Defying Pygmalion : new critical approaches to women in surrealism

Pyle, Issy and Grass, Delphine (2025) Defying Pygmalion : new critical approaches to women in surrealism. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

Text (2025pylephd)
2025pylephd.pdf - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs.
Download (4MB)

Abstract

The scholarship surrounding women in Surrealism has seen considerable advances in recent years, with increasing numbers of publications solely dedicated to women’s art within the movement. However, I argue that much of the theoretical machinery employed to study these women reproduces the hegemonic ideologies of psychoanalysis that limited their artistic expression in the first place. In this thesis, I explore a nomadological approach to women’s surrealism that seeks to build a method of critique that more fruitfully engages with these marginalised identities. In particular, I will explore how we may examine the use of mythological imagery in women’s surrealism to analyse portrayals of queer identity and desire. As a key recurring motif in Freudian psychoanalysis, a school of thought championed by the likes of André Breton, an examination of the subversion and creation of mythologies may provide unique insights into women surrealist’s relationship with wider surrealist philosophies. The first chapter analyses Valentine Penrose’s poetry and collage alongside Claude Cahun’s photography from a Nancean perspective, drawing in elements of queer phenomenology to establish the paralogical spatialities and temporalities invoked by their references to myth. In the second chapter, the aberrant portrayals of the self created by Leonor Fini and Leonora Carrington are critiqued in the light of Kristevan abjection, and New Materialist scholars. This New Materialist turn leads to Chapter Three, in which the potential for myth to serve as an autotheoretical exercise is examined with reference to Audre Lord’s concept of ‘biomythography’. Here, the relationship between Penrose’s collage and poetry allows us to consider the intersemiotic potentials of myth, and turn to a critique founded in translation theory in Chapter Four. Discussing translations of the self as a performance of fluid identity, particularly through a mythological lens, identifies potential in the concept of “thick translation” and the recontextualization of the relationship between researcher and artist. This leads to the fifth chapter, an exercise in creative-critical research that utilises experimental, autotheoretical translations to facilitate reparative academic gestures. This work illustrates the necessity of new and inventive approaches to the works of women’s surrealism, by exploring how conventional modes of critique may reproduce the hegemonic dynamics that characterised women artists as auxiliary, and inferior, to their male counterparts. It also suggests novel ways in which scholars may engage with the works of women surrealists, that resituates the role of the researcher in relation to these artists.