Petrified Mermaids: transcendence and female subjectivity in the aesthetics of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and André Breton's Nadja

Abstract

This article explores the triadic relationship between art, transcendence, and female subjectivity in the respective personal philosophies and aesthetics of the Surrealist André Breton and Virginia Woolf. Both Woolf and Breton speak of the ‘shock’ of transcendent experiences, which entail a violent rupturing of subject–object relationships. A close comparative reading of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Breton's Nadja reveals how the epistemological incoherence that such violent moments produce is repeatedly envisioned in the dislocation and dismemberment of an aestheticised female body. Ultimately in both texts, the freedom of transcendence proves too frightening for the men who seek it, and their solution is to create instead a fixed object of devotion in the form of a mysticised woman. The fates of both eponymous heroines demonstrate the inevitable failure of a sustained destabilising and liberation of mundane experience, and the subsequent, ironic costs to the freedom of the female subject. This article thus complicates critical readings of Woolf's novel that interpret its conclusion as representing the rejuvenation of its protagonist, as well as suggesting new ways to think of Woolf's work in the broader context of a contemporaneous European avant-garde.