Longing and Belonging in Leonora Carrington's the Oval Lady
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PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF ALGERIA MINISTRY OF HIGHER EDUCATION AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH DJILLALI LIABES UNIVERSITY OF SIDI BEL ABBES FACULTY OF LETTERS LANGUAGES AND ARTS DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Longing and Belonging in Leonora Carrington ’s jh The Oval Lady Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Degree of Magister in Post Colonial Woman Literature Written in English Presented by: Supervised by: Miss Nadia HAMIMED Prof. Fewzia BEDJAOUI BOARD OF EXAMINERS : President: Prof. Belabbes OUERRAD UDL,Sidi Bel Abbes Supervisor: Prof. Fewzia BEDJAOUI UDL,Sidi Bel Abbes Examiner: Prof. M.Y. BOULENOUAR UDL,Sidi Bel Abbes Examiner: Prof. Ghouti HADJOUI Tlemcen University Academic year: 2016 - 2017 DEDICATIONS Most importantly, none of this would have been possible without the love and patience of my parents. My family to whom this dissertation is dedicated , has been a constant source of love, concern, support and strength all these years. I would like to express my heart-felt gratitude to my family. My mother Khadidja ,my father Farouk,brothers Kader and Djamel and my beloved sister Rania ,thank you for supporting me . My ‘second half’ Mina has helped me stay sane through these difficult years. Her support and care helped me overcome setbacks and focused on my graduate studies. I greatly value her friendship and I deeply appreciate her belief in me. I also dedicate this work to all the postgraduates students : Maachou , Amina, Naceur, Djamila and Noureddine. I will never forget the time spent with you.You who answer the call in the middle of the day or night. You who answer the call from near or from far.You who answer the call for help without any expectation of personal gain. I ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Though only my name appears on the cover of this Magister dissertation, a great many people have contributed to its production. I owe my gratitude to all those people who have made this dissertation possible and thanks to whom my graduate experience has been one which I will cherish forever. My deepest gratitude is to my supervisor, Prof. Fewzia BEDJAOUI. I have been amazingly fortunate to have a supervisor who gave me the freedom to explore on my own, and at the same time the guidance to recover when my steps faltered. She taught me how to question thoughts and express ideas. Her patience and support helped me overcome many crisis situations and finish this dissertation. I hope that one day I would become as inspiring to my students as Prof.BEDJAOUI has been to me. Special thanks to Prof. Belabbes OUERRAD and Prof. Mohamed Yamine BOULENOUAR from UDL of Sidi Bel Abbes University for their precious help and enriching advice throughout the progress of this work. I also thank Prof. Ghouti HADJOUI from Tlemcen University who granted me part of his precious time to read and evaluate my Magister dissertation. As to Dr. Jean Philippe IMBERT from Dublin City University, who has been always there to give me significant advice, I am deeply grateful to him for helping me sort out the technical details of my work. I am also thankful to him for carefully reading and commenting on countless revisions of this manuscript. I would like also to thank Maestro Alejandro GOMEZ de TUDDO from Mexico City for the interesting two day conferences he gave on Art and Aesthetic interpretation at the University of Djillali Liabes, Sidi Bel Abbes. His talks in both English and French allowed me particularly, to see, to a greater extent, that we can have different perceptions of un/veiled reality depending on our subjectivity and desires. II ABSTRACT Born in 1917 in Lancashire England, Leonora Carrington was an artist, a surrealist , a painter, and a novelist . Both parents influenced Carrington to read their preferred fantastic literature. From her Irish mother she heard the work of James Stephens, who based much of his work on Irish traditional stories, while her English father liked the Gothic tales of William Wymark Jacobs. Carrington also heard ghost stories from her Irish nanny, Mary Kavanagh. All of these would feed the development of her distinctive style, where animals and fantastical creatures merge with alchemical imagery,and later in Mexico where she flourished and painted compositions that portrayed metamorphoses. Carrington’s art is that of awareness before illusion, one in which animal guides lead the way out of a world of men who do not know magic, fear the night, and have no mental powers except intellect. Leonora Carrington was embraced as a femme-enfant by the Surrealists because of her rebelliousness against her upper-class upbringing. However, She did not just rebel against her family, she found ways in which she could rebel against the Surrealists and their