La seconde Guerre Mondiale a précipité les femmes dans la sphère sociale. Il aura fallu un événement de cette importance pour enfin libérer les femmes du patriarcat. Malgré tout, les résistances masculines ont freiné les revendications féminines. La France est un des derniers pays occidentaux à avoir accordé le droit de vote aux femmes. Les mouvements fémininistes français n’ont pas suffit pour assoir cette révolution sociale ; même si elle a été un total bouleversement dans la vie de tous les jours. De 7% en 1906, elles seront plus de 30% en 1918 à travailler dans les usines pour remplacer les hommes alors au front. La femme a participé activement à l’effort de guerre. Le ministère de la guerre britannique le soulignera dans un rapport fait par une commission après la guerre. Les femmes ont découvert ce que les hommes leur avaient interdit jusque là ; le goût à l’indépendance. 
      Les basses couches sociales ont largement bénéficié de cette ouverture dans le monde du travail. La classe moyenne a peu profité de ces occasions : l’éducation est toujours réservée aux hommes. Ce n’est qu’avec le décret Bérard de 1927 que les femmes auront l’opportunité d’avancer dans leurs études. En effet, pour les femmes la culture s’avère un enjeu de taille : l’image de la femme sert à son oppression. Elles devront également lutter pour changer cette image, constamment utilisée par les hommes pour leur faire obstacle. Le Surréalisme apportera aux femmes les moyens de revendiquer une autre image d’elle-même. La révolution sociale des femmes a ainsi coïncidé avec la révolution culturelle d’André Breton. Elle ont trouvé dans le Surréalisme les revendications qu’elles avaient mises en avant dans l’action politique : une pensée opposée à l’idéologie dominante; en d'autres termes: une ouverture d’esprit loin des institutions académiques : une remise en question de la forme artistique. Les femmes de l’avant-garde ont été les premières rebelles qui ont contribué à la reconnaissance des femmes comme créatrices, et non plus comme de simples muses. 
 

Lucie Aubrac et Lee Miller: deux femmes résistantes sous l’Occupation 

<<A revised notion of resistance is needed...>> (Schwartz, 143) 

Dans son article <<Redefining Resistance: Women’s Activism in Wartime France,>> Paula Schwartz propose un élargissement de la définition de <<Résistance>> pendant la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale.  Elle dit, <<strict adherence to a military definition of resistance made women’s contribution invisible.  They were less likely to have participated in combat and more likely to have engaged in the many nonconventional forms of resistance that gave the movement its highly original character.” (Schwartz, 143) 

Je vous présente ci-dessous deux femmes qui ont fait de la résistance, chacune de sa propre manière: soit une résistance très active dans le cas de Lucie Aubrac, soit une résistance plutôt culturelle comme celle de la photographe et journaliste américaine Lee Miller. 
 

Lucie Aubrac est née Lucie Bernard, le 29 juin 1912, de parents vignerons de Mâcon. 

En 1929, elle est reçue deuxième au concours d’entrée à l’Ecole normale d’institutrice de Paris, mais après avoir passé l’été en Allemagne avec une bourse, elle renonce à l’Ecole, et ses parents lui demandent de quitter la maison.  A dix-sept ans, Lucie Bernard s’installe alors toute seule à Paris. 

En 1930, à Paris, elle fréquente des milieux différents, en particulier un cercle international de jeunesse et des jeunes communistes.  C’est parmi ces groupes qu’elle va entendre parler pour la première fois de fascisme et d’antisémitisme. 

Entre 1931 et 1938 elle réussit son bac (à vingt ans) et elle fait des études universitaires à La Sorbonne, où elle reçoit son agrégation d’histoire. 

Son premier poste d’agrégée d’histoire est dans un lycée de jeunes filles, à Strasbourg, où en 1938, elle rencontre un ingénieur des Ponts et Chaussées qui y fait son service militaire.  Raymond Samuel sera son mari. 

Lucie reçoit pour l’année scolaire 1939-40 une bourse pour commencer sa thèse aux Etats-Unis, mais en septembre 1939 la guerre éclate et elle renonce à y aller.  Lucie épouse Raymond Samuel le 14 décembre 1939.  Ils demandent leurs Visas pour partir aux Etats-Unis en 1940, mais encore une fois, ils renoncent au départ pour rester avec leurs familles et leurs compatriotes. 

En 1941, ils habitent avec leur fils à Lyon, où Lucie est professeur dans un lycée de jeunes filles - un poste qui lui sert pour ses activités résistantes.  Raymond travaille comme ingénieur, et jusqu’ au printemps 1943, le couple restera légal bien qu’ils mènent une vie de résistants parallèle. 

