Ok so on the website I came across a link that lead to a page called "The Monstrous Woman", which I thought would have ideal references to what we were currently studying. However, most of the links were broken, yet I did find this information on Angela Carter explaining where her themes she includes in her stories came from, which I found really interesting.
Carter was a notable exponent of magic realism, adding into it Gothic themes, postmodernist eclecticism, violence, and eroticism. Throughout her career, Carter utilized the language and characteristic motifs of the fantasy genre. "A good writer can make you believe time stands still," she once said. Her work represents a successful combination of post-modern literary theories and feminist politics.At the age of 20 she married Paul Carter, and moved with him to Bristol. Before starting her English studies at the University of Bristol.
The article also said how one of her early novels, 'The Magic Toyshop' first saw her developing themes of sexual fantasy, and revealed Carter's fascination with fairy tales and the Freudian unconscious. It tells a modern myth of an orphaned girl and the horrors she experiences, when she goes to live with her uncle and grows through a rite of passage into adulthood.
It then quotes Carter herself; "I can date to that time and to that sense of heightened awareness of the society around me in the summer of 1968, my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman. How that social fiction of my "femininity" was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing."
In 1970, having separated from her husband, Carter went to live in Japan for two years. During this period she worked at many different jobs, among others as a bar hostess. The experience of a different culture had a strong influence on her work.In 1979 Carter published 'The Sadetan Woman', where she questioned culturally accepted views of sexuality, and sadistic and masochistic relations between men and women. Surprising some of her readers, Carter defended the Marquis de Sade's images of women. Maybe the Marquis she defends is the Marquis she refers to in 'The Bloody Chamber"?
"I am the pure product of an advanced, industrialized, post-imperialist country"
The article describes her as the "high-priestess of post-graduate porn." 'Wise Children" her last novel, which focused on the female members of a theatrical family, was was marked by optimism and humor.
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