Resumo de The Sadien Woman

The Sadeian Woman is a feminist reading of the Marquis de Sade, who
is seen as a "moral pornographer" putting pornography into the
service of women, or at least creating room within it for "an ideology not
inimical to women". Though Carter provides some biographical background,
her focus is on three of Sade''s novels. In Justine the eponymous
heroine suffers repeated rape, torture, humiliation, and degradation, forever
escaping from one abuser only to fall into the hands of another. She is acted
on rather than acts, feels rather than reasons, and is the perfect victim.
Carter sees her as a spiritual ancestor of film stars such as Marilyn Monroe.
Her career is a "desecration of the Temple",
an inversion of the unnatural reverence accorded to women as Mothers and Wives.

Juliette, Justine''s sister, is her antithesis. She is rational, scheming,
predatory, vicious, and always in control, exploiting her sexuality to obtain
power and moving from city to city one step ahead of retribution. An astute
businesswoman, her career exhibits the virtues of bourgeois individualism ?
self-reliance and self-help ? and the consequences of the emancipation of
women, carried to their logical extremes. And in Philosophy in the Boudoir
the fifteen year old Eugénie receives an education in depravity, in a series of
lessons in transgression culminating in her rape and mutilation of her mother.

Carter has her own agenda, laid out in an opening chapter with the title
"Polemical Preface", but her interpretations and analysis are
presented in such a way that one can separate them from her summary of the
novels. (A separation sorely mangled in my summary above.) It is not necessary
to have read any Sade to follow The Sadeian Woman: this is important
because he is quite unbelievably tedious (I confess I never managed to read
more than a hundred pages of 120 Days of Sodom and small portions of Justine).
Carter uses more Freudian psychoanalysis than I usually have time for, but it
does seem unusually appropriate when it comes to Sade. She also has a tendency
to make a lot of small points ? much is made, for example, of the fact that
Eugenie''s Mother faints rather than orgasms when raped.

While The Sadeian Woman offers a one-sided view of Sade (his
political ideas are only touched upon), it has the advantage of brevity over
most books. It will be an accessible introduction to Sade for many who would
otherwise know him only as a popular bogeyman; it certainly inspired me more
than the rather staid biography I read a decade ago.

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