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The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History
'Sexuality is power' - so says the Marquis de Sade, philosopher and pornographer extraordinaire. His virtuous Justine keeps to the rules laid down by men, her reward rape and humiliation; his Juliette, Justine's triumphantly monstrous antithesis, viciously exploits her sexuality. In a world where all tenderness is false, all beds are minefields.
But now Sade has met his match.
With invention and genius, Angela Carter takes on these outrageous figments of his extreme imagination, and transforms them into symbols of our time - the Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes. Angela Carter delves into the viscera of our distorted sexuality and reveals a dazzling vision of love which admits neither of conqueror nor of conquered.
But now Sade has met his match.
With invention and genius, Angela Carter takes on these outrageous figments of his extreme imagination, and transforms them into symbols of our time - the Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes. Angela Carter delves into the viscera of our distorted sexuality and reveals a dazzling vision of love which admits neither of conqueror nor of conquered.
181 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
133 people are currently reading
5,077 people want to read
About the author
Angela Carter
177 books3,579 followersBorn Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature.
She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982) that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised." She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). She was there at the same time as Roland Barthes, who published his experiences in Empire of Signs (1970).
She then explored the United States, Asia, and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son.
As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in Shaking a Leg. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Wolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003).
At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives.
Her novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature.
Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer. Her obituary published in The Observer said, "She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and reveled in the diverse."
She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982) that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised." She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). She was there at the same time as Roland Barthes, who published his experiences in Empire of Signs (1970).
She then explored the United States, Asia, and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son.
As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in Shaking a Leg. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Wolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003).
At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives.
Her novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature.
Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer. Her obituary published in The Observer said, "She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and reveled in the diverse."
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May 23, 2011
This book's primary thesis is that the Marquis De Sade is the father of modern feminism. For the uninitiated, De Sade's works are infamous for their depictions of sexual humiliation and cruelty. We get the term 'sadism' from the sex practices he fearlessly explored.
Against all expectation, Carter supports this seemingly absurd thesis in a way that is lucid, reasonable, insightful, and even amusing. It seems there is a gift for women in Donatien's mad sensual rebellion, after all.
I have struggled for some time in trying to review this book, simply because it is still beyond me how anyone could be smart and talented enough to propose something so outlandish, and then to make it seem the most natural thing in the world.
Carter's observations on sexuality, gender, and pornography are as remarkable as Foucault's, with none of the meandering semiotics. Her ability to say precisely what she means, both evocatively and concisely never ceased to impress me.
She also suggests that many commonly accepted aspects of feminism are not only narrow-minded, but counterproductive. For instance: she presents how the popular 'mother goddess' figure is just another way to entrap women into the role of 'baby factory'--even making them proud of their one-dimensional existence. Of course, she says it better than I.
This book was roundly and vehemently criticized by high-ranking feminists when it was published. They could see no way that their plight could possibly be illuminated in the works of any man, let alone a man possessed of a perverse and dehumanizing sexuality.
They were uninterested in looking for a commonality with someone they were so clearly superior to. Contrarily, Carter shows that when we are able to connect ourselves to those we instinctively draw away from, we can move further from our narrow selves and closer to humanity.
How can a movement seek to move beyond mere gender definition and call itself 'feminism'? Would we call a movement to erase the delineation between rich and poor 'povertism'?
If the goal of feminism is to remove the discrepancies and prejudices between the sexes, why not name the philosophy after the goal instead of the conflict? 'Humanism' always sounded good to me.
Carter likewise desires to reach beyond barriers, refusing to accept a strict delineation between smut and philosophy. Her willingness to search for insight in the last place expected makes her first unique, and second, revolutionary. It is all too sad that modern sexual theory is still far behind the mark Carter set, it's current vanguard having neither the imagination nor the daring to match her, let alone excel beyond her.
Against all expectation, Carter supports this seemingly absurd thesis in a way that is lucid, reasonable, insightful, and even amusing. It seems there is a gift for women in Donatien's mad sensual rebellion, after all.
I have struggled for some time in trying to review this book, simply because it is still beyond me how anyone could be smart and talented enough to propose something so outlandish, and then to make it seem the most natural thing in the world.
Carter's observations on sexuality, gender, and pornography are as remarkable as Foucault's, with none of the meandering semiotics. Her ability to say precisely what she means, both evocatively and concisely never ceased to impress me.
She also suggests that many commonly accepted aspects of feminism are not only narrow-minded, but counterproductive. For instance: she presents how the popular 'mother goddess' figure is just another way to entrap women into the role of 'baby factory'--even making them proud of their one-dimensional existence. Of course, she says it better than I.
This book was roundly and vehemently criticized by high-ranking feminists when it was published. They could see no way that their plight could possibly be illuminated in the works of any man, let alone a man possessed of a perverse and dehumanizing sexuality.
They were uninterested in looking for a commonality with someone they were so clearly superior to. Contrarily, Carter shows that when we are able to connect ourselves to those we instinctively draw away from, we can move further from our narrow selves and closer to humanity.
How can a movement seek to move beyond mere gender definition and call itself 'feminism'? Would we call a movement to erase the delineation between rich and poor 'povertism'?
If the goal of feminism is to remove the discrepancies and prejudices between the sexes, why not name the philosophy after the goal instead of the conflict? 'Humanism' always sounded good to me.
Carter likewise desires to reach beyond barriers, refusing to accept a strict delineation between smut and philosophy. Her willingness to search for insight in the last place expected makes her first unique, and second, revolutionary. It is all too sad that modern sexual theory is still far behind the mark Carter set, it's current vanguard having neither the imagination nor the daring to match her, let alone excel beyond her.
December 12, 2014
A Feminist Exercise
"The Sadeian Woman" is a major cultural exercise for many reasons. Here are just four.
First, it tries to understand and explain pornography from a woman’s point of view (as at 1979).
Second, it examines the work of Sade and advances the proposition that he might be a "moral pornographer".
Third, it implicitly questions, like Simone de Beauvoir, "Must We Burn Sade?"
Lastly, if only in its title, it seeks to define or promote the concept of a "Sadeian Woman".
Porn Defined
In 1979, the definition of pornography was still problematical and divisive.
Conservatives opposed it, however defined, because it was sexually explicit. Feminists opposed it because women might have been the implicit target of the work. Right and Left therefore united in opposition. There was little subtlety or endeavour to define an acceptable middle ground (apart from the traditional legal defence of artistic or literary merit).
The focus of this work is literary pornography. It’s not really concerned with visual or graphic erotica. It’s about words. The issue is with what can be conveyed by words and imagination alone.
Carter doesn’t really define pornography in terms of what is or isn’t porn.
Let’s assume that she is referring to sexually explicit literature. It extends to both erotica and erotic violence.
Porn Characterised
What Carter is great at, though, is defining the characteristics of porn. It’s not really art for art’s sake. It has a job to do.
She believes it has two main functions: it can work as an instruction manual; and/or it can be designed to arouse the reader.
It starts with a "libidinous fantasy" and it transforms it into text. It turns flesh into words. These words, for men, become "mental masturbatory objects".
Still, for all the focus on flesh, it’s abstracted or sublimated into words. It works in the mind. It creates and caters to a "cerebral insatiability".
It works in the private space of the reader, yet it allows the reader’s own desires to invade his own private space.
In Carter’s words, it leaves a hole or a gap that the male reader is able to fill with his penis. Later, she says of Sade that the hole is big enough to fit his whip.
It allows a male to imagine a substitute activity, which is not what he is immediately reading about, nor is it real life sexual activity. It’s an act of the reader’s imagination.
Porn Universalised
At the same time, porn strips away extraneous detail, it reduces the sexual performance to pure functionality, to the interaction of penis and vagina, to erect probe and fringed hole. It strips away all of the complexity of real life and mythologises it:
"Pornography must always have the false simplicity of fable; the abstraction of the flesh involves the mystification of the flesh…it reduces the actors in the drama to instruments of pure function, so the pursuit of pleasure becomes in itself a metaphysical quest."
It simplifies it down to fundamental metaphysical concepts like positive and negative, the male exclamation mark and the female zero, the active and the passive, the vivid and the inert, the tiger and the lamb, the carnivore and the herbivore.
The mythologisation of the sex act universalizes it (and vice versa). "At the first touch or sigh he, she, is subsumed immediately into a universal." It is no longer a real, particularized, palpable, tactile experience. It becomes a "fantasy love-play of the archetypes":
"The anonymity of the lovers, whom the act transforms from me and you into they, precludes the expression of ourselves. So the act is taken away from us even as we perform it. We become voyeurs upon our own caresses.
"The act does not acknowledge the participation of the individual, bringing to it a whole new life of which the act is only a part. The man and woman, in their particularity, their being, are absent from these representations of themselves as male and female.
"These tableaux of falsification remove our sexual life from the world, from tactile experience itself. The lovers are lost to themselves in a privacy that does not transcend but deny reality. So the act can never satisfy them, because it does not affect their lives. It occurs in the mythic dream-time of religious ritual."
In effect, the tableax of falsification alienate us from sexuality.
Carter argues with and against this whole process of universalisation and de-particularisation. It blinds us to the real, to the particular, to ourselves, and to our selves. She wants to retrieve the de-universalising facts of real life.
Universalisation is not just anathema to humanity, it’s the enemy of women in particular:
"The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick. Pornography, like marriage and the fictions of romantic love, assists the process of false universalizing."
