SOURCE: Henstra, Sarah M. “The Pressure of New Wine: Performative Reading in Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman.” Textual Practice 13, no. 1 (spring 1999): 97-117.

[In the following essay, Henstra analyzes the acts of reading and revision in The Sadeian Woman.]

Angela Carter's critical essay on the Marquis de Sade entitled The Sadeian Woman is the most notorious of her non-fiction endeavours.¹ Its ambivalent attitude towards the pornographic writings of the ‘old monster’ who gave sadism its name—an attitude poised between praise and censure, curiosity and indignance—guaranteed the essay a mixed reception amidst the neophyte feminist debates on pornography at the time of its 1979 publication. The work raises questions about the differences between rereading older texts, as Carter does here, and rewriting them, as she does in much of her fictional work: Which practice is more politically effective? Which is more conducive to imaginative freedom? Which is better at avoiding complicity with the text it sets out to critique? Carter's view of the relationship between reading and writing suggests their mutual contribution to creativity: ‘Reading is just as creative an activity as writing and most intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode.’² This article will examine the combined impulses of reading (recitation) and writing (revision) in Carter's treatment of Sade's pornographic mythology. The Sadeian Woman serves as a model through which to formulate a concept of ‘performative reading’ to describe the project of confronting a misogynistic cultural authority with the material reality it obliterates. By exploring the changes that occur in the pornographic script under Carter's scrutiny, by tracing the redeployment of meaning that convinces the text to signify against its own dictate, we might test the effects of the new wine Carter injects into the Sadeian bottle.

The Sadeian Woman's subtitle changed from An Exercise in Cultural History to The Ideology of Pornography in the (Pantheon) reprint, a shift that gestures to several of the questions competing for Carter's attention in the study. What does Sade's fiction reveal about the distribution of power—not just sexual, but social and economic—in late eighteenth-century Europe? What of this distribution has changed in two hundred years and what, more pertinently, remains exactly the same? Does pornography comment on the real world of sexual relations or does it remain committed to the ‘timeless, locationless area outside history, outside geography, where fascist art is born’ (p. 12)? In her ‘Polemical Preface’ to the essay, entitled ‘Pornography in the service of women’, Carter locates pornography's misogyny in its dissimulation of a universal, immutable ratio between male and female, rendered graphic in street graffiti by the ‘probe and the fringed hole’ (p. 4). To refute the claim that sex precedes and transcends social conditions is to deny pornography its escapist, self-congratulatory assumptions. Carter's analysis of Sade will thus be driven by the need for contextualization, where that term exceeds its meaning of derivative or secondary ‘background’ research on a topic to signify the difficult project of grounding a mythical concept in the sites of its socio-historical production.

If universality has been used for keeping women at the bottom and convincing them they belong there, a ‘clever confidence trick’ Carter discerns in romance, politics and recent feminist valorizations of the maternal (p. 106) as well as in pornography, then perhaps a discourse of sex as contingent and specific would work in women's favour. Carter envisions the possibility of a ‘moral pornographer’ whose work would project a model ‘of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders’ (p. 19). She elaborates, ‘A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes. His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind’ (p. 20). I will return to the rhetorical subtleties of this ‘vision’, but for now it is important to note how Carter's field of enquiry narrows progressively: from the shortcomings of pornography in general to the potentials of one sort of pornography in particular to the pornography of Sade himself. Perhaps in expectation of what a ‘polemical’ preface might assert, many readers have imposed a syllogism here that makes the Marquis himself the moral pornographer Carter seeks (and will find) in the exploration of his works.

If not moral, Sade is surely portentous for Carter, especially in his conception of the heroic sisters who star in his novels, Justine and Juliette.³ Justine is Sade's sacrificial lamb, the virtuous woman abused, molested, tortured—but never corrupted; and for Carter, this indefatigable masochist personifies women's debased condition in the iconography of porn. More, Justine serves as an archetype made incarnate by such familiar victims as Marilyn Monroe, an extrapolation by which Carter reveals both the current virulence and the omnipresence of this ‘moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman’ (p. 77). Not to be dismissed, then, is the fact that Justine's description of a libertine monk molesting her fellow captive as ‘the filthy reptile withering the rose’ (p. 72) calls to mind the Virgin (rosa mundi), and Blake's corrupted innocence (‘The Sick Rose’), but especially the socalled ‘English Rose’: Diana, Princess of Wales, latest inheritor of the legacy of celebrity victimhood.⁴ Justine's virtue, made more inviolable with every violation of her body, is rivalled only by her sister's vice. Juliette is born a femme fatale and worsens only by degree under her long initiation into libertinism, but Carter also sees in her the ‘good old virtues of self-reliance and self help; “looking after Number One,” as we say in Britain’ (p. 101). Acknowledging that she can only cite the Cosmopolitan girl as a descendant of Juliette if the pedigree has been purged of most of its castratory aggression (p. 102), Carter is forced to conclude that ‘if Juliette has notably fewer spiritual great-granddaughters than her sister in the imaginary brothel where ideas of women are sold, then perhaps it serves to show how much in love with the idea of the blameless suffering of women we all are, men and women both’ (p. 101). In any case the sisters are equally circumscribed by the sexist discourses that give them life: ‘[Justine] is the bourgeois individualist in its tragic aspect; her sister, Juliette, affords its heroic side. Both are women whose identities have been defined exclusively by men’ (p. 77). That this statement applies equally well to the ‘female Oedipus’ of Philosophy in the Boudoir prompts Carter to treat Eugénie, along with her mother Mme de Mistival, as a filter through which to examine male aggression against the feminine (M)other. The Sadeian woman, at least as she appears in Sade, exists strictly within the confines of the male imagination.

