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  • Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post–World War I Reconstruction in France
  • Joan Tumblety
Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post–World War I Reconstruction in France. By Amy Lyford. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. 251. $55.00 (cloth).

This book explores the imagined fragility of male bodies in France in relation to the work of surrealist writers, artists, and photographers working in Paris after the First World War. The works of Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Man Ray—among the more famous—and Lee Miller and André Kertész—among the lesser studied in this context—are interrogated for evidence of ruminations on the vulnerability of manhood. For Lyford, these surrealists made “a concerted effort to undermine France’s ‘return to order’ through active interrogation of the concept of masculinity” (7). In this task she has drawn on a wide corpus of printed and unpublished texts and images and has made good use of archival material, notably, the Lee Miller archive in East Sussex, England, and the holdings on André Kertész at the Mission de la patrimoine photographique in Paris. The book engages with scholarship on the “visual turn,” the legacy of the First World War, interwar sexology and gender, and surrealist art and literature. Lyford also presents a pleasingly bold and original analysis that makes a mostly convincing case for the ways in which surrealists considered the fragile nature of masculinity. Some of the connections drawn between surrealist imagery and wider cultural anxieties about male “lack” hinge upon a Freudian analysis of the “fetish” and may thus appear speculative or reductionist to some readers. But that ought not to detract from what is a sustained, searching, and at times stunning analysis of images and texts.

In the introduction, Lyford casts the 1920s as a time when ideas about masculinity underwent “intense pressure” (2). She suggests that the robust and muscular male figures that featured widely on postwar publicity campaigns to promote national reconstruction must have seemed ironic to many given the large numbers of war mutilated and asks how that “disconnect” informed surrealist practice. Indeed, Lyford argues that surrealists sought to point to the illusory nature of traditional masculinity and to offer a politically charged “critique of the bourgeois sex-gender system in France,” in effect, a critique of consumer culture and the bourgeois nation itself (4). Is there a link, she also asks, between surrealists’ deformation of the female form and the mutilés de guerre? The rest of the book explores precisely how [End Page 179] that connection might be made, how surrealist representations of women might serve to reflect views about manhood shaped by corporeal anxieties arising from awareness of contemporary male dismemberment. She draws on but seeks to move beyond the work of feminist scholars such as Xavière Gauthier who have dismissed surrealist art as misogynist for the symbolic violence it wrought upon the female form. One way in which Lyford offers nuance to these feminist readings of the gendered art of surrealism is by reminding us that surrealists’ oft-stated admiration of hysterics—the latter’s allegedly closer connection to the unconscious and its desires—was itself potentially emasculating, since hysteria had for at least a generation been tagged as female. But her arguments go much further than that.

The first chapter reassesses surrealist use of the well-known nineteenth-century text by the comte de Lautréamont, Les chants de Maldoror, which was further popularized toward the end of the First World War. That author’s comment about a person being “as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” became in the 1920s an emblem of surrealism for its absurd juxtaposition of disparate elements, and indeed Salvador Dalí designed illustrations for the 1934 edition. Yet Lyford reminds us that the rest of this text in fact recounts a series of vile and excruciating tortures inflicted upon male bodies by a vengeful God and wonders how far this presentation of a fragile masculinity may have destabilized interwar audiences—including the surrealists themselves—at once battered with images of ideal manhood and conscious of...

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