*Warning, this was a post that was sitting as a draft because I forgot to click publish. Feel free to ignore this this week*
It was actually the discussion we had on Monday in class that inspired my topic for my final paper for this class. I appreciated the discussion in which we commented on whether or not the female figure in Ernst’s Monday book has an agency of her own when her face is obscured by the shell. This to me spoke at the heart of what the surrealist movement is most about. The propagation of the stereotype of the femme-fatale and other sexualized images of the female identity were widely ingrained in surrealism. In fact, Salvador Dalí’s pieces, often promoted through a rather benign perspective of dreamscapes to audiences today, confront a deep seated fear of the female identity and her sexuality. His piece “The Great Masturbator” of 1929, depicts a monstrous glob of a female body painted with symbols the denote an inherent sexualization of the female and also a fear. Her face is drawn near the genitalia of a clothed but exposed male body (TANGENT: interesting thought, but again I would offer the idea that the headless male figure holds more agency that the bodiless figure of the woman. He stands erect and present where as the woman has her eyes closed and he head is cocked in a way that suggests she is begging or insatiably desiring the male form). By her breasts rests a lily, whose cylindrical crevice takes on the idenity of the vaginal canal. An army of ants walk along the folds of the mass from which the female protrudes, suggesting an unrelenting “itch” that needs to scratch. Yet amid these sexualized images, the perverse is not forgotten. A fly clutches the stomach region, performing fellatio on what can be construed as either an udder, a phallus, or a nose. A skeletal like man is painted in the desert background, appearing to have no understanding that this monster lives before him. This painting is rather disturbing, and so little discussed in the general teaching of surreality.
I really like your reflection on the details of the image. I think Dali’s pieces emphasizes men’s perspective that women need to be “tamed” and that they use their sexual appeal as a way to manipulate men. Unfortunately, this is a long-standing perspective; it has its roots in classical antiquity. Some impressive philosopher’s like Aristotle talked about the manipulative nature of women and how they make men feel impotent for not bringing them to climax whereas, according to Aristotle, the biological nature of women makes them unable to climax at all!
I also read on Wikepedia that in Dali’s youth, his father showed him a book of deformed genitalia, for some vague reason, and that Dali was so radically influenced by these images that they continued to be incorporated in his art.