Frida Kahlo always appears to us masked; her face is still, her body idle, her clothing arranged. She appears to us in expressions of blank pain, stoic endurance. The imagery around her, however, betrays this blank expression, betrays the masking of her elaborate dress. It betrays her and hints at violence. The imagery around her body, her hair, her eyebrows; whether in the form of a dead bird at her neck or a hand hanging from her ear, hint at an explosion… An explosive pain, a fragmented body, a disrupted sense of self: hidden, masked, bound by a metaphorical ribbon. When André Breton described Frida Kahlo's artwork as 'a ribbon around a bomb'¹ he summarised the external perception of Frida Kahlo herself; the constructed-self of her artworks, the impact of her physical presence. Frida was violent, painful, passionate, expressive and dangerous, yet this danger was contained. The potential for her explosion was bound by symbolic ribbons: her costume and masking, her husband Diego Rivera, her self-portraiture.

In the masking of her body with elaborate clothing, and in the construction of her self portraits, Frida created an iconic figure of herself; strong, enduring, endlessly suffering, always beautiful. This construction of her external identity in her paintings managed to disguise the fragmentation and vulnerability expressed in her diaries, of her internal self. Where 'her luxurious dresses hid her broken body,'² her self portraits masked her broken identity. What her diaries reveal is a much less assured woman than her paintings suggest; a woman whose identity hinged on her relationship with her husband; a woman whose identity was shattered through the shattering of her body. A woman who exploded out of her ribbons and onto the page.

André Breton's description of Frida articulates her attraction, but it also articulates an underlying oppressive view of female sexuality, which highlights one of the most important cultural factors in Frida's work; the dominance of her relationship with her husband in the representation of her self. It was for Diego that she dressed in the traditional Mexican Tehuana dress, masking her body and reinventing her identity; during their separation she cut off her hair and stopped wearing the Tehuana clothing. In her diary, references to Diego rise time and again; showing the fusion between their identities in her perception of self:         

While she expressed violence and pain and female sexuality in her artworks, this violence was masked; controlled by the distancing of the viewer, the masking of her expressions and the beauty of the works. Breton did not describe her as 'a vein around a bomb.' Like her artworks, Frida was controlled, in a sense, by her beauty; her desire to conform to the ideals of her husband and her politics. While she was still subversive and her ideas were revolutionary, her revolution was an inherently personal and internal one; the true political force of her work lay in the quiet eruptions of her internal world into the external ribbon-self that she painted both physically and metaphorically. While she challenged society, particularly through works like 'A Few Small Nips'(1935) and 'The Suicide of Dorothy Hale' (1938-39), the force of this challenge relied on her first setting up an expectation of beauty, before slyly undermining it ('Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair,' 1940).

This duality between beauty and ugliness was reflected in the duality of masculine and feminine in her work, and in the contradiction between her radical potential and social conformity. It also points to the duality between her internal world and her external construction of self. The imagery that surrounds her steely face emphasizes this border by hinting at violence and a lack of control. By exposing her body, in particular her internal organs, Frida undermines the beauty of her external body, her clothing, her expression. It is the veins, arteries and blood of her body that echo an explosion, and contradict the ribbons of the external world, and it is this internal explosion that is prevalent in her diary work.

In her relentless self-portraiture, Frida portrays herself with detachment; exposing her body and her pain, both physical and psychological, with a symbolic distance. The result is a unified expression of identity, in which the physical torture she experienced is blended with the psychological sense of fragmentation this pain caused. Where she appears calm and steely in her paintings, her diary speaks otherwise:

Her self-portraits, in this sense, act as psychological mirrors, reflecting back to her a unified image of her identity, a combination of her inner turmoil with the external world. They link, in this sense, to Jacques Lacan's theory of the formation of identity; a child faced with its image in a mirror finds a pleasing sense of unity in the image, which contradicts the fragmented sense of self felt internally, and creates at the same time a feeling of alienation with the image in the mirror. While in her portraits her body is unified, in her diary she writes 'I am DISINTEGRATION.'⁵ In this sense, her artworks act as a metaphorical mirror; whilst her elaborate and beautiful costuming in life hid her fractured body, her artworks act as a mask over her fractured sense of self, its 'lack of harmony, its unfitness.'⁶ While they unify her image, they also alienate her from her internal sense of self, from her body. Perhaps it is in the disruptions on the pages of her diary that she explored a closer connection to her body and, importantly, a freer exploration of her identity.

