SOURCE: "Anaïs Nin's House of Incest and Ingmar Bergman's Persona: Two Variations on a Theme," in Literature and Film, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1979, pp. 47-59.

[In the following essay, Scholar examines the nature of identity as it appears in Nin's House of Incest and Ingmar Bergman's film Persona.]

     So now we are inextricably woven …
     I AM THE OTHER FACE OF YOU
     Our faces are soldered together by soft hair, soldered together,
     showing two profiles of the same soul.

¹

There is an intriguing congruence between this poetic description of merged identities in Anaïs Nin's prose-poem House of Incest (1936) and an identical visual image in Ingmar Bergman's film Persona (1966).² The similarity extends beyond an overlap of image. There are many commonalities between these disparate artists and works—as well as interesting differences—which are illuminated by this imagistic convergence. Both film and book present a "distillation" of the themes which haunted the artists in many other works. "It is the seed of all my work, the poem from which the novels were born,"³ Nin has said about her first work of fiction. Bergman has also described Persona in poetic terms,⁴ but this masterpiece came after more than twenty years of prolific filmmaking, and hence, has an artistic maturity which is lacking in Nin's first effort. Yet there is an intuitive, visionary quality to House of Incest which gives it an extraordinary luminosity.

Bergman has referred to Persona, along with Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence, as a "chamber work." This description applies to House of Incest as well: "They are chamber music—music in which, with an extremely limited number of voices and figures, one explores the essence of a number of motifs. The backgrounds are extrapolated, put into a sort of fog. The rest is distillation."⁵ Nin describes House as containing the "purest essence" of her meaning, the "distillation of her experience."⁶ In this "EDIFICE WITHOUT DIMENSION," she focuses on a small number of figures and puts the background into a "fog." The same could be said for later works, including Winter of Artifice and the five-volume Cities of the Interior, but House of Incest is the most condensed and poetic.

It is also the most unconventional of Nin's books, and the least amenable to analysis and definition. The same is true for Persona, which marks a radical departure for Bergman from more traditional forms and subject matter. Both works may have discouraged critical approach, because they tend to resist analysis and definition, as part of their meaning. Nin and Bergman alike wish to explore a realm of experience below or beyond rationality; they attempt to break down and through the comfortable masks and surfaces by which most of us live. For such purposes, they both require forms which depart from the norm. Experimental themes and forms are frightening to some, unsatisfactory to others. In addition, both film and book share a reputation for difficulty which has added to the confusion. Oliver Evans calls House the "most difficult of Miss Nin's books,"⁷ and John Simon refers to Persona as "probably the most difficult film ever made."⁸ It is hardly surprising, after such ominous warnings, that these works have not received as much recognition as they deserve.

II

The appearance of formlessness in the prose-poem is, to some extent, deceptive; each of the seven sections which compose the book has the underlying coherence of the dream. But the meaning of these "visionary symbolic dream sequences"⁹ must be "unravelled" by the reader. Nin created House out of a record of her dreams which she kept for a year, so it is her unconscious—transformed, to be sure—which provides the deepest structure in this work. Jung's words were her inspiration: "To proceed from the dream outward."¹⁰ But Nin herself doubted whether her dream exploration actually moved outward: "In House of Incest I describe what it is to be trapped in the dream, unable to relate it to life, unable to reach 'daylight.'"¹¹ Even though she may not have reached "daylight" in House, Nin was able to explore and suggest the rich potentiality of the dream terrain, which she continued to excavate in later writing.

Although there is no indication that Bergman created Persona out of personal dreams, he certainly seems to have been in a nightmarish state during its inception. He was confined to the hospital for two months with a disease of the inner ear which produced dizziness and a sensation of imbalance. "I was lying there," he says, "half dead, and suddenly I started to think of two faces, two intermingled faces, and that was the beginning, the place where it started."¹² Most of Persona takes place in that twilight zone between wakefulness and the dream state, life and death. It is difficult to separate dream and reality in the film, and this is another aspect of its reputed difficulty. Bergman has commented: "The reality we experience today is in fact as absurd, as horrible, and as obtrusive as our dreams … And one is strongly aware … that there are no boundaries between dream and reality today."¹³

But how much more difficult to recreate the wordless dream through language than through the visual image. Hence the use of photomontages in House to assist in this near-impossible task, and the reliance on hypnotic, incantatory language in the first sequence to facilitate reconstruction of a dream state. The barrage of images which flash rapidly on the screen during the first moments of Persona serve a similar function. They are both an effort to jolt the audience out of comfortable, ordinary existence and into a condition receptive to the unconscious, at the same time as they are a reflection of the artist's own unconscious creative process.

