"Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place"
About this Quote
Angela Carter dismisses mother goddesses and father gods as equally silly because both rest on the same mistake: turning human relations and historical power into sacred, unchangeable truths. Divine archetypes offer consolation and identity, but they also distract from the structures that actually shape womens lives: labor, law, violence, money, and the stories societies tell about sex and power. Emotional satisfaction, she suggests, is the bait of ideology. Myths seduce by promising depth and destiny while concealing the contingent, material conditions that could be confronted and transformed.
The line crystallizes Carter’s materialist feminism. Against romantic images of eternal femininity, she argues that gender is made, not given by nature or blessed by heaven. The 1970s revival of goddess spirituality within parts of second-wave feminism is one of her targets. For Carter, trading patriarchal father gods for maternal divinities only changes the mask. It keeps the move of sacralizing gender difference, reinscribing woman as essence, intuition, and nurture, and thereby blunting critique of the institutions that enforce inequality.
Her fiction and essays stage this argument. The Passion of New Eve satirizes a matriarchal cult presided over by a grotesque Mother, exposing how utopian archetypes can slide into authoritarian theater. In The Sadeian Woman she denounces the myth of woman-as-nature as an ideological trap that prettifies domination. Across her fairy-tale rewritings, she tears the veil from enchantment to show the material stakes beneath.
The final thrust is anti-transcendental and anti-essentialist. Myths are not harmless daydreams; they are technologies of feeling and belief invented to manage desire and maintain order. Liberation, for Carter, depends on demystification: analyzing the material conditions, and inventing new narratives that refuse to naturalize power. Reverence for archetypes may soothe, but it will not change the world that produced the need for soothing.
The line crystallizes Carter’s materialist feminism. Against romantic images of eternal femininity, she argues that gender is made, not given by nature or blessed by heaven. The 1970s revival of goddess spirituality within parts of second-wave feminism is one of her targets. For Carter, trading patriarchal father gods for maternal divinities only changes the mask. It keeps the move of sacralizing gender difference, reinscribing woman as essence, intuition, and nurture, and thereby blunting critique of the institutions that enforce inequality.
Her fiction and essays stage this argument. The Passion of New Eve satirizes a matriarchal cult presided over by a grotesque Mother, exposing how utopian archetypes can slide into authoritarian theater. In The Sadeian Woman she denounces the myth of woman-as-nature as an ideological trap that prettifies domination. Across her fairy-tale rewritings, she tears the veil from enchantment to show the material stakes beneath.
The final thrust is anti-transcendental and anti-essentialist. Myths are not harmless daydreams; they are technologies of feeling and belief invented to manage desire and maintain order. Liberation, for Carter, depends on demystification: analyzing the material conditions, and inventing new narratives that refuse to naturalize power. Reverence for archetypes may soothe, but it will not change the world that produced the need for soothing.
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| Topic | God |
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