Much commentary on Angela Carter's work draws a distinction between her literalist or ‘down to earth’ pieces and those that take flight into fantasy and myth. Paulina Palmer, for instance, posits a ‘key area of tension’ in Carter's writing between ‘two antithetical impulses’ that inform it: an analytic and ‘demythologizing’ bent in her works before 1978, and, from The Bloody Chamber onward, an emphasis on ‘celebratory and utopian elements’.⁵ Carter's impatience with such accounts stems from the precisely anti-‘u/topian’ political stance that pits her against the ‘no-place’ of universal human experience that informs discourses like pornography. ‘I become mildly irritated,’ she states, ‘when people, as they sometimes do, ask me about the “mythic quality” of work I've written lately. Because I believe that all myths are products of the human mind and reflect only aspects of material human practice. I'm in the demythologising business.’⁶ Nevertheless, Margaret Atwood will insist that, although Carter sees all myths as ‘consolatory nonsenses’ (a phrase Atwood quotes from The Sadeian Woman), ‘in The Bloody Chamber she proceeds to provide us with consolations of another kind, and she does so through the folk tale form, which is about as close to myth as you can get’.⁷ What is the source of this overwhelming reluctance to take the author at her word? Is it related to the preference many of these readers admit for the later work—the taste for lyricism and whimsy over exegesis and for Grimm/Disney over Sade as source material? Might it stem further from a sense that Carter finally escapes her fetters somehow through the imaginative worlds of her fairy-tales and carnivalesque novels?⁸ Does the enterprise of examining closely the sleights of patriarchal mythology promote a ‘distortion’, as Palmer feels, in that it risks ‘making those structures appear even more closed and impenetrable than, in actual fact, they are?’⁹ What sort of positive feminist vision might Carter leave us with in The Sadeian Woman if it is not to be a ‘celebratory, utopian’ one?

The concerns and contradictions touched on above indicate the extent to which an understanding of Carter's theoretical project will depend on a clarification of her terms. Her distinction between the terms ‘mythical’ and ‘material’ remains stable but differs in crucial ways from the various definitions deployed above. Judith Butler's theory of performative discourse serves as a useful lens through which to examine Carter's formulation of myth. I use Butler's framework for two reasons: to situate Carter's ideas amidst current social and theoretical debates concerning the investment of power in language, and to provide the lexical background for a concept of performative reading by which we might further examine Carter's treatment of Sade. Butler's account of performativity, introduced in Gender Trouble and elaborated further in Bodies that Matter, challenges the notion of language as mimetic or passively representative of extralinguistic ‘facts’.¹⁰ One such ‘fact’ is the binary of sex, cast as a prediscursive reality or truth upon which assumptions about gender behaviour are based. Butler proposes a reversal of this formula, so that ‘this production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender’.¹¹ Gender as a set of cultural signifiers is not descriptive or representational; rather, it is performative insofar as its signifying acts produce and reiterate the sexed body that it then dissimulates as prior to any description. Regarding signification as performative makes it an active, circular system of reference, so that sexual ‘identity’ and gendered social behaviour exist in a complex reciprocity: I ‘perform’ my gender constantly to reiterate and maintain my identity as a woman; the fiction of my female ‘identity’ regulates and delimits my performance. The discursive systems of power that create fields of cultural intelligibility and unintelligibility determine at once the ‘nature’ of the female body I inhabit and the behaviour that will express my ‘femaleness’.¹²

Butler would agree, then, with the claim of Carter's ‘Polemical Preface’ that ‘flesh is not an irreducible human universal’ (p. 9). However much we wish to evoke it in the service of arguments about ‘natural’ sexual relations based on ‘natural’ sexual difference, biology simply doesn't exist outside those specific evocations of it. When she states ‘our flesh arrives to us out of history, like everything else does’, Carter insists on the material and cultural determination of sexual identity and experience without explicitly concluding with Butler that discursive labels generate that identity and experience. But the difference is one of degree not kind, and Carter comes especially close to Butler's thesis when she defines the ‘mythic schema’ that determines how we perceive and interpret sex. The operative core of this mythology is the discursive binary of gender archetypes, ‘behavioural modes of masculine and feminine, which are culturally defined variables translated in the language of common usage to the status of universals’ (p. 6). The particular experience of flesh is subsumed and finally constituted by the discourse that universalizes it, so that Carter remarks on the tendency of women in particular to avouch the myth even when it diverges wildly from reality:

This confusion as to the experience of reality—that what I know from my experience is true is, in fact, not so—is most apparent, however, in the fantasy love-play of the archetypes, which generations of artists have contrived to make seem so attractive that, lulled by dreams, many women willingly ignore the palpable evidence of their own responses.

(p. 7)

To pit women's ‘own responses’ and ‘palpable evidence’ against the myths informed by patriarchal systems of power and by their cultural manifestations (i.e. ‘generations of artists’) is not to argue that women's bodies provide an experiential truth that (masculinist) language merely occludes. Carter is rather positing myth as a sort of second order signification, a discourse so culturally invested with performative power that it overtakes and stands in for other renderings.¹³

Insofar as Sade construes sex as the formulaic expression of a stable ratio of power—the universal mastery of strong over weak—he enforces a myth. Insofar as he insists on Justine's innate and incorruptible virtue and on Juliette's innate and unshakeable vice, proscribing the possibility of change, he constructs mythical archetypes with no possible ‘real-life’ correlatives.¹⁴ And insofar as his libertines claim justification for their crimes in the mercilessness of nature, they too take their cue from the myths of biological imperative. But where Sade uses porn to parody the social inequalities enforced by the enlightened institutions of his day by stripping down all human interactions to their skeletons of self-interest, Carter discerns a nascent anti-mythological impulse. What sort of work will a reading of Sade need to undertake in order to effect the transformation whereby nascent resistance becomes ‘pornography in the service of women’? So far I have sought to determine what Carter draws out of Sade's writing, and how she synthesizes that material; the remainder of this examination focuses on what Carter reads into the texts. I intend the phrase ‘reads into’ to be understood quite literally, so that it points to the kind of actively supplemental or contributive treatment of a text that I want to call ‘performative reading’. In its engagement with its subject text (Sade's corpus) on several critical planes The Sadeian Woman serves as a model from which to elaborate some of the characteristics that might set a performative reading apart from more traditional, receptive forms of interaction with texts.