In other words, for Nin and Bergman alike, the unconscious is their own starting point, their subject matter, and their focus in the audience at once. As Bergman comments, "You sit in a dark room and you have this little bright, bright square before you … And of course, it goes right inside you and right down in your emotional mind—in your unconscious."¹⁴ Nin is more explicit about audience involvement in this process in a discussion of Bergman's films:

It is the emotional, not the analytical, journey which brings deliverance from secret corrosions. Bergman's films have that intent; we should accept the fact of a profound emotional journey into mostly unexplored realms, into all we have not dared to feel, to say, to act, to embrace in life. It is a journey through dark regions. But it should stir in us all the unknown elements in ourselves … this is the world which Jung has called our shadow. Bergman presents the shadow of the selves we do not wish to acknowledge.¹⁵

III

House as well as Persona has the intent which Nin describes here. Jung's concept of shadow and persona are directly relevant to both works, and profoundly significant as a whole for Bergman and Nin. Bergman was reading Jung during the time he was working on the film, and has acknowledged the Jungian basis for its title.¹⁶ "Persona" originally meant actor's mask, which Jung extended to the personality we construct to meet the world, "designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other hand, to conceal the true nature of the individual."¹⁷ Nin summarizes the effects of developing this social mask in the fourth published diary:

The acceptance of this social role delivers us to the demands of the collective, and makes us a stranger to our own reality.

The consequent split in the personality may find the ego in agreement with general community expectations, while the repressed shadow turns dissenter.

Failure to acknowledge this dark alter ego creates the tendency to project it onto someone in the immediate environment, the mirror opposite to one's self.¹⁸

It is this split between the socially acceptable facade and the hidden shadow self projected outwards which is dramatized in both House and Persona. Persona, shadow, and double are prominent themes in the work of both Nin and Bergman, but in House and Persona they are more fully explored. The two women in each work can be seen as personifications of mask and shadow respectively, at the same time as they play out the drama of identification and projection between two selves. They are each dramas of division and isolation, both internal and external. Fusion within the self, resolution of the feelings of division, and unity between two selves, prove impossible to sustain, but it is this quest for wholeness which underlies both film and book.

From one perspective, Alma, the nurse in Persona, and the narrator in House represent the external, daily personality or persona. Elizabeth, the actress in the film, and Sabina in the prose poem personify the shadow figure. We first catch a glimpse of Elizabeth literally masked in theatrical make-up and playing the role of Electra. But in suddenly ceasing to speak or act, she seems to resign the artificiality of her customary pose. Yet she remains protected and concealed behind the silence she maintains almost undisturbed in the course of the film. The psychiatrist in the hospital where she is staying at the beginning of the film interprets her condition as the abyss between "what you are for others and what you are for yourself … the continual burning need to be unmasked. At last to be seen through, reduced, perhaps extinguished. Every tone of voice a lie, an act of treason. Every gesture false." But she warns her: "Your hiding place isn't watertight enough. Life starts leaking in everywhere. And you're forced to react. No one asks whether it's genuine or not, whether you're true or false." She suggests that Elizabeth's silence is but another role which she will play out until it loses interest for her.

Some of the fears which the psychiatrist points to in her analysis of Elizabeth are expressed by the characters in House. Jeanne, who embodies the shadow side of the narrator's personality in the fourth section of House, is a verbal counterpart to Elizabeth: "I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you" (HI, 46-47). The desire to be known and fear of being known, the yearning for the protection of the mask, and the relief of stripping the mask: these universal dualities produce some of the tension and struggle in both works.

Persona and House reflect the ambivalent attitude of Nin and Bergman alike towards being understood: there is a purposeful obfuscation of meaning, at the same time as there is a revelation of deepest meaning. Both seem suspicious of the craving to scrutinize and penetrate which is characteristic of artist and critic. The writer in Through a Glass Darkly is shown to be guilty of this, as is Elizabeth in the film. Nin rails against this tendency in critics throughout her writing, including this passage in which she discusses the critics' reaction to Bergman: "The critics are annoyed by mystery. If significance eludes them they feel powerless … The one who seeks analytical clarity remains only a tourist, a spectator."¹⁹ In place of critical detachment. Bergman and Nin alike demand immersion in the experience on the part of reader and audience.