En 1943, Raymond est connu chez les résistants comme <<Aubrac,>> et il devient responsable de l’Armée secrète de <<Libération>> dans la zone sud.  Lucie est pour eux <<Catherine,>> et elle participe aux activités du <<Groupe-Franc.>> 

En 1943, Raymond est arrêté deux fois par la Gestapo - la dernière fois (lors de sa troisième arrestation) il est condamné à mort - mais à chaque fois, Lucie organise et participe à sa fuite.  Maintenant recherchée par la Gestapo, et enceinte de six mois, elle devient une fugitive. 

Lucie Aubrac est désignée pour siéger en tant que représentante du mouvement <<Libération-Sud>> à l’Assemblée consultative d’Alger, ce qui assure son départ de France. 

Le 9 février 1944 la famille Aubrac arrive enfin en Angleterre, après des mois d’attente en cachette et deux autres tentatives de fuite ratées.  Trois jours plus tard, naît sa fille Catherine dans un hôpital à Londres. 

Ce jour-même, dans son lit d’hôpital, à l’âge de 31 ans, Lucie Aubrac est décorée d’une médaille - reconaissance de mérite militaire - par François d’Astier, général d’aviation. 

Aujourd’hui, à quatre-vingt-six ans, Mme Aubrac continue à faire des conférences dans les collèges et les lycées pour parler aux adolescents de ses années de Résistance, pour qu’ils connaissent les valeurs pour lesquelles les Résistants se sont battus. 
 

Femmes-Maîtres ou Femmes-Maîtresses: Camille Claudel et Lee Miller. 

      If Camille Claudel, French sculptor, (1864-1943) and Lee Miller, American model, photograph, war reporter (1907-1977) were considered to be mainly the muses respectively of French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1885-1898) and American photographer Man Ray (1928-1932) ; a closer approach to their art and lives shows that they were much more than simple objects of desire. 
      Both C.Claudel and L.Miller were born too early to have experienced the change of reality in women’s rights, they both participated unconsciously in the making of a feminine identity. Camille Claudel was for example the victim of the patriarchal artist society of France before WWI, unable to expose because of her gender. Whereas Lee Miller was for too long only a beautiful face among others on Vogue magazine issues. For a glance at several aspects of their lives and art, please refer to their  bibliography and feel free to visit the websites that are dedicated to them. 
 

María Luisa Bemberg 

María Luisa Bemberg’s entrance into the male-dominated world of Argentine cinema has been a rather unlikely one. She comes from a privileged Buenos Aires family, has neither a high school diploma nor a university education, and began her film carrer at the age of 56, after having raised her own family. According to the director, she came into the world of cinema for ideological reasons conceived from a life of frustration at the double standards and limited expectations of upper-class Argentine women. She calls her films an expression of the rebellion she has felt since childhood. Now, nearly two decades since her first cinematographic work, she has made six full-length features in addition to several shorter films. 
 
De eso no se habla includes many of the recurrent themes in Bemberg’s work--solitude, death, dispair, themes she says have to do with people in the most universal sense. She is also interested in problematizing the social and political context of these issues. Often reffered to as a director of women’s or feminist cinema, Bemberg states that her films "present images of women who are vertical, autonomous, independent, considerate, brave, and alive" (Bach 22). The characters of De eso no se habla certainly illustrate their authors description. 
 
The 1993 feature, based on the short story of the same name by Julio Llinas, is the tale of a wealthy woman, Leonor, her daughter, Carlota, who, "will always be small,"and their life in a provincial Argentine town. 
 
In the screenplay she co-authored of Llinás’s story, Bemberg takes full advantage of her visual medium, reinforcing and rewriting the relationship of the written and spoken to the visual. In the hands of María Luisa Bemberg, that of which we do not speak becomes a powerful image which we certainly cannot help but see. 
 
Bemberg, De eso no se habla and Argentine cinema on the web 
 
Britto, Vera. "De eso NO se habla: Social Conformity in Present Day Argentinean Film." http://www-personal.umich.edu/~fiatlux/essays/de.eso.html 
 

Celtic Myth in a Surrealist Context 

The Celts were a people comprised of numerous tribes who, thousands of years ago, dominated most of Western Europe until its conquest by the Roman Empire, at which time the Celts were either killed, assimilated or pushed back into remote corners of Northwestern Europe.  Fragments of their beliefs which have been handed down to us today came via their descendants in Brittany, Ireland and the fringes of the British Isles.  These tales evoke a magical world, heavily imbued with symbolic meanings and populated by fairies, with marvels around every bend and an always blurry line defining the boundaries of the Other World. 

