MIGRATIONS OF WORD AND IMAGE: LEONORA CARRINGTON AND LA DAME OVALE, 1937-42

This thesis examines the word-image relationship between Leonora Carrington’s 1937-8 short story, “La Dame Ovale,” and painting Green Tea (La Dame Ovale) (1942) that she created on either side of a war-driven, transatlantic migration from France to New York. I propose to broaden the framework through which we consider the correspondence between Carrington’s verbal and visual compositions beyond biography and Surrealist ideology to incorporate her interests in Jungian psychology and the humanist theory of ut pictura poesis. In the following argument, I suggest that Carrington’s use of themes related to foreignness and movement, and the interrelations of these in regard to identity, fracture previous assumptions about the story and painting as self-portraits. Indeed, when we consider Carrington’s Dames Ovales in this framework, I argue they can be read as forming a collective portrait of her geopolitical moment.