limited perspective of women. She mocks established order and this imposed hierarchy through her use of masking strategies and hybrid configurations. One can clearly see this in Leonora Carrington's work where animals reveal themselves to be forces of nature. Through her work :The Oval Lady ,Carrington suggests to re-define the image of the woman-child the child who plays the role of innocence, seduction and dependence on man, and transforms this woman into a being who, through childhood worlds of fantasy and magic, is capable of creative transformation through intellectual power rather than sexual power. The Oval Lady depicts women and animals together, with the animals in the role of metaphorical amanuensis, communicating difficult and profound experiences. Moreover the woman writer considers animal alteration to be a blessing, a site of weightiness, and she chose animals as her imagined symbols. By means of this rebellious reclamation of the gendered animals, She effectively broke down gender codes. This humanlike utilization of animals which disturbs to some extent the traditional gender codes , exposes gender as self-naturalized where gender is chosen and worn. Indeed Carrington uses animals as strong feminine symbols to express her own version of life and art. III TABLE OF CONTENTS VII DEDICATIONS……...………………………………………………...…………….............I ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...………………………………………………….…………..II ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………….III GENERAL INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER ONE : INTER/CULTURAL ENCOUTERS FROM LANCASHIRE TO MEXICO 1.1 Introduction ………………………………………………………………...……..9 1.2 English Culture……………………………………………………………………10 1.2.1 Social Stratification ………………………………………………………….13 1.2.2 Class and Castes …………………………………………………………....13 1.2.3 Gender Roles and Statuses ………………………………………………….14 1.2.4 Relative Status of Women and Men …………………………………...........14 1.2.5 Marriage,Family and Kinship ……………………………………………….15 1.2.6 Domestic Unit ………………………………………………………………15 1.2.7 Inheritance ………………………………………………………………….16 1.2.8 Kinship ……………………………………………………………………..16 1.2.9 Infant Care…………………………………………………………………..16 1.2.10 Child Rearing and Education ……………………………………………….17 1.2.11 Higher Education …………………………………………………………...18 1.2.12 Etiquette ……………………………………………………………………18 1.2.13 Religious Conviction ……………………………………………………….19 1.2.14 Support for Art …………………………………………………………….20 1.2.15 Literature ……………………………………………………………………21 1.2.16 Graphic Art …………………………………………………………………21 1.2.17 Performace Arts …………………………………………………………….22 1.3 Irish Storytelling …………………………………………………………………22 IV 1.3.1 Myths and Legends ………………………………………………………..26 1.4 Mexican Culture ………………………………………………………………….30 1.4.1 History ……………………………………………………………………..30 1.4.2 Contemporary Mexico …………………………………………………….33 1.4.3 People ……………………………………………………………………...34 1.4.4 Languages ………………………………………………………………….35 1.4.5 Religion ……………………………………………………………………35 1.4.6 The Celebration of the Day of the Dead ………………………………….36 1.4.7 Passing Away as a Step Forward ………………………………………….37 1.4.8 Literature …………………………………………………………………..37 1.5 Leonora Carrington :The Woman and the Artist …………………………………40 1.5.1 Introduction to Max Ernst and The Surrealist Movement ………………...42 1.5.2 Eruption of War :Down Below …………………………………………….43 1.5.3 Carrington’s Artworks…………………………………………………......44 1.7 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………..48 CHAPTER TWO : FEMINISTS’ APPROACH TO SURREALISM 2.1 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………...50 2.2 Feminism ………………………………………………………………………..51 2.2.1 History ……………………………………………………………………...52 2.2.2 First Wave …………………………………………………………………..53 2.2.3 Second Wave ………………………………………………………………..54 2.2.4 Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex …………………………………….55 2.3 Feminist Art ……………………………………………………………………...56 2.3.1 Feminism and Performance Art ……………………………….....................59 2.3.2 Feminism and Body Art………………………………..................................59 V 2.3.3 Feminism and Video Art ………………………………................................60 2.3.4 Feminism and Textile Art ………………………………..............................60 2.4 Third Wave ……………………………….............................................................61 2.5 Chicana Feminism ………………………………………………………………..65 2.6 Post-Feminism ………………………………........................................................68 2.7 The Message of Surrealist Art……………………………….................................69 2.8 Sigmund Freud’s Theory of Dreams ………………………………......................80 2.8.1 Interpreting Dreams ………………………………......................................81 2.8.2 Sigmunds Freud’s Method ………………………………............................83 2.8.3 Robert Desnos ………………………………...............................................83 2.9 Surrealists Women ………………………………...............................................85 2.10 Post War Surrealist Women………………………………................................94