Angela Carter’s ‘rigorous system of disbelief’: Religion, misogyny, myth and the cult

Mulvey-Roberts, Marie

Abstract

Angela Carter professed her atheism as a rigorous system of disbelief and demythologized religion throughout her work. This included her surrealist art film, The Holy Family Album (1991), and her satire of medieval Catholicism in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), whose sadomasochistic theology practised by centaurs is particularly damaging to women. The polarized representations of woman as profane whore or holy virgin is explored by Carter in ‘The Wrightsman Magdalen’ (1993). In The Passion of New Eve (1977), she exposes the fallacy of the idealization of women from earth mother to screen idol, and the continuing denigration of women within religious belief. For the first time, there will be a detailed analysis of the guru Zero as based on Charles Manson’s infamous sex cult, responsible for the brutal murder of the film actress Sharon Tate, in an expose of the dark underbelly of the ethos of free love in the counter-culture of the 1960 and 1970s. Carter’s iconoclastic radical scepticism ranged from expressions of traditional Christianity of the Middle Ages up to that of a twentieth-century guru and was informed by her feminism, and political and ideological outlook on the world, which is reflected throughout her writing.

• Publication Date: Jul 17, 2019
• Deposit Date: Nov 28, 2019
• Pages: 145-165
• Book Title: The Arts of Angela Carter: A Cabinet of Curiosities
• Chapter Number: 7
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526136787.00014
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/4748904
• Publisher URL: https://www.manchesterhive.com/view/9781526136787/9781526136787.00014.xml