As the members of the Surrealist group were fascinated by dreams, the unconscious and the irrational, many of them naturally gravitated toward Celtic mythology as one of the inspirations for their work.  One aspect of this can be seen in their use of Celtic goddesses.  It is interesting to note, however, the differences in the male and female surrealists representation of her – men hoping to glimpse the mystery beyond through her powers and women, emboldened by her strength, aspiring to overturn the impression that they exist primarily to lead men to their enlightenment. 

“All Surrealist visions of woman, from the femme-enfant to the sorceress, converge in the image of the fairy Melusine,” writes Whitney Chadwick in Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (141). Jean Markale in Women of the Celts describes Melusine as one incarnation of the mother goddess, who, although she may have originated in the East, subsequently was associated with Celtic myth and the French countryside.  This collection of myths later inspired Jehan D’Arras’ fourteenth century Roman de Melusine. 

D’Arras’ work, in turn, introduced Melusine to André Breton, leader of the Surrealist group, who was happy to induct her into his service.  In Arcane 17, Breton ruminates,  “Melusine, always the lost woman, the one who sings in the imagination of man . . . it is she whom I invoke.” 

To the men of the Surrealist movement, the female sexuality of Melusine ultimately symbolized the unknown:  “Endowed with supernatural powers, Melusine holds the key to mysteries forbidden to men and inaccessible to the world of reason and logic” (Chadwick 142).  As such, she was their muse, their marveilleux, their alchemical vessel through which they might achieve transformation. 

Women, on the other hand, took an entirely different route.  In Melusine, they found the muse in themselves.  Instead of reflecting men’s identity, they found their own.  Instead of being treated as inspiring objects, they refashioned themselves as inspired subjects.  Melusine and the Celtic society she represented, one in which women’s powers and contributions were respected rather than repressed, inspired quite a few of the female Surrealist artists and writers to use these images in their protest against patriarchy in general – and the depiction of women by (male) Surrealist artists in particular. 

This can be seen in varied works by women of the Surrealist period.  For example, Gloria Feman Orenstein, in analyzing “La Fleur des Amants” a sketch by Nadja (from the eponymous novel by Breton) finds a pictoral representation of the Celtic influence.  “Sketched in visual hieroglyphics of Nadja is the disclosure by a female visionary of the sacred knowledge of her ancient psychic powers and of her lost matrilineage connected with the Celtic mythological tradition that she identifies with, particularly in her choice of Melusine as a symbol for herself.” 

Leonora Carrington, a British author and artist, drew heavily upon her Celtic heritage and used a multitude of these symbols in her works. Many of these symbols are explained in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, published in 1948 and which Carrington called “the greatest revelation of my life” (Chadwick 186).  The myriad allusions Carrington makes to Celtic mythology cannot be exhausted here but one finds, among other things, portrayals of the white goddess (whether in human or animal form but all associated with the Celtic mother goddess), Irish inscriptions (encoded in mirror writing), cauldrons and other symbols of Celtic mythology.  Similarly, her literary works employ grail quests, triple muse invocations, underground lairs of the gods and goddesses and characters named after Irish mythological counterparts.  The way in which Carrington uses these references communicates her desire for a future society which will value women’s powers in and of themselves. 
 

Julio Llinás was born in Buenos Aires and studied literature at the Sorbonne. In France, he became involved in the surrealist movement. He cofounded the Phases movement and, with Aldo Pellegrini and Enrique Molina, two of the fundamental names of the Argentine literary avant-guard, founded the magazine A partir de cero. His major works are Pantha Rhei, La ciencia natural and Clorindo Testa. 
 

Le plaisir “des sens” dans les oeuvres de Nelly Kaplan 

   “Je vous salue, Maris… 
   et délivrez-nous du mâle, 
   Ainsi soit-il. 
    (Rituel du Matriarcat.)” 

   “Puis le combat s’arrête, faute de cons battants.” 

    du Réservoir des sens de Nelly Kaplan. 
 
