Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism by Katharine Conley

Conley, Katharine. Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Pp. 179

“Clearly there is sometihng for women in surrealism,” maintains Katharine Conley in her new book, Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism. Clearly there’s something for women, if one considers the large number of feminist critics who have chosen to work in an area noted for its misogyny. Conley’s quest to find that something appeases the internal critic who asks herself, as the author does in her preface, “…why, as a feminist scholar, I was attracted to surrealism in the first place… Was I a masochist?” (xii). If the answer is “yes,” at least Conley feels she is in “good company, since…many scholars of surrealism, both in the United States and in France, are women.” This paradox she calls her “private riddle” (xiii).