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d34ecd2
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The one-eyed man will be King in the country of the blind only if he arrives there in full possession of his partial faculties -- that is, providing he is perfectly aware of the precise nature of sight and does not confuse it with second sight, nor with the mind's eye's visions, nor with madness.
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vision
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Angela Carter |
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a8ffa7e
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The tiger sat still as a heraldic beast, in the pact he had made with his ferocity to do me no harm. He was far larger than I could have imagined, from the poor, shabby things I'd seen once, in the Czar's menagerie at Petersburg, the golden fruit of their eyes dimming, withering in the far North of captivity. Nothing about him reminded me of humanity.
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Angela Carter |
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7c32125
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Twined in this fortuitous embrace, Jewel and Marianne lay among the curling ferns. At first, outlines but no colours appeared in the forest and all was blank forms of uniform and phantom grey but, after the sun penetrated the branches, the trees acquired flesh from the darkness and, as the sky grew light, she saw nothing that was not green or else covered with flowers. Plants she could not name thrust luscious spires towards her hands; grea..
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Angela Carter |
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e1bddd8
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Now all shun the village below the chateau in which the beautiful queen of the vampires helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes.
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Angela Carter |
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bab2c81
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The waxen fingers of the Countess, fingers of a holy image, turn up the card called L'Amoureux. Never, never before... never before has the Countess cast herself a fate involving L'Amoureux. She shakes, she trembles, her great eyes close beneath her finely veined, nervously throbbing eyelids; the lovely cartomancer has, this time, the first time, dealt herself a hand of love and death.
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Angela Carter |
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ef93a1e
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I watched with the furious cynicism peculiar to women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly
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Angela Carter |
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9132e4e
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he herself will serve them coffee in tiny, cracked cups of precious porcelain and little sugar cakes. The hobbledehoys sit with a spilling cup in one hand and a biscuit in the other, gaping at the beautiful Countess in her satin finery as she pours from a silver pot and chatters distractedly to put them at their fatal ease. A certain desolate stillness of her eyes indicates she is inconsolable. She would like to caress their lean, brown che..
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Angela Carter |
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1cac985
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But the Countess herself is indifferent to her own weird authority. She believes that, by ignoring it, she can abnegate it. More than anything, she would like to be human; but she does not know if that is possible. The Tarot always shows the same configuration: always she turns up La Papesse, Le Mort, Le Tour Abolie, wisdom, death, dissolution.
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Angela Carter |
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b7b95d8
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His tobacco had a richly herbal smell, as though it was good for you.
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Angela Carter |
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92e22d5
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Necessary connections are fabulous beasts.
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Angela Carter |
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3f576f6
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The notion of a natural propensity for vice is essential to Sadeian psychology; vice is innate, as is virtue, if social conditions are unalterable. This straitjacket psychology relates his fiction directly back to the black and white ethical world of fairy tale and fable; it is in conflict with his frequently expounded general theory of moral relativity, that good and evil are not the same thing at all times and in all places.
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good-and-evil
ethics-and-moral-philosophy
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Angela Carter |
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e70168a
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At this time, the cusp of the modern age, the hinge of the nineteenth century, had a plebiscite been taken amongst all the inhabitants of the world, by far the great number of them, occupied as they were throughout the planet with daily business of agriculture of the slash and burn variety, warfare, metaphysics and procreation, would have heartily concurred with these indigenous Siberians that the whole idea of the twentieth century, or any..
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time
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Angela Carter |
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1a50f1b
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Because she is the channel of life, woman as mythic mother lives at one remove from life. A woman who defines herself through her fertility has no other option. So a woman who feels she has been deprived of motherhood is trebly deprived--of children; of the value of herself as mother; and of her own self, as autonomous being.
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motherhood
fertility
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Angela Carter |
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1db9241
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Sin and contraception aside, anal intercourse has an egalitarian lure for Sade. If sexual relations are implicitly political in Sade, the sexual act, among equals, is one of mutual if sequential dominance.
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dominance
sexual-relations
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Angela Carter |
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f19318c
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Sade's manicheistic dualism sees the world as irredeemably evil; vice must always prosper, virtue always despair. There is no hope for us as we are now.[...]Sade's vision is utterly without transcendence.
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virtue
transcendence
vice
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Angela Carter |
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2bfe5c3
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Sade's work, with its compulsive attraction for the delinquent imagination of the romantics, has been instrumental in shaping aspects of the modern sensibility; its paranoia, its despair, its sexual terrors, its omnivorous egocentricity, its tolerance of massacre, holocaust, annihilation.
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romantics
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Angela Carter |
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3e63656
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Justine is a good woman in a man's world. She is a good woman according to the rules for women laid down by men and her reward is rape, humiliation and incessant beatings. Her life is that of a woman martyrised by the circumstances of her life as a woman.
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justine
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Angela Carter |
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ca3f357
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I saw before me a mansion in the Gothic style, all ivied over, and, above the turrets, floated a fingernail moon with a star in its arms.
