Carter AO5 Flashcards
Allmark
[On photographing the femme fatale] long luxurious hair, hooded gaze, her mouth slightly apart and her reddened lips reflect sexual arousal.
Andrews and Palmer
It is not only a challenge to gender found in Carter’s work. Carter envisions replacing ‘uniform Englishness’ with something more heteroglot and untidy.
Embraces ‘englishness’ in terms of historical flux rather than in terms of the statis and petrification of English ‘heritage’.
Atwood
A new form of misogyny: women’s hatred of women.
Was a born subversive, in the sense of the original root: to overturn.
Bettelheim
Psychoanalytical approach to the function of fairytales: The fairytale estranges the child from the real world and allows them to deal with deep-rooted psychological issues and anxiety provoking incidents to achieve autonomy.
Explains the original Beauty and the Beast as the story of a girl’s necessary maturation from daughter to bride.
Bindisha
The Company of Wolves features an anecdote thrown in almost as an aside.
In an environment in which all things are apparently possible, a woman still cannot escape patriarchal judgment and male violence.
Wolf-man or full-man, these husbands are exactly the same in their abuse of women.
Bristow and Broughton
Carter’s work anticipated several years of the most urgent feminist debates to develop in the 1980s and 90s.
Carter
I’m a great admirer of folklore.
Truly, I think the degree to which the bourgeoisie has appropriated the culture of the poor is very interesting, it’s very shocking. Fairy tales are part of the oral tradition of Europe. They were simply the fiction of the illiterate.
I’m in the de-mythologising business.
I suppose I’m glad that the year of the Jubilee was the year of the punk really, it was actually a very happy kind of irony, almost tasteful.
A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.
Intention was not to do versions of or adult-fairytales but to extract the latent content from traditional stories.
Mother is in herself a concrete denial of the idea of sexual pleasure since her sexuality has been placed at the service of reproductive function alone. She is the perpetually violated passive principle; her autonomy has been sufficiently eroded by the presence within her of the embryo she brought to term. Her unthinking ability to reproduce, which is her pride, is, since it is beyond choice, not a specific virtue of her own.
I am all for putting new wine into old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode.
A wedding dress is like a gift-wrapped girl. It’s as though the wearer is only existing in transition. She’s passing from her father to her husband, and only at the moment of passage is she allowed any being at all, in this completely artificial manner.
The romantic glamour surrounding the clothing and flowers (lillies) etc. only disguises her real function, which is as the supreme icon of woman as a sexual thing and nothing else whatsover.
Carter’s obituarist
Remained true to herself.
Her representation of sexual desire sometimes led her into vulgarity.
Her admirers wonder whether she cared about answers to the questions she set herself.
Engaged herself with sexual themes which have been the reserve of male novelists, a truly independent standpoint by women is difficult to formulate without becoming strident and thus ceasing to be literature.
It is clear that Carter’s writing exasperated those who felt that modesty, grace, and dignity were prerequisites of proper literature.
Clark
The Company of Wolves offers only the standard patriarchal opposition between the feral, domineering male, and the gentle submissive female.
De Beauvoir
Women are half-victims, half-accomplices like everyone else.
DiQuinzio
Essential motherhood: the naturalisation of motherhood.
An ideological formation that specifies the essential attributes of motherhood and articulates femininity in terms of motherhood. According to EM mothering is a function of women’s female nature. EM construes motherhood as natural and inevitable. A woman’s development and satisfaction requires motherhood. Woman’s psychological and emotional capacities for empathy, awareness, of the need of others, and self-sacrifice is natural in women.
Duncker
Duncker sets out to examine the political limits to Carter’s use of the fairytale.
Fairytales are educational propaganda for children.
Carter falls into the infernal trap inherent in the fairytale and rewrites tales within the straitjacket of their original structures.
The fairytale remains the carrier of ideology.
Carter explains, amplifies, reproduces, rather than alters.
TBC is a reworking of Jane Eyre. The blindness of the piano tuner is a symbolic castration like the mutilation of Mr Rochester; impotent, dependent, it puts him on the same level as Jane.
For all her perceived c20th progressiveness, Carter could never imagine Cinderella in bed with the fairy godmother.
Dworkin
Fairytales are the beginning, where we learn who we must be, as well as the moral of the story.
They delineate the roles, interactions, and values which are available to us.
The fairytale is the primary information of the culture.
First scenarios of women and men which mould our psyches.
Men and women are clearly portrayed as different, absolute opposites…she could never do what he does at all, let alone better.
Gamble
Carter persistently associates bridal apparel with the shroud and the body of the bride with that of the corpse. The wedding dress in her work never quite coincides with the right body. Carter uses her fiction to expose the apparatus of power that underlies the institution of marriage.
The wedding dress signals the death of an autonomous female subjectivity.
Gordon
She was concerned with unpicking the mythic roles and structures that underwrite our existences. In particular, the various myths of gender identity.
Carter produced work that stood defiantly apart from the work of her contemporaries.
She played with disreputable genres.
