“Ours is an Orgiastic, Not an Ecstatic Culture.” Angela Carter Discusses Cultural Expressions of Sexuality in her Non-Fiction

Abstract

“I found myself, as I grew older, increasingly writing about sexuality and its manifestations in human practice. And I found most of my raw material in the lumber room of the Western European imagination,” Angela Carter wrote in “Notes from the Front Line.” The passage is significant for several reasons. Carter identifies sexuality in its diverse manifestations as her main concern and acknowledges images derived from European popular tradition as the source of her “raw material.” Moreover, she characterises her prose as intertextual and identifies herself as a Caucasian Westerner. It is from this contemporary, Europe-centred perspective that she, first, surveys manifestations of sexuality, and then uses them to create her own—often allegorical—imaginative stories. This paper is concerned with the former stage of Carter’s intellectual endeavour: surveying expressions of sexuality in public discourse from a Western woman’s point of view.