Abstract

This thesis examines the use of occult-inspired imagery in the paintings of Surrealist artists, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo, through a feminist, anti-essentialist methodology. My approach departs from essentialist and universalist definitions of women that I identify in foundational scholarship on women Surrealists and offers a new approach by engaging with anti-essentialist theories. I argue that these artists draw on occult sources and folklore to convey images of womanhood that challenge the notion of a normative, fixed identity that essentialist ideologies necessitate. Further, I explain how their representations of typically “feminized” occult archetypes, such as the goddess and the witch, encourage anti-essentialist analyses by resisting and deconstructing the normative patriarchal stereotypes these artists encountered throughout their lives, including the limiting characterizations of women in the Surrealist movement. I employ feminist theories from Elizabeth Grosz, Diana Fuss, Simone de Beauvoir, and others to my anti-essentialist reading of their occult-inspired paintings. Finally, I use Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of strategic essentialism to analyze how, in their paintings and magic practices, these artists drew on and simultaneously parodied the empowering yet essentialist myths about women that exist in occult traditions, such as the perception that women wield magical faculties and innate spiritual connections to the natural world. Ultimately, this thesis argues for the relevance and value of an anti-essentialist methodology in feminist interpretations of Varo’s and Carrington’s occult-inspired paintings.