Wit & Attitude Quote by Angela Carter

Carter’s question lands like a trapdoor: it starts as dreamy metaphysics and ends as a jab. “Is not this whole world an illusion?” could be mysticism, but the follow-up - “And yet it fools everybody” - turns it into social critique. The move is pure Carter: seduce the reader with the glamorous language of unreality, then remind you that the con is collective, consensual, and profitable.

The intent isn’t to float above the world; it’s to expose how the “world” is staged. Carter wrote in the wake of second-wave feminism and at the height of postmodern suspicion about grand narratives. Her fiction keeps returning to the idea that gender, desire, morality, even “nature” are performances with scripts handed down by power. Calling the world an illusion is less a cosmic shrug than a way of saying: look how easily we confuse costume for essence, story for truth, spectacle for fate.

The subtext sharpens in “everybody.” Not “most people,” not “the masses” - everybody. Carter refuses the flattering escape hatch where the reader gets to feel like the enlightened exception. If we’re fooled, it’s because the illusion is engineered to be livable: it offers coherence, roles, romance, punishment, and reward. It’s not just deception; it’s comfort with a price tag.

Carter’s signature is that she doesn’t merely unmask the illusion; she implicates our appetite for it. The line needles that appetite, daring you to ask which parts of your life feel “natural” only because you’ve rehearsed them long enough.