Parenting & Family Quote by Angela Carter

Carter takes a scalpel to the sentimental myth of innocence as a moral ideal. In her phrasing, anxiety isn’t a symptom to be cured; it’s the first flare of ethical awareness. “Beginning of conscience” reframes dread as a cognitive awakening: the moment you recognize consequence, you also recognize your power to harm, to choose badly, to be implicated. That tremor is not weakness. It’s the price of seeing.

The sentence builds like a family tree with poisoned roots. Conscience “parents” the soul, suggesting the soul isn’t a pristine essence you’re born with but a hard-earned, socially entangled formation. Carter’s fiction is full of heroines who become real only once they’re dislodged from fairy-tale safety; here, she’s arguing that interiority is manufactured in friction, not in purity. Anxiety is the labor pain of selfhood.

Then comes the provocation: conscience “is not compatible with innocence.” Innocence, in Carter’s hands, isn’t childlike sweetness; it’s a political state, a privilege, often a performance. To stay innocent is to stay unaccountable. Once you can imagine what you might do to others - or what others might do to you - innocence becomes less virtue than ignorance dressed up as virtue.

The intent is anti-romantic and anti-comfort: a warning against narratives that promise moral cleanliness. Carter is pushing readers toward a darker, more adult ethics where unease is evidence you’re awake, and where the soul isn’t a safe place to retreat but a structure built from responsibility.