It should not be forgotten that Bellmer had tendencies to transvestitism and cross-dressing, a paraphilia generally known as transvestic fetishism, a condition of male heterosexuals. Lichtenstein points out that Bellmer’s life-long urge to dress as a female, to wear nylons under his trousers, is allied to his obsessive identification with young girls and dolls.28 While Bellmer does not seem to have suffered from acute gender dysphoria, in which he would want to change into a woman, he did sometimes fantasize what it would be like to be female, to know the life of a doll “from inside”. Indeed, Bellmer had once contrived “a succession of six tiny dioramas that encapsulated the artist’s own fantasies of what young girls desired”.29 Erotic identification with adolescent girls, together with replicating them as suffering dolls, is evidence that Bellmer could not fully differentiate himself from his mother. For security he merged with his long-suffering mother, the innocent victim of a sadistic husband who, as an authoritarian father, repelled him—there is no evidence for rapproach-ment with his father, let alone for a wished homosexual union. As his mother seems not to have turned seductively to son Hans for erotic compensation, Bellmer identified with her female being rather than becoming phobic about it. He was nonetheless defensively avoidant while identifying with her loneliness and suffering. So much is evident, yet more would need to be known about early irregularities of attachment to be entirely sure about causality.
But this does not tell us much about a specific trauma over which Bell-mer’s perverse creativity attempted to triumph. The best account of one is found in the curiously allusive and oblique Memories of the Doll Theme. Had Bellmer been able to assimilate and understand what had actually happened in this youthful episode with girls, he would have been able to report it in much clearer language. As it is, he conveys only indistinctly the intensity of sexual anxiety which helps to explain the compulsive repetition with which his doll art unfolded. The dolls were the final objectification of repeated attempts to capture in inanimate objects Bellmer’s confused adolescent sexual arousal. That there had been trauma is shown by the hostile reprisal Bellmer admits towards the dolls, “when their charms were captured rapaciously by the conscious gaze: when with aggressive fingers, grasping after form, slowly, part-by-part, that which the senses and the brain had distilled emerged”. His purpose in fabricating the dolls had been “creating beauty and also distributing the salt of deformation a bit vengefully”. But a hint of passive identification with “her limitless submissiveness” being “reserved for despair” is also present while he speaks of “the final triumph of the young maidens, with their large averted eyes”.30 This is ambivalent cherishing and reprisal, inseparable in the images Bellmer had created as containers for anxiety. Earlier attempts to contain anxiety in magical objects had been less successfuclass="underline" “black Easter eggs decorated with doves and rings of pink sugar” or “a single colored glass mar-ble”—images “to stretch the imagination towards something clearly unset-tling”.31 (The marble offered “an interior view”, of female sex, as may be seen in the oil painting Die Puppe (1934) of a dismembered doll in a kind of ecstasy to which this passage alludes (Taylor, plate 1).)
And what had been “clearly unsettling” if not feelings about girls’ games Bellmer tries to reconstruct with a sort of faux-ineptitude, claiming his language incapable of “such intricate things”. Some giggling girls, acting in collusive secrecy, mesmerized young Bellmer with their sexuality. The traumatic moment seems to have come with “what trickled down from the attic stairs, through the cracks of the door, from playing doctor—something like a raspberry schnapps enema”. Schnapps is an alcoholic beverage, but the suggestion is of menstrual blood accidently released by “playing doctor”. Bellmer will not say exactly what he saw, commenting only that it “was not without appeal, even enviableness”. And he adds, “in view ofjust the legs of such little brats, no one would have remained without some suspicion”. He seems to have seen an issue of blood from between the legs of one of the “little brats”, a traumatic shock from which he never quite recovered. What follows denigrates the girls calling them “knock-kneed”, “stumbling about like young goats”, while inspecting the curvature of their legs. Thereafter, legs became an obsession of Bellmer’s doll constructions—detached legs resembling artificial limbs having a fetishized life of their own.
