Surrealism and Women

Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor of English French and Comparative Literature Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, Rudolf Kuenzli, Gloria Gwen Raaberg — 1991

These sixteen illustrated essays present an important revision of surrealism byfocusing on the works of women surrealists and their strategies to assert positions as creativesubjects within a movement that regarded woman primarily as an object of masculine desire orfear.While the male surrealists attacked aspects of the bourgeois order, they reinforced thetraditional patriarchal image of woman. Their emphasis on dreams, automatic writing, and theunconscious reveal some of the least inhibited masculine fantasies. The first resistance to the malesurrealists' projection of the female figure arose in the writings and paintings of marginalizedwoman artists and writers associated with Surrealism. The essays in this collection explore thecomplexity of these women's works, which simultaneously employ and subvert the dominant discourse ofmale surrealists.Mary Ann Caws is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the GraduateCenter of the City University of New York. Rudolf Kuenzli is Professor of English and ComparativeLiterature and Director of the International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa. Gwen Raaberg isDirector of the Center for Women's Resources and Research at Western Michigan University.The Essays: What Do Little Girls Dream Of: The Insurgent Writing of Gisï¿½le Prassinos. Finding What YouAre Not Looking For. From Dï¿½jeuner en fourrure to Caroline: Meret Oppenheim's Chronicle ofSurrealism. Speaking with Forked Tongues: "Male" Discourse in "Female" Surrealism? Androgyny:Interview with Meret Oppenheim. The Body Subversive: Corporeal Imagery in Carrington, Prassinos, andMansour. Identity Crises: Joyce Mansour's Narratives. Joyce Mansour and Egyptian Mythology. In theInterim: The Constructivist Surrealism of Kay Sage. The Flight from Passion in Leonora Carrington'sLiterary Work. Beauty and/Is the Beast: Animal Symbology in the Work of Leonora Carrington, RemedioVaro, and Leonor Fini. Valentine, Andrï¿½, Paul et les autres, or the Surrealization ofValentine Hugo. Refashioning the World to the Image of Female Desire: The Collages of AubeEllï¿½ouï¿½t. Eileen Agar. Statement by Dorothea Tanning.