A performative reading will first of all approach its subject text as itself a performance—a citation or rehearsal of a power-invested discourse it simultaneously seeks to reassert and fortify. Rather than focus only on ‘innovations’ or originary moments, a performative reading zeros in on those passages that raise the curtain on the limits of the stage such that the apparatus necessary to sustaining the illusion becomes apparent. (Carter calls her approach ‘an exercise of the lateral imagination’ (p. 37); one thinks of a flashlight shone sideways into the wings.) A performative reading also insists on the relative volatility of the text, its susceptibility to a redeployment of meaning and its constant renegotiation of power in the field of cultural significance. It therefore refuses to invest the subject text with the authority of a misogynistic illocutionary act, and its own élan is proof against the notion that the text relegates the female reader to a permanently objectified or silenced position. Finally, such a reading will construct its response along generic lines which themselves scrutinize the text's structural claims. The body of the text is confronted by the body of the critical response; at no time is either body forgotten, allowed transparency or universalized. Not surprisingly when a redeployment of meaning is on the table, the performative reading's most effective rhetorical tool will be irony. Irony ensures that to (re)cite norms in obedience to their designative functions and to parody those norms so that they signify against the power that authorizes them are flipsides of a performative coin that never stops spinning on its edge. This indissolubility of repetition and refutation guarantees that the ironic reading will encounter accusations of complicity with the text it tackles.¹⁵

To illuminate how Carter treats Sade's mythical world as a performance that at once challenges the norm and resurrects it, I will focus on two passages in Sade over which Carter's reading lingers. The first describes a series of mock-weddings in which Juliette and her libertine partner-in-crime Noirceuil dress in drag and twice marry their children, playing first the brides, then the grooms. The scene is exactly that: a scene, a formally choreographed parody of a formally choreographed religious ceremony whose language has the cultural power to enact what it says (‘I take thee _____ to be my husband’ is an action as well as a declaration). That this scene is repeated, and with variations on the gender roles, is doubly transgressive against the institution (the Church) which lends the ceremony its performative authority. While Carter points out that the weddings and the infanticidal slaughter that follows them form the ‘apogee’ of Juliette's libertine career (p. 98), the scene is by no means more overtly theatrical or parodic than the orgies and crime sprees that occur throughout the text. Several studies of Sade have delineated the way his writing collapses the normative narrative structure upon itself to draw attention to the overdetermined operations of power. Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, for one, describes the Sadeian orgy as a mise-en-abyme unit: as the link between the textual body and the erotic body, the orgy reflects the self-parodic, quotational and overcoded character of the pornographic script as a whole.¹⁶ Mazur places this specularity in the service of Sade's parodic staging of the social script, claiming that where society operates on confession and hidden sin, Sade posits proclamation and open transgression, and where society masks its rituals of oppression with institutional discourses (law, Church), Sade stages and rehearses these rituals in their grossest forms. Through its distortions and repetitions the orgy/mirror in Sade finally reflects society in the buff. Scott Carpenter goes further to argue that Sade's ‘figurality’, his use of metaphor and other rhetorical tropes which create semantic ‘slippage’, was itself transgressive, because eighteenth-century thinking equated literal language with virtue and suspected figural language of catachrestic abuse or inherent misrepresentation. Since God as the word incarnate is the ideal instance of literality, Sade's figural masquerade by which libertinism presents itself as virtuous (as in the ‘sacred’ scene of the wedding ceremony) mocked his society on religious, ethical and linguistic levels simultaneously.¹⁷

Carter would agree with the above assertions that Sade's theatricality contributes to a parodic vision of the dominant institutions in society, but her reading investigates the Sadeian script as mimicry on another level as well. For Carter, the Juliette/Noirceuil weddings are significant in that they constitute a ‘demonstration of the relative mutability of gender’ (p. 98). The nuptial ‘charade of sexual anarchy’ tops off a series of such inversions or slippages between genders that Carter sees as a radical challenge to the biological equation by which sex dictates gender. For Judith Butler, drag performances can make visible the imitative structure of all gender, in that they dramatize the way ‘normal’ gender performances must be reiterated continually to supplement and sustain the projection of a unified gender identity.¹⁸ In Sade, drag works somewhat differently: that the male and female libertines take turns to occupy the seat of phallic mastery means gender, for Sade, reduces to strong versus weak rather than male versus female. Carter notices, ‘Sade regularly subsumes women to the general class of the weak and therefore the exploited, and so he sees femininity as a mode of experience that transcends gender. Feminine impotence is a quality of the poor, regardless of gender’ (p. 86). If there is a performative challenge to the social apparatus of gender/power in Sade's work, Carter locates it in the need to repeat incessantly the scene of domination. The phallus as a ‘modality, passed from man to woman, woman to man, man to man, woman to woman, back and forth, as in a parlour game’ can only be said to ‘contain’ or ‘possess’ power as many times as it is wielded: ‘the sceptre of virility … is not a state-in-itself’ (p. 145). The endless circulation of the gender/power position in Sade thus dramatizes the instability of power in society. Every assertion of dominance will require further assertions to dissemble a stable ‘possession’ of authority; power never fully exhausts the possibility of insubordination or inversion.

If to conclude that the Sadeian orgy reveals the citational—and therefore volatile, excessive, somewhat indeterminate—quality of social authority is to construe ‘the old lecher’ as more hopeful and egalitarian than his works suggest, Carter quarries for the precise point at which Sade might proscribe such an interpretation. She observes that in the scene of Juliette's and Noirceuil's weddings there is one gender inversion which Sade avoids:

For Noirceuil and not she [Juliette] has been the instigator of this extraordinary game of dressing up and gender transformation, and he is careful to omit certain elaborations that would truly suggest an anarchy of the sexes—that, for example, Juliette, as a man, should marry he himself, as a woman; not for one moment, even in fantasy, could he allow Juliette to act out that kind of class dominance over him.

