Sadeian Women: Erotic Violence in the Surrealist Spectacle

A Surrealist painter whose artistic vision is equally visible in her literary works, Dorothea Tanning established a solid dialogue between literature and the plastic arts. The corpus of her literary oeuvre is rather small, consisting of a novel, a volume of poetry and her memoir, Between Lives. This paper argues that Tanning can be regarded as an exemplary author of a creative transfer between verbal and plastic imagination. It also explores the tension between the two means of expression, most visible in her novel Chasm: A Weekend. Here, the imagery and enigmatic symbolism of her painting come to life in the story of a strange little girl called Destina Meridian.

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Female Authority Figures in Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm: A Weekend

Glăvan

2021

Gender Studies

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Little girls and young women are Dorothea Tanning’s recurrent archetypes, defining and structuring her conceptual archive concerning gender and the feminine. A celebrated painter and sculptor who shaped her artistic vision in the proximity of the historical avant-gardes, Tanning was also a writer who revealed the mystery and estrangement of family ties in Chasm: A weekend, a novel she started writing in 1943 and published six decades later, in 2004. This singular book offers a privileged dialogue between literature and art, as several episodes revisit and translate the high tension of some of her most representative paintings. From within a feminist framework, the article will discuss aspects of female authority and control in Tanning’s novel as dominant forms of female empowerment, present throughout her visual Surrealist oeuvre. I argue that examining these allegories reveals their role as connectors between the literary and the visual arts, between Dorothea Tanning’s fiction and her painting.

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Sadeian Women: Erotic Violence in the Surrealist Spectacle

Cited by 3 publications

References 5 publications

What Pat(rick) Califia can teach us and Deleuze cannot: A Lacanian reading of BDSM erotica and contemporary ideologies

What Pat(rick) Califia can teach us and Deleuze cannot: A Lacanian reading of BDSM erotica and contemporary ideologies

Verbal Dreamscapes. Dorothea Tanning’s Visual Literature

Female Authority Figures in Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm: A Weekend

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