The reduction of woman to universalized flesh distracts a woman from the far more important recognition that "my anatomy is only part of an infinitely complex organization, my self."
Thus, it alienates women from body, sex and self.
The Moral Pornographer
Importantly, Carter doesn’t totally reject literary pornography as a genre.
Instead, she posits a moral pornography that would work differently from customary porn:
"…the pornographer’s more usual business is to assert that the function of flesh is pure pleasure."
Pleasure, like flesh or the body, is more complicated than porn portrays it. It too is part of this "infinitely complex organization, my self."
Carter then defines the alternative:
"The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders, and projects a model of the way such a world might work.
"A moral photographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes.
"His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind.
"Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he entered the realms of true obscenity as he describes it."
The Terrorist of the Imagination
Carter obviously doesn’t see the moral pornographer as upholding mainstream morality. It needs to be overturned. The moral pornographer needs to be a revolutionary:
"The pornographer has it in his power to become a terrorist of the imagination, a sexual guerilla whose purpose is to overturn our most basic notions of these relations, to reinstitute sexuality as a primary mode of being rather than a specialised area of vacation from being..."
The above analysis occurs in the first chapter called "Polemical Preface: Pornography in the Service of Women".
In the second half of the chapter, Carter turns her attention to Sade and how he fits into this scheme of things. It’s here that Carter’s approach has attracted most criticism from other feminists.
I don’t recall any point at which she says that Sade is an unreserved moral pornographer, in the sense that the whole of his work has this moral purpose. Instead, she says:
"Sade became a terrorist of the imagination…,turning the unacknowledged truths of the encounters of sexuality into a cruel festival at which women are prime sacrificial victims when they are not ritual murderesses themselves."
Carter doesn’t pretend that Sade is an angel. It’s clear that he was transgressive, both personally and in his writing. She recognises that "erotic violence…will be condemned out of hand."
Still, there is a sense in which a terrorist of the imagination can be a friend of women, an ally in the battle for feminist causes:
"The pornographer as terrorist may not think of himself as a friend of women…but he will always be our unconscious ally because he begins to approach some kind of emblematic truth, whereas the lackey pornographer, like the devious fellows who write love stories for women’s magazines, that softest of all forms of pornography, can only do harm."
Women, feminists or otherwise, will no doubt disagree about the merits of this proposition. Andrea Dworkin labelled "The Sadeian Woman" a "pseudofeminist literary essay", arguing that "the power of the pornographer is the power of the rapist."
In the balance of this review, however, I’d like to focus on what Carter found of value in Sade, and what she found lacking.
To be honest, what she found lacking points to the real value of Carter’s own views about how porn could be of service to women.
"Storm Troopers of Individual Consciousness"
Each of the next three chapters is dedicated to one of Sade’s books: "Justine","Juliette" and "Philosophy in the Bourdoir".
Carter sticks very closely to the text in order to make her points. Rarely do these chapters transcend synopses and achieve the exhilaration of the first and last chapters.
The two women, Justine and Juliette, are sisters, but dialectical opposites:
"Justine is a good woman in a man’s world…Her life is that of a woman martyrised by the circumstances of her life as a woman.... She is the heroine of a black, inverted fairy tale and its subject is the misfortunes of unfreedom.
"Justine is the holy virgin; Juliette is the profane whore…Juliette is of the world, worldly..her sexual affairs are engaged in either for profit or for fun; she is contemptuous, embarrassed by professions of love.
"Juliette is a version of Faust written by a man who believed that, if man exists, we do not need to invent the devil."
Carter quotes the poet Apollinaire on the two sisters:
"It was no accident the Marquis chose heroines and not heroes. Justine is woman as she has been until now, enslaved, miserable and less than human; her opposite, Juliette, represents the woman whose advent he anticipated, a figure of whom minds have as yet no conception, who is rising out of mankind, who will have wings, and who will renew the world."
Carter isn’t quite prepared to equate Juliette with today’s New Woman. However, she sees some value in the description of the contrast between the two.
More importantly, she describes Juliette herself in terms of her terrorism:
"She uses sex as an instrument of terror…she lobs her sex at men and women as if it were a hand grenade."
It’s almost as if Juliette herself is the moral pornographer, the most appropriate vehicle for "the total demystification of the flesh."
Carter elaborates in the fourth chapter:
"The Sadeian woman, then, subverts only her own socially conditioned role in the world of God, the King and the Law. She does not subvert her society, except incidentally, as a storm trooper of the individual consciousness."
For both Sade and Carter, God, the King and the Law are "the trifold masculine symbolism of authority".
What's not absolutely clear is whether the concept of a "Sadeian woman" is just Carter's description of Sade's female characters in his fiction, or whether it incorporates women who might use the characters as role models. I suspect that the former is the case.
Master and Slave
The last chapter hones in on the actual relationship between man and woman, libertine and victim, debaucher and debauchee.
Like Simone de Beauvoir’s essay before it, the analysis is couched in the Hegelian terminology of Master and Slave.
The libertines are not just men. Juliette herself becomes a libertine, though with a difference:
"Sade’s female libertines…ingest but do not integrate within themselves the signs of maleness."
Juliette like all libertines, regardless of gender, lives outside society and the law:
"She has obtained the lonely freedom of the libertine, which is the freedom of the outlaw…
"Sade’s heroines, those who become libertines, accept damnation…exile from human life, as a necessary fact of life…So Sade creates a museum of woman-monsters."
What drives all libertines in Sade is their own orgasm. Carter refers to orgasm at various points as precious, even sovereign. The orgasm is a singular concern. The libertine cares only for their own. There is no interest in or desire for a reciprocal or simultaneous orgasm. No value if attached to mutuality. The libertine must be a Master, a despot. An orgasm means a triumph of the ego:
"Orgasm has possessed the libertine; during the irreducible timelessness of the moment of orgasm, the hole in the world through which we fall, he has been as a god, but this state is as fearful as it is pleasurable and, besides, is lost as soon as it is attained.
"He has burst into the Utopia of desire, in which only the self exists; he has not negotiated the terms of his arrival there, as gentle lovers do, but taken Utopia by force. See, the conquering hero comes. And, just as immediately, he has been expelled from it, a fall like Lucifer’s from heaven to hell."
This coming to an end, this expulsion is an un-selfing. For all of the pleasure, it too is alienating.
The libertine is trapped in an absolute egotism and perpetual solitude of his own construction:
"In Sade, sexual pleasure is an entirely inward experience."
The flipside of the outlaw status of the libertine is that the pleasure he gets is bound up with criminality. In fact, the pleasure is greater, precisely because the sexual act is criminal:
"…his criminality is his excuse, the source of his pride, and of his denial of love.
"The libertine’s perversions are the acting out of his denial of love."
Ultimately, this is where Carter (like Simone de Beauvoir) parts company with Sade. The libertine is not just opposed to God, the King and the Law. He is also opposed to love.
Neither women nor men can learn any more from Sade that will help the next part of the journey.
Onwards to "Joy, Limitless Joy"
As with Simone de Beauvoir, Carter seeks reciprocal and mutual recognition (in Hegel’s terminology) and Mitsein (in Heidegger’s).
The libertine who is trapped in diabolic solitude has a holy terror or fear of love.
It’s in this fear or terror that Carter finds "the source of all opposition to the emancipation of women."
Carter drives home the point with a lengthy quotation from Emma Goldman’s pamphlet, "The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation."
It’s such a good statement of the concerns that Simone de Beauvoir and Angela Carter share with respect to Sade (as developed and expressed within an Hegelian framework) that I’ll end this review with the last few sentences:
"The most vital right is the right to love and be loved.
"Indeed, if partial emancipation is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be a sweetheart and mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate.
"It will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds…
"A true conception of the relation of the sexes will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows but one great thing: to give of one’s self boundlessly, in order to find one’s self richer, deeper, better.
"That alone can fill the emptiness, and transform the tragedy of woman’s emancipation into joy, limitless joy."
"The Sadeian Woman" is a major cultural exercise for many reasons. Here are just four.
First, it tries to understand and explain pornography from a woman’s point of view (as at 1979).
Second, it examines the work of Sade and advances the proposition that he might be a "moral pornographer".
Third, it implicitly questions, like Simone de Beauvoir, "Must We Burn Sade?"
Lastly, if only in its title, it seeks to define or promote the concept of a "Sadeian Woman".
Porn Defined
In 1979, the definition of pornography was still problematical and divisive.
Conservatives opposed it, however defined, because it was sexually explicit. Feminists opposed it because women might have been the implicit target of the work. Right and Left therefore united in opposition. There was little subtlety or endeavour to define an acceptable middle ground (apart from the traditional legal defence of artistic or literary merit).
The focus of this work is literary pornography. It’s not really concerned with visual or graphic erotica. It’s about words. The issue is with what can be conveyed by words and imagination alone.
Carter doesn’t really define pornography in terms of what is or isn’t porn.
Let’s assume that she is referring to sexually explicit literature. It extends to both erotica and erotic violence.
Porn Characterised
What Carter is great at, though, is defining the characteristics of porn. It’s not really art for art’s sake. It has a job to do.
She believes it has two main functions: it can work as an instruction manual; and/or it can be designed to arouse the reader.
It starts with a "libidinous fantasy" and it transforms it into text. It turns flesh into words. These words, for men, become "mental masturbatory objects".
Still, for all the focus on flesh, it’s abstracted or sublimated into words. It works in the mind. It creates and caters to a "cerebral insatiability".
