The Art of Guilt and Self-Division: Anaïs Nin’s A Spy in the House of Love

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.