Angela Carter on the Ideology of Pornography:

Rereading Marquis de Sade

Julia Šamarina
Tallinn University of Educational Sciences
Estonia

My paper concerns several extremely problematic issues for women:

pornography, the writing of Marquis de Sade, and Angela Carter. The 18th century French
nobleman Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) is father of sadism and a classic of pornography.
His writing has aroused horror, indignation, and fascination. Angela Carter (1940-1992)
is one of the most original and boldest British women writers of her generation, her
writing career spanning from 1960s through early 1990s, ending with her death in 1992,
her literary achievement marked by nine novels, five collections of short stories, a
number of radio and television plays and some works of non-fiction. The Sadeian
Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979) is Carter’s original study of Marquis de
Sade’s books. (It also sets out an argument to be developed in her own fiction of 1970s
through early 1990s). The book is, in her own words, “a late twentieth-century
interpretation of some of the problems he [Sade] raises about the culturally determined
nature of women and the relations between men and women that result from it”(1).
Carter’s own writing reveals a polemical fascination with the erotic that some see
as a liberating feminist project, others, however, use as a ground for labelling the writer
“a high priestess of postgraduate porn”1 .
Finally, pornography itself has been a great concern with feminism, especially in
relation to violence against women, and has been a major dimension of critiques of
patriarchy. On the other hand, the emancipatory potential of pornography in liberating
sexual inhibitions and providing affirmation to sexual minorities has also been pointed
out. 2

1
This phrase appears in a number of commentaries, and is also mentioned in the introduction by Bristow
and Broughton, 1997:1, 19.
2
Mill, 1970, On Liberty; Susan M.Easton. The Problem of Pornography. Regulation and the Right to Free
Speech. London: Routledge. 1994.

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 The definition of pornography found in feminist literature for the most part
follows that of Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who define the phenomenon
as “sexually explicit material which subordinates women through pictures or words”
(Easton xii)
The relationship between pornography and literature is also a complex one.
Feinberg (1987) identifies three main approaches:
1. Pornography and literature are quite distinct, although pornography may be useful
provided that we are clear that it is not literature (a view associated with Burgess
1970);
2. Pornography may be seen as a corruption or perversion of genuine literature as
judged by literary standards (George Steiner 1970);
3. Pornography can be seen as form of literature and sometimes has literary merit
(Kenneth Tynan 1970).
Feinberg, however, is reluctant to regard pornography as art, for, according to
him, a pornograph is as predictable as a dictionary or a telephone book, even if at a
high level. Literature reflects crucially on the human condition, while pornography
only stimulates sexual arousal (Easton 1994:xiv-xv). Angela Carter, however, argues
that Sade’s books can be regarded literature, since they do not only reflect on the
human situation, but provide a profound insight into the nature and structure of
patriarchy. Like Freud, another target for feminist attacks, Sade shows how a
patriarchal structure works and he does so by creating microcosms of power.
At first glance Sade may indeed be seen as a verbal abuser of women, since his
victims most often happen to be women. His characters can be roughly divided into
libertines and their victims, the objects of their desire. I use the word object quite
literally: the beautiful people in the novels Justine, Juliette, and The One Hundred
and Twenty Days at Sodom are objectified, turned into passive objects, into things.
Gerome, a lustful monk in Justine confesses:
How petty pleasure seemed to me once associated with a feeling
other than the desire to rut. I copulated only to abuse the object
of my lust, and the sexual act did not provide me with any other
joy but the desecration of this object … (289)
… It is a perfectly natural feeling: you can’t love something
you’ve already copulated with (293)

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 Sade’s libertines speak of the objects of their lust as anonymous things. The objects
do not have any identity, gender or age: a beautiful girl is just as likely to become a
victim as a beautiful boy, and a crone can have the same destiny as a young beauty.
Beautiful and innocent, with names like Cupid or Narcissus, the boys in Sade’s books
have the same predicament as women, and a horribly tragic end. Beauty is destiny, to be
beautiful means to be automatically cast down the hierarchy, down the power-ladder, into
the torture chamber and the grave. Beauty is also a construct, and therefore unnatural.
In the framework of this argument, Carter goes as far as equating the beauty of Sade’s
numerous Justines (the type named after the main “suffering woman” , the protagonist of
Sade’s novel of the same name) to the hideousness of the crones hired by the libertines in
The One Hundred and Twenty Days at Sodom, judging both as cases of excess. In the
book, the ugly crones become objects of desire just like the beautiful virgins. Once made
objects, they are put in the passive case. Carter sees their draconian deaths as a natural
outcome of their passive existence:

To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case - that is, to be killed.
This is the moral of the fairy tale about the beautiful woman (SW 77) 3 .