It works in the private space of the reader, yet it allows the reader’s own desires to invade his own private space.
In Carter’s words, it leaves a hole or a gap that the male reader is able to fill with his penis. Later, she says of Sade that the hole is big enough to fit his whip.
It allows a male to imagine a substitute activity, which is not what he is immediately reading about, nor is it real life sexual activity. It’s an act of the reader’s imagination.
Porn Universalised
At the same time, porn strips away extraneous detail, it reduces the sexual performance to pure functionality, to the interaction of penis and vagina, to erect probe and fringed hole. It strips away all of the complexity of real life and mythologises it:
"Pornography must always have the false simplicity of fable; the abstraction of the flesh involves the mystification of the flesh…it reduces the actors in the drama to instruments of pure function, so the pursuit of pleasure becomes in itself a metaphysical quest."
It simplifies it down to fundamental metaphysical concepts like positive and negative, the male exclamation mark and the female zero, the active and the passive, the vivid and the inert, the tiger and the lamb, the carnivore and the herbivore.
The mythologisation of the sex act universalizes it (and vice versa). "At the first touch or sigh he, she, is subsumed immediately into a universal." It is no longer a real, particularized, palpable, tactile experience. It becomes a "fantasy love-play of the archetypes":
"The anonymity of the lovers, whom the act transforms from me and you into they, precludes the expression of ourselves. So the act is taken away from us even as we perform it. We become voyeurs upon our own caresses.
"The act does not acknowledge the participation of the individual, bringing to it a whole new life of which the act is only a part. The man and woman, in their particularity, their being, are absent from these representations of themselves as male and female.
"These tableaux of falsification remove our sexual life from the world, from tactile experience itself. The lovers are lost to themselves in a privacy that does not transcend but deny reality. So the act can never satisfy them, because it does not affect their lives. It occurs in the mythic dream-time of religious ritual."
In effect, the tableax of falsification alienate us from sexuality.
Carter argues with and against this whole process of universalisation and de-particularisation. It blinds us to the real, to the particular, to ourselves, and to our selves. She wants to retrieve the de-universalising facts of real life.
Universalisation is not just anathema to humanity, it’s the enemy of women in particular:
"The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick. Pornography, like marriage and the fictions of romantic love, assists the process of false universalizing."
The reduction of woman to universalized flesh distracts a woman from the far more important recognition that "my anatomy is only part of an infinitely complex organization, my self."
Thus, it alienates women from body, sex and self.
The Moral Pornographer
Importantly, Carter doesn’t totally reject literary pornography as a genre.
Instead, she posits a moral pornography that would work differently from customary porn:
"…the pornographer’s more usual business is to assert that the function of flesh is pure pleasure."
Pleasure, like flesh or the body, is more complicated than porn portrays it. It too is part of this "infinitely complex organization, my self."
Carter then defines the alternative:
"The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders, and projects a model of the way such a world might work.
"A moral photographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes.
"His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind.
"Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he entered the realms of true obscenity as he describes it."
The Terrorist of the Imagination
Carter obviously doesn’t see the moral pornographer as upholding mainstream morality. It needs to be overturned. The moral pornographer needs to be a revolutionary:
"The pornographer has it in his power to become a terrorist of the imagination, a sexual guerilla whose purpose is to overturn our most basic notions of these relations, to reinstitute sexuality as a primary mode of being rather than a specialised area of vacation from being..."
The above analysis occurs in the first chapter called "Polemical Preface: Pornography in the Service of Women".
In the second half of the chapter, Carter turns her attention to Sade and how he fits into this scheme of things. It’s here that Carter’s approach has attracted most criticism from other feminists.
I don’t recall any point at which she says that Sade is an unreserved moral pornographer, in the sense that the whole of his work has this moral purpose. Instead, she says:
"Sade became a terrorist of the imagination…,turning the unacknowledged truths of the encounters of sexuality into a cruel festival at which women are prime sacrificial victims when they are not ritual murderesses themselves."
Carter doesn’t pretend that Sade is an angel. It’s clear that he was transgressive, both personally and in his writing. She recognises that "erotic violence…will be condemned out of hand."
Still, there is a sense in which a terrorist of the imagination can be a friend of women, an ally in the battle for feminist causes:
"The pornographer as terrorist may not think of himself as a friend of women…but he will always be our unconscious ally because he begins to approach some kind of emblematic truth, whereas the lackey pornographer, like the devious fellows who write love stories for women’s magazines, that softest of all forms of pornography, can only do harm."
Women, feminists or otherwise, will no doubt disagree about the merits of this proposition. Andrea Dworkin labelled "The Sadeian Woman" a "pseudofeminist literary essay", arguing that "the power of the pornographer is the power of the rapist."
In the balance of this review, however, I’d like to focus on what Carter found of value in Sade, and what she found lacking.
To be honest, what she found lacking points to the real value of Carter’s own views about how porn could be of service to women.
"Storm Troopers of Individual Consciousness"
Each of the next three chapters is dedicated to one of Sade’s books: "Justine","Juliette" and "Philosophy in the Bourdoir".
Carter sticks very closely to the text in order to make her points. Rarely do these chapters transcend synopses and achieve the exhilaration of the first and last chapters.
The two women, Justine and Juliette, are sisters, but dialectical opposites:
"Justine is a good woman in a man’s world…Her life is that of a woman martyrised by the circumstances of her life as a woman.... She is the heroine of a black, inverted fairy tale and its subject is the misfortunes of unfreedom.
"Justine is the holy virgin; Juliette is the profane whore…Juliette is of the world, worldly..her sexual affairs are engaged in either for profit or for fun; she is contemptuous, embarrassed by professions of love.
"Juliette is a version of Faust written by a man who believed that, if man exists, we do not need to invent the devil."
Carter quotes the poet Apollinaire on the two sisters:
"It was no accident the Marquis chose heroines and not heroes. Justine is woman as she has been until now, enslaved, miserable and less than human; her opposite, Juliette, represents the woman whose advent he anticipated, a figure of whom minds have as yet no conception, who is rising out of mankind, who will have wings, and who will renew the world."
Carter isn’t quite prepared to equate Juliette with today’s New Woman. However, she sees some value in the description of the contrast between the two.
More importantly, she describes Juliette herself in terms of her terrorism:
"She uses sex as an instrument of terror…she lobs her sex at men and women as if it were a hand grenade."
It’s almost as if Juliette herself is the moral pornographer, the most appropriate vehicle for "the total demystification of the flesh."
Carter elaborates in the fourth chapter:
"The Sadeian woman, then, subverts only her own socially conditioned role in the world of God, the King and the Law. She does not subvert her society, except incidentally, as a storm trooper of the individual consciousness."
For both Sade and Carter, God, the King and the Law are "the trifold masculine symbolism of authority".
What's not absolutely clear is whether the concept of a "Sadeian woman" is just Carter's description of Sade's female characters in his fiction, or whether it incorporates women who might use the characters as role models. I suspect that the former is the case.
Master and Slave
The last chapter hones in on the actual relationship between man and woman, libertine and victim, debaucher and debauchee.
Like Simone de Beauvoir’s essay before it, the analysis is couched in the Hegelian terminology of Master and Slave.
The libertines are not just men. Juliette herself becomes a libertine, though with a difference:
"Sade’s female libertines…ingest but do not integrate within themselves the signs of maleness."
Juliette like all libertines, regardless of gender, lives outside society and the law:
"She has obtained the lonely freedom of the libertine, which is the freedom of the outlaw…
"Sade’s heroines, those who become libertines, accept damnation…exile from human life, as a necessary fact of life…So Sade creates a museum of woman-monsters."
What drives all libertines in Sade is their own orgasm. Carter refers to orgasm at various points as precious, even sovereign. The orgasm is a singular concern. The libertine cares only for their own. There is no interest in or desire for a reciprocal or simultaneous orgasm. No value if attached to mutuality. The libertine must be a Master, a despot. An orgasm means a triumph of the ego:
"Orgasm has possessed the libertine; during the irreducible timelessness of the moment of orgasm, the hole in the world through which we fall, he has been as a god, but this state is as fearful as it is pleasurable and, besides, is lost as soon as it is attained.
"He has burst into the Utopia of desire, in which only the self exists; he has not negotiated the terms of his arrival there, as gentle lovers do, but taken Utopia by force. See, the conquering hero comes. And, just as immediately, he has been expelled from it, a fall like Lucifer’s from heaven to hell."
This coming to an end, this expulsion is an un-selfing. For all of the pleasure, it too is alienating.
The libertine is trapped in an absolute egotism and perpetual solitude of his own construction:
"In Sade, sexual pleasure is an entirely inward experience."
The flipside of the outlaw status of the libertine is that the pleasure he gets is bound up with criminality. In fact, the pleasure is greater, precisely because the sexual act is criminal:
"…his criminality is his excuse, the source of his pride, and of his denial of love.
"The libertine’s perversions are the acting out of his denial of love."
Ultimately, this is where Carter (like Simone de Beauvoir) parts company with Sade. The libertine is not just opposed to God, the King and the Law. He is also opposed to love.
Neither women nor men can learn any more from Sade that will help the next part of the journey.
Onwards to "Joy, Limitless Joy"
As with Simone de Beauvoir, Carter seeks reciprocal and mutual recognition (in Hegel’s terminology) and Mitsein (in Heidegger’s).
The libertine who is trapped in diabolic solitude has a holy terror or fear of love.
