ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines ambivalent representations of women in surrealism in order to situate Angela Carter's politics of gender and sexuality in relation to the movement. The surrealist belief in automatism as a way to access the unconscious was increasingly replaced with a pursuit of 'the marvellous', also perceived to have potential to liberate the mind from societal preconceptions and moral strictures. The surrealist struggle was pledged to a revolution that was both political - as the surrealists' alignment with the Communist Party. If Carter used surrealist call for liberation of imagination as a way to critique the construction of 'woman' as man's other, the surrealists often uncritically used and even glorified notions of feminine mystery, passivity and otherness. The surrealists reiterated the association in early psychoanalytic thought between hysteria and femininity. The association of an irrational feminine sensibility and the unleashing of unconscious desires recurs throughout Breton's writing, and 'woman' herself is repeatedly construed as an ideal model of consciousness.
