The short fiction piece “Birth” by Anaïs Nin can be found in a larger collection of her works titled Under a Glass Bell. However, the story can also be found, practically word for word, in Nin’s book Incest: From “A Journal of Love” - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin. This is because it is a true story, so technically the piece should be considered creative nonfiction. In the introduction to Nin in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, it states that Nin intended to “capture the living moments of her emotional reactions to experience” (588), and she is more than successful in doing so within this short piece through both language and imagery. I want to analyze the historical influences on Nin as a woman living in 1930’s France and how, by utilizing the contrasting images of both fire and ice throughout the story, Nin has successfully captured the contradictory emotions of a woman who both loves and hates the thing she has created.
Upon first reading of this story, I could not help but be reminded of Robert Frost’s short poem, “Fire and Ice”:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
On the literal level, Frost speaks of the destruction of the world but he also uses the symbols of fire and ice as symbols for the human emotions of passion and hate, respectively. Though Nin is not speaking about the end of the entire world, she does speak about the potential ending of one life and does so through a similar motif as Frost. The “ice” of the story is presented through the doctor and the two nurses; The speaker states that “A few hours before he adored me, served me. Now he was angry” (588). The doctor progressively gets more and more angry at both the situation and the speaker because of how long the whole process is taking and the nurses are shown to have a sort of cold indifference to the speaker’s pain, speaking about their own personal experiences with birth as the speaker appears to lay dying on the table in pain. In Incest, Nin speaks about acquiring a sage-femme, or a midwife, who was supposed to assist her with her abortion by giving her drugs to stunt fetal development. She also speaks of her German doctor who performs surgeries on her and gives her drugs to help induce false labor. The way she talks about them in her diary, and in the story “Birth,” implies a slight level of unprofessionalism. For example, when one of the nurses slams her knee into Nin’s stomach or when the doctor inflicts spiteful pain because Nin was taking a long time to give “birth” to the dead fetus. During and after World War I, birth rates in France were so low that “the Vichy regime firmly established motherhood as women’s lot, equating abortion with treason against the state” (Hughes and Reader 1). It was then that anti-abortion laws were officially passed and prohibited not only abortion but also spreading information on contraception or physically distributing contraception. It wasn’t until the Mouvement de la Libération des Femmes in the 1970’s that real changes were made towards the favor of the legalization of abortion. It is not unlikely that Nin did acquire shady assistance from under qualified medical professionals.
The “fire” in the story comes from within the speaker and is emphasized through both her passionate feelings for the fetus and her intense physical pain. In the beginning of the story, the speaker is conflicted: she says she is afraid of the “child”, the “dead fragment” of herself, being “out in the cold” (588), as if it were a stray dog caught in the rain, despite the fact that it is killing her. However, this sympathy for the fetus is later transformed as the “child” itself transforms into a “demon strangling me” (590). The speaker herself also goes through a transformation as her hopelessness turns into primal determination. In Incest, the “Birth” scene takes place towards the end of the August 29th, 1934 diary entry. At the beginning of this day, there is a few paragraphs in which Nin addresses her baby directly, saying:
All of us forever seeking again this warmth and this darkness, this being alive without pain, this being alive without anxiety or fear or aloneness. You are impatient to live; you kick with your small feet, my little one, not born yet; you ought to die. You ought to die before knowing light or pain or cold. You ought to die in warmth and darkness.
This contrast of the mother’s womb being a “warm, safe place” and the outside world being full cold and hate plays not only off of the fire and ice imagery but it also references the classic literary image of the mother’s womb as the only “safe” place in the world, from both physical and moral harm. Nin violates this image because she is the one who chose to kill the fetus before it was born, choosing a harmful act for both her body and the fetus’ and her ethics.