The second section of House, which is the primary focus of this discussion, revolves around the narrator, who is a writer, and Sabina, a masked personage, who is her shadow self. The narrator, like Alma the nurse in Persona, is protected by the semblance of normality and wholeness which she presents at the start of the narrative: "Step out of your role and rest yourself on the core of your true desires … I will take them up" (HI, 27). Sabina is the more obviously disguised: "Sabina's face was suspended in the darkness of the garden … The luminous mask of her face, waxy, immobile, with eyes like sentinels" (HI, 18, 22). They are both masked figures, but the narrator's mask is her artistic persona, which enables her to play the role of integrator and nurturer, while Sabina's mask is her primeval sensuality. She embodies the shadow side of "proper" femininity. Nin describes her as sexually overpowering: "Every gesture she made quickened the rhythm of the blood and aroused a beat chant like the beat of the heart of the desert, a chant which was the sound of her feet treading down into the blood the imprint of her face" (HI, 18, 21). There is also an aspect of cruelty and power hunger in her: "Her necklace thrown around the world's neck, unmeltable. She carried it like a trophy wrung of groaning machinery, to match the inhuman rhythm of her march" (HI, 21).

Both Sabina and Elizabeth have an inhuman quality, related to their silence and waxy immobility. They represent the dreamed self, woman as OTHER. The mysterious, unformed aspect to both provide invitations for audience projection and fantasy. The narrator in House and Alma in Persona project onto this flexible image buried facets of themselves, both positive and negative. Alma identifies with the fantasy self she sees in the beautiful, successful actress. Elizabeth, and boasts that she could change herself into her if she tried hard. The narrator in House expresses her identification with the other in beautiful poetic language:

Your beauty drowns me, drowns the core of me. When your beauty burns me I dissolve as I never dissolved before man. From all men I was different and myself, but I see in you that part of me which is you. I feel you in me; I feel my own voice becoming heavier, as if I were drinking you in, every delicate thread of resemblance being soldered by fire and one no longer detects the fissure (HI, 25-6).

The writer in House yearns to merge with her mirror-opposite, the physical embodiment of her dreamed self. Mirror love is a persistent theme in Nin's writing, which gains clarity over the years. In Seduction of the Minotaur, the last novel of Cities of the Interior, she summarizes the meaning of this attraction to Sabina:

It was a desire for an impossible union: she wanted to lose herself in Sabina and BECOME Sabina. This wanting to BE Sabina she had mistaken for love of Sabina's night beauty. She wanted to lie beside her and become her and be one with her and both arise as ONE woman; she wanted to add herself to Sabina, re-enforce the woman in herself, the submerged woman, intensify this woman Lillian she could not liberate fully … She had loved in Sabina an unborn Lillian. By adding herself to Sabina she would become a more potent woman.²⁰

The narrator's longing, from this perspective, is not so much for another person, as for the liberation of the buried parts of herself. This is one of the patterns which binds the dream fragments of House together, and for that matter, much of Nin's writing: woman's struggle to liberate the submerged aspects of herself, to resurrect and confront qualities considered socially unacceptable, such as overt sexuality and creative ambition. The dramas of twinship in this volume, and elsewhere in Nin, are variants on the theme of this drive towards self-fulfillment; but mirror love turns out not to be a satisfactory method of attaining that completion of self, since it leads to isolation, guilt, and self-division. Sabina is but a facet of the narrator's self-reflected image, and she is left confined in the coils of self-love: "Worlds self-made and self-nourished are so full of ghosts and monsters," she tells Jeanne (HI, 47). The writer in the last section of House cries out: "If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other" (HI, 70).

As unsatisfactory as this narcissistic form of love is shown to be in House, it may perhaps be a necessary stage of development, particularly for the artist who, almost by definition, must be self-reflective, self-absorbed, especially at the beginning of the creative process. From this vantage point, House of Incest is about the birth of an artist, just as it is about the birth of the artist's first work. In uniting with Sabina, the narrator hopes to attain the visibility as woman and artist that she lacked: "Sabina, you made your impression upon the world. I passed through it like a ghost … DOES ANYONE KNOW WHO I AM?" (HI, 26). Similarly, if Alma in the film is regarded as a projection of Elizabeth, the actress/artist, then the film, too, may be about her creative birth. Nin describes Persona, interestingly enough, as just that: "Part of the mystery is that he takes us into the act of birth, birth of a film as well as of a character."²¹ Elizabeth's alienation from her roles as actress, wife, and mother also makes sense in terms of her conflicts as woman and artist, just as the narrator's struggles in House may be seen as a duel between the demands of the woman and artist within herself.