It’s in this fear or terror that Carter finds "the source of all opposition to the emancipation of women."
Carter drives home the point with a lengthy quotation from Emma Goldman’s pamphlet, "The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation."
It’s such a good statement of the concerns that Simone de Beauvoir and Angela Carter share with respect to Sade (as developed and expressed within an Hegelian framework) that I’ll end this review with the last few sentences:
"The most vital right is the right to love and be loved.
"Indeed, if partial emancipation is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be a sweetheart and mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate.
"It will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds…
"A true conception of the relation of the sexes will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows but one great thing: to give of one’s self boundlessly, in order to find one’s self richer, deeper, better.
"That alone can fill the emptiness, and transform the tragedy of woman’s emancipation into joy, limitless joy."
September 30, 2019
With characteristic insight and clarity, Angela Carter ransacks the literature of de Sade to see if it has anything to offer feminist thought. She analyses two of his characters; the relentlessly innocent and abused Justine, and the sexual terrorist Juliette, finding similarities between them as well as contrasts - most interesting for me was the fact that neither one shows any solidarity whatsoever for other women.
Analysing another text, Philosophy in the Boudoir, Carter comes to her surprising overall conclusion that de Sade lacks courage. Since he relies on a dualism that pegs people as inherently vicious or virtuous, there is no hope of transcendence or regeneration.
Analysing another text, Philosophy in the Boudoir, Carter comes to her surprising overall conclusion that de Sade lacks courage. Since he relies on a dualism that pegs people as inherently vicious or virtuous, there is no hope of transcendence or regeneration.
In his diabolic solitude, only the possibility of love could awake the libertine to perfect, immaculate terror. It is in this holy terror of love that we find, in both men and women themselves, the source of all opposition to the emancipation of womenAs philosophy, this is very lively and fairly easy to follow, and the book is concise and helpfully structured. I'd recommend it to anyone reading or critiquing de Sade.
September 2, 2013
Carter appreciates pornography, in her own way. I appreciate Carter. I bet she would kick Camille Paglia's ass in a fight.
March 3, 2015
Carter hasn't made Sade a pressing priority, hasn't propelled his books any higher up my to-read list, but her readings, especially of Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791), are full of striking passages. These are perfect summaries of a very familiar type:
!
!
...in the character of Justine Sade contrived to isolate the dilemma of an emergent type of woman. Justine, daughter of a banker, becomes the prototype of two centuries of women who find the world was not, as they had been promised, made for them and who do not have, because they have not been given, the existential tools to remake the world for themselves. These self-consciously blameless ones suffer and suffer until it becomes second nature; Justine marks the start of a kind of self-regarding female masochism, a woman with no place in the world, no status, the core of whose resistance has been eaten away by self-pity.
!
Justine’s virtue is not the continuous exercise of a moral faculty. It is a sentimental response to the world in which she always hopes her good behavior will procure her some reward, some respite from the bleak and intransigent reality which surrounds her and to which she cannot accommodate herself. The virtuous, the interesting Justine, with her incompetence, her gullibility, her whining, her frigidity, her reluctance to take control of her own life, is a perfect woman. She always does what she is told. She is at the mercy of any master, because that is the nature of her own definition of goodness.
!
For Justine is extraordinarily single-minded. This single-mindedness makes her rebel against that Fate that mistreats her; she is in revolt, even, against human nature itself, or, rather, against a view of human nature as irredeemably corrupt. Justine would say, as all good revolutionaries have said: ‘Even if it is so, then it should not be so,’ and, though she is far too pusillanimous to do anything about it, she never deviates from her frail and lonely stand, from the idea that men and women need not necessarily be wicked.
August 25, 2019
I have been wanting to read this book since I saw the fascinating BBC documentary on Angela Carter last year - I have read all of Carter's fiction but none of her other writing.
I am not an ideal reviewer for this book, because for one thing I am male, and for another I have never read de Sade and to be honest I probably never will. Much of this book pits Carter's iconoclastic 70s feminism against Sade's 18th century libertinism, finding a surprising amount of common ground. Most of the chapters start with a summary of one of Sade's works, then move on to discuss the ideas and contemporary resonances.
Inevitably, much of the content is graphic, but in my view never gratuitously so, but I would not recommend this as a starting point for anyone who has never read Angela Carter.
I am not an ideal reviewer for this book, because for one thing I am male, and for another I have never read de Sade and to be honest I probably never will. Much of this book pits Carter's iconoclastic 70s feminism against Sade's 18th century libertinism, finding a surprising amount of common ground. Most of the chapters start with a summary of one of Sade's works, then move on to discuss the ideas and contemporary resonances.
Inevitably, much of the content is graphic, but in my view never gratuitously so, but I would not recommend this as a starting point for anyone who has never read Angela Carter.
August 11, 2016
This was the opening salvo in my two-pronged attack on reading a work of De Sade (Philosophy in the Boudoir: Or, The Immoral Mentors) - the second prong will be Sade: A Sudden Abyss. I chose this because I love Angela Carter's short fiction and know her as imaginative writer and clear thinker.
And that's what you get here. Carter tackles the notorious figure and finds interesting and amazing things to tease out, all while floating a larger concept of what pornography is. The primary works she investigates are the infamous "twinned" sister books, Justine & Juliette, and the above named Philosophy in the Boudoir. There are so many interesting ideas here that it's almost impossible to keep track of them. Carter's take on Sade is that he is a satirist, but unlike Swift, who mocks humanity because we roll in shit, Sade mocks humanity for rolling in shit and acting as if we can, and are, reaching for the stars. One of the most enjoyable aspects of this book is that Carter treats Sade neither as a freakish pervert to be instantly dismissed (well, yeah, or there wouldn't be a book at all), nor as some "divine" Saint. She does not have time for those who take Sade seriously as a man modeling an achievable (or even desirable) philosophy, in fact, she seems to imply those "Sadeians" have missed the point entirely. Although it's never specifically stated, her take on Sade seems to be a man who had very serious things to say about life, oppression, equality and power, but who deliberately said them in an uncompromising, aggressive way while also indulging himself in his most extreme fantasies and sexual perversions. He refused to excise his particular proclivities from his arguments, and even used them and himself as examples.
JUSTINE, for those who don't know, is the tale of a young girl who lives her life by virtue and spends her life being chased, raped, confined, beaten, used and accused of crimes she doesn't commit. In Sade's world, she becomes the scapegoat of virtue. Meanwhile, JULIETTE, her sister, dedicates herself to vice and crime and thrives stupendously, moving higher and higher into positions of power and wealth. Carter unpacks both these works in detailed and creative ways, spinning out an argument that Justine (in just one minor example), is the prototype of the standard Hollywood starlet sex symbol that culminates in the figure of Marilyn Monroe. Contrarily, she argues that JULIETTE, though seen as "succeeding" in the surface ways our society perceives success, is also enslaved by her situation, she just makes the best of it that she can by discarding everything that makes her human.
The wrap-up, where Carter reads BOUDOIR as Sade's manual for the training of young women for thriving in this hideous world (while indulging his every perverse whim, and taking every chance to philosophize at great length between the fornication) is fascinating. Without revealing too much, Carter tracks (with, as others have noted, a refreshing lack of jargon - although those who find Freud completely bankrupt at this point in history could argue that point, as Carter relies heavily on some Freudian theories involving "the phallic Mother") Sade's attempt to completely destroy the figure of Motherhood, and then makes a pointed observation that his inability to allow one minor event to happen, an event that happens over and over in other contexts but simply CANNOT BE ALLOWED to happen in this context, to this character - his failure to write that moment, that possibility, exposes the structure and theory of BOUDOIR as false. It's stunning work and amazing stuff!
And that's what you get here. Carter tackles the notorious figure and finds interesting and amazing things to tease out, all while floating a larger concept of what pornography is. The primary works she investigates are the infamous "twinned" sister books, Justine & Juliette, and the above named Philosophy in the Boudoir. There are so many interesting ideas here that it's almost impossible to keep track of them. Carter's take on Sade is that he is a satirist, but unlike Swift, who mocks humanity because we roll in shit, Sade mocks humanity for rolling in shit and acting as if we can, and are, reaching for the stars. One of the most enjoyable aspects of this book is that Carter treats Sade neither as a freakish pervert to be instantly dismissed (well, yeah, or there wouldn't be a book at all), nor as some "divine" Saint. She does not have time for those who take Sade seriously as a man modeling an achievable (or even desirable) philosophy, in fact, she seems to imply those "Sadeians" have missed the point entirely. Although it's never specifically stated, her take on Sade seems to be a man who had very serious things to say about life, oppression, equality and power, but who deliberately said them in an uncompromising, aggressive way while also indulging himself in his most extreme fantasies and sexual perversions. He refused to excise his particular proclivities from his arguments, and even used them and himself as examples.
JUSTINE, for those who don't know, is the tale of a young girl who lives her life by virtue and spends her life being chased, raped, confined, beaten, used and accused of crimes she doesn't commit. In Sade's world, she becomes the scapegoat of virtue. Meanwhile, JULIETTE, her sister, dedicates herself to vice and crime and thrives stupendously, moving higher and higher into positions of power and wealth. Carter unpacks both these works in detailed and creative ways, spinning out an argument that Justine (in just one minor example), is the prototype of the standard Hollywood starlet sex symbol that culminates in the figure of Marilyn Monroe. Contrarily, she argues that JULIETTE, though seen as "succeeding" in the surface ways our society perceives success, is also enslaved by her situation, she just makes the best of it that she can by discarding everything that makes her human.
