For surrealists woman is real enough to embody poetry in the flesh
Evidence
As Breton’s view is exclusively poetic, it is exclusively as poetry and thus as Other that woman is envisaged. If one were to ask about her own destiny, the response would be implied in the ideal of reciprocal love: her only vocation is love; this is in no way inferiority, since man’s vocation is also love. However, one would like to know whether for her as well, love is the key to the world, the revelation of beauty; will she find this beauty in her lover? Or in her own image? Will she be capable of the poetic activity that makes poetry happen through a sentient being: or will she be limited to approving her male’s work? She is poetry itself, in the immediate that is, for man; we are not told whether she is poetry for herself too. Breton does not speak of woman as subject. Nor does he ever evoke the image of the bad woman. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 605 (
#complicates, via linked claim)
For all poets-or almost all-woman embodies nature; but for Breton, she not only expresses it: she delivers it. Because nature does not speak in a clear language, its mysteries have to be penetrated in order to grasp its truth, which is the same thing as its beauty: poetry is not simply the reflection of it but rather its key; and woman here cannot be differentiated from poetry. That is why she is the indispensable mediator without whom the whole earth would be silenced: “Nature is likely to light up and to fade out, to serve and not to serve me, only to the extent that I feel the rise and the fall of the fire of a hearth which is love, the only love, that for a single being … — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 599 (
#expands, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Surrealist exaltation of woman still denies her subjectivity; she remains Other — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 605; Woman in Breton’s surrealism is the mediator who delivers nature’s truth; Surrealist desire reduces woman to the status of a fetishized equivocal object. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 595 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Woman in Breton’s surrealism is the mediator who delivers nature’s truth
#expands(0.90) - Surrealist exaltation of woman still denies her subjectivity; she remains Other
#complicates(0.88) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 605 - Breton fused woman, nature, and poetry into a single mediating totality
#expands(0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 599 - Surrealist desire reduces woman to the status of a fetishized equivocal object.
#complicates(0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 595