The Goddess and the Islands: Mythopoetic Aura, Arts and Culture in the Balearics

Abstract

[eng] This paper examines the treatment of the female trope as a precedent of creation during the 60s and 70s by foreign artists who made their journeys to the Balearics . Due to the social, political and economic movements that took place in the mid-twentieth century, the Balearic Islands became an artistic hotspot wherein these geniuses drew inspiration from. The Islands were reborn as a figurative Muse in a patriarchal social system whose artists tried to change by fusing the entitlement of Her with the Isles’ connotations attributed to the Goddess. The aim of this paper is to explore the extent of which these blurred boundaries between literary and artistic blossoming, society and the Muse are intertwined in the Islands to substantiate how its representation resulted in a degeneration of the basic beliefs integrated with Her. Evidence has been gathered by dint of a review on some of the artists’ output, collected mainly from books, songs, paintings and sculptures, setting out a departure point from Robert Graves’s The White Goddess . This research challenges the way in which the prototypical perception of the Muse has been characterized as it deviated from its initial set of values to a reduced image of sexual objectification since men deprived women of the agency they deserved.