‘The Desecration of the Temple’; or, ‘Sexuality as Terrorism’?: Angela Carter's (Post-)feminist Gothic Heroines

Carter's fiction sits uneasily in relation to both Gothic and feminist discourses, especially as they converge through the category of the ‘female Gothic’. Owing to her interest in pornography and her engagement with the sexual/textual violence of specifically ‘male Gothic’ scripts – for example, the Gothic scenarios of Sade, Poe, Hoffmann, Baudelaire and Stoker – Carter's Gothic heroines have frequently been censured as little more than objects of sadistic male desires by feminist critics. This article re-reads Carter's sexual/textual violations – her defiance of dominant feminist and Gothic categories and categorisations – through the problematic of (post-)feminist discourse and, especially, the tension between ‘victim’ and ‘power’ feminisms as prefigured in her own (Gothic) treatise on female sexual identity, The Sadeian Woman (1979). Mapping the trajectory of her Gothic heroine from Ghislaine in Shadow Dance (1966) to Fevvers in Nights at the Circus (1984), it re-contextualises Carter's engagements with the Gothic as a dialogue with both the female Gothic and feminist discourse.