Because patriarchal society is hierarchical, there will always be abusers and the
abused, torturers and the tortured. Sade’s Justine is a good woman because she behaves
according to the rules laid down for her sex by the male sex. In Sade’s world, as in any
patriarchal system, virtue consists in observing an arbitrary set of rules, and the only
reward virtue can hope for is to be able to escape punishment. Justine’s virtue
subsequently turns her into a female martyr. The reward she receives for her goodness is
rape, humiliation, deceit, confinement, and endless pain. Justine is shown as a sexually
active woman, and yet this activity, since it is involuntary, turns her into a victim. Justine
has committed a gross crime by being born a woman. She is punished for the original
crime of Eve, and she is not only a martyr but also a female Christ, for she has to bear on
her body the pain due to all female sex. What is worse is that the girl is a gratuitous
victim: her suffering does not serve as redemption, her virtue does not do any good to

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anyone, least of all herself. Her virtue does not save her from torture, only facilitates it.
Therefore, virtue is useless if not harmful in the world of men who hate women whose
manners they have themselves invented, and since a woman has no other value to put on
the market except her virtue, she can , having lost it, utilise her body for her own benefit.
Thus, refuting a sympathetic attitude to a woman like Justine, Carter seems to be
suggesting that women who accept the male point of view of themselves, who passively
put up with male chauvinism, deserve to be tortured. Therefore, Carter refuses to regard
Justine as a real woman, a woman without quotation marks. For her, Justine is obscene to
the extent to which she is beautiful.
Her beauty, her submissiveness and false expectations that these qualities will
do her some good are what make her obscene (SW 57).

The other type of woman created by an unfree society is Juliette, younger sister of Justine
and the heroine of Marquis de Sade's novel Juliette, or the Prosperities of Vice.
The opening chapter of Justine introduces the two girls receiving their education
in a convent, which is a school of life for both girls, but in opposite ways. If Justine
learns piety and submission, Juliette learns pleasure and reason, which, as the title of the
novel suggests, she will turn into vice.
Carter treats the paradox of Justine and Juliette as inherently pre-conditioned by
the social structure they inhabit, the "trifold masculine symbolism of authority" (SW 80) -
that of God, the king and the law. Juliette survives because she knows better than her
sister that it is useless to rebel against fate. The only way of dealing with the system is to
accept its terms for one's own benefit.
The general rule, as Angela Carter sees it, is as follows: the comfort of one class
depends on the misery of the other. To be a woman is to be automatically defined as the
other, and therefore placed at a disadvantage in man's world. But the author sees being a
woman as a "more easily remedied condition" (SW 78) than poverty. What it takes is
abandoning "the praxis of femininity" and entering the world of men and the world of the
rich. The only way to do it is to enter it on the terms of this world.
Juliette proves successful at "abandoning the praxis of femininity". She is a
rational woman who "leaves not a single cell of her brain unused" (SW 79). She learns

3
SW stands for The Sadeian Woman in citations of the present text.

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eagerly from her teachers, criminals and libertines, that Nature has made the weak to be
slaves of the strong, and in order to escape slavery one must embrace tyranny. She
becomes a sexual terrorist. This provides her both with material prosperity and libidinal
gratification. In the world of cash-sale structure, with nothing but her body to put on the
market, she utilises the possibility to sell it dear.
Juliette never stoops to compassion, mercy, gratefulness or any other attribute of
common humanity. This ensures her success. In murdering her friends and burning her
own daughter, she transcends humanity and attains "the lonely freedom of the libertine"
(SW 99). This, according to Carter, is the only way for her to survive, because she lives
in a world of patriarchal law, which is oppressive by its nature. In Carter's view,
patriarchal law is unjust not because it is specifically oppressive to women, but because it
confines power to a single dominant class. That is why it is possible, in this system, to
transcend one's gender (as Juliette does), to part company with the oppressed and unite
with the oppressors.

