UPDATE ON SURREALIST WOMEN
New Critical Orientations
Issue XXXIII of Mélusine recently devoted to the question of feminine self-representation in surrealism marks a decisive turning point in our understanding of the movement and invites us to rethink studies in this domain. Let us first recall that research in the field of surrealism over the past three decades has reconsidered the scope and rewritings of the movement outside the circles of founding members and beyond European borders. This has allowed us to reframe the movement, to better understand its repercussions, and to better measure its amplitude. This critical approach aimed at situating surrealism outside its borders, and at rethinking it from the center to its peripheries, has highlighted the internationalism of the movement and the central role it played in the development of modernity up to today. This has been the subject, as is well known, of numerous works and interdisciplinary research conducted by Henri Béhar and his CNRS group. It is precisely from this angle that the unprecedented works on surrealist women and the central role they played through their contribution in all domains of culture must be placed. The pioneers, Renée Riese Hubert and Gloria Orenstein, resolutely established this field of study by making us discover several generations of surrealist women hitherto unknown or even ignored by criticism. Thus an entire community of women artists and writers, some of whom were in fact often too young in the 1930s to distinguish themselves through their production, emerged from the shadows. The first research in this domain revealed that they would ultimately have allowed the movement and its aesthetic to extend to the present day. The colloquium organized in 1997 at Cerisy by Katharine Conley and Georgiana MM. Colville welcomed researchers from diverse horizons and played a determining role in confirming the vital role played by surrealist women. This exceptional and unprecedented event, and let us recall in an institution that has traditionally devoted itself to masculine writing, brought international visibility to women writers and artists of the avant-gardes. The participants in this colloquium undoubtedly defined and established the field of study by demonstrating the diversity of manifestations and subjects explored by women in writing as much as in the visual arts: theatricality, politics, sexuality, madness, such were some of the surrealist leitmotifs that were explored and reframed from the perspective of feminine production. We can therefore no longer today neglect the amplitude and profusion of these new fields of research and the diversity of critical reflections that this motivates on an international scale. And issue XXXIII of Mélusine devoted to the question of self-representation of surrealist women again demonstrates and attests by itself that research and critical approaches in this domain are rich, diverse and that doors are henceforth open to new generations of researchers. The first part of the volume focuses on self-representation while the second part is a tribute to Leonora Carrington. In this tribute, Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron invites us to new reflections on the question of bilingualism and the role it may have played in Leonora Carrington's work.
The deliberate choice to center the volume on the question of self-representation by Henri Béhar, Georgiana MM. Colvile and Annie Richard is not by chance.
The question of self-representation, indeed, is a fundamental question for this first generation of women who distinguished themselves in the avant-gardes. The analysis of women's self-representation includes autobiographies such as that of Kay Sage presented by May Ann Caws or the study of the diary in Frida Kahlo by Gaelle Hourdin and Modesta Suarez; Lee Miller's unpublished self-portraits figure there with Patricia Allmer's contribution; analyses of autofictions such as those of Agar, Deharme, Cahun, or Prassinos explore the question of self-representation in writing and in correspondences, a domain little studied until now. Intimate diaries such as those of Kahlo, Bona or Gala open new chapters to our understanding of this community of women. Among these women, it is the image of Jacqueline Lamba, "silent siren" according to Martine Monteau and Alba Romano-Pace who "remains a secret painter" (85), and inhabits this community of women through her invisible presence.
Gayle Zachmann's contribution that opens the volume sets the tone by reframing these women "in the service of the revolution" (21) and who henceforth embody a new figure of the revolutionary woman. The contributions that follow demonstrate the variety and amplitude of the research domain as much as the critical approaches that are multiple. Jean-François Rabain for example orients the image of the self and the body as a central trope in Cahun that invites a psychoanalytic reading of the psyche. In the same perspective Andrea Oberhuber explores the figuration of the self in Meret Oppenheimer. Sybylle Pieyre de Mandiargues highlights the dislocation of the subject based on an analysis of portraits in Unica Zurn and Bona de Mandiargues. The approach to the identity body in Myriam Bat-Yosef by Dominique Jourdain allows better situating corporeality and onomastic self-determination. Also important are the analyses of scenographies of the self by Danièle Méaux. Self-representation "in hybrids" as Leila Jarbouai defines this term frames the volume by showing that surrealist women knew how to ultimately explore and exploit the margins to their advantage (193), there where "all metamorphoses remain possible" (193).
This dossier on surrealist women brings together a large number of approaches and subjects whose amplitude is henceforth too vast to be united in a single volume. Without doubt, this volume, veritable turning table, will lead to subsequent studies that are even longer and more specialized in the decades to come.
University of Sydney