In the story after four hours into labor, the nurses inject the speaker with a shot in order to induce labor, and the speaker says “the ice and the blue that was all around came into my veins” (589). She becomes overwhelmed with hopelessness, being unable to remember why she is fighting so hard for something that has already ended. It isn’t until the doctor physically harms her that “the heat of my anger warms me, all the ice and pain are melted in the fury” (590) and she is reminded that she is the reason to fight against the child and the death it brings with it. The speaker says that “inside of my body there are fires” (590) which is the only time she refers to there being multiple fires. The things burning are most likely all of the speaker’s struggles “with my child and with the meaning I put into it, with my desire to give and to hold, to keep and to lose, to live and to die” (590). These things burn as if they were a sacrifice for the speaker’s “savage” ritual of the drumming against her stomach, which ultimately leads to the expulsion of the fetus. By “burning” or letting go of all connection to the fetus, and turning it into the inhuman creature of the demon, the speaker is finally able to physically let go. However, the story ends with the speaker seeing the dead fetus and she calls it “a little girl” (591), returning to it it’s human qualities. The story then ends with the description of the fetus “glistening with the waters of the womb” (591). It is interesting that Nin chose to use “waters” here as water is the melted form of ice and also the element most commonly used to put out fires. This is playing with the idea that the womb is the only place in which one is safe from the fire and ice of the world, yet this fetus was unable to be protected even there, either through abortion or natural causes.
In the Norton Anthology, “Birth” ends here with what is almost an open ending; the ending seems to suggest regret or sympathy because of the shift in language and tone. However, in Incest, only a few lines later, Nin states frankly “I hated it for all the pain it caused me, and because it was a little girl and I had fancied it to be a boy” (Nin). Most of Nin’s diary is like this, especially when speaking about her pregnancy: she shifts from cold indifference to warm passion almost from line to line. In Anaïs Nin: A Biography, Deirdre Bair claims the account of the birth is both “a portrait of monstrous egotism and selfishness” (200) and “nothing more than an experience she could write about” (202). Even though Nin describes her heinous, self-caused “birth” with both black humor and sarcasm, her brutal honesty and lyrical language is what makes this piece so memorable and captivating.
Despite “Birth” being one of Nin’s more well known pieces, it is still problematic because despite Nin’s honest tone throughout not only the story but also her diary, she frequently attempts to justify the situation. After reading Nin’s diary, it is apparent to me that she chose to have this abortion simply because she did not want to. She did not want another child to raise because she wanted to live her life as a free, sexual spirit, a mistress to all. However, she mentions several other small reasons for not having the child: the man she believed was the father would reject the child, her husband would not raise the child, she could not raise it on her own, she could not have anymore children than she already had, that the child is at optimum pureness and will be nothing but corrupted outside of the womb, she would have died from childbirth, etc. This shift in tone from warm to cold is something also seen in another piece of abortion literature written around the same time in America: Gwendolyn Brooks’ “the mother.” In this poem, Brooks’ speaker goes back and forth between loving thoughts and cold brush-offs, leaving the reader confused about how the speaker really feels:
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine? --
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty… (Brooks 781).
Nin feels the same way as the speaker in Brooks’ poem; she felt that the child was never a child but simply an extension of herself that would take from her both time and life. As she states in one of her diary entries during the exact moment she decides to abort the child:
I refuse to continue to be mother. I have been mother of my brothers, of the weak, of the
of Huge, of my lovers, of my Father. I want to live only for the love of man, and as an
artist -- as a mistress, as a creator. Not motherhood, immolation, selflessness.
Motherhood, that is solitude again, giving, protecting, serving, surrendering. No. No. No.
From this perspective, it appears that the abortion, and the fetal creation of Nin and one of her lovers, comes to represent everything that has ever held her back in life. By killing the fetus, Nin allows herself to give “Birth” to a new life for herself, a free life.
The fire and ice imagery throughout this story not only helps to emphasize the contradictory emotions that the speaker is feeling towards the entire situation, but also it emphasizes the literal morbid contradiction of giving “birth” to a dead child. Throughout this entire essay, I was tempted to call the speaker “the mother,” just as Brooks does to her speaker in her poem. This brings forth a huge question: what is motherhood? Can it be defined so easily as having a child? Immediately after the birth scene, after the line about how she had wished it a boy, Nin has a moment of honest regret before saying: “The failure of my motherhood, of at least the embodiment of it, the abdication of one kind of motherhood for the sake of a higher one” (Nin). It is clear that the “Birth” is a symbolic one for Nin’s future self, a “body for passion alone” (Nin). However, I also believe that Nin was aware of the type of literature she was writing and the discourse surrounding it. From the literal standpoint, in “Birth,” Nin is not questioning the validity of the speaker’s emotions through the fire and ice motif, but she is questioning the ability to continue with life after the ice has melted and the fires have been put out, when an act of life brings forth nothing but death.
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