Carter📝📚 - Margaret Atwood, Running with the Tigers🐯
"To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case that is, to be killed."
Carter's "Sadeian Woman" - moral of fairytale about perfect women
"The love that changes - and in some ways diminishes - him is not only Beauty's love for him... It is also his love for Beauty. Through it he loses his mythical dimensions - only sexual desire in isolation has a larger-than-life quality - but he gains his humanity"
Courtship (other way round in Tiger's Bride)
"Predator and prey, master and slave are the only two categories that he can acknowledge"
De Sade
"Women can escape sacrificial lambhood (the 'natural' condition of women...) only by adopting tiger hood (the 'natural' role of men)"
De Sade's argument about women attempting to escape victimisation
"The primal condition of man cannot be modified in any way; it is eat or be eaten"
De Sade, as interpreted by Carter in "The Sadeian Woman"
"They have to denature themselves, much as Lady Macbeth did"
Epitome of lamb becoming a tiger
"What Carter seems to be doing in 'The Bloody Chamber' is looking for ways in which the tiger and the lamb, or the tiger and the lamb parts of the psyche, can reach some sort of accommodation"
Exploration of the possibilities of de Sade's lamb-tiger dichotomy
"To combat traditional myths about the nature of woman, she constructs other, more subversive ones"
Feminist myths
"The reductionist nature of pornography as a form"
Snow Child, Bloody Chamber
"Strips herself of all clothing... Down to her 'real' nakedness, that of herself as subject rather than object"
Tiger's Bride
"'Tigers' and 'lambs', carnivores and herbivores, those who are preyed upon and those who do the preying"
Tiger-lamb dichotomy
"The nature of men is not fixed by Carter as inevitably predatory, with females as their 'natural' prey. Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender"
Transgression of traditional gender roles - "subject to mutability"
