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Feminist Science Fiction - Angela Carter's New Wine

"Neither do men put new wine into old bottles."
The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, 9:17

Dangerous anarchistic ideas and fantastical images combine in the science fictional worlds of British author Angela Carter. She has been characterized as a "fairy godmother", "wizard", and "spellbinder" - the "white witch of English Literature." Her influence in political and artistic movements is legion, having spread worldwide after publication of her 1979 feminist rewriting of popular fairy tales The Bloody Chamber.

"Reading is just as creative an activity as writing and most intellectual development depends on new readings of old texts," wrote Angela Carter, "I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode."

She was in the "demythologizing business," and her "anti-mythic" sci-fi novel, The Passion of New Eve, fueled the growth of anarchist feminism while satirizing itself at the same time through dark humor, "They blew up wedding shops and scoured the newspapers for marriage announcements so that they could send brides gifts of well-honed razors...there were rumors of a kamikaze squad of syphilitic whores who donated spirochetal enlightenment for free to their customers out of dedication to the cause." She conceived the novel, "as a feminist tract about the social creation of femininity"

Described as feminist science fiction, surrealism, magical realism, anarcha-feminism, and postmodern her writings attacked the core myths of capitalist patriarchy with a fierce precision, "I'm basically trying to find out what certain configurations of imagery in our society, in our culture, really stand for, what they mean, underneath the kind of semireligious coating that makes people not particularly want to interfere with them."

Her novels, like The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, interfered so successfully with the images of power that movements like the surrealists and situationists put her on a pedestal, which she promptly demolished. "I thought [the surrealists] were wonderful, I had to give them up in the end. They were, with a few patronized exceptions, all men and they told me that I was the source of all mystery, beauty, and otherness, because I was a woman - and I knew that was not true. I knew I wanted my fair share of the imagination, too."

"Her books unshackle us, toppling the statues of the pompous, demolishing the temples and commissariats

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