Female Subordination, Surrealist Instinct, or Something in Between? Deconstructing Rene Magritte’s Depiction of Women in “Le Viol”
By Bailey Hosfelt
Editor’s Note: This was originally an academic paper written for the author’s Gender and Modern Art class in Spring 2018. It has been reformatted for ease of reading online. There is a bibliography at the bottom of the article for all sources cited.
To put it frankly, Belgian artist Rene Magritte’s grotesque and deeply provoking surrealist work Le Viol (1934) is difficult to categorize. On a rudimentary level of interpretation, the painting superimposes a woman’s body onto her face: breasts become eyes, the navel a nose, and pubic mound for a mouth. Given its matter-of-fact title — French for “the rape” — art historians and feminist scholars alike have provided ample evidence that Magritte’s work dehumanizes the female subject and, as a result, does nothing to condemn the male gaze that was, at times, pervasively present within the realm of surrealist art.
In this vain, Magritte’s depiction, although only of one woman, creates implications about his thoughts toward the entire gender, which many deem as being negative. However, interdisciplinary discourses about Le Viol offer a manifold approach to unpacking the full meaning of this profoundly gendered painting and the potential motivations of its creator. Rooted in psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and studies of representational language, various authors elucidate that perhaps there is more to Le Viol than the visceral reactions of vile misogyny and an invitation to violate that first meet the viewer’s eye.
This is not to say popular interpretations of Le Viol — women’s lack of agency, a prioritization of male desire, and the act of rape itself, to name a few — are inaccurate or without clear substance. Common understandings of Magritte’s work could not have become so widespread among scholarly circles if they were neither well-constructed nor frequently occurring. Nevertheless, alternate theories about Magritte’s artistic intentions such as displaying the complicated projection of male anxiety, societal perversion toward silence, and subversion based on his own bereavement are equally stimulating and must also be taken into account.
Through a layered analysis that considers both sides of the coin, one will see that Le Viol cannot be interpreted as solely black or white in its treatment toward women. I argue that Le Viol occupies the multifaceted realm of grey where the artist challenges the viewer to not just look at the artwork but also the society that accepts or rejects its content, especially the very behavior of the individuals within it who ultimately make this decision. In doing so, I will prove that this startling work by Rene Magritte simultaneously supports and subverts the societal subservience of women: a conclusion that shall become apparent through forthcoming exploration of common as well as recherché interpretations of Le Viol.
In Rene Magritte’s Le Viol, “what women speak, eat and see is nothing but desire” (2).¹ This statement from author Howard Eilberg-Schwartz in the introduction of Off With Her Head!: The Denial of Women’s Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture reveals that every part of the face that would traditionally allow a woman to interact with the world — to see, to smell, to make herself heard — was deliberately removed by Magritte and replaced with overwhelmingly sexual imagery. Although this aligns with a central theme in the artistic movement of surrealism — the idea that man is driven by desire — it is not an excuse for the expression of sexual instinct that, in
this instance, is both explicit and exploitative. As Alyce Mahon demonstrates in “Staging Desire,” a chapter within Surrealism: Desire Unbound, Magritte’s Le Viol occupies space within the canon of surrealist art that was often interpreted as immoral, pornographic even.²
She furthers that this graphic work is disturbing on a number of levels. In Le Viol, an erotic invitation to violate is graphically offered. The viewer’s first instinct is to regard the depicted woman as an object of desire, for her physical body is starkly superimposed onto what should be the face. With breasts as eyes, a navel as a nose, and pubic mound for the mouth, it becomes difficult to reorient the mind to remember what is supposed to be there. The senses that are normally associated with facial features — sight, smell, and speech — are no longer offered. Now the only way the inarticulate subject can communicate with those seeing her is not through her own gaze
but rather theirs. She has no sight.
Yet, she must endure that of others that is quite voyeuristic and unwelcome. Surrealist art frequently became synonymous with the expression of sexual
instinct and the authentic voice of the inner self. and Magritte’s Le Viol certainly fits this mold.³ However, it is important to note that Le Viol portrays human impulse and desire in a manner that is far from mutual. The female subject is depicted by a male artist, and, in this case, portrayed in a problematic light that invokes her gender as being subordinate. Magritte prioritizes male desire in Le Viol while at the same time denying women any sense of physical yearning.
