installment of Nin’s unexpurgated diary. Entitled Incest, more shocking than Madonna’s Sex, Nin’s diary revealed, as the Times article duly reported, that Nin “was simultaneously sleeping with her psychoanalyst, her cousin Eduardo, her husband and her father.” Madonna’s controversial erotic fantasies faded, the article seemed to imply, when contrasted with the outrageous stories from Nin’s life. But juxtaposing Nin with the famous pop star served another purpose than just ranking these two female artists on the controversy scale: it was also a way of promoting the forgotten cultural icon with the help of a celebrity who was then at the top.1
Nin and Madonna have a lot in common, but above all, both are controversial personalities whose image underwent many transformations. Sex was a major turning point in Madonna’s career. Prior to its publication, Madonna had a following among many feminists, who regarded her as “a symbol of unrepressed female creativity and power—sexy, seductive, serious, and strong.”2 With the release of Sex, however, the pop icon lost her radical edge, because her book was seen as paying homage to a patriarchal pornographic culture. The publication of Nin’s unexpurgated diaries, which revealed a new face of the author, similarly disappointed certain groups of readers.
Nin emerged on the American literary scene in 1966 with the publication of the first installment of her multivolume Diary of Anaïs Nin (reprinted in the United Kingdom as The Journals of Anaïs Nin) and almost instantly became a cultural symbol, a role model, and a celebrity revered by many of her contemporaries. Nin was invited to give lectures and interviews; she was filmed, photographed, and recorded. Young women in particular identified with the personal and professional struggles depicted in the volumes of her Diary. Considered a pathfinder, Nin was celebrated for her candid confessions, insights into female psychology, and distinctive writing style. Nin’s popularity reached new levels shortly after her death in 1977. The posthumous release of her erotic stories, praised for the exploration of sexuality from a female perspective, made her a best-selling author.
But a decade later, her stature as a representative of women and a reliable narrator of her life story diminished. The unexpurgated diaries and biographies published in the 1980s and 1990s disclosed many painful and discreditable details about Nin’s life, including the fact that she had an incestuous relationship with her father and that she had lied in her previously published Diaries. Much of the attention Nin received at that point was quite negative, especially in feminist circles. Once esteemed for her efforts to achieve artistic and personal emancipation, Nin was thereafter regarded as a devious manipulator, a liar, and a master of self-promotion. She became a controversial figure whose life attracted more attention than her works.
Since Nin came to the limelight in 1966, a variety of stories on her have appeared. Some of them were produced by Nin in her Diary, which during her lifetime became a major medium through which she developed her persona—a version of herself manufactured for the public. Nin, like Madonna, was in charge of how she wanted to present herself to her audience, and she carefully crafted her image. But Nin’s self-portraits came down to us saturated with the culture and times she lived in. For instance, Nin’s concept of femininity was shaped by the way she was brought up, the books she read, the experiences she went through, the acquaintances she made, the narratives she encountered—in a word, by the ideas about femininity that circulated at that time.
But Nin did not have a monopoly on the construction of her public personality, and stories about her were also disseminated in biographies, films, plays, critical studies, and memoirs on her. None of these sources captured the real Nin, although a few might have promised to do so. Every text constructed a different Nin and a different account of her life, and just as it is impossible to fix the meaning of any text, so too is it impossible to determine who the real Anaïs Nin was. However, what is important is which story is chosen for attention, and how it is told. Critics, scholars, reviewers, fiction writers, biographers, playwrights, filmmakers, and fans who attempted to portray Nin did not write in a cultural vacuum. Like Nin, they were affected by the times and places they inhabited. They therefore supplied their own version of Nin rather than capturing a real person, and their portraits of Nin convey to us not only their attitude toward the author but also cultural phenomena that helped foster this attitude.
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Nin has been largely absent from academic curricula, scholarly debates, and popular culture. That said, scholars do comment on Nin’s works, but they do so either in the journal A Café in Space: The Anaïs Nin Literary Journal or in monographs devoted to Nin. Rarely does one find articles on Nin in mainstream academic periodicals. Nin also inhabits popular culture, but she hardly ever makes it to the headlines the way she did in previous decades. But paradoxically, this absence of Nin today, which stands in stark contrast to her very prominent presence in the 1960s and 1970s and then in the 1990s, makes Nin an interesting case study.
When we consider the expanding literature on celebrity culture and Nin’s popularity in American culture in the 1960s and 1970s, the fact that there has not been a single study devoted entirely to Nin as a celebrity, a public figure, or a cultural phenomenon is astonishing.3 Viewing Nin as a celebrity is a great way to learn more not only about Nin herself but also about American culture. Tracing the trajectory of Nin’s celebrity, the reception of her writings, and the changing constructions of her public persona facilitates the examination of the rise and fall of cultural icons. Whereas in the 1960s and the 1970s Nin was considered an important writer and a voice of the generation, in the 1990s she was reduced to a “major minor writer.”4 The changing portraits of Nin enable an analysis to be made of the interplay between Nin and the culture that first brought her to prominence and then pushed her off the pedestal. By looking at which version of Nin prevailed or was privileged at a given time, the dominant cultural movements, together with the ways in which they produced the Nin that met their own needs, can be identified and examined.
The specificity of Nin as a case study also yields stimulating insights into celebrity culture studies and autobiography studies. Bringing these two disciplines together can enhance our understanding of the complexity of public personalities. The specific trajectory of Nin’s celebrity status facilitates an examination of the fallen icon. Nin’s example demonstrates that falling out of grace is closely connected with both changes in image and cultural shifts. The fact that different portraits of Nin were emphasized/constructed at various times reflects changing American culture and highlights the importance of market factors in the creation of her persona. Nin’s example also illuminates, and has the potential to advance, some important issues in autobiography criticism. It brings to light the dynamic relationship between the stories we tell about ourselves, our identity, and our cultures. The multilevel construction of the Nin persona serves as a good illustration of how the self is fashioned through narratives, not only obvious ones such as diaries but virtually all stories that invite us to give an account of ourselves and our lives (such as lectures and interviews). It also points to the malleability of identity, which changes with every story told.
The analysis of the complex process of the construction of Anaïs Nin’s public persona (or rather, personae) by herself and by a variety of media in the United States requires consideration of the following questions: How have Nin’s name and persona been used? What has she come to signify? What sort of statements has she been brought to support? What products has she advertised? What debates has she triggered? What was her own contribution to her image making? And last but not least, In what ways have these constructions corresponded with cultural phenomena? Throughout this book Nin is approached as a construct or a set of representations, rather than as a historical individual. It is necessary, however, to investigate how Nin the person intervened in her career and in her image production, because her involvement was a driving force behind the creation, distribution, and promotion of her public personality. Although I do not try to identify the authentic Nin—that is, I am not preoccupied with determining who Anaïs Nin really was or which of the versions of her that have been circulating in the media is accurate—the section that follows contains a brief biography of Nin for the benefit of those readers who might not be familiar with her life and
