The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History

"The personal and the political is a theme that runs through all of these books, and this is exactly what Angela Carter was writing about, back in the 70s, in The Sadeian Woman . It’s partly polemic about pornography and prostitution, it’s partly literary history and history about the Marquis de Sade and his writings . She’s really exploring whether you can have sex that is divorced from politics and history and the power dynamics around you. People are still talking about that all the time, and I think that dilemma—that tension between the personal and political—is always central to feminism. This book was written long before the internet existed, but because of the widespread availability of pornography online, it’s absolutely fascinating to read now. It feels so resonant. Angela Carter is such an important part of Virago’s history. When we talk to writers who want to be published by us, or when we talk to people who want to work at Virago, hers is the name that comes up over and over again. A lot of us read and admired The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan , which came out recently. There’s so much discussion at the moment about sex and power and pornography and prostitution—or sex work, depending on your views. We felt The Sadeian Woman was a great choice because it was part of those discussions in the 1970s on how the second wave approached those issues, but it feels so up to date. It’s surprising; it’s provocative. You can’t help but find something challenging on every page. I thought about this really hard because you can classify it in so many ways. There is polemic in there, but it’s grounded in literary history and history as well. It’s slightly hard to categorize. As the publisher, we get to decide, and I put it down as cultural criticism in the end."

"This was written a few years after Sade/Fourier/Loyola , and Carter had obviously read both Barthes and Foucault. You can read Foucault between the lines throughout The Sadeian Woman. Carter is a fascinating writer in all sorts of ways. She was one of the first English writers to engage with Sade—who was a banned author in England at the time she was writing because of the moral panic that followed the Moors Murders (when it transpired that Ian Brady had read Sade’s Justine). It’s also a time when second wave feminism is starting to exert its influence on Anglo-American culture, and in fact Sade becomes a highly contested figure within feminism at this time. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . On the one hand, we have Angela Carter’s book on Sade in 1979 and on the other Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography , dedicated to Rose Keller, and with a really interesting chapter on Sade. And Dworkin is furious with Carter for her book. There’s a heated debate between these different strands of feminism around the power of pornography and the relationship between violence and pornography.Sade becomes a totemic figure in this debate—a poster boy for pornography and violent pornography at that. He is seen by both Carter and Dworkin as the true face of men lurking behind pornography. But Carter recuperates Sade for female readers, which seems a really counterintuitive move in all sorts of ways. She’s not the first to do so. The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire compiled a little anthology of selections from Sade in 1908, and in his introduction to that he talks about Justine and Juliette as two different visions of womanhood, the former subjugated and the latter liberated. He famously describes Sade as “the freest spirit who ever lived” and as someone who wanted women to be just as free as men. As strange as it may seem, Apollinaire is presenting Sade as a kind of proto-feminist, and it’s striking that Carter quotes him in The Sadeian Woman. Carter is obviously fascinated by Sade, and deeply influenced by her reading of his fiction— The Bloody Chamber has Sade all over it. And Carter is fascinated by Juliette in particular, by this figure of female power—a woman of action. Juliette becomes a model for some of the female protagonists in The Bloody Chamber . What also interests Carter is Sade’s acknowledgement of women as sexual beings—something which she thinks is revolutionary. There are issues in terms of the historicity of all that, and I think Sade is slightly less revolutionary than she thinks, but she is right to talk about Sade seeing sexuality as being at the heart of human identity. And Sade is certainly interesting on women. Carter’s reading of Sade is idiosyncratic and provocative, but it’s no less brilliant for all that. It’s not a historicised reading of Sade, it’s using Sade and thinking about Sade in relation to the moment at which she’s writing. It’s basically two cultures being thrown together and seeing what comes out of it. Dworkin coruscates Sade critics for minimising his violence against women and she’s right to do so. She goes too far in all sorts of ways but she’s a good polemical writer. She is brilliant on Roland Barthes’ dehumanisation of Rose Keller. In Sade/Fourier/Loyola , Barthes says that what fascinates him about Sade is the little details, like the fact that instead of saying “mademoiselle” he says “milli”, a Provençal variation. Barthes says he is also fascinated by the “white muff” in the account of the Rose Keller affair. Dworkin rightly notes that Barthes marginalises Keller and her suffering—she disappears from the picture and he focusses on the objects. So, there is a sense in which Sade’s critics simply duplicate the misogyny that they read. Then Dworkin attacks Carter, but less successfully—she underestimates her. Carter is not saying Juliette is how women should be—she expressly says she is not a model for female behaviour—but she is saying that through Juliette Sade dismantles myths about womanhood (myths of maternity and so on). For Carter, the fact that sex in Sade’s fiction is for recreation not procreation is important, and useful; she puts Sade to work in the service of women and that’s a really interesting idea. I like the idea of “An Exercise…” because I think there is a sense in which she is trying something out. And it’s not perfect, but there are these fascinating little insights that are just thrown up throughout. She talks about the moral strength of the victim in Sade, for example. It’s also striking that the most compelling literary criticism on Sade has been by women: somehow women have found it easier to write about Sade than men. Maybe it’s because they are not incriminated in the same way by it. “It’s also striking that the most compelling literary criticism on Sade has been by women” This is true of the academic study of pornography more generally too. Linda Williams, who wrote a pioneering study on pornography called Hard Core , said a few years ago that the most interesting work in that field has been almost entirely produced by women or gay men. Straight men have not done very well on the subject, and I think the same thing has happened with Sade."