The Sadeian Woman - quotes - complete

Question 1

What does carter say about beauty, youth and innocence in women

Answer 1

beauty, youth, and innocence in women give them an artificial ascendancy…she is compensated for her defencelessness by a convention of respect which is largely false’

Question 2

What does carter say about the mystification of the feminine self

Answer 2

herself mystified by herself, narcissistically enamoured of the idea of herself as Blessed Virgin, she has no notion at all of who she is except in fantasy’

Question 3

What does Carter say about where Justine’s valuing of herself lies

Answer 3

has never resided in herself but in the values of the open market’

Question 4

What does carter say about what Justine is the start of

Answer 4

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’

Question 5

What Edmund ___say the Sadeian woman is for her other books

Answer 5

Gordon - a sort of guide to the other books she wrote during this period

Question 6

What is Carter’s attitude to Sade overall

Answer 6

he expresses the hypocrisies of a patriarchal society that treats women as property

Question 7

What do Juliette and Justine represent

Answer 7

Opposing responses to patriarchal oppression

Question 8

what particular response to the patriarchy does Justine embody

Answer 8

following traditional morality in an effort to attain virtue (but it only leads to suffering)

Question 9

what response to the patriarchy does Juliette embody

Answer 9

she embraces libertinism and uses her sexuality as a source of power and agency

Question 10

What is Carter’s response to 1970s radical feminist movements about sexuality

Answer 10

she sees it as dangerous to completely reject sexuality/suppress sexual expression
- as it could paint women as perpetual victims who have no power to define their sexual agency (denies agency)

However she also acknowledges that sexuality is not inherently liberating

Overall the relationship between sexuality and power is nuanced and can be used to subjugate or empower women

Question 11

what did 1970s radical feminist movements view sexuality/overt sexual expression and pornography as

Answer 11

tools of patriarchal control for the objectification of women

Question 12

Give a quote supporting the idea that the dominatrix character in pornography is not a powerful female figure

Answer 12

the dominatrix is actually a ‘manifestation of the victim’s guilt before the fact of his own sexuality’

Question 13

what is the association with teh setting of the forest in Justine

Answer 13

‘the place of rape’

Question 14

what is the association with the fortress in Justine

Answer 14

‘the place of confinement and pain’

Question 15

give a quote about Justine and virtue and suffering

Answer 15

there is ‘no mysterious virtue in Justine’s suffering’

Question 16

what is the essence of Justine’s virtue

Answer 16

‘doing what she is told’

Question 17

what makes Justine important to herself

Answer 17

‘her denial of her own sexuality, it what makes her important to herself’

Question 18

Justine offers herself up as an object of ____expecting ___and is instead inevitably ___

Answer 18

pity, respect, desecrated

Question 19

the dual standards of feminist y are perfectly balanced in what girl

Answer 19

pre-pubescent (on the cinema screen - you could analyse the cinematic nature of some of Carter’s work and see this as similar to the pulp-fiction cinematic nature of Dracula)

Question 20

why can beauty and sexuality not be reconciled in women

Answer 20

while that beauty relies upon a conception of beauty in innocence, they cannot be married

Question 21

why is the ‘pre-sexual waif’ a sexual icon

Answer 21

she is ‘tacitly assumed to be sexually inactive’ so her sexy beauty cannot ruin her attractiveness)

Question 22

Give a quote about passivity being death-like

Answer 22

to be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. 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 perfect woman.’

Question 23

Give a quote about how niether Justine nor Juliette succeed in overcoming the patriarchy

Answer 23

b. Justine is a ‘pawn’, Juliette is the ‘queen’, but the king is still ‘the lord of the game’

Question 24

Give a quote showing Sade’s works are like fairy tales

Answer 24

a. Sade sees psychology as fixed, with vice and virtue as innate. ‘this straightjacket psychology relates his fiction directly to the black and white ethical world of fairy tale and fable’

Question 25

Give a quote about the moral structures of fairy tales

Answer 25

black and white ethical world of fairy tale and fable

Question 26

Give a quote about the unresolved contradiction in Sade’s fiction whcih could be used to explore morality and amorality in TBC

Answer 26

his characters represent moral absolutes in a world where no moral absolutes exist’ (this is an unresolved contradiction in his fiction

Question 27

Give 2 things that are symbolic of the womb

Answer 27

‘the sea’ and ‘caves’

Question 28

give male attitudes to the womb according to Carter

Answer 28

‘men long for it and fear it’ - this could link to the bloody chamber in the bloody chamber being a womb (the marquis sees it as his ‘enfer’ and hence fears it but he also loves it

Question 29

Give carters description of the womb

Answer 29

‘warm, moist, dark, inward, secret, forbidden, fleshy core of the unknowable labryrinth of our experience’

Question 30

Why are women sacred

Answer 30

they possess a womb

Question 31

how do we demystify the woman

Answer 31

deny the bankrupt enchantments of the womb

Question 32

how is the mother a denial of sexual pleasure

Answer 32

‘her sexuality has been placed at the service of reproductive function alone’

Question 33

How does safe write about sexual relations - in what terms?

Answer 33

’in terms of butchery and meat’

Question 34

what are the delights of meat

Answer 34

The butcherly delights of meat…are not sensual but analytical;

Question 35

give a quote about carnal knowledge

Answer 35

carnal knowledge is the infernal knowledge of the flesh as meat