Although the same narcissistic impulse informs the film as the book, whether from Alma's or Elizabeth's perspective, it differs from House in that the dynamic between two women seems much more apparent, perhaps due to the greater tangibility of the figures in the visual medium. Alma's identification and projection onto Elizabeth is concretely displayed when she begins to dress and behave like her, until finally their images on the screen become inextricable. It is this loss of definition between the two selves which is at once feared and desired, as is the case in the book. Nin has commented about House and Persona: "In House of Incest I treated the theme of exchange of personalities, as Bergman did later in the film Persona. Sabina and the writer of the poem are in constant danger of identifying with each other and becoming the other."²² Total identification in both cases leads to confusion and loss of identity, a sensation of drowning in the other. Alma's captivation by her mirror-opposite forces her into a confrontation with her own shadow self, and a loss of the comforts of her mask.

Gradually the protective coating of her nurse's uniform wears off, and she is revealed both to herself and to the audience. Elizabeth's silence forces her in upon herself, and this is the source of her terror and her desperation. She begins to reveal things about her past which she had long ago forgotten. She recounts an early sexual experience and a subsequent abortion. The next day, she discovers a letter from Elizabeth to her psychiatrist in which her psyche is discussed in abstract, analytic terms. She feels vulnerable and betrayed, and takes brutal revenge. Alma places a piece of broken glass in Elizabeth's path as retribution, and in that act the persona of the nurse is stripped bare. Bergman conveys this crack in her mask visually by having the image of her face through the window crack and burn immediately after this event. It is a powerful visual metaphor, suggesting the collapse of personality, reality, and art simultaneously.

After the film burns, there is a duplication of some of the same disturbing images Bergman used in the opening sequence of the film. Once again the audience is made aware that they are watching a film, at the same time as they are presented with an image which burns right through the surface of art, reality, and mask. When the camera refocuses, in place of Alma's face in the window, Elizabeth appears. The audience is unsettled; it is impossible to sort out exactly what is "real." There is an increasing confusion between the identities of Alma and Elizabeth, between imagined and actual events. Yet to attempt to untangle what is dream and what actually "happens" in the film is to miss the point. Boundaries have been eradicated in both these works between real and dreamed events, between mask and shadow, and between the two women.

IV

The center of the drama in both film and book, and the point of convergence between visual and verbal image, comes at the moment of total identification between the two women. The fusion of the narrator and Sabina is described in words which provide a perfect counterpart to the screen variation on this theme: "So now we are inextricably woven … Our faces are soldered together by soft hair, soldered together, showing two profiles of the same soul" (HI, 28). In the film, the faces of the two women are literally merged into a single face, at first obviously off-kilter, then disturbingly integrated. It is an indelible image of integration and self-division at once, a picture of unity between mask and shadow, between Alma and Elizabeth, and of fragmentation and loss of self. There is a haunting terror and beauty in this image which is unmatched by any other shot in Bergman's impressive repertoire.

This visual fusion of identities comes after one of the most excruciating scenes in the film. Alma's identification with Elizabeth is at this point nearly total. She is dressed exactly like her, and appears to have absorbed her inner self as well. She discovers Elizabeth looking at the picture of her son which she had torn apart at the start of the film. Alma uncovers the picture which Elizabeth attempts to hide, and proceeds to tell Elizabeth how she felt before, during, and after her pregnancy. We watch Elizabeth's pained reaction as Alma reminds her of the social pressures that led Elizabeth to get pregnant to begin with (the accusation that she was not a complete woman, even though she was a successful artist), the hostile feelings she had towards the unborn child within her, and the disgust and hate she felt for the newborn infant. There is probably no deeper shadow Alma could reveal in Elizabeth: her lack of the "appropriate" motherly feelings. Bergman replays the exact same scene, only this time the camera focuses on Alma's face instead of Elizabeth's. The audience wonders how she could know these things about Elizabeth. Is she projecting her own deepest feelings? It is impossible to say, but the revelation of her own abortion suggests her involvement in the accusation. The two women are one in the overlap of their hidden selves. At the end of this scene, the two faces merge; they are inextricably woven.