As a result, this demonstrates that the woman depicted not only lacks control over her own bodily instinct but also any sense of internal agency. In an effort to better understand the motivation behind portraying a overpoweringly
unequal depiction of desire between the genders, it is helpful to look to Magritte’s own words about his work. In Rene Magritte: Selected Writings, the artist offers commentary on his creations. When it comes to Le Viol, Magritte provided a succinct, three-sentence sentiment about the piece: “Woman gave rise to Le Viol. This is a woman’s face made up of her body. The
breasts are eyes, the nose is a naval and her sex replaces the mouth” (66).⁴
This terse statement is quite explanatory, especially his choice to use the phrase “her sex” to refer to the female’s genital region. In a way, it completely invalidates the woman’s sexuality, denying her an identity that is anything except for an object of male desire and pleasure. Magritte does not mince words or provide an unnecessary circumlocution, which leads the reader to not read between the lines but simply understand what he said. The phrase “woman gave rise to Le Viol” seems equally abhorrent, as if to suggest that women created their own subservient status within society, and, as
a result, are personally responsible for a physical violation that happens to them: rape.
American author and Professor Emerita of Women’s Studies Susan Gubar further expands upon the scenario Magritte presents, stating that “the represented figure — robbed of subjectivity and placed on display like a freak — deserves to be raped” (722).⁵ In this case, the painted woman is
nothing but a displaced genital organ. Gubar suggests that, in Le Viol, a woman’s anatomy is said to be her destiny. Given that the surrealist realm has an impressive breadth expanding to both literature and psychoanalysis, it makes sense that Gubar uses a fictional character from William Faulkner’s Mosquitoes as a point of comparison. In this 1927 novel, a male character celebrates the feminine ideal as “a virgin with no legs to leave me, no arms to hold me, no head to talk to me,” which Gubar equates with Magritte’s work.
The woman in Le Viol becomes an inarticulate genital organ, “closing down all of the openings that ordinarily let the world enter the self so that
Magritte’s subject seems monstrously impenetrable or horrifyingly solipsistic” (722).⁶ In doing so, Magritte ironically allows this impenetrable subject to be displayed in a context that invites the viewer to gaze intrusively, perpetuating the permissibility of societal penetration.
There is no question that surrealist art sought to liberate human thought in an unconventional and instinctual manner. Driven by desire and sexual impulse, artists wanted to provoke with their work in order to spark controversy, conversation, and, if done successfully, revolution. In addition to popular interpretations of Le Viol, many art historians argue that
Magritte’s grotesque work depicts the act of rape itself, as it is occurring. As Mahon explains, “the neck is elongated beyond the demands of erotic sinuosity” (279).⁷ Although the viewer will most likely interpret the body as being a woman’s at first, gender becomes ambiguous and Magritte’s artistic construction soon thereafter turns into an optical illusion of sorts.
Mahon continues that “the head of hair becomes pubic in texture, penetrated by rather than crowning the face/body, while the pubic hair itself condenses into a neat goatee beard” (279).⁸ The shading on the mid-section of what is first interpreted as the female subject’s neck, is also eerily reminiscent
of the penile raphe on midline of the male phallus, which furthers the idea that this work amplifies a societal taboo — rape — in a visceral and subversive way. If one is to turn the image upside down, it certainly resembles the act of sexual intercourse occurring.
