Surrealist Ghostliness

5 Dorothea Tanning’s Gothic Ghostliness

119 5 Dorothea Tanning’s Gothic Ghostliness We are waging a desperate battle with unknown forces. Dorothea Tanning, Between Lives Dorothea Tanning’s work hums with an inner energy sometimes expressed in the turning movements of dancing bodies. Even in stillness , the young women in her paintings contain an explosive force that propels them beyond the frame. This hint of a ghostly and tactile third dimension expressed in the turning blur of movement in her two-dimensional works—her version of ghostliness—later becomes materialized in her soft sculptures, which she began making in the 1960s. The first of these, Pelote d’épingles pouvant servir de fétiche (henceforth Fetish), is a large velvet figure that bristles with the pins the viewer is invited to stick into it (fig. 23). Through their sensual softness these sculptures pull the viewer in, whereas her painted figures whirl outward toward the viewer. The doll-like girls in her work from the 1940s and 1950s emit what Whitney Chadwick has called “a heightened awareness of the world and a sensitivity to the unconscious forces that animate and transform” it (Women 138). Like the heroine of Tanning’s gothic novel Chasm, these young women eagerly seek knowledge about all aspects of the human, including the increasingly embodied ghosts they discover haunting the old houses they inhabit and reflecting back to them hidden aspects of their own desires. 120 Dorothea Tanning’s Gothic Ghostliness The ghostliness of Tanning’s work stems from the reality she confers on the invisible energies that press on the visible and bubble forth from below the surface of ordinary settings such as hallways and broom closets. Tanning’s interiors project the ghostliness typical of the kind of late eighteenth-century gothic fiction Breton praises in the “Manifesto,” and the transformations she shows in her painted work are typical of the fairy tales he also singles out for praise as preferable to the realist novels so widely admired at the beginning of the twentieth century. They also echo the vivid awareness of a parallel world inhabited by ghosts typical of spiritualism, surrealism ’s repressed ghost. Her female figures are alive with rushing inner forces, just as Breton had imagined the body to be during the automatic trance, when he compared the early surrealists to “modest recording instruments” intent on capturing the secrets released by the unconscious mind in group settings. For women, however, the 23. Dorothea Tanning, Pelote d’épingles pouvant servir de fétiche (1965).© Dorothea Tanning. Tate Gallery, London. Dorothea Tanning’s Gothic Ghostliness 121 metaphor of the body as a nonsentient technological object requires revision, since women have often been categorized according to their bodily functions, as little more than nonintellectual vessels for human reproduction. For Tanning, the female body invites reimagination as a forcefully whole human being, at once intellectual and sensual, fully attuned to lived human experience and ready for Foucault’s visualization of Bretonian automatism as a kind of “raw and naked” possession by inner voices that lead to “the discovery of a space that is not that of philosophy, nor of literature, nor of art, but that of experience” (Aesthetics 173–74). Upending the assumption typical of the American Midwest in which she grew up, that young women belong in the home, Tanning shows domestic space to be full of threats and temptations only the most ingenious person can conquer. Her settings resonate with mysterious desires materialized as body parts, flowers, or strange hybrid animals summoned psychically by ordinary women whose pent-up energy finds release in ghostly manifestations. Her heroines persistently face challenges where there ought to be none, requiring them to assert themselves. Life’s struggles are a universal factor of human experience for Tanning. They begin in childhood and persist in multiple environments, regardless of gender. A study of Tanning’s career demonstrates how the ghostliness inherent in surrealism ’s first productions threads through her work from start to finish. By midcentury, when she was just hitting her stride, surrealist ghostliness had become so established it shows up openly, no longer reliant on anamorphic readings to reveal ghostly doubles. Tanning’s sensuality and her move to tactile sculptures in midcareer situate her ghostliness within another surrealist trend, one that involves a turning away from predominantly visual modes of expression toward more material and tactile models. I will show how the explicit sensuality of her painted and graphic work anticipates her...