In her book The Figure of the Doll in Culture and Theory, Asko Kauppinen
suggests that ‗dolls are inextricably linked with sexuality‘(2000, p. 7). Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century several artists have employed dolls as representative of female figures in ways that reflect the sexualised and dissected anatomical models and artworks from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While these dolls do not necessarily directly reference artistic representations of female autopsies, they are connected with them in a variety of ways. Formally, many of these dolls are particularly reminiscent of van Rymsdyk‘s medical depictions of truncated and dismembered female bodies, while conceptually the similarities of the eroticised and dismembered female dolls are inevitably connected with the similarly sexualised and dissected female corpses depicted in nineteenth- century European female post-mortem artworks. German Surrealist sculptor and photographer Hans Bellmer‘s eroticised, pubescent dolls provoke similar feelings of transgressive sexual tension to that produced in the female anatomical works discussed previously.
Bellmer‘s production of his numerous Poupées in the 1930s was apparently originally inspired by his attendance at the opera The Tales of
Hoffman, by Jacques Offenbach in the early 1930s (Jelinek & Miller 2010,
p. 35). In this opera, the hero Hoffman falls in love with a life-sized doll, ‗Olympia‘, thinking that she is in fact human. Olympia is subsequently torn
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apart by another character and Hoffman‘s error is heartbreakingly revealed. It was after watching this opera, that Bellmer created his first doll. Perhaps his most famous work La Poupée (Figure 73) was made in 1933 and
presented in his book of photographs also titled La Poupée in 1936.
Standing at just over four and a half feet tall, the doll is constructed from a papier-mâché of plaster and flax fibre, which Bellmer sculpted into a female torso and mask-like head. Embellishments include a glass eye and a long unkempt wig of dark hair. Her legs are prosthetic, while her arms are non- existent. In the black and white photograph, the doll leans against a wall at
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the base of a staircase in a darkened space. She is clothed in a cheap and ill- fitting chemise that exposes her naked buttocks which are presented to the viewer. Her head twists and she gazes over her shoulder through the sightless, death-like eye. So much has been written about this work, and yet she remains unfathomable and disturbing. She is a mixture of coquette and innocent child: overtly sexual and disarmingly vulnerable. The power in the work lies in the ‗uncanny‘ quality discussed earlier. She is obviously and patently inanimate: a doll composed of course textured, unrealistic elements, yet she is also disquietingly human. There is a sense that terrific violence has been perpetrated against her: her ‗skin‘ is slashed and scarred and her arm sockets suggest almost that her limbs have been wrenched from her body. The frenzied violence of Dix‘s Lustmord artworks is also imbued in
this work. She is a tragic figure and we regard her with a mixture of horror and sympathy. She is literally disarmed and cannot repel attacks on her body and although as an inanimate collection of disparate materials she is quite dead; she is also disconcertingly alive.
Hal Foster describes Bellmer‘s dolls as ‗uncanny confusions of animate and inanimate figures, ambivalent conjunctions of castrative and fetishistic forms, compulsive repetitions of erotic and traumatic scenes, difficult intricacies of sadism and masochism, of desire, defusion, and death‘ (1993, p. 101). This description could equally be applied to the beautiful young naked and semi-naked female corpses lying on dissecting tables before mature, clothed anatomists in nineteenth-century autopsy artworks. The conjunction of the erotic and traumatic are inevitably manifest in these earlier artworks as are the suggestions of fetishism, sadism
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and death. Interestingly Bellmer‘s further motivation for his creation of his first doll was also tied to his own transgressive desire and unrequited lust. Silke Krohn writes that Bellmer sought to sublimate his desire for his adolescent cousin Ursula by secretly making the doll as an antitype to the ‗ideal woman‘ (Jelinek & Miller 2010, p. 35). That Bellmer‘s transference of desire was successful is borne out in his obsession with the fabrication of more and more dolls in increasingly dismembered and sexualised forms.
