Convulsive Beauty: Images of Hysteria and Transgressive Sexuality: Claude Cahun and Djuna Barnes
- Convulsive Beauty: Images of Hysteria and Transgressive Sexuality Claude Cahun and Djuna Barnes
Sexual deviance and social transgression often formed a symbiotic relationship in the surrealist assault on normative culture. The best term to describe this relationship is “convulsive beauty,” a phrase that appears in André Breton’s novel Nadja (1928) as well as in Mad Love (1937), and refers to surrealism’s dedication to exhibiting disturbing upheavals in psychological coherence at the level of the individual mind or social body. Understood, in part, through psychological models for understanding human sexuality, convulsive beauty describes a surrealist method for presenting the impact that restrictive social mores made on the human psyche through visual and literary depictions of shocking psychological regressions that result in transgressive behaviors. As a subject matter for art, it demonstrates the surrealist commitment to compromise traditional aesthetics by shocking audiences with a range of unspeakable human expressions: hysteria, obscenity, pornography, and violence. As I argue, however, surrealist representations of convulsive beauty can also be interpreted and understood in terms of gender and sexual difference evident in Freudian theories about human sexuality. In order to identify some of the gender and sexual politics that characterize varying portraits of convulsive beauty, I analyze images in one of Salvador Dali’s photomontages alongside those present in several of Claude Cahun’s self-portraits and Djuna Barnes’ narrative Nightwood. The simulations of hysteria and the projections of a deviant female sexuality introduced by Cahun and Barnes in these works suggest that these women rejected the theories and images that reinforce the categorization of women as the weaker sex in surrealism, as hysterics more likely to exhibit failed sublimations and as bodies less likely to embody the aggressiveness needed to perform more sexually transgressive acts. [End Page 212]
Psychological Repression and Sexual Difference in The Phenomenon of Ecstasy
Many surrealists used images of failed repression to depict the psychological impact of socializing forces on individual lives. Sublimation and desublimation are useful categories for discussing the impact that Freud’s ideas had on this form of surrealist thought. 1 The unspeakable realities defined by the madness of hysteria or the perversion of obsessive neuroses, according to Freud, results from some sort of failed repression. In “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” (1924), Freud writes that such psychoneuroses stem from unsatisfied “sexual needs” bound to the “suppression of instincts” (186). The suppression of these sexual instincts occurs during a process Freud identifies as sublimation, by which he means a desire or sexual impulse is successfully converted into a socially sanctioned activity. By contrast, desublimation is the resurgence of the sexual impulse that often manifests itself in some deviant form of sexual expression. In short, by artistically presenting social perversions as failed sublimations or desublimations, surrealists provided audiences with images depicting the restrictive nature of social norms. The representation of such socializing failures provided a window of opportunity for artists to shock audiences into being more critical of the social systems that influence human behavior. After all, for a desublimatory action to take place, a sublimation or repression would have occurred first. This is why de Beauvoir proclaims that the unrestrained libidinal nature of Sade’s work demonstrates the degree to which he is not free. That is, for a transgression to occur, a social law restricting individual freedoms must be broken. In this context, it is fair to say that convulsive beauty emerged as an art of desublimation. However, it is also fair to say that the images of women played an important role in this emerging art form.
There is, perhaps, no example more rich with the subtle complexities of convulsive beauty than what can be found in the images integrated into one of Dali’s works. In the photomontage The Phenomenon of Ecstasy, Dali assembles a series of faces and arranges them in a way that lead the eye around the frame, exposing hysteria, chaos, and passion—the viewer, artist, and objects out of control. There are several levels of expression that arise from the link between repetition and sexuality in this work. The repetition of body parts denotes sexual fetishism and sexual obsession, unacceptable desires [End Page 213...
