Convulsive Beauty: Images of Hysteria and Transgressive Sexuality: Claude Cahun and Djuna Barnes

Abstract

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 beauty/' a phrase that appears in Andre 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.