The wrap-up, where Carter reads BOUDOIR as Sade's manual for the training of young women for thriving in this hideous world (while indulging his every perverse whim, and taking every chance to philosophize at great length between the fornication) is fascinating. Without revealing too much, Carter tracks (with, as others have noted, a refreshing lack of jargon - although those who find Freud completely bankrupt at this point in history could argue that point, as Carter relies heavily on some Freudian theories involving "the phallic Mother") Sade's attempt to completely destroy the figure of Motherhood, and then makes a pointed observation that his inability to allow one minor event to happen, an event that happens over and over in other contexts but simply CANNOT BE ALLOWED to happen in this context, to this character - his failure to write that moment, that possibility, exposes the structure and theory of BOUDOIR as false. It's stunning work and amazing stuff!
Shelved as 'read-in-2021'
November 26, 2024I had to read some actual De Sade (Justine, in my case) just so I had some grounding from which to read Carter's cogent reflections on him. I'm not sure how essential reading de Sade in the 2020s is, but Carter remains ever insightful, so the whole process proved worthwhile.
February 5, 2018
Como já havia ficado claro com a leitura dos contos de fadas com twist de empoderamento feminino que Angela Carter formulou, ela é uma mulher muito inteligente e sua perspicácia fica ainda mais evidente quando se trata de teoria literária. Pudera eu ser tão sagaz quanto ela.
Carter faz uma bela introdução explicando que apesar da misantropia sadeana, Sade realizava uma sátira sobre as relações entre homens e mulheres e o tipo de pornografia que executava dava poder às mulheres porque não era o tipo de submissão ao status quo presente em livros como Fanny Hill, tanto que Sade entendia mais do poder do clítoris do que Freud cem anos depois.
No segundo capítulo Carter analisa Justine e o quanto está em confluência com a mulher ideal erigida pelo patriarcado, em parte do capítulo a autora faz um paralelo entra a mulher masoquista Sadeana representada por Justine e o ideal de mulher que convencionou-se no cinema com ênfase específica no mito de Marilyn Monroe que representaria a Justine definitiva do século XX.
No terceiro capítulo a autora discorre sobre Juliette, a antítese de Justine, de como ela é a negação da mulher erigida pelo patriarcado, de como ela se perpetua como a supermulher nietzscheana no ápice do próprio poder.
O quarto capítulo se refere à Filosofia na Alcova em que a autora analisa veementemente a questão edipiana do estupro da mãe pela filha Eugenie, além de usar a teoria kleiniana da inveja e gratidão, seio bom/mau para explicar as relações entre mãe e filha.
Carter encerra o livro alinhavando que os libertinos sadeanos seriam tão perversos polimorfos quanto as crianças na teoria freudiana, além de um pequeno posfácio com um trecho da escrita de Emma Goldman.
Carter faz uma bela introdução explicando que apesar da misantropia sadeana, Sade realizava uma sátira sobre as relações entre homens e mulheres e o tipo de pornografia que executava dava poder às mulheres porque não era o tipo de submissão ao status quo presente em livros como Fanny Hill, tanto que Sade entendia mais do poder do clítoris do que Freud cem anos depois.
No segundo capítulo Carter analisa Justine e o quanto está em confluência com a mulher ideal erigida pelo patriarcado, em parte do capítulo a autora faz um paralelo entra a mulher masoquista Sadeana representada por Justine e o ideal de mulher que convencionou-se no cinema com ênfase específica no mito de Marilyn Monroe que representaria a Justine definitiva do século XX.
No terceiro capítulo a autora discorre sobre Juliette, a antítese de Justine, de como ela é a negação da mulher erigida pelo patriarcado, de como ela se perpetua como a supermulher nietzscheana no ápice do próprio poder.
O quarto capítulo se refere à Filosofia na Alcova em que a autora analisa veementemente a questão edipiana do estupro da mãe pela filha Eugenie, além de usar a teoria kleiniana da inveja e gratidão, seio bom/mau para explicar as relações entre mãe e filha.
Carter encerra o livro alinhavando que os libertinos sadeanos seriam tão perversos polimorfos quanto as crianças na teoria freudiana, além de um pequeno posfácio com um trecho da escrita de Emma Goldman.
June 30, 2021
Never one to conform, the wonderful Angela Carter set out to argue that the Marquis de Sade was in fact a feminist. And as much as I adore her - and as much as it kills me to admit – she hasn’t quite convinced me.
It’s awful that I see myself aligning with some of the reviews published in the wake of The Sadeian Woman (as read in the wonderful documentary, Of Wolves and Women): precisely that Carter never quite reaches the point she sets out to make.
Yes, it’s wonderful that Sade let his women have sex outside the sphere of procreation. But much of Carter’s argument relies on microscopic and rather circular analysis, ultimately drowning in its own artifice; the argument is certainly not incisive. There were some wonderful sections towards the beginning of the polemic - including God as the referee in the bedroom, and an analysis of the vagina as an inert space – but ultimately it offered me little by way of food for thought, which is so unusual for Carter. (I do seem to remember that she was writing to a deadline for this one, fulfilling a brief from the new publishing house, Virago. Maybe I’ll let her off.)
Provocative, yes. Subversive, yes. Readable? Yes, I flew through this one, strangely enough. I suspect it will improve on a re-read.
It’s awful that I see myself aligning with some of the reviews published in the wake of The Sadeian Woman (as read in the wonderful documentary, Of Wolves and Women): precisely that Carter never quite reaches the point she sets out to make.
Yes, it’s wonderful that Sade let his women have sex outside the sphere of procreation. But much of Carter’s argument relies on microscopic and rather circular analysis, ultimately drowning in its own artifice; the argument is certainly not incisive. There were some wonderful sections towards the beginning of the polemic - including God as the referee in the bedroom, and an analysis of the vagina as an inert space – but ultimately it offered me little by way of food for thought, which is so unusual for Carter. (I do seem to remember that she was writing to a deadline for this one, fulfilling a brief from the new publishing house, Virago. Maybe I’ll let her off.)
Provocative, yes. Subversive, yes. Readable? Yes, I flew through this one, strangely enough. I suspect it will improve on a re-read.
May 28, 2020
Sade, the monstrous and irredeemable, is a major part of my life, and reading this was long overdue. Carter offers a bracing, clear-eyed embrace of Sade, a feminist critique and defence of pornography, and a defiant exploitation of the intellectual and theoretical vistas opened by Sade. I'm trying not to say it's a seminal text, but it is - if you're coming to Sade for the first time I'd recommend Annie Le Brun's Sade: A Sudden Abyss https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4..., but if you already have some familiarity with him this needs to be on the shelf.
One of the problems is that people read commentators on Sade more than they read Sade himself. (My advice: read Sade ...) Carter's book usefully outlines the plots of Justine, Juliette, and Philosophy in the Boudoir, but if you've read them you may question the need for that degree of explanation.
I did find myself a little disappointed that even Angela Carter succumbed to a tendency of cultural theorists & commentators not to feel any need for accuracy. They're only little things, but giving the wrong Marx Brothers film title (a capital crime in this household) and misquoting Some Like It Hot in a really interesting discussion of Marilyn Monroe and Justine is just unforgivably sloppy.
AND: at one point, Carter mentions Sade defining art as 'the perpetual immoral subversion of the existing order'. You'll find this all over the net, usually unattributed but where it is attributed, inevitably ascribed to Carter. The quotation is accurate, but it isn't about art, it's about legislation and manners. Artists have seized on the description as a good summary of what there is in Sade to inspire, and it looks like Carter (drawing from the inspiration the Surrealists found in Sade) enthusiastically took it in this direction, but it's not /quite/ what Sade said. Which matters, because Sade is always - but /always/ - precise.
I
One of the problems is that people read commentators on Sade more than they read Sade himself. (My advice: read Sade ...) Carter's book usefully outlines the plots of Justine, Juliette, and Philosophy in the Boudoir, but if you've read them you may question the need for that degree of explanation.
I did find myself a little disappointed that even Angela Carter succumbed to a tendency of cultural theorists & commentators not to feel any need for accuracy. They're only little things, but giving the wrong Marx Brothers film title (a capital crime in this household) and misquoting Some Like It Hot in a really interesting discussion of Marilyn Monroe and Justine is just unforgivably sloppy.
AND: at one point, Carter mentions Sade defining art as 'the perpetual immoral subversion of the existing order'. You'll find this all over the net, usually unattributed but where it is attributed, inevitably ascribed to Carter. The quotation is accurate, but it isn't about art, it's about legislation and manners. Artists have seized on the description as a good summary of what there is in Sade to inspire, and it looks like Carter (drawing from the inspiration the Surrealists found in Sade) enthusiastically took it in this direction, but it's not /quite/ what Sade said. Which matters, because Sade is always - but /always/ - precise.
I
September 22, 2015
Fabulous critical thinking and writing from Angela Carter.
Convincing in some parts: the microscopic analysis of "Virtue" in relation to Justine was so compelling. I couldn't put the book down during that chapter.
The later chapters, with the more Freudian discussion, I felt less convinced by, and hence, bored. Though, for me, this is always the case with anything Freud related.
Convincing in some parts: the microscopic analysis of "Virtue" in relation to Justine was so compelling. I couldn't put the book down during that chapter.
The later chapters, with the more Freudian discussion, I felt less convinced by, and hence, bored. Though, for me, this is always the case with anything Freud related.
