Daily Inspiration Quote by Angela Carter

Carter takes the cozy proverb "man proposes, God disposes" and gives it teeth: in heterosexual mythology, God is replaced by woman, but not as a sovereign force. As the passive object. The twist lands because it’s grammatical before it’s ideological. "Man proposes" assigns agency as default; "woman is disposed of" flips woman into the grammatical dumping ground of other people’s plans. Carter isn’t just describing sexism, she’s showing how it hides in the sentence structure of tradition.

"Mythic schema" matters here. Carter’s target isn’t individual bad men; it’s the story machinery that makes unequal relations feel timeless, even romantic. "Schema" suggests a template you can keep reusing: courtship plots, marriage scripts, the whole cultural operating system where men do, women are done-to. The phrase "disposed of" is deliberately ugly: it evokes property, waste, the tidy removal of a problem. It’s the language of inheritance and housekeeping smuggled into the language of love.

Contextually, this sits squarely in Carter’s project across the 1970s and 80s: raiding fairy tales, pornography, and Gothic tropes to expose their power arrangements, then rewriting them with women who bite back. She understood that patriarchy’s most effective trick is aesthetic. It doesn’t always coerce; it narrates. Her line reads like a diagnosis of plot itself: who gets to desire, who gets to choose, who gets the dignity of being an actor rather than an outcome.