Whether it is the male phallus literally penetrating the female subject or Magritte seemingly doing so in an artistic way by superimposing a woman’s anatomy onto her face, it displays a societal turpitude in a profoundly physical way that forces addressment. However, it is important to underscore that, if one is to view this interpretation where the male genitalia is
present, he or she need not overlook the inconsistency in anatomical subjectivity among the genders. Gubar articulates that Magritte’s Le Viol “denies the existence of female genitalia, for the vulva-mouth here is only a hairy indentation” (722).⁹
While there is no concrete evidence that this was a deliberate decision made by Magritte, it is still noteworthy, for the elongated neck visa-vis the male phallus receives a more objective portrayal. According to the online interactive from the 2013 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary,” Le Viol also demonstrates affinities between related objects: the visual correlation between a woman’s face and body. Moreover, it adheres to French writer and surrealist Andre Breton’s concept of humour noir, or black comedy, which made light of subjects traditionally considered
offensive and serious. Rape and “the grotesque result [that is Le Viol]” clearly fits under the large umbrella of French black comedy.¹⁰ In this regard, Le Viol was not remarkable because it destabilized the idea that women were only seen as sexual objects devoid of autonomy, asking to be raped but because it displayed this very position in a publicly jarring piece of art.
Although there is ample evidence that Rene Magritte’s Le Viol demonstrates women in a physically objectified manner that denies their autonomy, leaving them in a position of submission and inarticulateness while that of the male gaze and desire is prioritized, studies of psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and representational language offer alternative interpretations of the work.
These approaches do not disprove popular understandings of Le Viol; however, each offers perspectives that consider a complicated variety of societal implications. In Danielle Knafo’s scholarly journal article “What Does a Man Want? Reflections on ‘Surrealism: Desire Unbound,” she offers commentary on the exhibition “Surrealism: Desire Unbound” that
displayed Le Viol at the Tate and Metropolitan Museum of Art and also gave source material for Tate curator Jennifer Mundy’s book bearing the same name (also mentioned earlier). In Knafo’s interpretation of the works at the exhibition — a majority of which were created by men and depicted various women in less-than flattering forms — she refutes the title and explains that the works are instead very bound, mostly by women’s physical bodies. She writes that there were copious instances of women “stripped of their humanity, identity and sense of belonging” (288), which certainly aligns with the aforementioned interpretations of Le Viol where the female
subject is violently stripped of her own agency.¹¹
However, Knafo goes on to offer a deeper psychological analysis of the exhibition. She believes that each work on display, including Le Viol, represents a complicated projection of male anxiety and perversion that psychoanalytic theorist Robert Stoller called “the erotic form of hatred” in 1986.¹² Knafo places this “aesthetic solution for problems of male gender identity” in its appropriate historical period in order to provide further sociopolitical context (288).¹³
Surrealism thrived, especially in Europe, during the time between the two world wars. In this regard, the identity of men was under a clear microscope. This may have resulted in various works like Le Viol being created during these decades due to male perversion being at the forefront of society as an unfit but prevalent coping mechanism for vulnerabilities about their own physical aptitude.
Inciting Salvador Dali as a relevant example, seeing as his work also had a prominent place in this exhibition, Knafo shares a quote from Dali that “perversion and vice were the most revolutionary forms of thought and activity” (289).¹⁴ Because many surrealists thought themselves as individuals seeking to destabilize preexisting social structures, it was revolutionary that these artists depicted sheer eroticism in such an unapologetic manner.
Upon first glance, Le Viol does not appear to portray a multidimensional depiction of women. Magritte did not succeed in subverting the male gaze and the pitfalls that consequentially follow, but perhaps his work was
remarkable in a different regard. Magritte’s work addresses a larger theme of male anxiety and undeveloped gender identity — specially their internal desire and perverse thoughts that may manifest as a result — in a profoundly manner.
Continuing on with other approaches to unpacking the full meaning of Magritte’s Le Viol, it is helpful to look toward the surrealist’s own biography and see how his personal experience may have shaped his professional creations. Gubar takes an interesting shift in “Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and Depictions of Female Violation,” wherein she suggests a reinterpretation of Le Viol keeping the details of Magritte’s mother’s suicide — in which her body was later removed from the river with her nightgown covering her face, leaving her body exposed — and the psychological impact this could have had on his artistic motivations. Here, she supports author Martha Wolfenstein’s argument that Magritte’s “penchant for transforming (or superimposing) one image into (or onto) another serves as a screen for Magritte’s defense against bereavement, as he revenges himself against the mother he was not supposed to see by viewing
her as deprived not only of her eroticism but also of his sight, smell and taste” (724).¹⁵
This intertwines themes of abandonment and loss with seduction and desire, suggesting that Magritte utilized an aesthetic strategy in Le Viol to allow himself to cope with an extremely traumatic childhood experience. Gubar then suggests that Magritte “must rape the most familiar of all
objects, the first object of his desire” (724).¹⁶ A connection can be made her between this theory about Magritte’s bereavement with that of psychological associations to Sigmund Freud.