August 9, 2011
You need strong nerves and dispassion to read this one. I wouldn't have been able to manage it a few years ago but found myself appreciating and devouring it now. It reveals a great deal about the discourse that goes into "making" women what they are. I especially loved Carter's psychoanalysis and feminist deconstruction of Sade's women and the things that set him apart from other men writing at the time.
May 13, 2013
Hmmmm. I haven't read the source material. Given what I learned of it, I can state categorically that I will not read the source material. The critique is broken into two not-entirely-reconcilable (in my understanding) parts: the first is the majority of the book, and treats Sade's writings as political polemics, heavy on the satire, that are meant to expose problematic class and political structures. This is interesting in broad strokes, and gives Carter's overarching thesis: that Sade was the first feminist pornographer because he was the first to tell the truth about how antifeminist sex-as-then-practiced was, and to expose the commodification (and comestification; and more generally, treating as fungible) of the exploited persons in the sex act, as played out on such an unequal field. So, it took me a while, but I kind of came around to her point of view (she's an incredible writer, and very persuasive).
But then the second part actually critiques the sex acts themselves, and tries to uncover what is wrong with the character that they would want to, for instance, force someone else to eat their excrement, or eat their sex partner after they are finished with them. And, I have to say, the two critiques seemed fundamentally at odds. Either it's a political satire, and therefore "what is wrong with this character" is that he represents the greed of the aristocracy, or it's a critique of perverted sex acts, and these particular characters are broken at some fundamental level, and their own neuroses and psychoses are playing out in their criminal acts. I mean, I guess you can say the guy that represents the aristocracy is damaged by the same system that creates an aristocracy that cannot conceive of the lower classes as equals, or even human. But isn't that unnecessarily convoluted? He represents what is wrong with society's class distinctions; he is corrupted by society's class distinctions to such a point that we can sympathize with his POV because he couldn't have learned any better; he is playing out the actual class distinctions on a grand scale that corrupted him on a personal scale?
Hang on, I might have just talked myself into believing that the argument is coherent after all.
But then the second part actually critiques the sex acts themselves, and tries to uncover what is wrong with the character that they would want to, for instance, force someone else to eat their excrement, or eat their sex partner after they are finished with them. And, I have to say, the two critiques seemed fundamentally at odds. Either it's a political satire, and therefore "what is wrong with this character" is that he represents the greed of the aristocracy, or it's a critique of perverted sex acts, and these particular characters are broken at some fundamental level, and their own neuroses and psychoses are playing out in their criminal acts. I mean, I guess you can say the guy that represents the aristocracy is damaged by the same system that creates an aristocracy that cannot conceive of the lower classes as equals, or even human. But isn't that unnecessarily convoluted? He represents what is wrong with society's class distinctions; he is corrupted by society's class distinctions to such a point that we can sympathize with his POV because he couldn't have learned any better; he is playing out the actual class distinctions on a grand scale that corrupted him on a personal scale?
Hang on, I might have just talked myself into believing that the argument is coherent after all.
April 15, 2017
preface is really good and interesting, but I was less interested in and convinced by the later chapters (and also a bit bored to be honest - surprisingly so, considering the enormous amount of weird sex stuff that happened).
April 28, 2022
Angela Carter DESTROYS Dworkinites with MARXISM and CLOSE READING
Want to read
June 25, 2008From Alan Moore:
It’s like when you’ve got people like Angela Carter who, in her book The Sadeian Women, she admitted that there was the possibility she could imagine a form of pornography that was benign, that was imaginative, was beautiful, and which didn’t have the problems that she saw in a lot of other pornography. I think even Andrea Dworkin said the same thing. She said it a bit more grudgingly, but she said that conceivably there was, there could be, a benign form of pornography but she didn’t personally believe that it would ever happen. So that’s what we’ve tried to do. We’ve tried to say, yes, good pornography can exist, and I think that possibly the fact that we called it pornography wrong-footed a lot of the people who, if we’d have come out and said, “well, this is a work of art,” they would have probably all said, “no it’s not, it’s pornography.” So because we’re saying, “this is pornography,” they’re saying, “no it’s not, it’s art,” and people don’t realise quite what they’ve said.
It’s like when you’ve got people like Angela Carter who, in her book The Sadeian Women, she admitted that there was the possibility she could imagine a form of pornography that was benign, that was imaginative, was beautiful, and which didn’t have the problems that she saw in a lot of other pornography. I think even Andrea Dworkin said the same thing. She said it a bit more grudgingly, but she said that conceivably there was, there could be, a benign form of pornography but she didn’t personally believe that it would ever happen. So that’s what we’ve tried to do. We’ve tried to say, yes, good pornography can exist, and I think that possibly the fact that we called it pornography wrong-footed a lot of the people who, if we’d have come out and said, “well, this is a work of art,” they would have probably all said, “no it’s not, it’s pornography.” So because we’re saying, “this is pornography,” they’re saying, “no it’s not, it’s art,” and people don’t realise quite what they’ve said.
July 6, 2020
I had a spare day and decided to read something small that had been on my to-read pile for quite some time now. How wrong I was to choose this book! It may be tiny, but every sentence serves as a dagger to the gut. I'm not sure I agree with exactly what Carter sees at points, but certain insights resonate and repel at the same time, and reading it feels like witnessing a grotesque, yet clinical autopsy of a decaying corpse. Incredibly difficult to read in parts, it nonetheless has obvious value in parts - two of particular note were its analysis of class and sex, and of Marilyn Monroe's appeal to the masses. I find Carter's defence and admiration of certain points of view to be viscerally wrong and at odds to some of her other insights or conclusions. An interesting, if difficult read.
July 22, 2015
Too much essentialism & summarization of the texts to be truly great but her thesis is something that is so up my alley that it's in my house. More like 3.5
February 2, 2025
4/5
I am still not completely convinced that Sade had all this in mind when he wrote his stories, but Angela Carter sells her argument with such conviction it’s hard not to be completely invested. Definitely gonna read more of her work.
I am still not completely convinced that Sade had all this in mind when he wrote his stories, but Angela Carter sells her argument with such conviction it’s hard not to be completely invested. Definitely gonna read more of her work.
July 27, 2023
I'm sure Angela Carter did her very best to analyze what the Marquis de Sade wrote.
But after reading through this exhausting non fiction that sees Freudian archetypes in every single female character portrayed and then dissects de Sade's spiritual feelings on them (and why he's afraid of a certain type of woman, yadayada), I will say something that some people apparently need to hear:
It's just porn. It's not that deep.
Carter builds this whole discourse in which she builds up de Sade as simultaneously proto-feminist (at least, he wanted women to be sexually liberated) with weird hints of proto-anarchism (y'know, encouraging criminal acts as the only way the poor can get back at the rich) but also intensely misogynistic and selfish.
And maybe he was all that. People are complicated. But the reason why Justine (the "Madonna" character who got punished, tortured and killed for her virtue) and Juliette (the "Whore" character who got her cake, ate it, killed her children and got rich lol) are the way they are isn't because of some deep beliefs Sade held.
"Justine" is not a cautionary tale. It's not moralistic. Sade isn't teaching his audience stuff. It's porn.
"Juliette" is also not moralistic. Debauchery and evilness are not a surefire way to getting rich & famous quick and Sade knew this, because he grew up with debauched rich people, none of whom actually earned the money.
Sade tortures and murders Justine because he thinks she's boring and the only form of entertainment he will get from her is torturing her and then killing her. Sade was probably fed up with virginal holier-than-thou heroines and I doubt it actually runs any deeper than that.
Juliette does not get rewarded for her evilness or her lewdness, either. She gets all the riches, and a wife of her own to have a happily ever after with because Sade finds her entertaining. I'm certain he was just tickled pink writing Juliette as the antithesis of the heroine that was typical for his time.
So why one star? Well, first because Carter wasted her time dissecting porn that, beside the notoriety of de Sade as the name-giver of "SADISM", was really just that: porn. Second because she wasted MY time and made me go through Justine and Juliette's whole life story to prove her point, which she did not btw.
Finally, 1 star because porn has changed since the 70s. I really wish I could send a copy of Ice Planet Barbarians, Fifty Shades of Grey and Outlander to Angela Carter in heaven, so she can rest in peace knowing it's no longer the men that dominate written pornography. I would sure like to know her Freudian interpretation of "spurs" on blue alien dicks and of course the infamous "inner goddess" monologues.
But after reading through this exhausting non fiction that sees Freudian archetypes in every single female character portrayed and then dissects de Sade's spiritual feelings on them (and why he's afraid of a certain type of woman, yadayada), I will say something that some people apparently need to hear:
It's just porn. It's not that deep.
Carter builds this whole discourse in which she builds up de Sade as simultaneously proto-feminist (at least, he wanted women to be sexually liberated) with weird hints of proto-anarchism (y'know, encouraging criminal acts as the only way the poor can get back at the rich) but also intensely misogynistic and selfish.
And maybe he was all that. People are complicated. But the reason why Justine (the "Madonna" character who got punished, tortured and killed for her virtue) and Juliette (the "Whore" character who got her cake, ate it, killed her children and got rich lol) are the way they are isn't because of some deep beliefs Sade held.
"Justine" is not a cautionary tale. It's not moralistic. Sade isn't teaching his audience stuff. It's porn.
"Juliette" is also not moralistic. Debauchery and evilness are not a surefire way to getting rich & famous quick and Sade knew this, because he grew up with debauched rich people, none of whom actually earned the money.
