Angela Carter said that all writing is political. She was a feminist but refused to confine her dazzling imagination and corrosive intellect to any ideological category. Her work dissects the thought patterns and social and political institutions that limit and warp the lives of women and other marginalized people. She exposes the mechanisms by which supposedly free societies shackle people’s minds, showing readers the gears and levers of control, potentially transforming the way they see the world, just as the narrator in “Flesh and the Mirror” comes to see her lover, herself, and the city through transformed eyes.

Carter said that living in Japan radicalized her and taught her to be a woman. In the 1960’s she established herself as one of the most promising young writers in England, but then she won the W. Somerset Maugham Award and used the prize money to go to Japan, partly to flee a disintegrating marriage. Carter lived at first with a Japanese lover and later alone. She remained in Japan from 1969 to 1972 and, while there, wrote “Flesh and the Mirror.”

Carter’s friend, novelist Salman Rushdie, has said the dark eroticism of Japan challenged Carter and deflected her writing into an exploration of female sexuality. Carter said her writing project was to investigate the social fictions that regulate people’s lives. The foreignness of the Japanese culture helped her understand how people, including women, are the products of social construction, not artifacts of forces outside human control. Humans create society through their own decisions, which then shape their roles as women and men or members of particular ethnic groups and social classes. Social roles are not handed down by a god or by nature but are constructed by humans. For example, patriarchy is the product of human decisions and, therefore, subject to change by people’s actions. The foreign customs of Japan helped her see the artificiality of habits and institutions that had once seemed natural and inevitable. Sexuality especially seems to most people to be a universal, a part of inherited human nature. Not so, said Carter. Flesh, or human sexuality, comes to people out of history, a lesson the mirror forces the narrator to acknowledge.

The mirror reveals the games people play in their relationships. It leaves the narrator confronting reality itself. The knowledge is so disconcerting that she dresses and flees, but she is unable to escape what the mirror revealed.

When Carter died at age fifty-one, many admirers wanted to portray her as a mischievous good witch, as a fairy godmother, or as an earth mother. Carter would have none of that in her own life. She regarded all mythical versions of women from the virgin to the healing mother as, she said, consolatory nonsense. In “Flesh and the Mirror” she examines and laughs at the woman as victim, the woman blinded by romantic love, hysterical with showy passion. That is a traditional character, one that Carter deconstructs by turning her raucous laughter on herself, in the person of the narrator. Carter has been called a cultural saboteur, which is an accurate description of the role she plays in this story.