Bellmer had other less helpful guides. His long-term creative endeavor narrowed and perverse sexual obsessions intensified as he absorbed writings by the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille. If anything his illustrative art, following such perverse literary texts, became less exploratory and humane in the sense that the dolls’ pathos vanished. The dolls’ touching oddity gave way to hard pornographic illustrations to Georges Bataille’s Histoire de I’Oeil (1947)—deft in draughtsmanship but too transgressive even for Surrealists, including Andre Breton. Bellmer seems to have been in thrall to a writer given to producing shock, revulsion and disgust, with a tendency to link sex with murderous violence.37 The six engravings for Bataille’s book unfortunately allied Bellmer’s interest in pornography to his art, limiting its ability to grow. The illustrations deflected him from following the compassionate theme that flickers in the background of his identification with the dolls. instead of exploring more deeply his conflicted feelings for the dolls, Bellmer’s work became sexually explicit, including prurient photographs of female genitals. citing biographical reasons in stressful events for heightened eroticism is helpful, but it does not change the distorting, damaging and morbid images of human sexuality to which Bellmer turned.38
Bellmer was never dedicated to cruelty as, for example, was the Nazi concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele. He was evidently not a physical abuser of women, seeming to suffer with them rather than deliberately cause bodily suffering. But punitive, even sadistic, tendencies are obvious. The 1958 bondage photographs of Unica are explicit attacks on the female form, painful for her to endure and repulsive to look at. No doubt they were made with her cooperation, and we cannot gauge her own masochistic wish to be punished by restraints. Yet Bellmer was their perpetrator, as he had been the dismemberer of dolls and other such symbolic acts of anxious avoidant revenge. He was not a Nazi torturer (being a declared anti-Nazi), but much the same impulses as led to concentration camp torture and death of prisoners are found in Bellmer’s psychology. The disconnected, “thrown” female dolls’ legs of the early 1930s are uncomfortably like the piled bodies from extermination camps a few years later. They too are medical (surgical) “experiments” of a kind, lying far outside the accepted realm of art. A necrophiliac death theme appears in certain of the doll photographs of 1935.39 In this sense, Bellmer was prophetic but in a particularly horrible way he did not himself wish to understand.
A sort of group fantasy contagion may be detected, “using” the artist as its conduit. Bellmer’s art caught gynophobic signals from pathological German society and culture. It caught this anxious, fearful and punitive transmission because he was psychologically prepared and technically ready for the task. As the rebel son of an authoritarian officer class father who was an abusive husband, Bellmer could not avoid emulation; discipline and arbitrary punishment were in his blood. There may have been an ambivalent Oedipal theme at work, but much more Bellmer seems to have been oppressed by the feminizing alliance with his mother which, while it allowed him heterosexuality, yet so restricted his feelings to the avoidantly narcissistic that he had to enact resentment. Sexual over-stimulation at the seductive hands of young girls in Bellmer’s adolescence, girls with whom he seems to have colluded, left him edgy and resentful—a trauma, though named, was never overcome. (This is recorded fact, without needing to hypothesize “primal scene” trauma to explain Bellmer’s overstimulation.) His cousin Ursula’s precocious sexuality contributed further overstimulation. Like his mother, Bellmer was a victim of punitiveness and, while repelled by Nazism, it gave him a powerful hypermasculine retributive theme to work out on the female forms he invented. This became a desperate, life-long obsession with damaged females, reinvented in many guises, but never understood, mourned, integrated and relieved. The quality of art inevitably suffered from chronic punitive and narcissistic misuse.
The point is that Bellmer’s creations advance the cause of art less than they may seem to do. Art needs to be reflective upon (not just representative of) such obsessive wishes. Art that does not see itself impedes and sometimes degrades the creative urge. Time and again Bellmer registers missed opportunity, his art becoming so hermetically sealed that no other imaginative life could enter. As Unica’s mental health deteriorated, Bellmer’s art fixed itself in despairing cynicism and he seems unable to have devised new images to assess the state of their lives. There were no more self-probing double portraits to show the final stages of their fusion and separation. He must have realized regarding Unica’s and his own plight that there could not be, and perhaps never was, a rewarding art of sexual “liberation”. His alcoholism said as much, and his health deteriorated.
Thus little is to be gained by talking about doll art, and its sequels, as reparative, or about Bellmer’s lifetime of endeavor in art as having a successful restorative or redemptive function. Other doll art tells us about moving its makers in productive directions. Some artists who felt destructive towards dolls have made much more of the opportunity for insight. In D. H. Lawrence’s autobiographical Sons and Lovers (1913), where the hero Paul Morel is a mother’s boy who hates his father, the “sacrifice” of a doll is tellingly symbolic of Paul’s developing ambivalence towards women. The doll Arabella, belonging to his dominating sister Annie, receives his boyish resentment when “he jumped crash into the face of the hidden doll”—covered in the sofa. Annie was appalled but forgave her brother who, a few days later, said “‘Let’s make a sacrifice of Arabella.’ ‘Let’s burn her’. Lawrence writes, “So long as the stupid big doll burned he rejoiced in silence. At the end he poked among the embers with a stick, fished out the arms and legs, all blackened, and smashed them under stones.” “‘That’s the sacrifice of Missis Arabella,’ he said. ‘An’ I’m glad there’s nothing left of her’”.40 When thinking back on this passage early in the novel, the perceptive reader (along with Lawrence himself) sees it to be a precursor of Paul’s lengthy troubled relations with women, from his mother to his lovers: all become sacrifices, in one way or another, to Paul/Lawrence’s erotic ambivalence.