Which was later fatal

1. Does "to reduce the inventiveness of Bellmer’s solution to his fears" mean:

• a. to reduce his inventiveness to his fears (an approach which focuses more on his fears than his inventiveness)

or

• b. to reduce his inventiveness in his technique of representing his fears (an approach that tends not to see his inventiveness in his works that represent his fears)?

2. Does "rather than simply situating his creation as a substitute object" mean "rather than understanding his works simply as representations of his biography"?

3. Does "tubercolosis, which was later fatal" mean "tubercolosis, which will finally kill her"?

Context:

The female doll is dismembered and reassembled in contorted poses which are said to allude to Bellmer’s repressed sado-masochistic desires. Bellmer’s biography has been used to ‘narrativise’ the relation to death and loss in these fantasy constructions, an approach to his work which tends, I think, to reduce the inventiveness of Bellmer’s solution to his fears. Around the time of making the life-size doll, a number of autobiographical factors seemed to coalesce, but I want to emphasise Bellmer’s intention to create ‘new desires’ rather than simply situating his creation as a substitute object. It is the case that his wife was diagnosed with tubercolosis, which was later fatal, and a series of three events occurred in his personal life: the reappearance in his family of a beautiful teenage cousin, Ursula Naguschewski; his attendance at a performance of Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, in which the protagonist falls tragically in love with the lifelike automaton Olympia; and a shipment from his mother of a box of old toys which had belonged to him as a boy.