Surrealism and Boundless
Don't want to share any spoilers here ... so I won't go too much into the content of the Boundless (to be released Feb. 17, 2015) Reader's Guide. However, here's a look at how surrealism impacts the book.
The action in Boundless begins in 1927, a time in American and world history when the world was changing dramatically. Nearly seventy years of Victorian morality was fading. In America, the '20s was a time of immense economic prosperity that saw the birth of the Jazz Age. But, beneath that glitter was the rise of organized crime fueled by prohibition, the poverty of sharecroppers in the South and Mid-West and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
Society and culture evolved. Women earned the vote, people became more mobile through the cheap, mass produced automobile. Arts and culture shifted into the surreal.
As I was writing Boundless, I was intrigued by the surrealism movement and how it impacted my story of two young women growing up in Alabama, and the deal they were offered at the crossroads one night. The painting that inspired me most was L'Orage, (The Thunderstorm), painted in 1926 by French artist Georges Malkine.
Malkine was the only painter to sign André Breton’s surrealist manifesto in 1924. According to the Museum of Modern Art: The Surrealists sought to overthrow the rules of modern society by demolishing its backbone of rational thought. To do so, they attempted to tap into the “superior reality,” of the subconscious mind.
In one night the women of Boundless were violently thrust from a corporeal, mundane life to a world not only physical, but often supernatural, where thoughts and dreams have power. For women with little authority in their own lives, to suddenly become more - to have power over themselves that can shape the rest of the world - that felt surreal.
Malkine's painting of a tall black chair makes the viewer uncomfortable. It truly feels surreal. At first glance you could believe it was just the ghostly fog swirling about the chair. But it is more. It is a seat for one surrounded by uncertainty. The dimensions are subtly stretched and strange. It is beyond the ordinary, but yet ordinary. Just like Minerva and Idella.
Boundless
Melissa Wyllie
The action in Boundless begins in 1927, a time in American and world history when the world was changing dramatically. Nearly seventy years of Victorian morality was fading. In America, the '20s was a time of immense economic prosperity that saw the birth of the Jazz Age. But, beneath that glitter was the rise of organized crime fueled by prohibition, the poverty of sharecroppers in the South and Mid-West and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
Society and culture evolved. Women earned the vote, people became more mobile through the cheap, mass produced automobile. Arts and culture shifted into the surreal.
As I was writing Boundless, I was intrigued by the surrealism movement and how it impacted my story of two young women growing up in Alabama, and the deal they were offered at the crossroads one night. The painting that inspired me most was L'Orage, (The Thunderstorm), painted in 1926 by French artist Georges Malkine.
Malkine was the only painter to sign André Breton’s surrealist manifesto in 1924. According to the Museum of Modern Art: The Surrealists sought to overthrow the rules of modern society by demolishing its backbone of rational thought. To do so, they attempted to tap into the “superior reality,” of the subconscious mind.
In one night the women of Boundless were violently thrust from a corporeal, mundane life to a world not only physical, but often supernatural, where thoughts and dreams have power. For women with little authority in their own lives, to suddenly become more - to have power over themselves that can shape the rest of the world - that felt surreal.
Malkine's painting of a tall black chair makes the viewer uncomfortable. It truly feels surreal. At first glance you could believe it was just the ghostly fog swirling about the chair. But it is more. It is a seat for one surrounded by uncertainty. The dimensions are subtly stretched and strange. It is beyond the ordinary, but yet ordinary. Just like Minerva and Idella.
Boundless
Melissa Wyllie
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