‘Melusina after the scream’: Surrealism and the Hybrid Bodies of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo

Abstract

In his 1944 text, Arcane 17, the Surrealism-founder, André Breton advocated increased political power for women, and yet invoked the hybrid body of the femme-enfant, Melusina as the image through which to articulate his vision. This paper discusses the hybridization of the female form in surrealist images and texts by Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, to question the role of the female hybrid body within Surrealism. Deliberately transgressive, visceral depictions of beastly hybrids are contrasted with harmonious visions of metamorphosis, to show how the gendering of hybrid bodies as female relates to the artists’ esoteric and exoteric depictions of human subjectivity.

Key words:

• Leonora Carrington
• Remedios Varo
• André Breton
• Surrealism
• female
• hybrid
• identity
• subjectivity
• Gilles Deleuze
• Rosi Braidotti

Notes

1 Leonora Carrington, ‘The Stone Door’, in The Seventh Horse and Other Tales, trans. Katherine Talbot & Anthony Kerrigan (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988), 76–141 (p. 85).

2 André Breton, Arcane 17, trans. Zack Rogow, with an intro., by Anna Balakian (Copenhagen/Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2004), 77.

3 Elza Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1998), 13 & 22.

4 Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image, 2–3.

5 André Breton, Communicating Vessels, trans. Mary Ann Caws & Geoffrey T. Harris, with notes & intro. by Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln, NE/London: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1990), 109.

6 For reproductions of the works discussed here see <http://remedios-varo.com> (accessed 9 June 2017).

7 See Man Ray, André Breton, Yves Tanguy & Max Morise, Exquisite Corpse (1928), Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection, 106.1991, Man Ray Trust/ARS, available at <http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/119118> (accessed 9 June 2017).

8 Renée Riese Hubert provides a detailed investigation of the influence of Lautréamont on Breton and the surrealists, including a list of the various works in which Breton cited the poet in her Surrealism and the Book (Berkeley/London: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 189–231.

9 See, for example, Ralf Schiebler, Dalí: The Reality of Dreams, trans. Fiona Elliott (Munich/London/New York: Prestel, 2005), 44.

10 Sherry Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male As Nature Is to Culture?’, Feminism–Art–Theory: An Anthology, ed. Hilary Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 17–33. Such ideas are present in many traditions throughout the world, for example the idea of yin and yang in Chinese philosophy.

11 Whitney Chadwick explores this theme in depth as it relates to female surrealist artists in the fourth chapter of her book, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, entitled ‘The Female Earth: Nature and the Imagination’ (London: Thames and Hudson/Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1985), 141–80 (p. 141). One such example is Frida Kahlo’s Roots (1943), a painting that clearly equates Kahlo’s fertility issues to an arid earth.

12 Xavière Gauthier, Surrealisme et sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 99.

13 See, for example: Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, ‘Gender and the Hybrid Identity: On Passing Through’, in Hybrid Identities: Theoretical and Empirical Examinations, ed. Keri E. Iyall Smith & Patricia Leavy (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2008), 81–101; and Suryia Nayak, Race, Gender and the Activism of Black Feminist Theory: Working with Audre Lorde (New York: Routledge, 2014).

14 Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149.

15 Haraway explains that ‘[c]yborgs are not reverent; they do not remember the cosmos. They are wary of holism but needful of connection’ (see ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, in The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell & Barbara M. Kennedy [London/New York: Routledge, 2001], 291–324 [p. 293]).

16 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 119.

17 Tara Plunkett, ‘Self and Desire: Surrealism in the Images and Texts of Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington’, PhD thesis (Queen’s University, Belfast, 2013).

18 Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 119.

19 Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis/London: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987), 382.

20 Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 124.

21 Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 127; Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Massumi, 312.

22 Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 124.

23 Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 128.

24 Leonora Carrington, ‘The Debutante’, in The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below, trans. Kathine Talbot & Marina Warner, with an intro. by Marina Warner (London: Virago Press, 1989), 45–47. For a reproduction of the portrait, see Susan Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Farnham: Ashgate/Burlington: Lund Humphries, 2010), 31.

25 Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, 79.

26 Katharine Conley, Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism (Lincoln, NE/London: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1996), 51.

27 Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet (London/New York: Penguin, 2005), 151. Further references are to this edition and will be given in the body of the article.

28 Leonora Carrington, ‘As They Rode along the Edge’, in The Seventh Horse, trans. Talbot & Kerrigan, 3–15 (p. 3).

29 For reproductions of these paintings, see Aberth, Leonora Carrington, 38 & 47.

30 For reproductions of The House Opposite and El mundo mágico de los Mayas, see Aberth, Leonora Carrington, 65 & 101. For a reproduction of Femme et Oiseau, see Gabriele Griffin, ‘Becoming As Being: Leonora Carrington’s Writings and Paintings 1937–40’, in Difference in View: Women and Modernism, ed. Gabriele Griffin (London: Taylor & Francis, 1994), 92–107 (p. 93).

31 María José González Madrid, ‘Recetas, pócimas, retortas: alquimia y creación en la pintura de Remedios Varo’, in Remedios Varo: caminos del conocimiento, la creación y el exilio, ed. María José González Madrid & Rosa Rius Gatell (Barcelona: Eutelequia, 2013), 99–119 (p. 113).

32 Janet Kaplan, Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys (New York: Abbeville Press, 2000), 158–59.

33 For a definition of The Hermetic Principle, see The Three Initiates, The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece (Auckland: The Floating Press, 2014), 17.

34 Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 127.

35 Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 127.

36 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Massumi, 15.

37 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Massumi, 12.

38 Margrit Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)ethics (New York/Abingdon: Routledge, 1997), 9; italics in the original.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.