The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art
Book by Robert James Belton; University of Calgary Press, 1995

Debasement - or perhaps "adulteration" would be a less loaded term - is a frequent component of cultural fashion. One thinks of the thin Darwinism of those who saw the first World War as hygienic, of the poorly assimilated Zen of the beatniks in 1950 and of the trendy nihil- ism of the punk-rockers in 1980. It is important to note, however, that pseudo-science, eastern mysticism and western anarchism also influ- enced other sectors of society, which adulterated them in their own ways. The situation in the 1920s and 1930s was a similar reciprocal definition or codetermination of cultural fashion and its adherents. The Surrealist ideology thus confirmed and challenged public or intellectual interests which were themselves outside of the movement: Bachofen's writings inspired Masson, but they also excited Stefan George, a non-Surrealist poet working in Munich in the 1920s; Louis Feuillade's film serial Fantômas delighted Magritte, as well as tens of thousands of others who were utterly indifferent to imaginative revolution; and, of course, Freud stimulated everyone. 16 Somewhere in the shifting veils of conventions shared and denied, of codes endorsed and refuted, are the outlines of a Surrealist Woman. She remains, as will be seen, the creation of a patriar- chal order whose contemporary reception ensured that she would be seen in an antifeminist light.

The reception of Surrealist images of Woman by non-Surrealists has disclosed meanings quite different from those of the Surrealists them- selves. Surrealism was always of interest to philosophically oriented minds, including many of those we now consider canonical figures. Georges Bataille and Jacques Lacan, for example, were both close enough to the movement that I will include them within its orbit. In contrast, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno both published rather more dis- tanced reflections, neither of which commented specifically on the issues to be considered here. 17 The first thinker to recognize the central flaw of Surrealism in its failure to grant Woman her subjectivity was Simone de Beauvoir. In Le Deuxième sexe (the second sex), she described the domi- nation of society by males who could only see themselves as subjects, whereas women were always objects. Men were thus always directing thought or action, while women were only the things to which thought or action was directed. Surrealism was merely one expression among many of a one-sided Hegelian consciousness which set itself up as es- sential and all others as tributary. In the course of her investigation, Beauvoir surveyed the place of Woman in the poetry of André Breton. She explained key terms like elective love (freedom from legislative re- strictions), reciprocal love (each sex must freely choose the other), and unique love (a single Woman, salvation of all humanity, recognized in a succession of real women). She concluded that Breton's Woman was a key to the beyond even while anchored in nature: personifying beauty, truth, and poetry, Woman was everything for Breton but nothing for herself. 18 She was a stereotype.

The Surrealists' first collective exhibition after the appearance of Le Deuxième sexe was the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme [sic] of 1959/60. As the orthography shows, it was dedicated to Eros. The great variety of erotic expression seemed to be an unintended rebuttal of Beauvoir and of the notion that public interest in Surrealism was flag- ging. 19 Within five years the pendulum began to swing the other way. In 1965, for example, Robert Benayoun published his Erotiqtte du surréalisme (the Surrealist erotic), a laudatory compilation of images and ideas drawn from four decades of artistic activity. 20 Breton died within a year, further provoking a revival of interest, and his name was on the lips of many during the Parisian student riots of 1968. 21 This may have been partly due to the relaxed sexual atmosphere of the period, which linked unrestricted libidinal gratification to social revolution on a plane that was more prosaic than anything the original Surrealists had imagined.