As We Rode Along The Edge: Leonora Carrington And The Surrealist Woman
cythera
http://www.13am.net/iconoclast/leonora/edge.html
Essay:
http://www.13am.net/iconoclast/leonora/leoessay.html
"Where is the ebullient infinite woman who immersed as she was in
naïveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self disdain by the
great arm of parental conjugal phallocentrism, hasn't been ashamed of
her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of
her drives . . . hasn't accused herself of being a monster?"
-Hélène Cixous, 'The Laugh of the Medusa'.
"Nurse! Do let's pretend that I am a hungry hyena and you're a bone!"
-Lewis Carroll, 'Through the Looking Glass'.
"We are, therefore we are not that what we might have been if we were
otherwise than that which we would have been if we were."
-Leonora Carrington.
The synthesis of the animal and natural world with that of the
civilised and human is an essential and repeated topos in the literary
and visual work of Leonora Carrington - a synthesis that does not
necessarily create the monster of Cixous' passage, at least not a
monster that Carrington would hide away in the dark. Just as the
'monstrous' Juniper of Carrington's work 'The Sisters' is released from
her attic prison to wreak havoc as she searches for the moon,
Carrington's monstrous women are symbols of liberty and autonomy -
desiring creatures that embrace mouvance; as Carrington herself refused
her proscribed identity as a polite nouveau riche debutante and escaped
into the havoc of the French Surrealist group.
Many critics have embraced a psychobiographical approach to
Carrington's literary work, reading her stories as extensions of
autobiography. Whilst this approach is certainly valid in respect to
some of her work ('En-Bas' especially), it has a tendency to elide her
project as a Surrealist writer. Similar to the 'prose poems' of André
Breton, Carrington's stories reflect partly a Surrealist autobiography,
but as Renée Riese Hubert suggests, Carrington's work is a self-
conscious project in which her combination of grotesque forms depict
'a fantastic world that is entirely of her own making'. Not only does
this world remake another in its combinations of forms and antitheses,
it conforms in many ways directly to a tenet of Bretonian Surrealism -
creating 'communicating vessels' of binary propositions (human/animal,
civilised/uncivilised) and breaking down dualism, to create a realm of
compulsive beauty.
Reading Carrington's work as a synthesis of Surrealist biography and
Surrealist fiction one can reach a closer understanding of her literary
project. Further than this, Carrington should be read as not only a
Surrealist, but as a woman Surrealist, for whom autobiography and the
literature of subversion create a discourse for the expression of her
desires and her lived experience. Like Giséle Prassinos, Carrington was
hailed as a femme enfant by the Surrealists (by Max Ernst particularly,
with whom she had an intimate relationship) - a position that placed
her as the bearer of meaning in male Surrealist revolution, instead of
an active participant in it. Carrington however, as her disruptive
fiction shows, was a 'femme enfant who was also an enfant terrible'.
For Carrington the role of femme enfant was not one that required
submission to the male Surrealist, but was in itself a role that
encouraged a female/feminist Surrealist revolution. According to Marina
Warner 'departing from Surrealism's erotic voilée Carrington created a
different aesthetic for female representation'.
Carrington's fiction is populated by the femme enfant. In the story
'The Oval Lady' Lucretia is literally the woman-child. She has been
kept in her nursery until the age of fifteen, creating a fantasy world
with her fantasy equine lover Tatar the rocking horse - a world she is
loathe to give up in exchange for womanhood and subjugation by her
father. Lucretia refuses patriarchy and instead opts for the 'feminine'
realm of her nursery, defying her father and changing into a horse. In
this story the father forces her to 'put away childish things' by
destroying Tatar, which becomes a metaphor for the disempowerment of
female desire. In the stage play Penelopé based on this story, the
father fails to overcome Tatar (who was also the fantasy lover of his
dead wife) when Penelopé/Lucretia morphs into a horse (Carrington's
'chosen avatar')Ýand escapes with Tatar into a stream of white light,
causing the father to destroy himself.
Carrington's identification with the femme enfant is evident in her
self-portrait. Carrington is seated in a room in riding clothes whilst
on the wall behind her hangs a rocking horse. In the window a real
horse is seen galloping in the distance and approaching her from the
left is a hyena bitch whose teats are swollen with milk. In her work
the femme enfant does not exist for the gaze or the for the projection
of meaning onto her by the male observer. Hers is an autonomy created
by an inherent power found within the mythos of the femme enfant. As
Lucretia/Penelopé refuses to obey the law of the father, so too does
she revel in her subversive position which combines elements of both
child and woman - both desiring creatures, the untamed 'irrationality'
of the child giving power to the woman. Carrington does not aver from
the images of childhood and madness that so enticed the Surrealists but
reads/re-reads them in ways that create an identity that is for oneself
instead of as a space for projection by the male. This alterity is a
position of power for Carrington, a place of subversion, containing an
awareness that the masquerade of femininity can be extended to include
irrationality and hysteria. This position is posited by Georgiana M. M.
Colville:
Women Surrealists made extensive use of their own beauty in self
portraits and explored the worlds of childhood and madness, where men
tried to confine them, as passages to their true identity.