The pages of her diary link more closely with an internal, unconscious sense of self. As writing and artwork that is expressed with passion and lack of constraint, her diary has a chaotic, abstract, fractured feel; extremely expressive yet incoherent. Julia Kristeva suggests that underlying language and the symbolic order of the external world lies a semiotic chora, a space that links to early childhood, associated with the mother and the unconscious.⁷ This semiotic chora is displaced at Lacan's mirror-stage by the introduction of language and the patriarchal functioning of society. It continues to disrupt the symbolic order, however, through the eruption of repetition, gaps and the irrational in language. These semiotic eruptions are inherently feminine and are closely linked to the female body. This disruptive language can be seen right through Frida's diary, with reference to the body and sensation;

Kristeva argues that through the writing of the unconscious and bodily space associated with the semiotic, women can enter and disrupt the patriarchal language that traditionally excludes them. The fragmented and physical language in Frida's diary, in this sense, can be seen as linking very closely with the semiotic. Where her artworks portray a carefully constructed 'bomb', a silent suffering, her diary portrays the explosion. Her body rises up and screams through the pages, contradicting the masked and stoic appearance of her face in her self portraits.

This explosion of the internal also undermines social expectations; it freely engages in self questioning, in the search for identity. It allows for a fluid interpretation of self; one that incorporates unconscious sensation with conscious thought. It expresses honestly feelings about love and social expectations. It allows for the eruption of the feminine. This internal explosion in writing, allowing for a deep understanding of self is, I think, where the power of the diary, journal and autobiography lie. Frida doesn't need specifically to speak politically; she speaks for herself, and this self-expression resonates among women generally. As Nancy Mairs says in 'Remembering the bone house', 'I want my 'life,' in reporting the details of my own life, to recount, at the level beneath the details, the lives of others. No modesty is entailed here – simply the desire to celebrate the private rather than the public world of human habitation.'⁹

Just as Frida was overshadowed in her public life by Diego, so her diary is at times overshadowed by his presence. Through the exploration of her private life, her internal world and the level beneath the details, however, Frida's experiences of her body and her identity have well transcended the presence of Diego in their influence on the public world. This shows the ways in which the personal can infiltrate and override the political. Her personal imagery and her internal world resonate on a universal level:

Frida Kahlo's diary, through its exploration of her internal world, through the eruption of her body and her fragmented sense of identity, explodes the carefully groomed ribbons that confined her social 'bomb.' In the process, it both validates the exploration of feminine identity and illuminates the relationship between the female body and society.

Grace McQuilten is a Melbourne writer of all things to do with art, poetry and short fiction. She has a Bachelor of Creative Arts from Melbourne University and works at the Ian Potter Museum of Art.

Notes
1 Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Mexican Modernism, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2001, p.25.
2 The Diary of Frida Kahlo; An Intimate Self Portrait, Harry N Abrams Inc. Publishers, New York, 1995, p.23.
3 The Diary of Frida Kahlo, p.205.
4 The Diary of Frida Kahlo, p.271.
5 The Diary of Frida Kahlo, p.225.
6 Ibid, p.275.
7 Kelly Oliver (Ed), The Portable Kristeva, Columbia University Press, New York, 1997.
8 Ibid, p.216.
9 Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House; An Erotics of Place and Space, Beacon Press, Boston, 1995, p.6.
10 Ibid, p.273.