Lillian
A violinist who comes to the analyst convinced she is a criminal and a man, and who cannot make either claim stick. Her two sessions are the funniest and saddest pages in the book.
To be told what she is — she keeps asking him what he thinks and worrying that being cured will mean being sent away.
The book
At a glance
- A patient of the analyst, in "The Voice"
- Violin
- The American South. She has also lived in Paris and Holland
- Nin later gave the name to a pianist in her Cities of the Interior novels. This is a different woman
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeLillian is one of the patients in "The Voice", the last of the three novellas printed in Winter of Artifice, the 1939 book by the French-born American writer Anaïs Nin. She gets two long sessions, both of them almost entirely her own voice, and she talks the way people talk when they have never been allowed to before.
She has come to confess to being a pervert and a murderer. The affairs with women are real; the murders are not. She believes she killed a school friend by wishing her dead before her wedding, and a little boy years after giving him an enema with a straw, and she asks the analyst whether he does not think it was her fault.
What Nin does with her is refuse to take the confession at its own valuation. The analyst listens to her announce her dark deeds and notices that nothing she says charges the room the way she wants it to. She works hard at being masculine — she says she walks like a man and hated perfume as a child — and everything about her, down to the way she takes her shoes off, tells him otherwise.
This profile is drawn from the Swallow Press edition of 1948, read in the Internet Archive's scan of the book.
How the book draws them
- How she comes inSideways, like a crab, shaking an umbrella dripping with melted snow, bundled into her coat as if she were a package rather than a body. She swings her walk to make it masculine and then asks, flushed, whether she should take off her shoes and lie down.
- The opening line"I find it hard to confess to you, I am a pervert, I've had a lot of affairs with women." She delivers it with heavy gestures and dark implications, and the atmosphere of the room stays as delicate as her hands.
- The woman she thinks she killedA girl in her southern hometown who married and died on the wedding night. Lillian had prayed she would die rather than marry a man, and has held herself responsible ever since. She says men have no tenderness in them.
- The bowPractising in a ground-floor room in Paris with the windows open, she looked at her bow for a long time, was seized by a violent wish to pass it between her legs as though she were the violin, did it, and saw people laughing in the street outside. She nearly died of shame.
- The operationShe was told it was for appendicitis. She found out afterwards that her woman's parts had been removed and that she could not have a child, and she has taken it since as proof that she is a cripple and that no man will want her.
- AfricaAs a child she kept a scrapbook of Africa with maps, timetables, sailings and pictures of boats and aeroplanes. Her school was a two-hour walk away, so she called the walk Africa and set out for it prepared for a journey. She liked school for that reason, and stopped going when a new one was built five minutes from her house.
- "Lillian, do this for me"How she remembers the woman she loved before the current one: always dying, always well enough to receive lovers, always sending her to telephone or carry the music. She notices, out loud, that she may not love the current one at all.
- Kneeling on the pavementLeaving him one day she stumbles on the hotel steps and finds herself on her knees on the sidewalk. She says she did not mind at all, that she has wanted to kneel in the street for years and never dared, and that she now has something warm inside her that he cannot take back.