Krohn also suggests that Bellmer‘s photograph of his disassembled doll from 1934 (Figure 74) ‗recalls images of an anatomical dissection‘ (2010, p. 35). This is because the mysterious conjunction of transgressive
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sexual desire, sadistic violence and death are inevitably manifest in both genres. As Foster writes, Bellmer‘s photographs frequently present his
‘Poupées in scenes evocative of sex as well as death‘ (Foster 1993, p. 102). Bellmer‘s dolls increasingly manifest his sexual fantasy in which he plays with the forms: dissecting and reassembling; twisting and contorting them into more highly eroticised and dehumanised compositions.
Mulvey‘s theories around fragmentation and fetishisation are also particularly relevant to this work in which Bellmer has literally deconstructed the female body to reconstruct a fantasy of female sexuality
that responds to his own desires. In fragments, she is expressed as a collection of fetish objects rather than as an individual. Once again Bellmer‘s version of the female body is an invention founded on a masculine projection of female sexuality in which her body is reduced to consumable pieces; victimised, mutilated, and objectified. Mulvey describes traditional displays of women for men as ‗an amazing masquerade, which expresses a strange male undertone of fear and desire‘ (1989, pp. 7,8). Bellmer‘s works amply manifest this sentiment as he constructs bizarre performers in his lurid pantomimes; objects of transgressive desire which he then punishes for the fear they engender within him.
In Untitled (Figure 75), Bellmer‘s doll becomes a headless
conjunction of limbs and female genitalia: two sets of splayed female legs incongruously connected by female buttocks. The child‘s socks and shoes again point to the pre-pubescent or adolescent female and the staging of the work on bare wooden boards make the body look ill-used and discarded. This sense of sexual abuse and abandonment is augmented yet further in
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Figure 75. Hans Bellmer, Untitled, 1934
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another two works by Bellmer, also untitled (Figures 76 & 77). In one an
ineffable conflation of female limbs and exposed genitals lie bruised and twisted on a mattress, while in the other, the body has been violently abused and its dismembered remains carelessly thrown down a staircase by the perpetrator of the attack. These dismembered dolls become dismembered female corpses, and Foster suggests that ‗they also exacerbate sexist fantasies about the feminine‘ (1993, p. 122).
Tellingly, Bellmer describes his Poupées as ‗victims‘ and writes of
his desire to have mastery over them‘ (Foster 1993, p. 107). He locates his own illicit ‗thoughts of the little girls‘ in the bodies of the dolls and seeks to punish them for the power that they exert over him. The punishment of woman for her sexual power manifest in nineteenth-century female autopsy artworks and the Weimar artists‘ Lustmord works, is once again here
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implicated in Bellmer‘s Poupées. The dismemberment and dissection of the doll by Bellmer equates to an attack on the image of the female body, in which it is shattered by the artist in order to punish it and avoid considering it in its entirety. Foster argues that ‗the physical shattering of the female image‘ is required for the ‗psychic shattering of the male subject‘. He applies this dictum to surrealist imagery generally, but in particular to Bellmer‘s dolls in which he suggests that ‗the ecstasy of the one may come at the cost of the dispersal of the other‘ (1993, p. 102). Thus in Bellmer‘s fantasy, his own sexual legitimacy is informed by the sexual and physical destruction of the objects of his desire. The dolls act as a facsimile of the young female bodies to which he is attracted but denied. His frustration is expressed in his imagery of the abuse and dismemberment of these bodies, which constitute a form of revenge on the possessors of ‗adolescent charms‘ that he has such difficulty in resisting (Jelinek & Miller 2010, p. 35). This is little different to the revenge on female sexuality more generally which tacitly informs nineteenth-century female autopsy artworks and is more graphically manifest in Dix and Grosz‘s ‗sex-murder‘ works from earlier in the twentieth century.