Sade tortures and murders Justine because he thinks she's boring and the only form of entertainment he will get from her is torturing her and then killing her. Sade was probably fed up with virginal holier-than-thou heroines and I doubt it actually runs any deeper than that.
Juliette does not get rewarded for her evilness or her lewdness, either. She gets all the riches, and a wife of her own to have a happily ever after with because Sade finds her entertaining. I'm certain he was just tickled pink writing Juliette as the antithesis of the heroine that was typical for his time.
So why one star? Well, first because Carter wasted her time dissecting porn that, beside the notoriety of de Sade as the name-giver of "SADISM", was really just that: porn. Second because she wasted MY time and made me go through Justine and Juliette's whole life story to prove her point, which she did not btw.
Finally, 1 star because porn has changed since the 70s. I really wish I could send a copy of Ice Planet Barbarians, Fifty Shades of Grey and Outlander to Angela Carter in heaven, so she can rest in peace knowing it's no longer the men that dominate written pornography. I would sure like to know her Freudian interpretation of "spurs" on blue alien dicks and of course the infamous "inner goddess" monologues.
May 2, 2017
I was probably disappointed by this text because I wasn't aware of what to expect before starting it. I thought it was something more fictional, story-like. I previously read Nights At The Circus and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and quite enjoyed both of them. What Carter offers us in The Sadeian Woman instead is an overview of the works of Marquis de Sade and the role of women (or The Woman/The Feminine) in them. She also creates some connections between Sadeian stereotypes and the present. While Carter made a few interesting points, especially early on, to me it felt more like a summary than an actual critical approach. For that reason, I'm only giving this two stars.
July 17, 2007
Love the polemical preface to this book! While The Sadeian Woman (originally published in 1979) may be something of a historical text these days, it's still a bracing read. Carter deconstructs the silly Ur-goddess myths of feminism with verve, glee and intelligence. You don't need to be a post-modern anything to enjoy it: any "outsider" will warm to her passion.
March 16, 2012
A wonderful polemic book about de Sade's female characters. Carter tackles the female types laid out in these revolutionary novels, comparing them to similar stereotypes that pervade contemporary society, for instance the blonde female movie lead. It is also an unflinching discussion of women, sex and sexuality. Gripping, strong and required reading for any Carter lover.
June 11, 2020
During the 1970s and early 1980s, there was such a thing as the feminist sex wars, also known as the lesbian sex wars or simply the sex wars or porn wars. They were about diverse sexual issues, but one of them was about the feminist stance to pornography. One group felt that porn was inherently misogynistic and a tool in the oppression of women, and should therefore be banned (they got support from conservative and Christian groups in this). Another group argued that, no, porn could be a way for women to liberate themselves because women should be allowed to have and want sex and be sexual creatures. A lot of nuance was lost within this debate, with the anti-porn group refusing to acknowledge that women are often indeed sexual creatures who desire sex and can enjoy porn, and the pro-porn group unwilling to engage with the fact that a lot of porn is violent towards women (rape porn, for example). Ultimately, in the USA the anti-porn group won a lot of support and managed to restrict pornography, though in practice this mainly meant that LGBTQ porn was banned and its makers and distributors persecuted, rather than mainstream porn.
Marquis de Sade, who lived from 1740 till 1814, wrote some very extreme porn during his lifetime. It was found so shocking, in fact, that he spent a large part of his life locked away in mental institutions in order to keep the general public safe. Apart from sexual acts we find a lot less shocking today (oral sex, anal sex, sex between two men or two women, orgies, certain fetishes regarding faeces and urine, what have you, this man wrote it all), his work also brimmed with violence and pain (there is so much rape in them, guys, as well as mutilation, murder, cannibalism, necrophilia, you name it); it is with reason that the word 'sadism' ('to gain pleasure from hurting another') was named after the Marquis. Needless to say, the anti-porn crowd found in Marquis de Sade everything that was bad about porn, and the pro-porn crowd did not have that much to bring in against it.
But then Angela Carter enters the discussion with her book 'The Sadeian Woman', shocking friend and foe alike. Through analyses of his major pornographic works, she argues that Sade's work is actually proto-feminist since Sade was one of the first (if not THE first) to divorce women having sex completely from sex' reproductive function. Instead, sex is all about pleasure. That pleasure is always to the detriment of another, for such is the way Sade perceives the world, but it is pleasure nonetheless.
An interesting book that is well argued.
It also has ensured that I NEVER want to read anything by Marquis de Sade.
Marquis de Sade, who lived from 1740 till 1814, wrote some very extreme porn during his lifetime. It was found so shocking, in fact, that he spent a large part of his life locked away in mental institutions in order to keep the general public safe. Apart from sexual acts we find a lot less shocking today (oral sex, anal sex, sex between two men or two women, orgies, certain fetishes regarding faeces and urine, what have you, this man wrote it all), his work also brimmed with violence and pain (there is so much rape in them, guys, as well as mutilation, murder, cannibalism, necrophilia, you name it); it is with reason that the word 'sadism' ('to gain pleasure from hurting another') was named after the Marquis. Needless to say, the anti-porn crowd found in Marquis de Sade everything that was bad about porn, and the pro-porn crowd did not have that much to bring in against it.
But then Angela Carter enters the discussion with her book 'The Sadeian Woman', shocking friend and foe alike. Through analyses of his major pornographic works, she argues that Sade's work is actually proto-feminist since Sade was one of the first (if not THE first) to divorce women having sex completely from sex' reproductive function. Instead, sex is all about pleasure. That pleasure is always to the detriment of another, for such is the way Sade perceives the world, but it is pleasure nonetheless.
An interesting book that is well argued.
It also has ensured that I NEVER want to read anything by Marquis de Sade.
January 5, 2025
Difficult but super interesting
January 10, 2021
Antinatalist, nihlistic, terroristic, self-consciously cruel, possessor of both courage and cowardice, the Marquis de Sade here appears as a tremendously useful companion and foil to Carter as she articulates a vision of emancipated sexuality, emancipated love and - consequently - emancipated society for all.
Certainly not the sort of thing you expect to be associated with Sade, but this is not achieved through a creative re-reading of the Marquis. A few reviewers on here have come away from this book viewing it as a statement that Sade was a feminist. I don't see why. The word itself does not appear once in this book, and Sade's vision of sexuality, his bourgeois individualism, his dehumanising transformation of flesh into meat, are not only rejected but roundly humiliated by the time Carter decodes the Sadeian universe as an Oedipal fantasy, an infantile and impotent rage against a disappointing world. None of this should be surprising to readers of Sade. Recall the Duc's fury in The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings: “It is madness to imagine one owes anything to one’s mother, and on what, therefore, would such gratitude be founded? On the fact she came when she was fucked? Rightly so, no doubt! As for me I see only reasons for hatred and contempt – does she bring us happiness when she brings us into the world? … Far from it, she hurls us into a world full of dangers and it is up to us to survive them as best we can.”
No, it is not that Sade turns out to be a friend to women - or to men. It is not the conclusion Sade reaches, but the route he takes, that provides Carter with her material. Sade desecrates and despoils, mocking the conservatives and the pious misogynists for whom a woman who acknowledges her beauty is an affront, and a woman who makes use of her sexuality is a demon threatening a violent castration. In two dark fairy tales, the pious world is turned on its head. Justine, the "virtuous" one, represents good conduct well chastised - declining to become a prostitute like her sister after they become orphans or to join a band of criminals. For her trouble, she is raped, tortured, enslaved, and framed for numerous crimes before being struck dead by lightning. The moral is as obvious as it is depressing: virtue is for the bourgeois, values are for those comfortable and safe enough to afford them - in the poor, virtue is a death sentence, a barrier against solidarity, and an invitation to comply with exploitation. It is no surprise that those without property are the most heavily policed, the most aggressively preached to. In her own novel, Juliette - Justine's sister - represents vice amply rewarded, fighting and fucking her way to the top, slaughtering and thieving her way to riches - a model of the entrepreneurial spirit in extremis. Their story ends with Juliette's amusement at the exploded body of her sister whom she herself had forced out into the storm. But this is no tale of female empowerment: Justine dies and Juliette thrives only by complying with the logic of the Manichean, claustrophobic world of Sade, as stifling and cold as the cells in which he spent most of his literary life, one without possibility of redemption, community, or change, where vice and virtue are dealt out by Nature with the pedestrian indifference of a lightning bolt. This is Sade as coward - and behind every nihilist rejection of the world lies a bleeding heart that cannot dare to hope lest it be destroyed. He does not dare to write a character who neither meekly submits nor gladly mimics, but actively resists with force and conviction the demand to be either the neck or the knife. To do so would be to consider the possibility of their failure - or, even worse, perhaps, the ambiguities and possibilities of their success.
The answer to a world where women must become as cruel and rapacious as the men who harm them just to rise above bare survival? We must learn, Carter says, to love gregariously, openly, on equal terms with one another, to reject - or even to accept - the fear that attends a genuine, naked connection with other human beings. Of course, of course - it has always been a question of love. We may have our doubts. But where Sade closes the door, Carter leaves it open - are we good enough for goodness?
