Abstract
Anaïs Nin’s semi-autobiographical novel, A Spy in the House of Love (1954), subjectivizes the physical experience of a wife’s infidelities while personifying the mental terrors of her guilt by means of a male figure: The Lie Detector. Embarked on a tournée of self-discovery, Sabina is an offstage actress who aestheticizes her adulterous affairs in a sophisticated art of self-division, whereby she intermittently plays the roles of a Byronic Doña Juana and a melodramatic Emma Bovary to continue to cherish her sexual freedom with many lovers, without losing the protection of her fatherly husband. Although guilt is part of Sabina’s artifice, the real risk inherent in her self-divisions and self-contradictions as a result of her infidelities, is to lose herself in her own lies and to fail to find her true identity beyond the Cubist canvas of her fragmented selves.
Highlights
The AdulteressFemale infidelity haunts men while inspiring writers
Thanks to her years of residence in interwar Paris, Anaïs Nin was imbued with the spirit of avant-garde movements that nourished her literary experimentalism and advocated for the syncretism of arts
Its heroine Sabina eventually discovers that she, too, is a Cubist work of art. While she claims that she is seeking her true identity in numerous houses of love and attempting to reassemble her different selves, Sabina suddenly finds her portrait
Summary
Female infidelity haunts men while inspiring writers. The Bible explicitly condemns to death both the promiscuous bride and the adulteress (Deuteronomy 22:21, Leviticus 20:10). (1973) or Anaïs Nin in Delta of Venus (1977), have observed women’s lasting emotional dependence on men, and celebrated their newly-won freedom of self-expression and action, including their right to satisfy their libido and voluptuous desires Before this historical and literary explosion of sexual permissiveness, the French-born Cuban-American writer and diarist Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) was a pioneering author by subjectivizing women’s physical experiences with tabooed sex, orgasm and infidelity from a genuinely female perspective: her own. This article further analyzes how Sabina simultaneously performs the antagonistic roles of victim and tormentor both in her marriage and in her extramarital sexual affairs She personifies the heroine from Nin’s autofictional diaries, this article examines instead Sabina’s versatility as an actress, who can reproduce two artificial scripts and incarnate two fictional heroines: the neglected, tragic wife – Emma Bovary from Gustave Flaubert’s novel – and the recidivist femme fatale – Doña Juana, a feminine version of Lord Byron’s Don Juan
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