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Angela Carter |
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afb36ef
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The dead know something we don't, although they keep it to themselves.
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Angela Carter |
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faf2eb5
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The excremental enthusiasm of the libertines transforms the ordure in which they roll to a bed of roses.
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Angela Carter |
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6baad83
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Indeed, pornography is basically propaganda for fucking, an activity, one would have thought, that did not need much advertising in itself, because most people want to do it as soon as they know how.
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propaganda
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Angela Carter |
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ff9a490
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For Sade, all tenderness is false, a deceit, a trap; all pleasure contains within itself the seeds of atrocities; all beds are minefields.
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tenderness
pleasure
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Angela Carter |
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4e497eb
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But there is no mysterious virtue in Justine's suffering. The martyrdom of this Christ-figure is absolutely useless; she is a gratuitous victim. And if there is no virtue in her suffering, then there is none, it turns out, in her virtue itself; it does nobody any good, least of all herself.
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virtue
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Angela Carter |
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021134f
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Then, if I am lucky enough to be taken with such poetic pseudo-seriousness, my nether mouth may be acknowledged as one capable of speech - were there not, of old, divinatory priestesses, female oracles and so forth? Was there not Cassandra, who always spoke the truth, although admittedly in such a way that nobody ever believed her? And that, in mythic terms, is the hell of it. Since that female, oracular mouth is located so near the beastly..
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Angela Carter |
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1ba4b3d
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If one sexual partner is economically dependent on the other, then the question of sexual coercion, of contractual obligation, raises its ugly head in the very abode of love and inevitably colours the nature of the sexual expression of affection. The marriage bed is a particularly delusive refuge from the world because all wives of necessity fuck by contract. Prostitutes are at least decently paid on the nail and boast fewer illusions about..
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Angela Carter |
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e77e824
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Old wives' tales -- that is, worthless stories, untruths, trivial gossip, a derisive label that allots the art of storytelling to women at the exact same time as it takes all value from it.
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Angela Carter |
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78a5a2e
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Pornography, like marriage and the fictions of romantic love, assists the process of false universalising. Its excesses belong to that timeless, locationless area outside history, outside geography, where fascist art is born. Nevertheless, there is no question of an aesthetics of pornography. It can never be art for art's sake. Honourably enough, it is always art with work to do.
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Angela Carter |
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af4f1b7
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Therefore pornography must always have the false simplicity of fable; the abstraction of the flesh involves the mystification of the flesh. As it reduces the actors in the sexual drama to instruments of pure function, so the pursuit of pleasure becomes in itself a metaphysical quest. The pornographer, in spite of himself, becomes a metaphysician when he states that the friction of penis in orifice is the supreme matter of the world, for whi..
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Angela Carter |
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a48573b
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Nothing exercises such power over the imagination as the nature of sexual relationships, and the pornographer has it in his power to become a terrorist of the imagination, a sexual guerilla whose purpose is to overturn our most basic notions of these relations, to reinstitute sexuality as a primary mode of being rather than a specialised area of vacation from being and to show that the everyday meetings in the marriage bed are parodies of t..
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sexuality
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Angela Carter |
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9de260f
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A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster. Her freedom will be a condition of personal privilege that deprives those on which she exercises it of her own freedom. The most extreme kind of this deprivation is murder. These women murder.
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murder
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Angela Carter |
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59fb856
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One of Sade's singularities is that he offers an absolutely sexualised view of the world, a sexualisation that permeates everything, much as his atheism does and, since he is not a religious man but a political man, he treats the facts of female sexuality not as a moral dilemma but as a political reality.
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Angela Carter |
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7d66cec
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Repression is Justine's whole being - repression of sex, of anger and of her own violence; the repressions demanded of Christian virtue, in fact.
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virtue
repression
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Angela Carter |
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2877309
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Yet wild things have a far more rational fear of us than is ours of them...
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wildlife
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Angela Carter |
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09e0e2b
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In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force.
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Angela Carter |
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06bd615
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She learns her lesson at once; to escape slavery, she must embrace tyranny.
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slavery
tyranny
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Angela Carter |
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4df3ce2
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To obtain his precious orgasm, the libertine must now hunt it down single-mindedly through seas of blood and excrement.
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excrement
libertines
orgasm
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Angela Carter |
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941276f
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It was an event of too massive arbitrariness for me to comprehend but, as the rain-washed light fell more and more wistfully on the gigantic tip of sandstone that killed my bearded lady, my reptilian friend, my shooting star and my blind philosopher, I became most deeply aware of mortality.
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Angela Carter |
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c1d74ae
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Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
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Angela Carter |
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c8ee0ed
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Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
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Angela Carter |
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86268b0
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A book is simply the container of an idea--like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.
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Angela Carter |
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a732e11
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My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis.
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Angela Carter |
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f0cde7a
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I understand,' said Melanie. An ancient, female look passed between them; they were poor women pensioners, planets round a male sun.
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poverty
powerlessness
patriarchy
|
Angela Carter |