Certainly not the sort of thing you expect to be associated with Sade, but this is not achieved through a creative re-reading of the Marquis. A few reviewers on here have come away from this book viewing it as a statement that Sade was a feminist. I don't see why. The word itself does not appear once in this book, and Sade's vision of sexuality, his bourgeois individualism, his dehumanising transformation of flesh into meat, are not only rejected but roundly humiliated by the time Carter decodes the Sadeian universe as an Oedipal fantasy, an infantile and impotent rage against a disappointing world. None of this should be surprising to readers of Sade. Recall the Duc's fury in The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings: “It is madness to imagine one owes anything to one’s mother, and on what, therefore, would such gratitude be founded? On the fact she came when she was fucked? Rightly so, no doubt! As for me I see only reasons for hatred and contempt – does she bring us happiness when she brings us into the world? … Far from it, she hurls us into a world full of dangers and it is up to us to survive them as best we can.”
No, it is not that Sade turns out to be a friend to women - or to men. It is not the conclusion Sade reaches, but the route he takes, that provides Carter with her material. Sade desecrates and despoils, mocking the conservatives and the pious misogynists for whom a woman who acknowledges her beauty is an affront, and a woman who makes use of her sexuality is a demon threatening a violent castration. In two dark fairy tales, the pious world is turned on its head. Justine, the "virtuous" one, represents good conduct well chastised - declining to become a prostitute like her sister after they become orphans or to join a band of criminals. For her trouble, she is raped, tortured, enslaved, and framed for numerous crimes before being struck dead by lightning. The moral is as obvious as it is depressing: virtue is for the bourgeois, values are for those comfortable and safe enough to afford them - in the poor, virtue is a death sentence, a barrier against solidarity, and an invitation to comply with exploitation. It is no surprise that those without property are the most heavily policed, the most aggressively preached to. In her own novel, Juliette - Justine's sister - represents vice amply rewarded, fighting and fucking her way to the top, slaughtering and thieving her way to riches - a model of the entrepreneurial spirit in extremis. Their story ends with Juliette's amusement at the exploded body of her sister whom she herself had forced out into the storm. But this is no tale of female empowerment: Justine dies and Juliette thrives only by complying with the logic of the Manichean, claustrophobic world of Sade, as stifling and cold as the cells in which he spent most of his literary life, one without possibility of redemption, community, or change, where vice and virtue are dealt out by Nature with the pedestrian indifference of a lightning bolt. This is Sade as coward - and behind every nihilist rejection of the world lies a bleeding heart that cannot dare to hope lest it be destroyed. He does not dare to write a character who neither meekly submits nor gladly mimics, but actively resists with force and conviction the demand to be either the neck or the knife. To do so would be to consider the possibility of their failure - or, even worse, perhaps, the ambiguities and possibilities of their success.
The answer to a world where women must become as cruel and rapacious as the men who harm them just to rise above bare survival? We must learn, Carter says, to love gregariously, openly, on equal terms with one another, to reject - or even to accept - the fear that attends a genuine, naked connection with other human beings. Of course, of course - it has always been a question of love. We may have our doubts. But where Sade closes the door, Carter leaves it open - are we good enough for goodness?
March 26, 2016
I like reading books about books. There are a couple of different kinds. There are the dry, academic kind. There are also the vague, fluffy kind for general readers. Then there are the kind that are really only using other books as their own jumping off point. This book is the last kind. Carter admits as much when she says in the Introductory Note that this is "neither a critical study nor a historical analysis of Sade." But she does cite and paraphrase the majority of Sade's works. The book's subtitle makes her project clear. (I guess there are two different subtitles for this book? Mine was "An Exercise in Cultural History.") Carter uses Sade as a touchstone for her own reflections on gender and sexuality in the modern world. Some of these have become a little dated, and some are still true. Some are both. For example, "sexual relations between men and women always render explicit the nature of social relations in the society in which they take place and, if described explicitly, will form a critique of those relations, even if that is not and never has been the intention of the pornographer." It's hard to agree with this sentiment in the age of Fifty Shades of Grey (no, I'm not going to link the book...), but the kernel of truth here seems right. Sex is a political act. Always has been, always will be.
The body of the book is composed of chapters that read Sade's Justine,Juliette, and Philosophy in the Boudoir or, The Immoral Mentors, with liberal reference to Salò or The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom as well. I would argue that this book is a good introduction to Sade since it largely comprises plot summaries of the texts with short philosophical reflections appended. Most of these reflections use Freudian terminology to reflect on the human universals which Sade contemplates. There are definitely moments of over-reading, but there are also moments of genius. Carter's potted summaries of Sade shimmer with sensuality and make this book probably necessary reading for any modern person who identifies anywhere on the BDSM spectrum. Carter is smart, well-read, and a deft reader. This text may not represent the cutting edge in feminist theory, but it does give you a lot to think about, and I imagine that when it was published (1979), it was ground-breaking in combining cultural critique of pornography with a willingness to take pornography seriously as literature. In fact, only recently has porn studies obtained its first scholarly journal. We still have a ways to go down the trail that Carter blazed ahead of us.
The body of the book is composed of chapters that read Sade's Justine,Juliette, and Philosophy in the Boudoir or, The Immoral Mentors, with liberal reference to Salò or The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom as well. I would argue that this book is a good introduction to Sade since it largely comprises plot summaries of the texts with short philosophical reflections appended. Most of these reflections use Freudian terminology to reflect on the human universals which Sade contemplates. There are definitely moments of over-reading, but there are also moments of genius. Carter's potted summaries of Sade shimmer with sensuality and make this book probably necessary reading for any modern person who identifies anywhere on the BDSM spectrum. Carter is smart, well-read, and a deft reader. This text may not represent the cutting edge in feminist theory, but it does give you a lot to think about, and I imagine that when it was published (1979), it was ground-breaking in combining cultural critique of pornography with a willingness to take pornography seriously as literature. In fact, only recently has porn studies obtained its first scholarly journal. We still have a ways to go down the trail that Carter blazed ahead of us.
September 30, 2019
I love Angela Carter's fiction and have been waiting to read this book ever since I read about it in Edmund Gordon's The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography. I haven't read Sade, and I don't really intend to, because all his books sound awful. But I wanted to understand how Carter read him, and it was really a very interesting perspective.
The first chapter, the introduction, discusses pornography as a art, because if we consider it an "art", we can being to question the ideology behind it and its aesthetics. And I think that this is probably the most relevant chapter today. This book came out in 1979, way before the internet has made porn widely available and became most men's sex education (there are studies about it!). So I think that her interrogation of porn's gender and power dynamics and the way in which they are part of a cycle of both reflecting and influencing society is even more important today than when it was first published. Angela Carter argues that there is a possibility of pornography being in the service of women. Now, I'm not sure I can agree with that, but that's beyond the scope of this review.
She sort of argues that Sade was the model for "model pornographer" since his pornographic writings appear to subvert the gender dynamics of 18th century France. Again, I haven't read these books and I don't want to. What Carter describes are stories that degrade women, but are in different in the way Sade puts their characters' attitude towards being degraded. While Justine resists it and is punished because of this, Juliette embraces being sexually abused. I hardly think that anything written by a rich aristocrat in 18th century France can truly be revolutionary in its treatment of women, but the idea that a woman is not actually defiled for having sex and enjoying it does sound like a surprising take for the time.
But the whole point that Angela Carter makes is that pornography has to be analysed to see how it reflects society and how women are treated. And it's definitely an interesting take, because popular discourse around certain porn stars kinda glorifies this idea of being "sexually liberated" but in a way that mostly benefits male. So, I appreciate what Carter did here, because it is a topic that needs to be examined way more deeply than it has, especially in academic circles.
The first chapter, the introduction, discusses pornography as a art, because if we consider it an "art", we can being to question the ideology behind it and its aesthetics. And I think that this is probably the most relevant chapter today. This book came out in 1979, way before the internet has made porn widely available and became most men's sex education (there are studies about it!). So I think that her interrogation of porn's gender and power dynamics and the way in which they are part of a cycle of both reflecting and influencing society is even more important today than when it was first published. Angela Carter argues that there is a possibility of pornography being in the service of women. Now, I'm not sure I can agree with that, but that's beyond the scope of this review.
She sort of argues that Sade was the model for "model pornographer" since his pornographic writings appear to subvert the gender dynamics of 18th century France. Again, I haven't read these books and I don't want to. What Carter describes are stories that degrade women, but are in different in the way Sade puts their characters' attitude towards being degraded. While Justine resists it and is punished because of this, Juliette embraces being sexually abused. I hardly think that anything written by a rich aristocrat in 18th century France can truly be revolutionary in its treatment of women, but the idea that a woman is not actually defiled for having sex and enjoying it does sound like a surprising take for the time.
But the whole point that Angela Carter makes is that pornography has to be analysed to see how it reflects society and how women are treated. And it's definitely an interesting take, because popular discourse around certain porn stars kinda glorifies this idea of being "sexually liberated" but in a way that mostly benefits male. So, I appreciate what Carter did here, because it is a topic that needs to be examined way more deeply than it has, especially in academic circles.
May 16, 2022
What a great meditation on the psycho-political (and ultimately, dead-end) productions of De Sade! I love how frank and witty carter is here, how right she is--well, how much I agree with her interpretations. I only wish I'd read this when it first came on my radar, back in the 1980s when we got a stack of them lost in the mail at the second hand bookshop where I then worked. I only read it now because I wanted, perhaps, to use it in the Literature and Gender course I'll be teaching in the fall. Sadly, it was the one book that didn't fit when I finalized my syllabus yesterday. Still, I might have to impose it upon college undergrads in the future. Still more than relevant all these years later.
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