The Body Divine: Constructing Female Identity Through Mythological Imagery and Intersemiotism in Surrealism

André Breton, the most prominent figure of the Surrealist movement in France, wrote about his desire to pursue a woman central to the movement as a muse "so that she, who naturally lived within a myth, would be mythologised," as French critic Pascaline Mourier-Casile points out in her commentary on Nadja (1994). The natural way in which women aligned with mythology in canonical surrealist works is increasingly problematised in both Francophone and Anglophone scholarship. Several critics have adopted a feminist approach to discuss the work produced by male surrealist writers (Lusty, 2007; Lomas, 2011) and a few anthologies have helped to make the work of female surrealist writers known (Caws et al., 1991), but there remains a striking lack of monographs on women's surrealism. My PhD thesis will expand this feminist scholarship, not only by studying the works of women associated with surrealism, but also by focusing on the use of mythology in their writing as well as in their visual art through sustained analysis of their intersemiotic practices.

Research Questions
- To what effect do female surrealist writers and artists use mythological imagery: to deconstruct or reconstruct their identity?
- To what extent is their use of this imagery related to, and different from, their male surrealist contemporaries?
- Should this mythological imagery bring us to reframe their association with the surrealist movement?