SOURCE: Henstra, Sarah M. “The Pressure of New Wine: Performative Reading in Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman.” Textual Practice 13, no. 1 (spring 1999): 97-117.

In the following essay, Henstra analyzes the acts of reading and revision in The Sadeian Woman.

Angela Carter's critical essay on the Marquis de Sade entitled The Sadeian Woman is the most notorious of her non-fiction endeavours.¹ Its ambivalent attitude towards the pornographic writings of the ‘old monster’ who gave sadism its name—an attitude poised between praise and censure, curiosity and indignance—guaranteed the essay a mixed reception amidst the neophyte feminist debates on pornography at the time of its 1979 publication. The work raises questions about the differences between rereading older texts, as Carter does here, and rewriting them, as she does in much of her fictional work: Which practice is more politically effective? Which is more conducive to imaginative freedom? Which is better at...