Time Reclaimed: Old “Femmes-enfants”

Abstract

Abstract: In surrealism the “femme-enfant” was a persistent model for female subjectivity both as a representational construction in literature and art, and as a position embodied by women artists themselves. This article discusses the work of three surrealist writers, Gisèle Prassinos, Leonora Carrington, and Joyce Mansour, each of them labeled as a “femme-enfant” within surrealist cercles. All of them, however, channeled their subjectivity through the personae of old women while they were still very young, in an odd juxtaposition between their perceived, and restrictive, image as a woman-child and their projected future of old age. Opposed to the “femme-enfant” stuck in an ahistorical perpetual present, the old women in the texts discussed usher in a dynamic timeline and permit the authors to exercise control over their own subjectivity and voice, while they short-circuit present, past, and future. By imagining themselves as old, these women surrealists take charge of a process that cannot be controlled—aging, the passing of time—and they reclaim time while they reclaim their own agency.