... the moral of Juliette’s life suggests the paradox of the hangman - in a
country where the hangman rules, only the hangman escapes punishment
for his crimes (SW 99).

Thus, in analysing Sade, Angela Carter comes to the conclusion that in the social
context he was writing, women are the prime sacrificial victims if they are not ritual
murderesses themselves. Carter's own fiction presents, on a more placid scale, a number
of Juliettes striving to define their place in the world of men.
Carter’s texts, such as novels Heroes and Villains (1969) and The Passion of New
Eve (1977) and short stories collected in a volume The Bloody Chamber (1979) present
an exposition of power relations and raise the powerful issue of the master’s dependency
on his slaves. In the fairy story and parable The Werewolf (1979), the Red Riding Hood
chops off the paw of the wolf threatening her, and the wolf lets out "a gulp almost a sob
… wolves are less brave than they seem", comments the author (BC 109). This rewriting
of a wolf's characteristics serves to prove that the structure of dominance entails a
necessary weakness, i. e., dependency of the master that undermines it. This, according to
Carter, facilitates Justine’s sufferings and Juliette’s triumph.

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 However, aggressiveness is not seen by Carter as a most desirable achievement on
the way to liberation. She sees both the types, that of the "suffering woman" and the
female terrorist as perverse. Neither is real woman, a character Carter is looking for
throughout her literary career.

She [Juliette] is, just as her sister is, a description of a type of female
behaviour rather than a model of female behaviour and her triumph is just as
ambivalent as is Justine’s disaster. Justine is the thesis, Juliette the
antithesis; both are without hope and neither pays any heed to a future in
which might be the possibility of a synthesis of their modes of being, neither
submissive nor aggressive, capable of both thought and feeling (SW 79).

Carter also points out that the free expression of desire is as alien to pornography
as it is to marriage. For her, pornography reduces flesh to meat, and its purpose is pure
consumption. In the fairy-tale The Company of Wolves (1969), which is Carter’s version
of the classic Red Riding Hood, the brave girl refuses to be made victim, to be
consumed. When confronted with the wolf, she is not frightened.

The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat
(The Bloody Chamber 118)

This refusal to give up her body as meat gives vent to her desire, puts her into a
superior position and affirms her right for life.

In Hélène Cixous' discourse, the Big Bad Wolf punishes the female sex for the
liberty of making her own detour "through her own forest" (481). He represents the
Great Mother (for he takes her place after she is gone), who is the main limit to the
daughter's sexuality and pleasure - a view associated with Cixous, Carter, and Sade.
Carter's Red Riding Hood mutinies against this distribution of authority. She saves
herself from being swallowed by laughter that disarms the about-to be violator:

She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped out his shirt for
him and flung it into the fire … (The Bloody Chamber 118.

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 This begets the possibility of consideration and love. In the morning, the girl is
found sleeping sweetly between the paws of the “tender” wolf.
Thus, Angela Carter sees the writing of Marquis de Sade as a reflection of social
relations on patriarchy. She regards his pornographic heroines Justine and Juliette as
metaphors or archetypes – the “suffering woman” and the terrorist, both of whom are
perverse in that they are both conditioned by a social necessity. Sade puts pornography in
the service of women when he refuses to regard female sexuality purely in relation to its
reproductive function, and proposes that it can be fully employed as an instrument of
power and an agent of female liberation.

Works Cited
Bristow, Joseph. and Trev Lynn Broughton, ed. The Infernal Desires of Angela
Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism. London: Longman, 1997
Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. London: Penguin, 1979.
--- The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. London: Virago, 1993.
Cixous, Hélène. “Castration or Decapitation?” Trans. Anette Kuhn. Contemporary
Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, Second Edition. Ed. Robert Con Davis
and Ronald Schleifer. N. Y.: Longman, 1989. 479–491.
Susan M.Easton. The Problem of Pornography. Regulation and the Right to Free
Speech. London: Routledge. 1994.
D.-A.-F-De Sade. La Nouvelle Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu. Moscow: NIK
1994