MARTHA'S OPÉRA
Scarce, lovely first edition of Penrose's neo-gothic epistolary novella.
Near fine.
Price: $150.00
MARTHA'S OPÉRA
"Il vole, il vole un petit papillon qui tire la lune"
A brief but remarkable text by the Surrealist collage artist and poet. Into the overtly gothic atmosphere of MARTHA'S OPERA, Penrose places an explicitly erotic relationship between two doomed lovers, Emily and Rubia: incarcerated and guarded by jealous male relatives who misapprehend the objects of their love, the women's mutual passion is disclosed to the reader through letters and their fate symbolically orchestrated by the mad Martha, a mythic and lawless figure and the object of ritualistic abhorrence and fear ("Mille maledictions sur vous, vielle sorcière"). Penrose revives another Rubia—or the same Rubia—in her great later work of collage and poetry, DONS DES FEMININES, which may be read as a continuation of MARTHA'S OPERA (Marwood) but whose disconnected and episodic qualities are quite different. The graceful ironies and sharp narrative shape of this earlier and wholly literary work depend as much upon the generic conventions and psychological revelations of the epistolary novel as on the hollowed architectural spaces of the gothic château; and just as in Penrose's later LA COMTESSE SANGLANTE (The Bloody Countess), the remorseless exigencies of blood are suddenly elevated by a poetic flight into the sublime. True lovers sink together beneath the layers of the same black veil, while outside the stone walls a witch makes her way by the black thorns and the light of the moon.
Read more: Renee Riese Hubert, A Study of Valentine Penrose; Kimberley Marwood, "Imaginary Dimensions: Women, Surrealism and the Gothic" in Purves, Women and Gothic.
The Object
Paris: Fontaine, 1946. 5.5'' x 4.5''. Collection "L'age d'or" dirigée par Henri Parisot. Original pink and white card wrappers by Mario Prassinos. Edition of 475; this copy not numbered. 28, [2] pages. Moderate edgewear and page toning. Pages unopened.
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