"She led me into the house of incest. It was the only house which was not included in the twelve houses of the zodiac. it could neither be reached by the route of the milky way, not by the glass ship through whose transparent bottom one could follow the outline of the lost continents, nor by following the arrows pointing the direction of the wind, nor by following the voice of the mountain echos."
Anais Nin (The House of Incest)
The House of Incest by Anais Nin and Flowers in the Attic by V.C Andrews are two titles that you may not hear in the same sentence very frequently; in fact, most of V.C Andrews readers may not be aware of Anais Nin’s work, and vice versa. But the content in these two books share a lot of peculiar and interesting similarities. In appearance, they are very different, The House of Incest doesn’t tell the story of a family, and it’s instead a very surrealistic and metaphorical work about the narrator trying to escape a dream in which she is trapped. Flowers in the Attic doesn’t give the appearance of a surrealistic and metaphorical novel as Anais’s book. For example, the subject of incest is not dealt in The House of Incest in a literal way, like it’s the case of Flowers in the Attic where you have a explicit case of incest between the members of the Dollanganger family. Anais Nin uses the word incest to refer to selfish love, and loving in others what you see of yourself. Although there is a passage in the book where she gives an explicit example referring to the character of Lot in the Bible:
" Stumbling from room to room I came into the room of paintings, and there sat Lot with his hand upon his daughter's breast while the city burned behind them, cracking open and falling into the sea. There where h sat with his daughter the Oriental rug was red and stiff, but the turmoil which shook them showed through the rocks splitting around them, through the earth yawning beneath their feet, through the trees flaming up like torches, through the sky smoking and smouldering red, all cracking with the joy and the terror of their love. Joy of the father's hand upon the daughter's breast, the joy of the fear racking her. Her costume tightly pressed around her so that her breasts heave and swell under his fingers, while the city is rent by lightning, and splits under the teeth of fire, great blocks of gaping ripped city sinking with the horror of obscenity, and falling into the sea with the hissof the eternally damned. No cry of horror from Lot and his daughter but from the city in flames, from an unquenchable desire of father and daughter, of brother and sister, mother and son."
p. 52ff. (The House of Incest)
" Stumbling from room to room I came into the room of paintings, and there sat Lot with his hand upon his daughter's breast while the city burned behind them, cracking open and falling into the sea. There where h sat with his daughter the Oriental rug was red and stiff, but the turmoil which shook them showed through the rocks splitting around them, through the earth yawning beneath their feet, through the trees flaming up like torches, through the sky smoking and smouldering red, all cracking with the joy and the terror of their love. Joy of the father's hand upon the daughter's breast, the joy of the fear racking her. Her costume tightly pressed around her so that her breasts heave and swell under his fingers, while the city is rent by lightning, and splits under the teeth of fire, great blocks of gaping ripped city sinking with the horror of obscenity, and falling into the sea with the hissof the eternally damned. No cry of horror from Lot and his daughter but from the city in flames, from an unquenchable desire of father and daughter, of brother and sister, mother and son."
p. 52ff. (The House of Incest)
Incest is a very taboo subject that creates shock and even disgust in the reader. Although , it was precisely this reaction what made this subject very appealing to many artist and writers, specially the 19th Romantics, which saw in incest a perfect theme for them to fit with ideas about death and sex . Famous works that deal with this subject is Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A family Chronicle and Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart. But did Nin’s work influence Flowers in the Attic? An influence can be assumed , even though the conexion may not be very explicit, Anais’s book is a very personal work influenced by things that happened to her and also very controversial like Andrew’s novel. It is a well known fact that Anaïs Nin was having an incestuous relationship with her father when she published her book, members of her family were supposedly horrified about this because they thought that the book was going to be an exposé of their relationship. But it was not the case, even though there is a reference to Lot’s incestuous relationship with her daughter in her work. Besides the obvious resemblance between Nin and Andrews’ books in respect to the title House of Incest which can be seen in the form of a house where family members have love affairs accompanied also by all the negative connotations that this title brings to mind, there are other similarities between these two works that caught my attention and I think may be a good field for further analysis.
Another interpretation of The House of Incest is that trying to live in a self-created world full of pleasure, instead of living in the real world full of pleasure and pain is a mistake. Self created worlds are full of demons and always degenerate into nightmares. The world in Flowers in the Attic is one that in a way fits this decription. On one side, you have Catherine, the narrator, who live in a room which is hinted to be the closest thing to hell, and her mother Corrine is on a very different plane where she enjoys all the benefits that money can give, luxurious trips, expensive clothes and gifts, a handsome and younger husband, people’s attention and admiration, everything but piece of mind. Corrine’s created world full of pleasure is in reality the worst type of nightmare since she is living a double life and in neither of these two lives she can be fully herself, she is always putting an act. I think House of Incest can be a book used as reference when analyzing the mental state that the characters in Flowers in the Attic find themselves completely absorbed, like the narrator in The House of Incest, every character in Flowers in the Attic are looking for dramatic ways to escape their reality . The Dollanganger siblings want definetely to escape Foxworth Hall where they are being slowly and painfully murdered, and Corrine wants to escape her past and start a new life with her new husband. In reality, it’s not that simple because lives are going to be destroyed in order for Corrine to achieve her ideal world.
The House of Incest is an excellent book, and Anais Nin is a very intuitive and extremely talented writer as Andrews, both have different ways of exploring the human psyche, but both definitely accomplished to create realistic messages for their audience.
