Through the practice of feminism, women are gaining a sense of confidence
and strength needed in order to reject some of the misused labels put onto
women, such as the role of Muse. The women Surrealists tended to reject the
label of Surrealist for themselves. Frida Kahlo said that even though she was
thought of as a Surrealist, she wasn't -- "I never painted dreams. I painted my
own reality."14 Whitney Chadwick suggests better descriptions of these women
artists as "Magic Realists" or "Neo-Romantics."15
When Leonora Carrington, an artist working within the Surrealist realm, was
asked about woman's role as Muse for the Surrealist artists, her response was,
"Bullshit."16 Poet Susan Griffin calls the idea of the male-defined muse "a cop-out"17
and contemporary poet/feminist/critic, Adrienne Rich describes it as "uninteresting."18
However,in rejecting the idea of the male-defined muse, we risk throwing out,
along with it, the a concept of a center of our own creativity. However, at the same
time, we have a chance to reclaim the original Muse as source of creative inspiration
and reinvent the muse to fit into our own experience of creativity. Poets such as
May Sarton, Emily Dickinson, and Denise Levertov have written of the muse as
source of their creative power.
Feminist critics tend to conclude that these women, in writing about or to their
muses are actually writing about or to themselves.19 The last stanza from "The
Muse as Medusa"20 is illustrative of women writing about the Muse as self:
I turn you face around! It is my face.
That frozen rage is what I must explore-Oh secret, self enclosed, and ravage place!
This is the gift I thank Medusa for.
Woman's acceptance of her Muse within will provide not only access to the source
of creative energy but will provide a sense of self-wholeness and a reclamation or
connection with "ancient history"21 which has been lost to our consciousness for
hundreds of years, lying rather dormant and often unrecognized within our collective
subconscious and within the universal female archetypes which surround us in myth.
The powerful female energy that was revered in pre-historical matriarchal culture
still lives, though disguised and filtered, within patriarchal myth.22
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