Dali Femme Fatale

I believe the two key terms used in surrealism regarding the female subject “femme enfant” and “femme fatale” characterizes the works of Dali. The femme fatale was the stereotypical woman who attracts a man sexually, and represents a huge threat to the man due to her infatuating characteristics. The femme fatale causes men to lose their minds, reason, intellectual ability, basically depriving the man from all his strength. It is evident that Dali furthermore felt threatened by the femme fatale in his painting The Spector of Sex Appeal (figure 1). The composition is created with a child in the lower right hand corner that appears to be inferior to the large scale reconstructed female figure. The child’s age appears to be around 5-6, interestingly the same age that Dali himself first remembers seeing the female nude (Gauthier 81). Furthermore, the eyes of the child seem to be glued to the nude female figure showing a potential awareness of a sexual comprehension. According to Gilles Neret, an association to the femme fatale is the fear or the Oedipus complex leading to a male child’s desires to possess his mother, which makes his father want to castrate the son. All though this is just a theory by Neret and Freud, I think that there is evidence of this femme fatale fear …show more content…
The two paintings have both over exaggerated the female form, Dali giving the female figure large breasts and Varo giving the female mannequin 9 breasts, as if to say that the idealization of the female figure cannot be obtained without enhancement. Dali creates the femme fatale figure almost as if he is frustrated with how much power the right and lust filled female figure can have, where as Remedios Varo attempts to mock desiring to want to become a mans idealization of the perfect female, transforming from the femme fatale into the femme