The Feminine Self: Anais Nin

An enduring preoccupation with the issue of feminine identity characterized both Anais Nin's life and work. Born in 1903, she “tried on” various socially formulated modes of femininity as though they were costumes, experimenting at various periods of her life with a multitude of roles: the nurturer of her two younger brothers; the jeune fille, affecting a lack of awareness of her beauty and charm, but extremely seductive; the lover and young wife, intensely enamored of her handsome husband, Hugh P. Guiler (a.k.a. Ian Hugo, filmmaker and engraver). Later feminine roles were to include the artist/dancer, entertaining and enthralling audiences with her beauty and skill; the adulteress-courtesan-muse figure, companion and inspirer of gifted, usually older men; sexual adventuress, pursuing a great number of partners and a great variety of erotic experiences.

Perhaps the most difficult role for Nin to fulfill—because there were so few role models in her day—was that of the woman artist. During the last decade of her life, when she felt comfortable with her identity as a woman artist and had finally achieved longdesired public recognition, Nin freely acknowledged that the most basic aspect of feminine identity was to form and maintain loving relationships. Ultimately, she accepted the role of nurturer, which she had been resisting for most of her previous life, and she “mothered” a vast number of young artists, inspiring them, aiding them in establishing literary careers, most important, helping them gain confidence in themselves as artists. Nin's acceptance of the principle of Eros as the essence of femininity as she experienced it is an example of the sort of wisdom her one-time therapist Otto Rank called “the voluntary affirmation of the obligatory.”

Nin's ideals for the behavior of the feminine woman generally do not include aspects of the destructive, so-called “devouring” archetype of the “great mother” (as described by Erich Neumann, M. Esther Harding, and many more r