SOURCE: “Voyages of Discovery: Leonora Carrington's Magical Prose,” in Women's Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3, July, 1994, pp. 271-84.

In the following essay, Gaensbauer describes Leonora Carrington's works of magic realism as “subversive voyages of self-discovery.”

Surrealism has always been associated with the act of discovery, and the surrealists have frequently been compared to the explorers who came to the “New World” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In his comprehensive study of the movement, Michael Carrouges portrays surrealism as a crossing of the “tropical jungles,” of the “prodigious savage continent opened up by Freud,” and the discovery of “new paths to penetrate toward the mysteries of our own bodies, toward the mental currents that unite all humanity and toward the cosmic mysteries themselves.”¹ Among the surrealists, few, perhaps only Antonin Artaud, have penetrated this “prodigious savage continent” more deeply than the artist and writer Leonora Carrington.² In her writing, Carrington...