Researcher ORCID Identifier

0009-0003-6448-7401

Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Art History

Second Department

French Studies

Reader 1

Natalie Rachlin

Reader 2

Julia Lum

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2026 Ava Koblik

Abstract

This thesis examines the relationship between selfhood, aesthetics, and politics in the collaborative work of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore through the lens of bovarysme, a theory of subjectivity developed by Jules de Gaultier that describes the capacity to imagine oneself otherwise. While existing scholarship has largely interpreted Cahun and Moore’s photographic practice through frameworks of gender performativity, this study argues that their visual and literary works are more fully understood through Cahun’s sustained engagement with bovarysme as a model of subjective transformation with political implications.

Focusing on the interplay between text and image, this project analyzes Cahun’s experimental writing alongside the pair’s photographic self-portraits and photomontages to demonstrate a coherent artistic strategy grounded in fragmentation, inversion, and montage. The first section pairs the poem Aurige (1930) from Aveux non avenus with the photograph Claude Cahun et Marcel Moore, sans titre [Cahun devant le miroir] (1928), showing how both works mobilize the mirror as a site of self-reinvention and destabilize fixed identity through formal disjunction and multiplicity. The second section considers the photomontage Frontispiece (1930) in relation to Cahun’s political pamphlet Les Paris sont ouverts (1934), arguing that the artists’ use of montage enacts what Cahun theorized as l’action indirecte: an open-ended, participatory mode of artistic engagement that provokes subjective and political transformation.

By situating Cahun and Moore’s visual production in dialogue with Cahun’s literary and political writings, this thesis demonstrates that their work articulates a model of subjectivity as fluid, relational, and continually reimagined. Ultimately, it argues that bovarysme operates not only as an aesthetic principle but as a political strategy, through which imaginative self-transformation becomes a means of resisting normative constructions of gender, identity, and power.

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