<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Little girls and young women are Dorothea Tanning’s recurrent archetypes, defining and structuring her conceptual archive concerning gender and the feminine. A celebrated painter and sculptor who shaped her artistic vision in the proximity of the historical avant-gardes, Tanning was also a writer who revealed the mystery and estrangement of family ties in Chasm: A weekend, a novel she started writing in 1943 and published six decades later, in 2004. This singular book offers a privileged dialogue between literature and art, as several episodes revisit and translate the high tension of some of her most representative paintings. From within a feminist framework, the article will discuss aspects of female authority and control in Tanning’s novel as dominant forms of female empowerment, present throughout her visual Surrealist oeuvre. I argue that examining these allegories reveals their role as connectors between the literary and the visual arts, between Dorothea Tanning’s fiction and her painting.</p></abstract>

Little girls and young women are Dorothea Tanning’s recurrent archetypes, defining and structuring her conceptual archive concerning gender and the feminine. A celebrated painter and sculptor who shaped her artistic vision in the proximity of the historical avant-gardes, Tanning was also a writer who revealed the mystery and estrangement of family ties in Chasm: A weekend, a novel she started writing in 1943 and published six decades later, in 2004. This singular book offers a privileged dialogue between literature and art, as several episodes revisit and translate the high tension of some of her most representative paintings. From within a feminist framework, the article will discuss aspects of female authority and control in Tanning’s novel as dominant forms of female empowerment, present throughout her visual Surrealist oeuvre. I argue that examining these allegories reveals their role as connectors between the literary and the visual arts, between Dorothea Tanning’s fiction and her painting.

Female Authority Figures in Dorothea Tanning’s <italic>Chasm: A Weekend</italic>

Gender Studies

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Female Authority Figures in Dorothea Tanning’s 

Little girls and young women are Dorothea Tanning’s recurrent archetypes, defining and structuring her conceptual archive concerning gender and the feminine. A...

Female Authority Figures in Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm: A Weekend

Published Online: Dec 27, 2021

Page range: 75 - 91

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/genst-2022-0006

Keywords
Surrealism, woman artist, female sexuality, domination, violence

© 2021 Gabriela Glăvan, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Female Authority Figures in Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm: A Weekend

Published Online: Dec 27, 2021

Page range: 75 - 91

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/genst-2022-0006

KeywordsSurrealism, woman artist, female sexuality, domination, violence

© 2021 Gabriela Glăvan, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Keywords
Surrealism, woman artist, female sexuality, domination, violence