Magritte was known to be fascinated with Freud, so Gubar suggests that the female subject in Le Viol could be viewed as a Medusa-like figure whose face petrifies (and horrifies and arouses) men due to the female genitalia that is associated with it (732).¹⁷ In this light, Gubar concludes, in conjunction with French philosopher Sarah Kofman’s analysis in The Enigma of Woman:
Women in Freud’s Writing, that Freud’s theory that female genital organs invoke both horror and pleasure in the male viewer “can help explain the mixture of revulsion and desire associated with the inspection of female body parts in Magritte’s painting in an so much surrealist art (732).¹⁸
While Le Viol is particularly public and desensitizing on one hand, it is also depressingly private and thought-provoking on the other. When considering the latter, it becomes apparent that perhaps Magritte’s work was not simply pornographic and grotesque but subversive and liberating for himself as well.
In “Image, Text and the Female Body: Rene Magritte and the Surrealist Publications,” Robin Adele Greeley picks up the conversation that, in many ways, Susan Gubar put forward in “Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and Depictions of Female Violation.” Greeley commends Gubar’s essay, which she calls a “nuanced, and therefore useful, reading of
Magritte’s imagery from a feminist perspective” (48), and reiterates some arguments already articulated.¹⁹ She then goes onto focus primarily on Qu’est-ce que le Surrealisme?, or What is Surrealism (1934), the pamphlet printed in 1934 by Andre Breton who selected Le Viol for its cover artwork, and themes of representational language and strategies associated with it.
Modeling as the illustrative reproduction on the cover of Qu’est-ce que le Surrealisme?, Le Viol very much serves as the answer for Breton’s inquiry. Greeley comments on this, in announcing a dualistic intention for Le Viol. According to Greeley, Le Viol was created to shock and repulse but the artwork was never intended to stand alone.²⁰ Breton posits the question, what is surrealism, and answers that Le Viol is it, seeing as it the reproduction is right there on the cover.
The two men then maintain a shared thesis statement of describing what the artistic movement of surrealism was truly about, which Greeley explains was always their plan. Le Viol “was meant both as the strident opening statement of Breton’s polemical text” as well as “an image off which the text would reverberate constantly from start to finish” (48).²¹ By placing Le Viol at the
forefront, it was impossible to ignore. Before the reader even turned the page to read Breton’s copy that gave surrealism a greater aesthetic and sociopolitical context, he or she grappled with the subject matter depicted in Le Viol: what the artwork said about the question and what the question said about the artwork.
In addition to considering the connection between written language with accompanying artwork, Greeley discusses representational strategies in Le Viol. She describes that the jolt Le Viol created by superimposing certain body parts in other places was “a version of the surrealist practice of disruption which was Magritte’s own” (51). Greeley furthers that a viewer’s initial reaction to recoil from the image “comes in part from the ease with which Magritte is able to make the visual slippage from face to genitals” (51).²² He or she is not only repulsed by Magritte putting a woman’s physical form on her face but also the ease in which they can themselves understand and accept these genitals as facial feature replacements. In confronting sexual and representational coherency and women’s inability to fully reach it, Greeley looks to Jacques Lacan to describe how issues of communication — specially the female subject’s inability to speak in Le Viol — can be manifested in the body’s physical form, or the artist’s depiction of it.
According to Lacan, “Woman” within language is also constituted as “Other,” which is “perpetually de-centered with respect to male Self” (55).²³ In other words, the very word woman already sets up a binary where she exists in a linguistic structure where the male is already in place and looked toward as the prioritized standard. As Greeley puts it, “[woman] is forced to utilize linguistic constructions which never directly address her being but which entirely determine her social existence” (55). This is applicable in Le Viol, for the female subject must accept another person’s view of her despite its grotesque and submissive nature. For Lacan as well as Greeley, woman is the object that must carry the burden of a society’s difficulties with sexuality and gender identity.