(p. 99)

Sade's methodical project of violating every taboo and usurping every authority finally stops short at freeing his female libertine from her identification with men. Sadeian women can abjure their gender to seize power when men give them licence to ‘play the man’, but femininity can never occupy the seat of mastery as the feminine. Carol Seigel comments on the above passage that ‘implicit in this is Angela Carter's disbelief that power exists only in relation to anything naturally related to maleness’, a statement implying that it is Carter, not Sade, who envisions an ‘anarchy of the sexes’ should Noirceuil relinquish the ‘sceptre’ to Juliette.¹⁹ Whether Sade in this scene guards against what he recognizes to be the fundamental transferability of gender is less crucial here than identifying how Carter presses beyond other readings of Sade as performative: yes, his sexual tableaux mirror social inequalities; yes, he also stages the compulsive repetitions by which power maintains itself; and in addition, Sade's rehearsals act out what he cannot allow if his world is to be determined by a stable ratio of strong over weak, vice over virtue. Carter's reading teases out how Sade at once toys with the possibility of inversion and convinces himself of the universality of tyranny. This uneasy combination compels him to reiterate the scene of rape, torture, murder ad nauseam, because each staging produces a margin of excess requiring further containment. By pursuing him past the limits of his performance, Carter discovers which strings he cannot pull without collapsing the tent under which he holds the ringmaster's whip.

The second moment in Sade to which Carter accords special significance occurs in Philosophy in the Boudoir, when Eugénie de Mistival completes her libertine education by ravaging her own mother. Carter's analysis of the passage elaborates upon and revises her reading of the weddings in Juliette, and here she returns to ‘the central paradox in all Sade's pornography’: is the phallus a site of enunciation and praxis open to occupation by anyone, and therefore open to transformation, or is it a ‘weapon of admonition, pure and simple’ that remains under the exclusive, oppressive direction of men? (p. 129) At the point when Eugénie declares that Mme de Mistival is reaching orgasm under her ministrations, Sade has the mother lose consciousness instead. ‘In other words,’ says Carter, ‘Sade has scared himself so badly by the obvious resolution of the psychodrama that he has set his creators to act out that he decides to censor her response. It frightens him’ (p. 128). Carter's extensive exploration of this fault line in the text is overlooked by Paulina Palmer, who accuses her of ignoring the ‘contemporary actuality’ of lesbian desire: ‘She restricts her consideration of the topic [of lesbian desire] to a discussion of the lurid sex-life of Sade's monstrous female creations of Juliette, Durand and Clairwil and … gives the reader the impression that lesbian sex exists only as a figment of the pornographic male imagination.’²⁰ On the contrary, lesbian desire in the Eugénie/Mme de Mistival scenario is precisely what threatens the pornographic male imagination and must be denied even as it asserts itself in the text. But Carter also notes that more instrumental in Mme de Mistival's fainting than the foreclosure of lesbian pleasure is Sade's absolute inability to imagine moral transformation, whether corruption or redemption. Mme de Mistival is a victim to Eugénie and her libertine instructors' mastery, and for the victim to glean pleasure from the same abuses enjoyed by the masters in orgies ‘would overthrow the whole scheme’ (p. 128). Here Carter clarifies the Sadeian paradox as a simultaneous assertion of sexual transformation and denial of moral transformation: if Eugénie's mother enjoyed herself, ‘being would cease to be a state-in-itself; it would then be possible to move between modes of being in a moral and not a sexual sense’ (p. 129). Carter highlights Sade's dilemma with reference to an ambiguity in the printing history of Philosophy in the Boudoir (p. 127):

‘Mothers,’ thunders Sade in the preface of the first edition, ‘prescribe this book to your daughters!’ In the second edition, however, he changes his tune. He vacillates. He warns: ‘Mothers, proscribe this book to you daughters.’ But perhaps this was a printing error. … Nevertheless, the vowels slip into and out of one another. Prescribe. Proscribe. What to do, what to do.

Carter's rendition of the problem underscores the final undecidability of Sade as a performative text. Many libertines of many genders occupy the phallic position, and these occupations are subversive insofar as they indicate the transferability of power, but no one in Sade occupies the phallic site in a mode contrary to its dictate. It is left to the performative reader to decide whether such a contrary occupation might be possible, and what implications it might have for the Sadeian woman. What to do, what to do indeed.

Many feminists would choose to burn Sade, or at least to censor the inheritors of his pornographer's pen and its twentieth-century technological equivalents. Robin Ann Sheets summarizes the debates that began in the mid-1980s and continue to rage among feminists concerning the representation of sex and violence in various media from Playboy to slasher films.²¹ A vital consequence of Carter's choice to reread Sade's work rather than rewrite it as she does other texts (as in The Bloody Chamber) is that her essay engages with the contemporary political field of such debates. Isolating two historical moments amidst these intersecting discourses on women and pornography will help to situate the political implications of Carter's reading. The first stance, articulated by Catherine MacKinnon, equates the representation of pornographic acts with the acts themselves, so that pornography itself ‘is a form of forced sex’. Viewing dirty pictures becomes ‘an act of male supremacy’, for rather than positing ‘imagery in some relation to a reality elsewhere constructed’, porn constitutes a ‘sexual reality’ in which women are exploited and objectified.²² This perspective attibutes to pornography the performative power to enact what it says, or at least to compel an enactment of what it says, in the manner of an imperative or command. Carter's performative reading places her in direct opposition to MacKinnon's stance in that it absolutely refuses to ascribe to the Sadeian text the authority of an interpellative act that makes its female readers into victims. Porn may be offensive to women—is bound to be, since ‘a male-dominated society produces a pornography of universal female acquiescence’ (p. 20)—but any ‘sexual reality’ it puts forward will be a second order, mythical version in the service of the status quo.²³ We have seen how myth for Carter is ‘designed to keep people unfree’ and how it can confuse our perceptions of (sexual) experience, but myth's performativity is always vulnerable to being read against itself and deployed against its intention. Carter's dream of a moral pornographer, for instance, involves precisely such a redeployment of pornographic myth.

