Your blog comments will be due on Wednesday, June 17th
by 10 am. You may draw from these questions for your posts, or develop
your own response to the readings.
1) One of Carter’s projects in this novel is to reveal
the ways in which desire can very much be a social construction. From Desiderio’s ever-shifting subject
position, we see him perpetrate a rape that runs him afoul of the law in one
instance, but then becomes an initiation of sorts later in the novel. It is the tale of Sleeping Beauty we tell our
children, but a horrible act of violence in another context. Pedophilia is socially acceptable in one
particular social schema, but taboo in others, and so on, as Carter switches
from exploiter to exploited, subject and object, and back again. What do you think of Carter’s game? To what extent is desire socially
informed? And if desire is truly the
root of imagination as was discussed in our earlier class session, what does
that mean for the work of the architect?
2) Both feminist non-feminist critics have criticized
Carter’s novels as “pornographic,” but Carter articulates how she sees herself
as bearing the legacy of the Marquis de Sade whom she calls “a moral
pornographer” who “might use pornography as a critique of current relations between
the sexes…Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because
he might begin to penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that
distorts our culture even as he entered the realms of true obscenity as he
describes it” (from Sadeian Woman 20). Mandy Koolen argues that Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor
Hoffman “demonstrate[s] the pervasiveness and insidiousness of patriarchy,
the ways that women internalize sexist and misogynist beliefs and, in turn, how
women’s sexual desires are shaped by living in patriarchal environments” (400).
Do you agree with Koolen? How can
certain environments be “patriarchal” and in what ways do we internalize such
systems of oppression?
3) In the House of Anonymity, Albertina (in disguise)
states, “My house is a refuge for those who can find no equilibrium between
inside and outside, between mind and body or body and soul, vice versa, etcetera,
etcetera” (131-2). In a previous class
session, Connor brought up the pervasiveness of “in-between” spaces in the
novel. What other instances of “in-between-ness”
do we see in this novel in terms of space, bodies, and desire?
