Admitting that the early dolls reflected his “anxiety and unhappiness”, and that rejecting the adult world he sought refuge in “the wonder of childhood”, Bellmer claimed that the dolls “became an erotic liberation for me”. This continued his interest in drawing young girls from an orphanage near where he lived, as reported later by his mother.8 With his father debilitated by cerebral hemorrhage and his first wife ill with tuberculosis, Bellmer felt the need of “liberation” from anxieties. Eroticism, primed by the excitement of his cousin Ursula Naguschewski, brought out the “doll theme”. From then on the imaginative “doll theme” accompanied his actual relations with women, reflecting Stoller’s comment that “Perverse people ... deal with their partners as if the others were not real people but rather puppets to be manipulated on the stage where the perversion is played”.9 Bellmer’s three principal relationships with women after the death of his first wife in 1938 indicate the latter, as if he were not relating to the women themselves but to female personifications of his own suffering. Each was a misalliance with a living doll that came to a sad end.
Lives of Girls and Women
When at about age twenty-five, the industrial engineer Bellmer married Mar-garete Schnell she was already ill with tuberculosis. The curious feature of Bellmer’s ten-year childless alliance with Margarete was his identification with her illness. Bellmer reported to a medical friend that he had become convinced that he too was mortally ill with tuberculosis. Yet he remained healthy while Margarete continued to deteriorate. Bellmer’s devotion to his ill wife was quite compatible with his development of the “doll theme” with which she colluded, as did his mother and brother. Always attentive, he diverted her during the last illness with games and collages and, when at length she died, Bellmer constructed a museum In Memory of my Wife Margarete.
His second marriage, to Marcelle Celine Sutter from Colmar, Alsace, lasted from 1942 until 1947 when they divorced after a bitter separation. Twin daughters were born of this marriage of convenience. As a French citizen, Celine gave legitimacy to Bellmer, a German refugee from the Nazis. Domiciled in Toulouse, he was suspected by the Vichy authorities of being Jewish. From 1938, when Bellmer migrated to France, he had romantic relationships with an English writer, Joyce Reeves and a Romanian dancer Lizica Codreanu, but only a French wife could avert persecution. From the start Bellmer found his life with Celine “hellish” and, when asked why he had married her replied: “Because she was the only woman I could never love or live with”.10
Whereas Celine accused Bellmer of perversion, the Bulgarian poet Nora Mitrani was fascinated by his art and began a biography to try to explain it. Bellmer and Nora lived together in Toulouse during 1947-8, but Bellmer was uneasy and tried to break out of this relationship in 1949 to move to Paris. Yet he could not fully separate. His union with Nora is portrayed as a doubling, a fusion of their persons in a drawing of 1948 (illustrated by Webb, #205), and there is a startling lithograph of Nora as a severe, dominating woman with another more serene figure behind suggesting a dual nature. The extra hands suggest risk of spider-like capture. (Taylor, plate #4; p. 181, where she takes the doubled figure to be Bellmer, not Nora’s other self.) By 1951, this relationship was over but, as Webb points out, Nora left valuable insights into Bellmer’s life and art. She wrote: “This destroyer of complacent consciences lives with an obstinate dream of a childhood love, a love reconquered thanks to two constantly threatened images, a woman, the faithful but disturbing reflection of his own narcissism, and a child, Doriane, a tiny child, his own, who has caressed him. These two images merge in order to reveal the veiled features of an intact love pursued by an eternal poetic fanaticism, never attained because of a continuous retreat into the eternal impossible”.11 Doriane was his favorite of twin daughters, and the split love of childhood origin is accurate. If Taylor is correct, Mitrani also introduced the idea that Bellmer’s obscene art was attempted self-therapy: “a secret need for equilibrium, the urge to create an imaginary evil from which we may take pleasure within the excesses of intellectual passion, in order to cure ourselves of the real evil we’re suffer-ing”.12 This is the most useful hypothesis about Bellmer’s art proposed by anyone associated with him.
Bellmer himself supported this view in “The Image of the Ego” and other brief writings in Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious, first published in 1957. By claiming that physical pain can be reduced by counter-irritation in another location, he implies that the same can be done with psychic pain. If a toothache can be decreased by digging fingernails into a clinched fist, then any pain can be “bisected”, “leading from the malaise to its image”. He adds, “Expression with its pleasure component is a displaced pain and a deliverance”. This is exactly the formula for his art of the doll and other erotic imagery, but we may wonder, in the context of Bellmer’s actual relations with women, how much “deliverance” there actually was.13 Bellmer, however, gives little help with autobiographical revelations. Instead he fantasizes a young girl who is prohibited sexuality by a repressive society. He writes, “The prohibition of pleasure being a momentarily indisputable fact, it subsequently compels the necessity of denying the source of the conflict by erasing the existence of the sex organ and the area around it. This is achieved by “amputating” it, leg included. Nevertheless, its image remains available to move into the vacant space, assume a meaning, and thereby cloak itself in a permissible reality”.14 This is what his dolls with missing and re-arranged limbs, visually suspended between the “real” and the “virtual”, actually mean—they are fantasies of prohibited desire and hostility projected upon young girls. These effigies of damaged girls exude the sexuality they are meant to exclude, erasure of sex giving it perverse emphasis. Belmer found the perfect means of configuring his avoidant pain by turning it into “a permissible reality”. surrealism sanctioned re-engineering female anatomy in accordance with arousal, avoidant manipulation and a wish for personal triumph over trauma. But Bellmer’s power to shock surpassed anything yet seen from the surrealists.
The stark power of Bellmer’s naked disarticulated Puppes arises from the strength of his motivation to invent them. The trauma of his young life seems to have broken apart and recombined his sense of the normal and rational in relations between the sexes. He writes, “Let us suppose ... that some events of an intimate nature had been seen, heard, and felt in such a way that, under the influence of shock, repulsion and feelings of guilt, the transfer or simply the initial loss of sight means: ‘I don’t see anything’, or ‘I don’t want to see any more’. Accordingly the eye, ear and nose become in turn a ‘real focal point’ which is necessarily opposed by a ‘virtual focal point of excitation’ such as the hand or heel”.15 (This is presumably the same traumatic experience narrated more fully in “Memories of the Doll Theme”, as will appear.) In the passage just quoted Bellmer’s psychological theorizing shows him displacing trauma by breaking up and reconfiguring the female body—a strategy of attack, but also reassembly. In other words, the retaliatory attack is mitigated by restorative repair, however bizarrely wounded the reconstituted creature may appear. Yet displacement is evasion of the real issue of sensory and psychic overload, of hyper-stimulation for which Bellmer had been unprepared. The art was his best response, miscarried repair though it now appears to be. Further remarks in “The Images of the Ego” about reconciling the contraries of a divided personality (as Freud showed in dreams) give evidence of Bellmer’s good intentions. But these were not to be realized by the hyper-sexual imagery of female body anagrams chosen by Bellmer. Nor did his actual relations with women turn him in a new direction.