Another reason why Carter's reading denies pornography its putative power to debase women is illuminated by imagining her response to a second critical perspective on porn. Linked tangentially to the problems posed by MacKinnon (although formulated some twelve years earlier) is Laura Mulvey's examination of the operation of the male gaze in mainstream cinema. Mulvey argues that movies follow a ‘sadistic’ trajectory, in which men systematically eliminate the threat that ‘woman’ as passive visual icon poses. For Mulvey, sadism becomes an integral part of the filmic plot: ‘This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end.’²⁴ Mulvey's assertion that sadism requires a narrative is reversed by Teresa de Lauretis in order to hypothesize that all narrative is inherently sadistic inasmuch as it depends upon the conventional masculine subject's mastery of a feminine topos or ‘object-space’.²⁵ Such speculations widen the scope of the pornographic from sadism's namesake corpus to current Hollywood productions—a move not unprecedented in Carter, considering her comparison of Justine to Marilyn Monroe. But Carter's reading shows that sadism's story, at least in Sade's writing, disappoints Mulvey's criteria in several major respects. First, we have already examined how in place of ‘linear time’ the novels' plots circle back upon the orgy scenario in perpetual variations so that the mirror supplants the ‘line’ as appropriate structural metaphor. In fact, The 120 Days of Sodom employs a doubly specular structure with a metatheatrical twist: each illicit act is first narrated by the whore Duclos, who reports on the activities at her brothel, and then is acted out by the libertines. Second, none of these narratives boast a satisfactory ‘ending’ in Mulvey's sense, since the libertine's desire is insatiable: ‘the more earnestly he strives, the further the goal recedes from him’ (SW [The Sadeian Woman], p. 149). And finally, if sadism ‘depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person’, then Carter cannot emphasize enough the Sadeian myth's falling short of this end. Nothing in Sade really happens because no one in Sade is really changed by events. Justine as the archetypal victim of sadism is never altered by her abuse: ‘She is always the dupe of an experience that she never experiences as experience; her innocence invalidates experience and turns it into events, things that happen to her but do not change her’ (p. 51). Carter later repeats this description so that it encompasses the assertion of mastery in general and any satisfaction derived from it: ‘Sexual pleasure is not experienced as experience; it does not modify the subject’ (p. 144).²⁶

Is this a conclusion we can extend to all narrative events and characters? Would we want to argue that stories, whether in movies or novels, portray experiences that fail to impact upon the narrative subjects who experience them? Perhaps in many cases we would: certainly in the case of most action films (murder as non-event), romances (work and all other non-love activity as non-event), skin flicks (sex as non-event). But surely there are also many narratives that convey experience that matters and consciousness that develops and is modified accordingly. Are these latter narratives, then, the only ones that can be termed ‘sadistic’ by the Mulvey/de Lauretis criteria (because they ‘make something happen’)? Or does Carter's reading of Sade trouble the link between narrative and sadism by suggesting that sadism denies a story, demands that nothing will happen because the force of its events remains external to characters who inhabit the mythological world of absolute moral immutability? In any case the stories Mulvey and de Lauretis describe, like those MacKinnon rails against, are all shown to be products of a mythology whose phantasmatic version of experience never coincides with (let alone dictates) the experience of its characters or its readers. An important qualification must be made regarding this juxtaposition of Carter's assertions with those of the critics listed above. Sadism as evoked by Mulvey is not simply synonymous with the will-to-mastery described in Sade's work; rather, the term evolves from psychoanalytic theory concerning castration anxiety and its resulting mystification of and hostility towards the mother-figure.²⁷ Carter's extensive use of psychoanalytic concepts to investigate Sade's treatment of the mother and the libertines' motivations is tempered by her scepticism towards the Freudian script she calls a myth of ‘cultural importance analogous, though less far-reaching, to the myth of the crime of Eve in the Old Testament’ (p. 125). My use of ‘sadism’ in the above discussion involves a conflation between Carter's account of it as the psychic drive for sexual domination and the (Sadeian) narrative that taxonomizes the workings of such an impulse. While the discrepancy between this use of the term and Mulvey's mitigates the implications of Carter's comments for Mulvey's theory, I think it is still worthwhile to note the opposite effects of sadism in Sade and sadism in film/narrative.

Perhaps the most actively performative aspect of Carter's reading arises as an effect of a feature normally considered passive or involuntary: her position as reader in relation to Sade. Theories like MacKinnon's posit the female reader/viewer of pornography as already silenced by the text that confronts them; the construction of women's experience as circumscribed and objectified by the male gaze precludes female agency or active participation in this experience. Jonathon Elmer argues that the rhetoric of pornography debates in the American court system and media relies on female silence as much as does the rhetoric of pornography itself:

the clamor of the debate, a debate which we now see is intimately related to male sexuality, takes place around a silent central hole. Female sexuality is that hole. The entire male debate depends upon that silent sexuality; those speechless dirty pictures are, quite literally, the hole in the male argument.²⁸

Can the silent central hole ever be made to speak? That is, could a woman strategically pretend to occupy the position of the hole, ventriloquize it, and so turn it into an enunciative position in order to upset the balance of the debate dependent upon its silence?²⁹ Carter uses the motif of the ‘fringed hole’ to describe graffiti's reduction of the female genitals; in pornography this hole becomes ‘the gap left in the text … just the right size for the reader to insert his prick into’ (p. 16). What happens when a female reader approaches this gap? She finds that ‘it is a hole large enough for women to see themselves as if the fringed hole of graffiti were a spyhole into territory that had been forbidden them’ (p. 36). Carter's rhetoric transforms the brutalized, silenced sexuality of women into a vantage point from which to watch the orgy. Rather than penetrate the hole, she infiltrates it. Engaging with the text from this self-proclaimed position already changes the terms of the equation by which female equals silence.