The girls’ game is unspecified, “But amazement was endless when they unexpectedly pulled themselves up and in impudent play tried out their suspension with runaway hoops, finally hanging naked from open embroidery and loose folds, in order to savor idly together the aftertaste of their game”.32 Hoops, detached legs and frills are the well known motifs of Bellmer’s most arresting fetishistic art of the mid 1930s. He was trying to construct a visual language by which to convey wordlessly the impact of witnessing girls’ games for which words were inadequate. Fascination vied with shock and horror as he assembled images to counteract feelings of being only “a thoroughly common youngster whose muddy pants and muddy shoes were grossly exaggerated in size when seen in the light of disenchanted self-contemplation”.33 It seems that the girls were adolescent with Bellmer just entering puberty. Being especially impressionable at that age, he was easily disenchanted. The event was psychologically catastrophic because Bellmer’s idealizing view of the feminine, formed by identification with his submissive mother, had been violated by the crudity of young girls’ sexual games. He was simply unprepared for what he saw, and had to contain the shock in art. The shock was intensified by identification with the girls, a revelation of his sexual ambiguity.
(The definition of trauma is a shocking event, or successive events, for which integration into one’s existing psychological organization is not possible. Typically, traumas are misprocessed in memory, with recollection impaired.) His comment is “the memory of them left behind too many desires that gnawingly and persistently began to circumscribe a certain goal”. The goal was in part for an “objective correlative” to the trauma, to transform “desire for their charm into destructive or creative activity”.34 Since he could never decide which, it had to be both love and hate for women in the quest for a synthetic triumph over trauma.
Misdirection of Play
So far no biographer has reconstructed these traumatic events beyond Bell-mer’s own enigmatic account. Webb had no further information, writing only about excitement “to be found in the secret garden, now visited by young girls”, later to be turned into black Easter eggs and other desired objects. He speaks also of “those difficult, exciting years of adolescence, when his games with his little girl friends were sowing the germ ... of the most extraordinary photographic fantasies”. It is only in Webb’s slightly different translation of a passage from Memories of the Doll Theme that he makes more explicit than Lichtenstein’s the likelihood that Bellmer’s traumatic encounter had been actively sexual on his part as well as the girl’s: “Nor was bitterness lacking when one of these supple dolls deigned to lower herself to the level of our world, when in the dark mazes of a dwelling made of chairs, crates, ironing boards covered with sheets, the heart was caught beating. Indeed, it was implied that one was not the first to have certain fugitive contacts ...”.35 So the girl was sexually experienced, initiating the youth Bellmer into intimacy for which he was unprepared? Yet Webb makes nothing of this, any more than he does of the later almost certainly sexual encounter with Bellmer’s cousin Ursula. He simply writes, Ursula “was fifteen, and seemed to be the reincarnation of those girls who had played with him in his secret garden ...”.36 No biographical headway is made, any more than interpretation can be confident of what these fugitive encounters with girls actually meant to Bellmer. Webb does not provide, nor do the more insightful Taylor and Lichtenstein supplement, a full narrative of the events Bellmer himself only began to write. No doubt yet another translation of his formulation would reveal more, as would a sentence by sentence critical reading. But in the absence of such work, the observation remains that Bellmer was never master of his experience to the extent of being able to state it clearly, either in word or image. Nor, in the absence of clarity, could he find the right combination of poetic images to make him want to sustain the effort of a full self-portrayal. He was not a W. G. Sebold able to free-associate into fiction the memory fragments that form into an account of life that is almost beyond grasp. The horrific lives of creative persons in twentieth century central Europe and Germany are indeed amenable to the reflective representation that gives them meaning. But such examples are rare and Bellmer never thought of himself as a writer. We wonder how much headway towards comprehending feelings, and their integration, he could have made with Werther-like confessions and smatterings of theory of psychopathology from Lombroso and Freud as guides.