The emotional intensity of this scene is accentuated by the intimacy of the camera shots. The faces of the two women fill the screen, and we are enveloped in their images. In this way, we are brought into the process taking place between them. If the film's full effectiveness is to be experienced, the audience must identify and project into the characters, just as they do with each other. The same invitation for audience participation takes place in House. At the high point in the merging of identities, the following words appear centered on the page:

     I AM THE OTHER FACE OF YOU …
     THIS IS THE BOOK YOU WROTE
       AND YOU ARE THE WOMAN
             I AM.
                                               (HI, 28)

The interchange of identities between Sabina and the narrator is extended through this method to include the reader as well. We are encouraged to discover and lose ourselves at once in the narrator's words. Complete identification with the narrator may lead to a discovery of the hidden artist within us, or to a sense of unity and mergence with our shadow self. The meaning of this peak moment in both book and film is the product of a coalescence of artist, audience, and actors.

But the center does not hold. The moment disintegrates, perhaps because of the difficulty of maintaining a feeling of wholeness in a shattered world, or within a fragmented self. The dissolution of the bond also suggests the fear of intimacy, a powerful leitmotif in the work of both Nin and Bergman. At least as strong as this fear of closeness is the fear of homosexuality, which appears as an undercurrent in Persona and House. The erotic component in Persona is implied by visual innuendo, such as the night scene in which the two women embrace and their figures overlap in a dream-like manner. The eroticism in the prose-poem is quite blatant: "Around my pulse she put a flat steel bracelet and my pulse beat … thumping like a savage in orgiastic frenzy" (HI, 23). The sexual suggestiveness in both House and Persona is shrouded with ambiguity, partly because of the dream atmosphere which pervades book and film. Whether the women touch in either case is irrelevant; what is significant is the potency of this buried fear which appears to surface at the moment of mergence. There is an immediate disintegration afterwards in both House and Persona, which is not remedied for the remainder of book or film, with the possible exception of the ambiguous endings.

In House, the narrator spins off into her "madness" as a result of this fusion and the concomitant fears. In one of the most effective passages in the book, she describes the feelings which have arisen from this mergence:

I am ill with the obstinacy of images, reflections in cracked mirrors. I am a woman with Siamese cat eyes smiling always behind my gravest words, mocking my own intensity. I smile because I listen to the OTHER and I believe the OTHER. I am a marionette pulled by unskilled fingers, pulled apart, inharmoniously dislocated; one arm dead, the other rhapsodizing in mid-air. (HI, 29-30)

The narrator's sense of self has been "dislocated" by this total mergence with her mirror-opposite. The image of her health and normality has been cracked, and she is left uncertain of who she is. She is divided between the reflection of herself which she presents to please the OTHERS and the buried shadow which has appeared as a result of this identification. Nin continues to depict woman divided against herself in unforgettable language:

I see two women in me freakishly bound together, like circus twins. I see them tearing away from each other. I can hear the tearing, the anger and love, passion and pity. When the act of dislocation suddenly ceases—or when I cease to be aware of the sound—then the silence is more terrible because there is nothing but insanity around me, the insanity of things pulling, pulling within oneself, the roots tearing at each other to grow separately, the strain made to achieve unity. (HI, 30)

This is the nightmare of total duality: the desire for unity, intimacy, counterbalanced by the fear thereof; the outer woman, persona, at war with the shadow. The allusion to freakish circus twins suggests the spectral fear of "abnormality" which leads to conflict and anxiety. There is no distinguishing the "pulling within" and without; the outer "insanity of things" is incorporated within, the violence buried inside gets projected outwards. This is poetically stated here, and in Persona, dramatically demonstrated through a series of violent acts on the part of Alma towards Elizabeth, which mirror the cruelty of the outer world. Bergman also uses documentary evidence to make his point.

In the early part of the film, Elizabeth is in her hospital room and turns on the television, only to recoil in horror at a clip of a Buddhist monk immolating himself in protest against the Vietnam war. The camera focuses steadily on the monk; we are brought into Elizabeth's experience and feel the same horror that she feels. The "madness" of her silence throughout the film makes sense in the context of her revulsion from a world in which such violence regularly occurs.