But overcoming the pornographic imperative of female silence will also hinge on how Carter characterizes herself as a reader, what she chooses to do once she infiltrates the hole. Does she identify with the male aggressors against the victims like Justine, joining in their derision of her ‘self-regarding female masochism’ (p. 57), her passivity and prudishness? Or does she take up the cause of the exploited against the tyranny of the libertine, aligning herself with his (m)other, for example, in order to psychoanalyse his mother-hatred? Recent feminist film theory has elaborated the role of the female spectator to suggest an inherent doubleness: the female viewer identifies with both male and female, or active and passive, ‘positions of desire’; desire for the other, and desire to be desired by the other.³⁰ Applying this doubleness of identification to the context of reading a literary narrative suggests a perspective similar to what Edward Said has termed ‘contrapuntal’. Contrapuntal reading involves the ability ‘to think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them coexisting and interacting with others.’³¹ Said's reading strategy is developed in particular relation to colonial narratives and their silenced intertexts, but the notion of contrapuntal perspective also illuminates Carter's approach to Sade as pornographer. Rather than aligning herself with predator or prey, Carter adopts a stance as onlooker, from which she ‘thinks through’ both experiences and allows them to cast each other into relief. A contrapuntal reading is performative in that it contributes the other side of the story, actively participating in the construction of meaning as the story unfolds and supplementing its version of narrative reality with another. Carter's focus on the Sadeian women Justine and Juliette undoes the good girl/bad girl binarism that defines them and turns instead to the negative space against which they are reified, the universe of moral absolutism that prohibits change. By thinking through the conditions of the sisters' experience while reading, she reaches the limits of their credibility as subjects in Sade's narrative, and so the limits of the credibility of the narrative itself. Thus, while not exactly ascribing a voice to Sade's silent women, a move that would involve so radical a departure from his text as to call into question the validity of her ‘reading’, Carter none the less has them dramatize and embody the weaknesses of their creator's perspective. In this way her contrapuntal reading satisfies Said's goal of ‘extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded.’³²

Carter's aggressiveness as a reader goes beyond the role of ‘onlooker’ mentioned above, however. As Sheets points out, The Sadeian Woman anticipates many of the arguments made in favour of pornography as the exercise of artistic licence and the positive demystification of sex in the mid-1980s. Carter's notion of the moral pornographer sounds oxymoronic to many who would view his ‘world of absolute sexual licence for all genders’ (p. 19) as immoral. But it is mainly Carter's fiction, the novels and stories published before her essay on Sade and since, that has led to her being called an ‘author of pornography’ and ‘the high priestess of postgraduate porn’.³³ As an author who decries the repression of women's sexual desire, who creates portraits of female characters whose eroticism does not undermine their strength, Carter is eminently qualified to comment on the conditions of the Sadeian woman. Much of the performative power of her reading of Sade thus arises from Carter's ethos as a feminist pornographer. If, as Elmer suggests, ‘speaking about pornography changes what it looks like’,³⁴ then someone with Carter's kind of authority on the subject has a special capacity to change the face of Sade. Is Carter herself the Sadeian woman she sets out to investigate? She shares certain qualities with some of them: like Juliette, she is highly rational (p. 79), she knows ‘how to utilise the power of the word, of narrative’ (p. 81), and (in much of her fiction) she has a passion for entropy, chaos, the volcano (p. 103). Like Durand and Clairwil, she is blasphemous: impatient with monogamy, disdainful of marriage, quick to overturn even such feminist sacreds as the beauty of motherhood and goddess-myths as ‘consolatory nonsenses’ (p. 106). Not that Carter is allied with these women over the Justine-types; rather, she embodies the balance she never finds in the text, ‘the possibility of a synthesis of their modes of being, neither submissive nor aggressive, capable of both thought and feeling’ (p. 79). The effect of the similarities between Carter's persona (as author, as reader) and her subjects of enquiry is to supplement her reading with an active performance in the role of a different kind of Sadeian woman. When she calls Juliette ‘a token woman in high places … engaged in destroying those high places all the time that she is enjoying the pastimes they offer’ (p. 107), we cannot help but imagine Carter herself in the ‘high places’ of the male pornographer. The ‘spyhole’ she infiltrates calls for the full force of the pun between ‘secret agent’ and ‘agency’: Carter changes Sade's text in the reading of it by performing the femininity-with-power against which he forecloses.

Carter complements and reinforces the strength of her role as female reader by presenting her ‘findings’ in the genre of the critical essay. Rachel Blau DuPlessis describes the essay as itself a feminine form, by virtue of ‘its distrust of system, its playful skepticism about generalization’ and its constant ‘rejection of mastery’.³⁵ Sade already looks different presented to us through the eyes of a female reader; his work will be transformed further through a feminine essay, whose very generic structure enacts a refutation against the key features of his pornographic mythology—system, generalization, mastery. That they are ‘acts of writing-as-reading’—instances of creative recitation or transformative reception—makes essays the media par excellence of performative reading. ‘These writings,’ says DuPlessis, ‘represent response, responsibility, responsiveness even under pall,’ and the practice of writing essays is ‘learned, to say it too bluntly, through the scrutiny of official lies.’³⁶ This statement links the features of the essay genre closely with Carter's own ‘demythologising business’: Carter claims that ‘myths are lies designed to keep people unfree’ and that the literary past is ‘a vast repository of outmoded lies, where you can … find the old lies on which new lies have been based’.³⁷ While Carter's attempt to deconstruct myth by grounding it in material conditions has often taken the form of fictional rewriting, fiction runs the risk of being construed as transcendent or utopian, a retreat from reality into an imaginative world in which anything is possible (and over which the author has no small degree of control). Demythologizing finds a powerful performative ally in the essay, not only because the genre is the accepted form for socio-theoretical debate, but because of its ‘defining attentiveness to materiality, to the material world, including the matter of language’.³⁸ Meaning adheres to mode in the essay: this implies both that (Sade's) ideas are scrutinized by the language used to frame or summarize them, and that the rhetorical strategies she chooses play a far more integral role in Carter's critique than the word ‘reading’ can suggest.

To approximate how the above formulation might operate in a performative reading, I will point to three rhetorical manoeuvres in The Sadeian Woman that are dependent on the non-transcendent materiality of the essay form. In the first example, Carter strips the pornographic myth of its universal, timeless quality by a forcible contextualization that goes beyond citing the social conditions of eighteenth-century France to drag the myth into the here and now of twentieth-century feminist debate. Importantly, this tactic is performed under the pretence of simply reciting Sade's plot: Carter is relating the events of Justine's imprisonment in the ‘pleasure pavilion’ at the St Mary-in-the-Wood monastery. By shifting pronouns while describing the victims' plight, Carter has the seraglio suddenly fall from the world of the pornographer's lonely imagination into her readers' material reality:

When a new girl is brought into the community, one of the residents is selected at random for ‘retirement,’ that is, murder … their lives are governed by a rigid system of regulations which exist primarily to provide the monks innumerable opportunities for punishment. Disordered hair, twenty strokes of the whip; getting up late in the morning, thirty strokes of the whip; pregnancy, a hundred strokes of the whip. The girls have no personal property. There is no privacy, except in the lavatory. For us, there is no hope at all. The monks rule their little world with the whim of oligarchs, of fate or of god. It is oddly like a British public school. It is like all hierarchical institutions.

