This talk explores the role of sound and music in A Spy in the House of Love and The Seduction of the Minotaur by Anaïs Nin. These novellas, which are two of the five interrelated novellas that together comprise (1954) Cities of the Interior, are fulgent with musical metaphors, sonic and musical representations, and examples of soundful writing. The “musicality” of each novella is entangled with both female protagonists’ (Sabina and Lillian) journeys towards self-knowing, specifically in relation to love, marriage, desire, and sex. Abbot explores the “musicality” and soundful nature of both novellas through a non-monogamous and kink-positive approach to not only contribute to undoing noted misogynistic, mononormative engagement through which some of her works have been (mis)understood, but also to take seriously the multiple forms of desire that are present, and curiously have been overlooked, within Cities. Throughout, Abbot will highlight how the themes of kink, love, sex, and depictions of race and cultural borrowing are entangled with the sonic on Sabina and Lillian’s trajectories.

Helen Abbot is a sonic intimacies scholar, multidisciplinary artist, fourth-year doctoral candidate at Western University’s Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism and lecturer in the Anthropology program at the University of Ottawa. She received her BA in music from Tufts University and MA in ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto. Her research interests lie at the intersection of music studies, sound studies, gender studies, and sex studies. Abbot’s work looks at the nature of intimacies in a variety of forms and how these intimacies are mediated by sonic phenomena. More specifically, her doctoral project is an exploration of the mechanisms and consequences of writer Anaïs Nin’s self-proclaimed feminine, musical writing style in her novel (1954) Cities of the Interior. Abbot is interested in how Nin mobilized this style of writing to explore certain complexities of womanhood in relation to love, desire, and self-knowing. In addition to her thesis, Abbot is a working violist and publishes creative writing.

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