Later in the film, we observe Elizabeth in one of her private moments in which she contemplates a photograph taken in the Warsaw ghetto, during the round-up of the Jews for the camps. The camera zeroes in on the pathetic figure of a little boy gazing in terror at the Nazis. The connection between private and societal breakdown is brilliantly revealed in this scene. Elizabeth's culpability in terms of her neglected child is suggested in her contemplation of the photograph.

Inner and outer nightmare converge for both Nin and Bergman, but the latter has a greater apprehension of external, political nightmares, and the former, at least in House, remains trapped in the inner nightmare, reluctant to "pass through the tunnel which led from the house into the world on the other side of the walls" (HI, 70). This difference between the two is reflected in their imaginative conceptions of transparent images. The window in the house of incest, for example, looks out on a "static sea, where immobile fishes had been glued to painted backgrounds" (HI, 51-52). The window in the summer house in Persona looks out on the world, reflects back to the characters and the audience woman's capacity for cruelty to others. The fissure in the window occurs directly after Alma places the piece of broken glass in Elizabeth's path. Images overlap once again: fragments of broken glass appear in House as well, but in that case, the writer is cut by her own book, perhaps in punishment for the "labyrinth of selflove," the prison of narcissism: "As I move within my book I am cut by pointed glass and broken bottles …" (HI, 62). This image suggests the guilt and pain involved in creation, particularly when the life and art are inseparable. The book becomes a mirror of the artist and reflects back to her a shadow image. It is interesting that Nin conceives of the image in a rather masochistic manner, and Bergman in more sadistic terms, perhaps in keeping with social conditioning.

Although there is more inter-play between the world perceived through the window and the reflection in the mirror in Persona than in House, it is the private, self-reflective struggle with the "monster who sleeps at the bottom of … [man's] brain"²³ which predominates in both Persona and House. This struggle between the shadow-monster and persona is an on-going process without resolution in either work. This is what unsettles so many about book and film: there are no certitudes, and the conclusions about the possibilities of real change are tentative. Alma boards a bus at the end of the film, presumably to return to her old life, but whether she has been changed by the experience we cannot be certain. We catch a glimpse of Elizabeth acting in Electra again, but whether this is past or future is impossible to say.²⁴ There is the suggestion in this image of her willingness to resign the mask of her silence and to return to "ordinary" existence. The film concludes with the same exposure to the film process with which it opened; once again, the audience is forced into an awareness of the gap between life and art, and of the limitations of the artistic process.

No such reminder takes place at the end of House which, in comparison, is more affirmative. The book concludes with a woman dancing "with the music and with the rhythm of earth's circles; she turned with the earth turning, like a disk, turning all faces to light and to darkness evenly, dancing towards daylight" (HI, 72). Perhaps this is a movement towards acceptance of the light and dark sides of the self, of mask and shadow; or, put another way, a movement in the direction of the world outside the self, "towards daylight." Nin ends the book, as she began it, in process, moving towards completion of her "uncompleted self" (HI, 15).

notes

1. Anaïs Nin, House of Incest (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1958), p. 28. (Originally published in Paris: Siana Editions, 1936). Subsequent references in the text will be to HI.

2. It should be understood from the start that I am not implying a case of influences here. As far as I know, Bergman is unaware of Nin's book.

3. Oliver Evans, Anaïs Nin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), p. 26.

4. Stig Björkman, Manns, Sima. Bergman on Bergman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 198.

5. Björkman, p. 168.

6. The Diary of Anais Nin. Volume Two. 1934–1939 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967), p. 319.

7. Evans, p. 26.

8. John Simon, Ingmar Bergman Directs (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), p. 215.

9. Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 119. Subsequent references to Novel.

10. The Diary of Anaïs Nin. Volume One. 1931–1934 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966), p. 132.

11. Novel, p. 18.

12. Simon, p. 39.

13. Simon, p. 239.

14. Simon, p. 288.

15. Anaïs Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976), p. 116. Subsequent references to In Favor.

16. See Simon, p. 224; Björkman, p. 202.

17. C. G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1956), p. 203.

18. The Diary of Anaïs Nin. Volume Four. 1944–1947 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), p. 59.

19. In Favor, p. 112.

20. Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1961), p. 125.

21. In Favor, p. 114.

22. Novel, pp. 122-123.

23. The Diary of Anaïs Nin. Volume Two, p. 347.

24. Bergman claims that Elizabeth has returned to the theatre, but this is not clear in the film. See Simon, pp. 31-32.