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

In spite of this, one writer saw that an uncritical acceptance of Bretonian orthodoxy led to a social impasse. Going further than Beauvoir, whose tone was coolly reproachful, Xavière Gauthier bluntly stated that "the Surrealist woman is a male forgery." Moreover, her lengthy Surréalisme et sexualité (Surrealism and sexuality) explicitly tied the stere- otypical Woman to a deeply entrenched phallicism. Inspired by the writ- ings of Jacques Lacan, then just coming into fashion, and others, she described the Surrealist veneration of the male generative organs as things magically superior to mere flesh. The Surrealist revolution was thus a failure. 22

Gauthier's research was inflected by a conscious political spirit bound to the era in which it was written. The present study is no less attached to its own period, which has seen the development of several stages of feminist criticism and the birth of a field of study called the "new mas- culinity." The first stage of feminist intervention was the recuperation of lost or neglected women artists. 23 Frida Kahlo, for example, was men- tioned only once in passing in William Rubin's 1968 exhibition catalogue Dada, Surrealisin, and Their Heritage, but since the publication of Hayden Herrera 's thorough 1983 monograph Frida:A Biography of Frida Kahlo, she has become the subject of a minor industry in popular publications, posters and calendars. 24 This recuperative enterprise has been going on for some time, but the most notable example of it in the wider field of Surrealism is Whitney Chadwick's 1985 survey Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. 25 The present study is not engaged in this activity.

In addition to a sharper interest in classism and sexism, the second stage of feminist criticism questioned whether there was a female aes- thetic characteristic of a female sensibility. 26 This once-fashionable ac- tivity has decreased in recent years because of a certain tendency towards essentialism. In Surrealist studies, one finds traces of it in publications on women artists with special interests in the primordial goddess and the mythic imagery surrounding her. For example, both Leonor Fini and Leonora Carrington have been described as depicting matriarchal soci- eties in which women have an essentially animal nature. 27 The present study makes a few remarks in this regard, but again it is not primarily engaged in this activity. The third stage of feminist activity in art history includes a number of postmodern hybrids of theoretical concerns, with special emphasis on gender analysis in the light of Derridean, Foucauldian, Freudian, and Lacanian thought. Some of these are fairly straightforward applications of these principles, as in Marcia Pointon's deconstructive analysis of nine- teenth-century paintings of the figure or Lynda Nead's consideration of images of the female nude in the liminal zone between art and obscen- ity. 28 Much has been done in this area with regard to other topics in the history of art, but relative to the other two stages of feminist criticism, only a little has been done with specific emphasis on Surrealism. The exemplary figures here are Susan Gubar and Susan Rubin Suleiman, whose work I will allude to more than once in the following pages. 29 Inspired by the writings of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous's con- ception of l'écriture féminine, other feminist writers of the third stage

26 For example, Heidi Göttner-Abendroth, "Nine Principles of a Matriarchal Aesthetic", trans. H. Anderson, in Feminist Aesthetics, ed. G. Ecker ( Boston: Beacon, 1985), pp. 81-94. 27 S. Gaggi, "Leonor Fini:"A Mythology of the Feminine, Art International 23. 5-6 ( September 1979):34-9; and Gloria Orenstein, "La Nature animale et divine de la femme dans les oeuvres de Leonora Carrington", Mélusine 2 ( 1981): 130-7. 28 Marcia Pointon, Naked Authority:The Body in Western Painting, 1830-1908 ( Cambridge: Cambridge, 1990); Lynda Nead, The Female Nude:Art, Ob- scenity and Sexuality ( London: Routledge, 1992), especially pp. 87-96. 29 Susan Gubar, "Representing Pornography:"Feminism, Criticism, and De- pictions of Female Violation, Critical Inquiry 13. 4 ( Summer 1987): 712-41; and Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent:Gender, Politics and the Avant- garde ( Cambridge, MAA: Harvard, 1990). Other examples will be men- tioned from time to time in the notes which follow.