Autoritate maternă, gotic și suprarealism: Dorothea Tanning
Maternal Authority, the Gothic, and Surrealism: Dorothea Tanning

Summary/Abstract: This paper investigates the intersection between the thematization of gothic maternity in Dorothea Tanning’s novel Chasm: A Weekend (2004) and the surrealist aesthetic paradigms that inform this singular literary work. It further seeks to position this inquiry within the broader framework of the intermedial dialogue between Tanning’s visual and literary oeuvre. The central contention is that Tanning reconfigures the maternal archetype through a surrealist optic, transforming the conventional tropes associated with motherhood—domesticity, submission, and devotion—into manifestations of maternal agency, authority, and autonomy, expressed through emancipation, independence, insubordination, and self-possession. Drawing upon theoretical perspectives by Mieke Bal, Susan Stewart, Whitney Chadwick, and Catriona McAra, the study identifies a productive tension between the gothic and surrealism, from which maternity emerges as both an aesthetic category and an ideological construct. In tracing these intersections, the analysis illuminates the ways in which Chasm: A Weekend reflects the imagery of Tanning’s painterly Maternity series (1947–1980), translating the once-idealized maternal figure into a visual and narrative register marked by exhaustion, resistance, and latent violence. Ultimately, by linking the cyclical genealogies of the novel’s heroines to the self-reflexive dynamics of her visual practice, Tanning articulates an alternative dialect of the Gothic, one that undermines domesticity and reclaims the maternal as a site of transformation, transgression, and creative power.

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