre with more serious literature and, second, and more importantly, they delay the promised pleasure” (144). Nin’s inclusion of a preface, which reads as an artist’s manifesto, reiterates Nin’s creative authority in revising the “shoddy [pornography] written by second-rate writers”, and further impedes the immediate immersion into sexual arousal that the pornographic work proffers, thus signaling Nin’s self- aware and subtle undermining of literary conventions (9). In “Mathilde”, the titular character discovers a pervasive misogyny: despite her yearning “to be courted with mysterious language”, her suitors behave aggressively (22). A would-be lover announces, “As soon as I saw you, I was stiff in my pants” (23). Elsewhere, another potential lover issues a humiliating monosyllabic command: “Kneel” (23). To Mathilde, “the crudity of the words was an insult”, prompting her to “strike” in anger (23). Read in connection with the preface—where Nin verbosely assails her commissioner, “No two hairs alike, but you will not let us waste words on a description of hair; no two odors, but if we expand on this you cry, cut the poetry” (11)—it is evident that Nin writes herself into her erotic narratives and refashions her client as Mathilde’s deplorably crude suitor. This demonstrates a self-reflexivity that effectively communicates her frustration at her commissioner’s demand to “leave out the poetry” (12). Indeed, the title of Nin’s erotica, Delta of Venus, already valorises Nin’s poetics because it figuratively mythologises herself as the Roman goddess of love and sexuality. The graphic reference to “Delta” functions as “a structural, geometric synonym for Venus’ vulvar area”, gesturing toward the somatic source of female sexual desire as likewise the precise location of artistic creativity (Swichtenberg 29).
If so, Nin’s establishment of the intimate correspondence between female desire and creativity in Delta clearly anticipates Cixous and Irigaray’s feminist aspirations of écriture féminine, which urges a psychosomatic re-approach to language. For Cixous, “woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies” (347). The reappropriation of language, a phallogocentric system, is privileged as a means of reclaiming the parallel suppression of female voice and desire in a patriarchal order. In “Elena”, the titular character discovers that “in the silence, the voice of a woman began what seemed at first to be a song, and then turned out to be another sort of vocalizing [...] clearer, firmer, rising in harmony with her pleasure” (133). The insistently aural/vocal representation of female libido clearly gestures toward a recovery of the woman’s voice via a corresponding expression of her desire. This resonates with Irigaray’s thesis—écriture féminine is to be approached “as if hearing an ‘other meaning’ always in the process of weaving itself, of embracing itself with words, but also of getting rid of words in order not to become fixed, congealed in them” (29). Indeed, it is Nin’s innovative reconfiguration of language that produces an erotics that resists surrender to phallocentric desire. While Manuel’s and George’s self-absorbed autoeroticism are registered as vulgar acts of phallocentric egotism, Mathilde’s masturbation is conversely documented in approving and poetic terms: the narrator finds Mathilde’s sexual act “enchanting [...] the skin was flawless, the vulva, roseate and full [...] the odorous moisture came like the moisture of sea shells” (26). Indeed, Mathilde’s aspiration for an egalitarian definition of love and eros transforms her into “Venus born of the sea with this kernel of salty honey in her, which only caresses would bring out of the hidden recesses of her body” (26).
While Delta registers a suspicion and confrontation of a phallogocentric sexual economy, alternative variations of amorous/erotic relationships are represented in an egalitarian fashion. These are shown as simultaneously producing and receiving pleasure. In “Elena”, “Leila leaned over Elena and covered her mouth with her own full lips in one interminable kiss” (Nin 141). Nin illustrates non-heteronormative sexual encounters with a far more sensual and erotic lexicon. In fact, Irigaray qualifies écriture féminine as “a sort of expanding universe to which no limits could be fixed” (31). In other words, this feminist innovation of language is both fragmentary and cosmic, demonstrated in Delta through its short story structure. It is an assembly of creative/erotic vignettes that demonstrates the plurality of female sexuality insofar as it produces an internal logic that is oppositional to phallocentricism – it “diffuses the polarization toward a single pleasure [and] disconcerts fidelity to a single discourse” (Irigaray 30).
Richard-Allerdyce proposes that Nin’s erotic literature foregrounds and illuminates a distinction between “positions that reinforce oppression and those that encourage each person to recognize and tolerate otherness” (18). Nin’s Delta simultaneously confronts a social order that permits patriarchal/phallocentric violence against women and registers an aspiration toward an egalitarian universe that celebrates and valorises plural sexual/gender identities and alternative configurations of relationships. Nin as authorial agency redeems and empowers her victimised characters, eventually enabling them to confront a misogynistic universe. In “Lilith”, Nin’s protagonist transcends a denouncement of herself as a “monster” to recover and embrace a suppressed non-phallogocentric desire (74). While Henry Miller finds that “writing to order [is] a castrating occupation”, Nin conversely appropriates such dominant ideologies of masculinity, femininity, and emasculation to effectively subvert a patriarchal structure and its values of misogyny and masochism (Nin 5, italics mine). Delta redeems the female erotic experience that, as Irigaray puts it, has historically been “denied by a civilization that privileges phallocentricism” (26). Through introducing a nebentext of subterfuge, Delta mobilizes a series of formal strategies, attending to the feminist project of écriture féminine, that innovatively transform Nin’s erotics into a potent political instrument, interrogating and assailing a dominant phallogocentric order.
An English Literature major in his senior year, Jason is interested in Asian American literature, gender studies, postcolonial theory (Said is a personal hero of his), and modernist American fiction. He was first introduced to Anaïs Nin at sixteen; his first Nin book was Under a Glass Bell. Caffeine, ramen, unreasonable levels of angst, Lana Del Rey, and immense desperation constitute his essay-combating arsenal.
[1] Écriture féminine (literally ‘women’s writing’), first conceived by Hélène Cixous and subsequently developed by other feminist thinkers such as Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig in the early 1970s, is a key theoretical concept in twentieth-century feminism that argues that meaning is produced and validated by a patriarchal culture. Écriture féminine identifies a critical female difference in language and interpretation and hence attempts to correct this manifestation of misogyny by urging women to write themselves into being and thus, to produce an alternative and liberated meaning (Cixous “The Laugh of the Medusa”).
[2] Polish philosopher Roman Witold Ingarden(1893-1970), working on theater and phenomenology, established a distinction between haupttext and nebentext. The former refers to the “primary text” (Aston and Savona 72), or what readily presents itself on the surface of things, while the latter refers to the “ancillary text” (Aston and Savona 72), or the unspoken conventions – such as stage directions—that underscore and govern the haupttext. It is essential to recognize that both the haupttext and nebentext are not separate and antithetical systems, but rather, engage with and inform the other. (see Aston and Savona Theatre as Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance)
[3] Lilith is a female demon associated with barrenness, lust, darkness and owls in Jewish mythology (Gaines “Lilith: Seductress, Heroine or Murderer?”). She is briefly mentioned in Isaiah 34:14. Jewish mythology later further developed the figure of Lilith—writing of her as Adam’s first wife, created together with Adam from the same earth (cf. Eve, who was created from Adam’s rib). She was later exiled from the Garden of Eden when she refused to submit to Adam as an inferior in sexual copulation (Gaines “Lilith: Seductress, Heroine or Murderer?”).
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