Irrationality and madness are present in Carrington's writings, but
they are rarely the exclusive domain of women. In 'As They Rode Along
the Edge' it is not the protagonist Virginia Fur who symbolises
madness, but the religious zealot St. Alexander. In true Surrealist
style, Carrington attacks the behaviour of the church as hypocritical
and amoral, but also in Surrealist style she presents these elements in
an absurd way: Alexander's piety is parodied as he appears in his
concrete underpants - exposing both the violent and absurd history of
Christian martyrdom and an uncanny resemblance to Sadean erotics.
This story also features one of Carrington's 'monstrous' women,
Virginia Fur. Unconcerned with cleanliness, 'civilised behaviour'
(although she 'always showed a deference' for animals), or traditional
femininity, Virginia is a forest dweller whose body is as much
animalian as human.
. . . and then her, and one couldn't really be altogether sure that
she was a human being. Her smell alone threw doubt on it - a mixture of
spices and game, the stables, fur and grasses.
Virginia's body moves beyond the pristine and self-conscious nakedness
of Magritte's symbolic 'woman', or the twisted and tortured bodies of
Bellmer or Masson- this body represents an unconscious liberty that
contradicts the patriarchal conception of the feminine. Colville
asserts 'Carrington is forever trying to create a wondrous creature in
whom, feminine, childlike, animal and plant qualities would
harmoniously merge'. Despite the violence of the tale Virginia appears
to have merged these qualities, creating for her autonomy from man,
church and society. Virginia subverts notions of docility, cleanliness,
and even 'maternal instinct' by eating her babies and exacting violent
revenge for the death of her lover.
For Carrington the animalian is preferable to the human. Marina Warner
states:
The human emerges as only one, lesser aspect of a polymorphously
organic universe, and people in Carrington’s art gain in stature, and
by implication, in wisdom, the closer they come to the creaturely. . .
Carrington on the whole considers animal transformation a blessing, a
deliverance, a site of transcendence.
In this way Carrington avoids endorsing a biologically essentialist
view that directly relates woman to nature. She posits the addition of
the animalian to the human instead of the stripping down, or replacing
the one position for the other.
The many hybrid creatures can be seen as an attempt to balance
polarities while transcending the normal, rational boundaries of
reality rather than fusion, they symbolise the juxtaposition of two
distinct identities. Their double origin marks a surplus rather than a
subtraction of being.
Carrington's penchant for addition includes the representation of the
erotic in her work. With a wink to Surrealist games and role playing
her creatures clothe and decorate themselves in exotic rituals. [...]
Conforming to Baudrillard's notion of 'the feline, theatrical nostalgia
for parade and ornament' that animals inspire, Carrington's characters
accumulate pattern and costume - a bower bird's mating ritual of giving
and adornment in superfluity. According to Warner:
make believe turns the key to the imaginal space and its voluptuous
pleasures, and make believe requires dressing up. Some of the
playfulness is erotic, though the costumes and stages are unfamiliar,
and the player, even when she laughs out of the side of her face,
plays for real.
The seriousness of Carrington's writings should not be obscured by
their fantastic style. In fashioning a new discourse of female desire
in Surrealism she also alludes to the problems associated with writing
within this male dominated discourse. This fear is given voice most
clearly in her story 'Pigeon Fly' [...] Carrington's awareness of
'painting herself into a corner' in the Surrealist movement is acute,
and indeed she has been decried by various critics as 'speaking with a
forked tongue' and toeing the Surrealist party line to the point where
her own feminist and aesthetic sensibilities have been obscured. This
is certainly the view that has been propagated towards Joyce Mansour
and to an extent Leonor Fini, and has also problematised the writings
of Gisèle Prassinos.
Carrington's 'monsters' are as Cixous suggests emblems of 'strong and
ebullient women'. They move beyond the prescribed positions of women
as objects of Surrealist revolution, and instead offer them a chance
to participate in their own revolution through re-appropriation of
their images, and attempting to break down at least one of the
dualities Surrealism seemed to ignore - that of masculine and feminine.
Nadine v. Hasselt. 1996
More of Leonora's stories:
http://www.13am.net/iconoclast/leonora/stories.html
____________________
Her Art
I.
A recent painting, Big Badger Meets the Domino Boys, 1986:
http://www.albany.edu/museum/wwwmuseum/crossing/artist4.htm
II.
A recent lithograph, Cocodrilos, 1974
http://artscenecal.com/ArticlesFile/Archive/Articles1995/Articles1295/
Carrington1.html
http://artscenecal.com/ArticlesFile/Archive/Articles1995/Articles1295/
Carrington.html
III.
On her work:
http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/courses/EdPsy387-Sp95/Steven-
Clark/project/Carrington/Carrington.html
IV.
Three line drawings and a short biography:
http://www.anyware.co.uk/sbs/20000.html
V.
More lithos, including "Jinetes" (The Horsemen):
http://www.mexconnect.com/MEX/kyron/kycarrington.html
VI.
"And Then We Saw The Daughter of the Minotaur," 1953
http://www.arts-history.mx/carrington/homepage.html
VII.
http://aries17.uwaterloo.ca/~dmg/leonora/expo.html
cythera
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