Nelly Kaplan, dans la majorité de ses oeuvres bibliographiques et filmiques, s’attaque avec beaucoup d’humour à l’autorité patriarcale.  Le Réservoir des sens est une richesse de jeux de mots, d’homonymes, qu’elle manipule dans le seul but de détruire le mythe masculin, en redistribuant les rôles associés à l’homme et à la femme.  Elle renverse l’ordre établi entre la sphère masculine et la sphère féminine, et elle recrée un monde dans lequel la femme est ‘maître’. Quant à l’homme, il est ridiculisé et représenté comme sexe faibe.  Elle les décrit comme des hommes-enfants, des objets sexuels, qui sont généralement deux concepts associés à l’image de la femme. 
Dans un de ses films, Néa, Nelly Kaplan poursuit son jeu avec les ‘sens’, mais sous un angle différent. Elle travaille dans le domaine des sens (physiques, et non linguistiques comme dans Le réservoir des sens), pour montrer l’éveil à la sensualité de la jeune héroine Néa.  C’est en effet par l’intermédiaire du plaisir des cinq sens que va se manifester son apprentissage á la sexualité, et Nelly Kaplan manipule parfaitement ce thème.  Elle renverse aussi certains clichés en nous dressant un tableau de la femme-voyeuse, représentation généralement associée à l’homme. 
 Nelly Kaplan est donc un maître dans le domaine des ‘sens’.  Comme l’a si bien écrit Chris Holmund dans son article “The eyes of Nelly Kaplan” (Screen 8QQ, Winter 1996, 37.4 pp. 351-67), “Nelly Kaplan has tried (...) to work not only in the realm of the census but in the realm of the senses.” 
 
 

Unica Zürn and Immobility 

In order to better understand the life and work of Unica Zürn, it must be viewed in relation to her partner of seventeen years, surrealist artist Hans Bellmer.   In this way, we can see how he affected her creative processes,  in fact,  her whole being. 

Zürn and Bellmer met in 1953 at an exposition of Bellmer’s works in Berlin after a series of coincidental meetings.  Bellmer designed dolls, and he immediately became captivated by Unica because she resembled so closely one of the dolls he had created.  Bellmer was quite a bit older than Zürn (15 years), but it did not matter.  The attraction was reciprocal.  Hence, Zürn followed Bellmer to Paris where she met several famous artists and writers, Henri Michaux, in particular, who represents the incarnation of her Man of Jasmine.  It should be noted here that Michaux’s influence on Zürn was almost as great as that of Bellmer. 

Unica Zürn was mentally ill (it has been said she was schizophrenic) and suffered several breakdowns throughout her life with Bellmer.  It is remarkable to notice the troubling irony of their relationship, that is to say, the fact that it represented both life and death for Zürn.  She was immobilized in one sense because of her emotional crises and constant committal to mental hospitals as a result thereof.  On the other hand, it was in this immobility that she found her voice, in other words her creative mobility.  She experienced further torment in her relationship with Bellmer:  her love for him rendered her immobile as well.  She was completely obsessed with this man whom she loved madly until the end of her life. 

Certainly, Bellmer and Zürn seemed to inspire each other.  They were both driven to write, to create.  Zürn evidently needed to communicate ideas she felt impossible to express verbally: “I couldn’t stop working on this drawing, or didn’t want to, for I experienced endless pleasure working on it.”1   Thus, in speech she may have been immobilized, yet through writing and art she found creative movement.  That is to say, through her illness, through her hallucinations,  she was able to discover her own inner voice. Bellmer represented a sort of divine inspiration for her as well.  Renée Riese-Hubert writes in Magnifying Mirrors that “In any case, the 17 years spent as Bellmer’s companion coincide almost exactly with the most productive period of her life” (141)2.   And as Marcelle Fonfriede affirmed recently, “Although Unica Zürn’s accomplishments and undoing may not have been determined by Bellmer, nonetheless she built and destroyed herself within his inexorable presence.  She could not shield herself from his reflection, both as man and artist, or avoid being shattered against his inexorable mirror.”3 
Whereas Hubert says one might not necessarily agree with this assessment of Zürn’s career, it is ironic and quite significant, that as a writer the most remarkable medium of expression for Zürn was the anagram, a medium she might never have discovered without Bellmer (MM 142). She herself says that “Inventing anagrams is one of her most intense preoccupations” (MJ 35). It soon became apparent that she needed the not only the torment of her own madness but that which her relationship with Bellmer provided as well.  “That’s the way it is for her,” she decided, “because the feeling of ‘happiness’ merely makes her stupid and unproductive.  She doesn’t know what to do with it” (MJ 49). 

1 Unica Zürn.  The Man of Jasmine and other texts.  Trans. Malcolm Green.  London:  Atlas P,  1977.  Trans. of Der Mann im Jasmin.  Frankfurt am Main:  Verlag Ullstein, 1985. 
2 Renée Riese-Hubert. Magnifying Mirrors.  Lincoln and London:  University of Nebraska Press, 1994. 
3 Marcelle Fonfriede.  Preface to Approches d’Unica Zürn by Unica Zürn.  Paris:  Nouveau Commerce, 1981.