Fatherhood Quote by Angela Carter

Carter takes a scalpel to a strain of feel-good feminism that tries to swap the old patriarch in the sky for a matriarch and call it liberation. The opening move is deliberately impolite: “Mother goddesses” aren’t a wholesome corrective; they’re “just as silly” as “father gods.” It’s a bait-and-switch aimed at readers who want myth to do politics for them. By flattening both figures into the same category of consoling fantasy, she refuses the easy romance of reversal.

The bite is in the trade she describes: emotional satisfaction purchased with “obscuring the real conditions of life.” Carter’s target isn’t feeling itself; it’s the way symbolic comfort can anesthetize critique. A goddess revival can read like radical reclamation, but Carter hears a lullaby: if oppression is reframed as a cosmic story with sacred feminine power waiting to be reawakened, then material arrangements - labor, sex, money, law, violence - get politely blurred. Myth becomes mood lighting.

Her last line sharpens into historical cynicism: “This is why they were invented in the first place.” Not because ancient people were uniquely foolish, but because power loves metaphysics that makes hierarchy feel natural, fated, even beautiful. Carter’s fiction often raids fairy tale and folklore to expose their machinery; here she’s warning that myths are not neutral artifacts to “recover.” They’re technologies of explanation, and explanation is where ideology hides. Replace the pronouns all you want; the spell still works.