If an individual is gendered male, he has the ability to control the
manner in which the language and discourse around him is built and, as a result, represent himself within these structures. But to be gendered female, as is the case in Le Viol, “means not to be able to communicate (or able at best to speak with one’s sex, not with one’s mind” (55).²⁴
As an artist, Magritte was able to construct a work that commented on women in a way that still gave him the power to manipulate his own representation, regardless of the fact that the female subject he painted in Le Viol was to remain mute. The female subject of Rene Magritte’s Le Viol experiences a distorted construction and even more difficult interpretation. The painting superimposes her body onto her face, which gives the viewer an initial impression that Magritte is nothing but a misogynist who sought to
perpetuate the male gaze within surrealist art. As expanded upon above, the content of Le Viol did lead to various negative interpretations such as an invitation to violate, the decreased autonomy of women, a prioritization of male desire, and the act of rape occurring.
However, there were also alternate theories about what Le Viol portrayed based on a more psychoanalytic and representational level of understanding. Themes such as the projection of male anxiety, societal perversion toward silence, subversion based on his own bereavement garnered scholarly
attention as well. In Le Viol, the act or rape is insinuated but never explicitly offered. A woman’s body is fragmented and silenced, and the viewer must seek to understand what this superimposing structure says not just about Magritte but also the society that accepts his artwork.
As a surrealist, Magritte wanted to dismantle traditional ways of thinking, and, in Le Viol, he confronted a societal taboo in a deeply provoking and impenitent manner. Given the multifaceted nature of discourse that formed as a result of Le Viol, it became apparent that this work was not just about the individual female body but also the relationship between men and women and the societal conflicts they encounter in their daily lives. Le Viol is an unsettling painting that cannot simply be categorized as either supporting or subverting the unequal status of women not only in the world of art but at large. As Robin Adele Greeley so eloquently puts it, “It is obvious that we do not want what Magritte delineates in Le Viol: that fragmented, mute
body which is the female. We may, however, want his means of articulating it” (56). In this case, it is not so much about what Magritte’s depiction of women says about himself but rather what it challenges his viewers to consider. Ultimately, Rene Magritte’s Le Viol is remarkable given its ability to proliferate so profoundly on the society who initially received it and those that continue to do so.
Works Cited:
1: Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard, and Wendy Doniger, Off With Her Head: The Denial of Women’s Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995), 2–27.
2: Mundy, Jennifer, Vincent Gille, and Dawn Ades, Surrealism: Desire Unbound (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001), 28.
3: Mundy, Jennifer, Vincent Gille, and Dawn Ades, Surrealism: Desire Unbound.
4: Rooney, K., and E. Plattner, Rene Magritte: Selected Writings (n.p, University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 66.
5: Gubar, Susan, “Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and Depictions of Female Violation,” Critical Inquiry, 13, (June 1987), 712–41.
6:Gubar, “Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and Depictions of Female Violation,” 712–41.
7: Mundy, Jennifer, Vincent Gille, and Dawn Ades, Surrealism: Desire Unbound.
8: Ibid.
9: Gubar, “Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and Depictions of Female Violation,” 712–41.
10: “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938,” MoMA, 2013, https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/magritte/#/featured/6/description (accessed April 2018).
11: Knafo, Danielle, “What Does a Man Want? Reflections on ‘Surrealism: Desire Unbound,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4, no. 3. (2003), 287–307.
12: Ibid.
13: Ibid.
14: Ibid.
15: Gubar, “Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and Depictions of Female Violation,” 712–41.
16: Ibid.
17: Ibid.
18: Ibid.
19: Greeley, Robin Adele, “Image, Text and the Female Body: Rene Magritte and the Surrealist Publications,” Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 15, №2 (1992), 48–57.
20: Greeley, “Image, Text and the Female Body: Rene Magritte and the Surrealist Publications,” 48–57.
21: Ibid.
22: Ibid.
23: Ibid.
24: Ibid.
