An exerpt from Ericka's dissertation:

Half Jane represented the Gothic idea of intermingling of things which were not meant to come together, in this case an assortment of women, animals, and machines. Like [Silent No More], Half Jane too has a ‘ghastly secret’ but it also had its own Gothic elements such as its scientific nature. “Obsession with vampires emerges from the Gothicization of science...William Harvey’s work on the circulation of the blood, discoveries in electricity, the fashion for craniology, the effects of drugs, and Darwinian evolution all became Gothic—a particularly medical form of the Gothic.”[1] We were not performing experiments like Victor Frankenstein or Doctor Jekyll, but we were acting out the experiment as if on paper, the shuffling and reshuffling of our over-simplified genetics in a visual of a Mendhelion square represented the sense of the medical or scientific Gothic.

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Half Jane possessed the gothic “fascination with…guilt and shame”[4] Additionally, it hinged on the gothic idea of fragmentation and its actual allusion to dismemberment. “One of the enduring characteristics of the Gothic can be found in its emphasis on fragmentation, inconsistent narratives and an excess of morphological, disjoined and decentralized forms and shapes.”[5] We were nothing in Half Jane if not fragmented.  Each new coupling was both the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the dual personalities of Doctor Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde.  This fragmentation is just as much a dismemberment of the self.  Mark Edmunson discusses this theory of the double in ‘Nightmare on Main Street’ saying it is “both reductive and powerful. It assumes that we are all playing a role in life, that inside a raving beast waits for the chains to loosen or snap.”[6] This is indeed what happens throughout Half Jane until the beasts begin to come forward and yet we appear ordinary. As Judith Halbestam says, “Depth and essence dissolve in this mirror dance, and identity and humanity become skin deep.”[7]

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As much as the fragmentation in Half Jane was Gothic, it was also surreal with its imagery taken straight from the exquisite corpse. Max Ernst also employed fragmentation in his drawings of hybrid figures and his use of “fracturing and fragmentation of form, together with the confusion and displacement of its imagery…[in Physiomythological Diluvian Picture] One figure is half human, half bird; while the other seems to act involuntarily, in a dream-like, automated state.”[8] While the style we employed to create this fragmentation appears to be a world away from that of Ernst, we still sought that fragmentation and in fact, in many of Ernst’s original sketches he used a kind of realism, and it was this realism that made the juxtaposition of animal body parts so outlandish, so marvelous. In the same way we did not employ abstract illusions to animals and machines but rather the real life images of those things, countered by our own real presence.

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If Half Jane was both surreal and Feminist then it was important to encounter the way Surrealism understood women historically, as the muse. However it was also important to know that “the composite muse for the male surrealists, which I call Automatic Woman, has a potential for shock and consequently for reversal—the potential to step down from her pedestal and to create on her own.”[9] This was an important as inspiration for me in Half Jane. Initially we are the victims or subjects of the audience and the spinning wheel of fate. But then just like the Automatic Woman, and the female surrealists, we develop agency, take control and begin to assemble ourselves. It was not only the female agency in surrealism that we tapped into, but also the hybrid nature of the surreal woman. In his painting Dancer ou Danger: Le impossibilite ou l’impossible, Man Ray “[Linked] the figure of the dancer—Woman as an emblem of beauty—to the figure of danger, Woman as Medusa.”[10] Our hybrid selves represented this same link. Our own bodies moving as dancers, positioned in boxes which alluded to works of art, prostitutes, the lovely, and passive, but the same boxes (utilizing projections) also presented our monstrous nature.

 

[1] Nick Groom; The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction; (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) , 92

[4] Groom, xv

[5] Gilda Williams; The Gothic: Documents of Contemporary Art; (London: Whitechapel and The MIT Press, 2007) , 42 (Grunenberg, Cristoph, Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth-Century Art)

[6] Williams, 30 (Edmunson, Mark, Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism and the Culture of the Gothic)

[7] Williams, 68 (Halberstam, Judith, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and Technology)

[8] Fiona Bradley, Surrealism. (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2001) , 18

[9] Katherine Conley, Automatic Woman: Representation of Woman in Surrealism (USA: University of Nebraska Press, 1996) 2.

[10] Conley, 28

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*full dissertation available upon request.