Officially ended by Elizabeth II in 1958, the formal debutante party was a very weird thing indeed. Leonora Carrington famously hated hers in the 1930s, running away shortly afterwards to take up with the Surrealists in Paris.
‘The Debutante’ is a strange comic horror story that lampoons the brutality of ‘sophisticated’ societal ritual. As in her paintings, Carrington’s writing draws from waking reality and dreams, from playfulness and from malevolence. In the ‘The Debutante’, a young woman preparing for her coming out ball meets a hyena at her local zoo. The girl is not at all enthused about the upcoming party, but the hyena is very keen to go in her place. They hatch a plan to squeeze the animal into the girl’s dress. A maid is callously killed so that the hyena can have a face to wear, to complete the disguise. The hyena goes off to the party and the girl stays home and has a nice time. Later, the mother returns furious – the hyena caused a terrible scene, refusing to eat any cake, before eating the face that it was wearing and escaping out of the window.
First published in 1940 in André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour. Collected in The Debutante and Other Stories, Silver Press 2017
A Personal Anthology 