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A review by vanityclear
The Sadeian Woman by Angela Carter
4.0
There are some knock-out drag-out genius statements in here. Angela Carter's pen is sharp, and she pulls no punches. She uses Sade's almost, not-quite there, approximation of liberation as a means to further her own argument for freeing ourselves from dominant traditions, dichotomies, and myths.
There's some brilliant analysis of voluntary sterility, which removes the woman (and her body) from the fertility-mother myth ("consolatory nonsense," Carter writes, in service of women "flattering themselves into submission"). This gem, for instance:
This is the crux of Carter's overarching thesis: Sade's pornography (an extension of his absolute atheism) reveals sexual reality and the social relations of that reality, however (un)intentionally. It strips away our myths and our illusions. Working with the naked truth of our relationships is the only ways to forge a new way forward, into a secularized world where the freedom of one group doesn't necessitate the unfreedom of others.
But Sade, while "unusual amongst both satirists and pornographers....because he is capable of believing, even if only intermittently, that it is possible to radically transform society," doesn't go far enough. He's held back by his own time, his own misogyny, his own fears about love and equality: "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 women." Take this reading of a scene from Philosophy of the Boudoir in which a daughter rapes her mother:
Sade is, ultimately, a scaredy cat, unwilling and unable to touch emotion. Carter, however, isn't. And now I really wish she'd turned her pen to porn.
There's some brilliant analysis of voluntary sterility, which removes the woman (and her body) from the fertility-mother myth ("consolatory nonsense," Carter writes, in service of women "flattering themselves into submission"). This gem, for instance:
... a voluntary sterility, freely chosen, makes [the womb, the breasts, the ovaries] of as little and as great significance as any other part of the human body without which it is possible to survive.
The goddess is dead.
And, with the imaginary construct of the goddess, dies the notion of eternity, whose place on this earth was her womb. If the goddess is dead, there is nowhere for eternity to hide. The last resort of homecoming is denied us. We are confronted with morality, as if for the first time.
There is no way out of time. We must learn to live in this world, to take it with sufficient seriousness, because it is the only world that we will ever know.
This is the crux of Carter's overarching thesis: Sade's pornography (an extension of his absolute atheism) reveals sexual reality and the social relations of that reality, however (un)intentionally. It strips away our myths and our illusions. Working with the naked truth of our relationships is the only ways to forge a new way forward, into a secularized world where the freedom of one group doesn't necessitate the unfreedom of others.
But Sade, while "unusual amongst both satirists and pornographers....because he is capable of believing, even if only intermittently, that it is possible to radically transform society," doesn't go far enough. He's held back by his own time, his own misogyny, his own fears about love and equality: "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 women." Take this reading of a scene from Philosophy of the Boudoir in which a daughter rapes her mother:
[Sade] makes her [mother] faint because he can only conceive of freedom as existing in opposition, freedom as defined by tyranny. So, on the very edge of an extraordinary discovery about the very nature of the relation between mothers and daughters, at the climax of his pioneering exploration of this most obscure of psychic areas, he gives in to the principle of safety. Instead of constructing a machine for liberation, he substitutes instead a masturbatory device. He is on the point of becoming a revolutionary pornographer; but he, finally, lacks the courage.
He reverts, now, to being a simple pornographer.
Sade is, ultimately, a scaredy cat, unwilling and unable to touch emotion. Carter, however, isn't. And now I really wish she'd turned her pen to porn.