(p. 43; my emphasis)

Recall that Carter's vision of the moral pornographer centres on the critique such an artist would offer of ‘current relations between the sexes’ (p. 20). Here, through exaggeration and surprise, she turns Sade into the moral pornographer by making his bizarre fantasy our current reality. The essay form allows Carter to assert an ‘us’ that at once performatively constructs herself as a sociopolitical representative of women in a man's world and her readers as members of that group.

A second and related feat of rhetoric, at work in the above scene and throughout her performative reading, involves Carter's deliberate blurring of the boundary between invention and ‘truth’. Reading a critical essay, we are more likely to assume an ingenuous or ‘honest’ reading of Sade on Carter's part than if we picked up a novel that incorporated or ‘wrote back’ to Sade's ideas. That Carter lays out her argument in a recognizable (and so ostensibly criticizable) form obfuscates the extent to which she metamorphoses Sade into the moral pornographer she seeks. The sleight of hand is in keeping with what Alison Lee sees as Carter's ‘postmodern practice’: she teaches her readers to suspect claims of truth and authenticity by ‘indicat[ing] a fluid boundary between the world of fiction and the world of the reader’.³⁹ Finally, the essay genre as DuPlessis describes it is especially conducive to the rhetoric of the manifesto, the creative vision of a future performed as present reality in its articulation. Carter's manifesto, her dream of a moral pornographer, is made ‘rhetorically palpable’ in her reading even as she describes exactly where Sade falls short of such a title, so that ‘the new time that is coming is already here in its own prose’.⁴⁰ The materiality of the essay permits a transformation from future into present tense. This process is rendered more legible if we consider that Carter's vision of a material mythographer of the future has a present-tense complement in the performative reader: ‘If we could restore the context of the world to the embraces of these shadows then, perhaps, we could utilise their activities to obtain a fresh perception of the world and, in some sense, transform it’ (p. 17). This statement, which serves as the thesis of Carter's essay, outlines the performative path by which the Sadeian script will be changed. Step by step, Carter's reading will supplement Sade's mythology with the material context it flees; the resulting Sade-plus-Carter text will then perform as the moral pornography through which to perceive afresh and transform the world.

The text that combines Sade's myth with Carter's materiality is inevitably an ironic one, for context is exactly what pornography eschews in order to remain pornographic. The ‘moral pornographer’ as oxymoron signals the pivotal status of irony in performative reading: irony is what allows Carter to recite both sides of the story at once. Irony is also what results in confusion over Carter's attitude towards Sade, so that Andrea Dworkin, for example, condemns The Sadeian Woman as ‘a pseudofeminist literary essay’ that exhibits complete disregard for the actual suffering endured by Sade's—and pornography's—victims.⁴¹ Even critics who elsewhere appreciate her ironic style find ‘problems for the feminist reader’ in Carter's attitude of ‘detached interest and intellectual curiosity, not indignation’, towards Sade.⁴² The characterization of irony as an abstractly curious, disengaged mode of reading renders it irresponsible or ethically suspect; such a view assumes that a reading cannot also care about what it ironizes. But as Linda Hutcheon points out, irony can be interpreted as ‘a more positive mode of artistic expression with renewed power as an engaged critical force, that is to say, as a rhetorical and structural strategy of resistance and opposition.’⁴³ Rather than distancing her from her subject, I would argue that Carter's deployment of irony implicates her deeply and deliberately in the text she examines (and not just to take advantage of the performative contribution of her ethos as female reader described earlier). A performative reading depends on irony's ambivalence between repetition and revision in order to remain in contact with its subject text even as it departs from the text's normative or intended meaning. An example of this duality occurs when Carter calls Sade a ‘great puritan’ for ‘disinfect[ing] of sensuality anything he can lay his hands on’ (p. 138). Sade would roll in his grave at being called puritanical, so Carter thwarts the intention of his obscenity with her description; at the same time, she thwarts the normative meaning of the word ‘puritan’ by using it to refer to Sade's ‘logic of the abattoir’ through which he turns flesh into meat. By setting ‘puritanism’ on irony's pivot Carter thus mocks Sade and sexual prudery at once.

What is interesting about the comments of the critics who perceive Carter as complicit with Sade is the attention they draw to the importance of reception in the operation of irony. How one reads an ironic text will determine, at least in part, what that text finally says. Such a conclusion applies equally to Sade's pornography and to Carter's reading of it, so that my comments participate in a multiply complicated field of enquiry: How are we to read how Carter is reading Sade? My focus on The Sadeian Woman as a performative recitation and redirection of the pornographic text incorporates the performative contribution of my own rhetorical decisions in reading Carter's irony. As a ‘speculative performance,’ says DuPlessis, ‘the test of the essay is whether it opens a space for the reader.’⁴⁴ Carter sees in Sade's text a space that might open to more than a lascivious escape. Her infiltration of this space allows her to read Sade's myth as performative inasmuch as it dramatizes the discursive operations by which social power refreshes itself, and as it simultaneously reveals the limits of its own system, the omissions necessary to sustaining the myth. Carter's reading renders Sade's porn a sociocultural artefact vulnerable to redeployment of meaning and so lacking the putative power to objectify women or univocally dictate their silence. And her reading at last melds with Sade's text to create a sort of hybrid discourse that concretizes her vision of the moral pornographer in the prose of her essay. The space The Sadeian Woman opens for its readers is a difficult one: ambivalent, didactic, caustic, surprising. Perhaps the space of performative reading is best compared to a challenge—a call to approach the spyhole, to take up whatever tools are lying about, to go ahead and work with the material to build a better kind of myth.

Notes

1. Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago, 1979). All further references to this volume will be cited in the text.

2. Angela Carter, ‘Notes from the front line’, in Michelene Wandor (ed.) On Gender and Writing (London: Pandora, 1983), p. 69.