Although his brutalised and sexualised Poupées, can be seen to have
arisen from Bellmer‘s own particular fantasies, similarly disconcerting images of fragmented and dismembered female bodies were produced by other artists aligned with the Surrealist movement. Alberto Giacometti‘s highly abstracted bronze sculpture Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932)
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woman‘s body, raped and ‗disemboweled, arched in a paroxysm of sex and death‘ (Flint 2015). The woman‘s legs are splayed, her ribcage laid open and her exposed cervical spine terminates in a small bulb of a head with mouth agape. The abstraction of the figure heightens the savagery of the sexual violence that she has been subjected to; she is dehumanised and negated in Giacometti‘s representation. The fragmentation serves to reduce her to a set of female body parts which once again effectively abrogates the necessity to consider her as a ‗unified entity‘ (Nochlin 1994, p. 53). As such, the corpse is de-subjectified, and becomes an anonymous receptacle for the fantasy of male lust and fury. The pendulum shaped extrusion attached to the figure‘s left arm is frequently read as phallic, although Giacometti stated that it ‗was inspired by the nightmare of not being able to lift an arm to push an attacker away‘ (Tate 2001). The overall formal effect of the splayed corpse is also representative of an open mantrap, alluding to female sexuality lying in wait to trap and emasculate the male. The work
Figure 78. Alberto Giacometti, Woman with Her Throat Cut, 1932
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then becomes the familiar male fantasy in which dangerous female sexuality is punished through the penetration and ultimate dissection of the female body.
Another figure of Surrealist fantasy is portrayed in Picasso‘s Seated
Bather (1930) (Figure 79). Here the abstracted female body is equipped
with a head that takes the form of what Robert Hughes describes as ‗a small, fierce animal‘ with the vertical mouth implicated as the emasculating vagina dentata (1991, p. 252). Once again treacherous female sexuality, symbolised
in the toothed vagina, is punished by the male artist in the deconstruction of the female body. Hughes suggests that ‗it would be hard to exaggerate the
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importance‘ of the ‗mythology of sexual violence‘ to Surrealism (1991, p. 252). The persistent representation of dissection and dismemberment in Surrealist imagery demonstrates that this sexual violence frequently culminated in the fragmentation of the female form and as such these works perpetuate the artistic convention of punishing female sexuality by applying the literal or figurative knife to the female body.
Perhaps the ultimate expression of the fragmented female body in Surrealist art is manifested in René Magritte‘s L'évidence éternelle (1930)
(Figure 80), a work consisting of five separate framed canvasses, each depicting part of a naked female body. When hung, this work approximates a life-size representation of a woman and the framing of her various body fragments separates each for individual attention, beginning with her averted face which fills the top section of the work. The turning aside of her face permits our perusal, although she is so disconnected from the remainder of her body that once again there is no requirement that we consider her in her entirety. Indeed Magritte deliberately suggests that we should be more interested in the individual component parts than her body as a whole. Like a series of highly cropped film stills, we focus on her breasts, her belly and genital region, her lower thighs and knees and finally, her ankles and feet. While we can ‗fill in‘ the missing pieces in our mind‘s eye, the fragmentation of her body serves to depersonalise the figure Magritte has depicted. She is also metaphorically dismembered; the sections of her body isolated from the whole.
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Figure 80. René Magritte, L'évidence éternelle,
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Conclusion
Artworks involving the dissection and dismemberment of the eroticised female body by the male anatomist, murderer or artist essentially relates to a revenge exacted by men for their perceived emasculation by the power that women exert over them. Bellmer‘s transgressive desire for young girls drives him to sexually reify then abuse, dismember and dissect his substitutionary dolls in an attempt to exorcise the power he believes they hold over him. The degradations of syphilis in nineteenth-century Europe and the changing roles of women under industrialisation was mirrored in post-war Germany and saw a burgeoning of artworks in both these time periods that focussed on highlighting deviant female sexuality and then responding to the threat embodied in the female form by dissecting, dismembering and disempowering the female body. In all the cases discussed thus far, the male artists could be considered complicit in encouraging and perpetuating a myopic and misogynistic vision of female sexuality, with Bellmer‘s hideously abused and denigrated dolls perhaps the most disturbing of them all. As noted, these constructions of the female body are all the inventions of male artists founded on masculine fantasies, and as signifiers of female sexuality are necessarily detached from reality. As Mulvey argues, the referent for conventional representations of the female form is frequently the male unconscious rather than the bodies of ‗actual women‘ (1989, p. xiii).
The final chapter of this enquiry will discuss female artists working later in the twentieth and into the early twentieth-first century whose creative
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responses to a trope traditionally handled by male artists, present an intriguing and confronting re-evaluation of male fantasies of female sexuality as represented in the dismembered female body.
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