SOURCE: "Anaïs Nin's House of Incest and Ingmar Bergman's Persona: Two Variations on a Theme," in Literature and Film, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1979, pp. 47-59.

In the following essay, Scholar examines the nature of identity as it appears in Nin's House of Incest and Ingmar Bergman's film Persona.

     So now we are inextricably woven …
     I AM THE OTHER FACE OF YOU
     Our faces are soldered together by soft hair, soldered together,
     showing two profiles of the same soul.

There is an intriguing congruence between this poetic description of merged identities in Anaïs Nin's prose-poem House of Incest (1936) and an identical visual image in Ingmar Bergman's film Persona (1966).² The similarity extends beyond an overlap of image. There are many commonalities between these disparate artists and works—as well as interesting differences—which are illuminated by this imagistic convergence. Both film and book present a "distillation" of the themes which...