3. Marquis de Sade, L'Histoire Complète de Justine and Juliette, in Oeuvres complètes, 16 vols (Paris: Cercle du Livre Precieux, 1966-7).

4. William Blake, ‘The Sick Rose’, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, in David V. Erdman (ed.) The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Anchor, 1988), p. 23. Elton John's pop-song elegy for Diana bid her, ‘Goodbye, English rose’; tellingly, the song used the melody and most of the lyrics of his tribute to Marilyn, ‘Candle in the Wind’.

5. Paulina Palmer, ‘From coded mannequin to bird woman: Angela Carter's Magic Flight’, in Sue Roe (ed.) Women Reading Women's Writing (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), p. 179.

6. Carter, ‘Notes’, p. 71.

7. Margaret Atwood, ‘Running with the tigers’, in Lorna Sage (ed.) Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter (London: Virago, 1994), p. 122. Carter's own distinction between myth and folklore points to a specific definition of ‘myth’ as complicit with the interests of social dominance that Atwood apparently overlooks. See Carter, ‘Notes’, p. 71: ‘I'm interested in myths—though I'm much more interested in folklore—just because they are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree. (Whereas, in fact, folklore is a much more straightforward set of devices for making real life more exciting and is much easier to infiltrate with different kinds of consciousness).

8. See, for instance, Nicole Ward Jouve's essay, ‘Mother is a figure of speech …’ in Flesh and The Mirror. Jouve admits, ‘The Bloody Chamber is the first Carter book I actually enjoyed. Perhaps it was the territory—Perrault, the Grimm Brothers, folk, Gothic. Always loved the stuff’ (p. 144).

9. Palmer, pp. 180-1.

10. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

11. Butler, Bodies, p. 7.

12. See Butler, Bodies, pp. 29-32 for a discussion of the indissolubility of materiality and signification: like the ‘chicken-or-egg’ paradox, the body is at once an effect of the sign and the constitutive condition for signification.

13. Roland Barthes uses myth in this sense to describe the accrual of images and associations by which discourses with an agenda, such as those of advertising (or colonialism), ‘pad’ a signifier until it loses contact with its original signified (or until that relationship is distorted beyond recognition). The signifier ‘diamond’, for example, gains more distance from its reference to a hard mineral mined in Africa and hoarded in warehouses each time it appears in commercials that proclaim, ‘This anniversary, tell her you'd marry her all over again!’ Here, the signifier is still the diamond, but the signified is spousal devotion, and the commercial itself becomes the sign in this ‘second-order semiological system’ of myth. See Mythologies (Toronto: Canada Publishing Ltd, 1973), pp. 114-17.

14. Carter qualifies her portrayal of Marilyn as a modern-day Justine with the observation, ‘The suffering sisterhood of imitation Justines all lack the most singular quality of their progenitor. … For Justine is extraordinarily single-minded’ (p. 102).

15. This list of characteristics applies to many readings other than Carter's. See, for example, Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), for a performative reading of Freud (and other Western fathers). Irigaray reads as Freud's ‘obedient daughter’ whose recitation of her father's words differs just enough to form a scathing critique of his ideas. The difference between Irigaray and Carter might lie in the slightly more redemptive impulse in Carter's redeployment of Sade (perhaps because, unlike Freud, he has always been on the margin of acceptability).

16. Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, Writing the Orgy: Power and Parody in Sade, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), p. 89.

17. Scott Carpenter, Acts of Fiction: Resistance and Resolution from Sade to Baudelaire (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), p. 48.

18. See Butler, Bodies, pp. 230-6.

19. Carol Seigel, ‘Postmodern women novelists review Victorian male masochism’, Genders, 11 (1991), p. 11.

20. Palmer, p. 195.

21. Robin Ann Sheets, ‘Pornography, fairy tales and feminism: Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1.4 (1991), pp. 639-41.

22. Catherine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 130, 148, 149.

23. Judith Butler scrutinizes MacKinnon's recent claims that pornography is equivalent to hate speech, arguing that the ‘social reality’ she describes pornography constructing for women is ‘more frail and less determinative than MacKinnon would suggest’. See Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 67.

24. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 16 (1975), p. 14.

25. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 121.

26. Simone de Beauvoir also points out the lack of inward consciousness of Sade's characters, and Carter's description of the libertine's non-experience echoes hers. See The Marquis de Sade (London: John Calder, 1962), p. 32: ‘[Desire and pleasure] do not constitute a living experience within the framework of the subject's psychophysiological unity. Instead, they blast him, like some kind of bodily accident.’

27. See Sigmund Freud, Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, ed. Nandor Fodor and Frank Gaynor (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1966) for a concise description of sadism in psychoanalytic terms.

28. Jonathan Elmer, ‘The exciting conflict: the rhetoric of pornography and anti-pornography’, Cultural Critique, 8 (1997-8), p. 60.

29. Luce Irigaray has demonstrated the impossibility of speaking as the feminine that is (negatively) defined by Plato, Freud, etc. Irigaray adopts—and advocates—a strategy of mimicry for women in which ‘one must assume the feminine role deliberately’ to expose the operation of its exploitation in (and by) discourse. See This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 76.

30. de Lauretis, p. 143.

31. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 32.

32. Ibid., p. 66.

33. Respectively, James Sloan Allen, and Amanda Sebenstyen, quoted in Sheets, p. 642.

34. Elmer, p. 56.

35. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘f-words: an essay on the essay’, American Literature, 68.1 (1996), pp. 33-4.

36. Ibid., pp. 17, 23.

37. Carter, ‘Notes’, pp. 71, 74.

38. Du Plessis, p. 24.

39. Alison Lee, Angela Carter (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), p. 16.

40. DuPlessis, p. 35.

41. Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (London: The Women's Press, 1981), pp. 84, 88.

42. Palmer, pp. 194-5.

43. Linda Hutcheon, ‘Introduction’, Double-Talking: Essays on Verbal and Visual Ironies in Contemporary Canadian Art and Literature’, ed. Linda Hutcheon (Toronto: ECW Press, 1992), p. 11.

44. DuPlessis, p. 28.