Womanhood as Male’s Desire: Angela Carter’s Snow Child and The Sadeian Count

The notion that womanhood has been shaped by patriarchal standards is far from new. The concept has been problematized by Monique Wittig’s (2002) lesbian feminism and later destabilized by Judith Butler (2006), as they argued that feminism had to move past what patriarchy had set female existence to be. In The Sadeian Woman (2001), Angela Carter argues that the ideology of pornography constitutes womanhood as a necessarily submissive term in social representation. This theory will be turned into fiction in her short-story The Snow Child, where the tale of Snow White is subverted and the little girl exists as nothing but a representation of the count’s sexual desire. The objective of this article is to analyze, using insights from the queer theory, how womanhood is depicted in the text. We will demonstrate how the short-story builds the image of womanhood as created by the predatorial eyes of a male figure, and then, moving beyond the specific narrative, present how Carter defended true love and reciprocal desire as a mode of social subversion.