"Sade's Woman" Subtitle: An Exercise in Cultural History Author: [British] Angela Carter

▼ "The Godmother of Literature" Angela Carter VS. "The Master of Eroticism" Marquis de Sade

Boldly deconstructing sexual desire as a political phenomenon and the gender myths that have prevailed for thousands of years

▼ Is a free woman in an unfree society a monster? Is a woman supposed to be feminine? Is a man supposed to be masculine? Is a woman's physiological structure determined that she must be the recipient of male sexual desire, must give birth, and be a mother? Is blonde, plump, but unfortunate Marilyn Monroe the successor of Justine, who remained chaste but died tragically?

▼The Marquis de Sade, who was born noble in 1740, wrote shocking pornographic literature such as "120 Days of Sodom" and "Philosophy of the Boudoir" in prison. Angela Carter, who was born in 1940 and devoted her life to breaking free from gender shackles and pursuing equal gender relations, wrote an offensive work (offending both men and women) - "Sade's Woman" in the 1970s when the sexual liberation movement was surging, and regarded Sade, who abused women in his works, as a "moral pornographic writer."

▼In "Sade's Woman", Carter did not promote or agree with the shocking violence, sexual abuse and misogyny in Sade's works. She believed that Sade was using pornographic writing to make a very lethal satire on human beings, using extremely vicious pornography to criticize the pathological relationship between the sexes and the oppressive power society behind it. He portrayed sexual relations in an unfree social context as a manifestation of pure tyranny. In his beastly orgy, the perpetrators are always those who hold political power, and the victims are those who have almost no power.

▼Alvito Manguel wrote in Charming Monsters: "If Little Red Riding Hood ends up lying in the wolf's bed no matter what she does, she still has two ways to escape. One is to adapt to her victimhood (the theme of Sade's Justine, or the Doom of Chastity), and the other is to become the mistress of her own fate (that is what Sade's Juliette said)." But Carter did not fall into the dilemma of becoming Justine or Juliette. She emphasized that the core of Sade's Woman is about how the world can be reconstructed; the most important right should be to love and be loved.

▼ "Sade's Woman" is a unique cultural history criticism by Angela Carter, an important British female writer. In this book, Carter re-evaluates the works of the controversial French philosopher and pornographic writer Marquis de Sade from a feminist perspective. Unlike ordinary feminists, Carter believes that Sade pioneered the way in which women were not simply written as reproductive tools. He saw the existence of women beyond their physiological characteristics, and thus liberated women in this sense. In this book, Carter analyzes sex as a kind of power politics, deconstructs the myth of gender, and creatively and pioneeringly transforms Sade's outrageous fictional female image into a female symbol of our time for criticism. Hollywood's sexy goddesses, mother-daughter relationships, pornographic works, and even the temples of sex and marriage are all devastatingly exposed to us by Carter's eloquent and witty words. Carter goes deep into the core of distorted sexual desire and proposes to establish a love relationship that recognizes neither the conqueror nor the conquered.

▼Sade’s Woman is neither a critical study nor a historical analysis of Sade, but an interpretation of some of the questions he raised in the late 20th century. These questions concern the culturally determined nature of women and the relationship between the sexes that arises from it, an antagonistic relationship that cruelly divides our common struggle to understand the world and is itself a profound revelation of this struggle.

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