Water Specters and Sea Changes by Women Surrealists: Re-envisioning Poe’s Maritime Gothic

Abstract

For the Surrealists, the sea was inspiring due to its sociobiological construction, its allure of voyages to the unknown, and its psychodynamic connection with the unconscious. Women artists, too, revised the tropes of the sea, particularly elaborating on the maritime Gothic (nightmarish shipwrecks, vortexes, trapped treasures, and bodies) as a means of resurgence for the oppressed, as well as the repressed. This analysis is based on artwork from women who engaged with Edgar Allan Poe’s writings (especially Dorothea Tanning and Leonor Fini), particularly focusing on the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and contrasting interpretations with their male counterparts. The central inquiry will be on how these women, without discarding the energy of the logocentric subversion of the masculine artists, experimented with putting versions of themselves into their paintings, and tended to feminize the Gothic. They achieved this through the imagery of pubescent or latent figures, as well as nursing motherly figures, and by exploring their entanglement with other species, as well as the links between the unconscious and the more-than-human elements that dwell, and often subside, in the sea.