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irrationality and the subconscious, in addition to experiments of modernists such as Djuna Barnes and Jean Rhys, who used expressionistic and stream-of-consciousness narration. Nin's writing did not rely on a chronological ordering of events as in the more conventional narrative style of Virginia Wolf, but rather on a poetic style using repetition, omission, and pastiche as her organizing principles.
     In Anis Nin's House of Incest, the narrator of the poem is shut off from the external world, able to register its workings only through her own
self-division. 22  The dissonance and dissension of external reality are internalized in the poem, evoked in images of violence, unpleasant odors, and the din of street sounds that confirm the dissociative split in the female consciousness that is the poem's subject. 23  It is in this particular poem that the commonality of Emily Coleman's experiences, narrated from the perspective of an institutionalized patient in Shutter of Snow, and Djuna Barnes's panoramic view of Nora's stream of consciousness through the narrator's viewpoint in Nightwood, come together to awaken our perception to the loss of innocence, as we begin to understand the struggle to define the psychological divisions of the dream world and the day world. 
     House of Incest parallels Barnes's Nightwood.  In both works the female Other represents a lost and prelapsarian past: in Nin's' poem, Sabina peers through the darkness with "an ancient stare, heavy luxuriant centuries flickering in deep processions" 24; In Nightwood Robin Vote wears the past as "a web about her", embodying  "a fearful sort of primitive innocence". 25  The final section of the poem exploits an even more explicit surrealistic rhetoric, the narrator stumbles into a room of paintings in which Lot's incestuous desire for his daughter is portrayed against the background of a burning city. 26 The incestuous passions of father for daughter "heave and swell" as "the gaping ripped city sinking with the horror of obscenity, and falling into the sea with the hiss of the eternally damned". 27
      After evaluating the testimony of these novels in the context of the "daughter-father", and "granddaughter-grandmother" incest scripts, one can come to a whole new understanding of the magnitude in which Barnes, White, Nin, and others altered what was acceptable fodder for women's writing.  Each stepped well beyond the confines of her era, thus moving modern literature toward a more truthful feminine voice.  Critic writer and Nin biographer, Benjamin Franklin V, wrote that, as an author, one of Nin's greatest values was illustrating that "the pursuit of one's completeness is a difficult task that must be under taken, even though it is unpleasant and even though it might not be successful in the end."  28 This might be said of all the expatriate women writers whose work addressed incest; they were breaking free of "multiple silences" through their words, if not completely, at least with some degree of triumph.

9. Ibid., p.27.

10. Broe, Mary Lynn & Ingram, Angela ed. Women's Writing in Exile.  North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1989, p. 7.
    

Footnotes

1. Brodsky, Joseph. "The Condition We Call Exile." New York Review of Books, January 21, 1988.

2. Eagleton, Terry. Exiles and Émigrés: Studies in Modern Literature. New York: Schocken Books, 1970.

3. Benstock, Sheri. "Expatriate Modernism", Broe, Mary Lynn & Ingram, Angela Eds. Women's Writing in Exile. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1989, p. 27

4. Stein, Gertrude. Paris France. New York: Liveright, 1940.

5. Benstock, Sheri. "Expatriate Modernism" , Broe, Mary Lynn & Ingram, Angela eds. Women's Writing in Exile. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1989, p. 27.

6. Ibid., p.27.
7. Ibid., p.27.
8. Ibid., p.27.

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