Daily Inspiration Quote by Angela Carter

Angela Carter’s line is a needle slid under the skin of civilization’s favorite story: that disorder comes from “out there,” and virtue lives safely “in here.” By asking, with mock innocence, who we’ll blame once the barbarians are gone, she turns conquest into an identity crisis. The joke is grim because it’s plausible. Enemies aren’t just obstacles; they’re narrative infrastructure. They give the dominant culture a clean mirror and a dirty scapegoat at the same time.

The specific intent isn’t to defend the so-called barbarian, but to expose how the category functions. “Barbarians” is less a description than a political technology: a way to outsource guilt, justify violence, and keep domestic failures from looking structural. Carter’s phrasing works because it’s a practical question disguised as a moral one. It treats blame like a resource we need to manage, which is precisely the indictment: we’ve organized our sense of self around deflection.

The subtext is Carter’s broader feminist and anti-myth project. In her fiction, “monsters” and outsiders often reveal what polite society is refusing to name about itself-sexual power, cruelty, complicity, appetite. Remove the barbarian and the comforting melodrama collapses; what’s left is the harder genre of self-recognition.

Contextually, coming out of late-imperial hangovers and Cold War binaries, the line also anticipates today’s politics of permanent emergency. The enemy is endlessly remade because a society addicted to innocence needs someone else to wear its sins.