How that social fiction of my "feminity" was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing."
In 1970, having separated from her husband, Carter went to live in Japan for two years. The experience of a different culture had a strong influence on her work. 1979 Carter published THE SADETAN WOMAN, where she questioned culturally accepted views of sexuality, and sadistic and masochistic relations between men and women. Surprising some of her readers, Carter defended the Marquis de Sade's images of women. After the novel Carter's fiction was described by some less enthusiastic critics as 'entertainment for boys and girls who like their De Sade mixed with Suchard chocolate'.
In the late 1980s Carter's writings occupied a central position within debates about feminist pluralism and postmodernism. Her interest in changing gender roles formed the basis for novels HEROES AND VILLAINS (1969), set in the post-holocaust world, and THE PASSIONS OF NEW EVE (1977). The protagonist, Evelyn, comes to a futuristic New York which has become the City of Dreadful Night, where disolute Leilah performs a dance of chaos for him. Evelyn finds his promised job extinguished. He undergoes deranging adventures and is captured in the desert by a cold-blooded female scientist who calls herself Mother and has assembled in her person various attributes of the goddess. She intends to rape Evelyn, change his sex, and impregnate him with his own seed, so that he may give birth to an ambivalent new messiah. In the end, Eve, having transcended the various impersonations s/he has passed through metamorphosis, takes ship westward, en route maybe to Eden. Concern with sexual politicis was central to Carter's burlesque-picaresque novel NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS (1984), which first begins in a gaslight-romance version of London, moves for a period to Siberia, and returns home. In this work the dystopia of The Passions of New Eve is replaced by humor and re-creation of the 19th-century bourgeois novel. Her other works incluce translations of Charles Perrault's fairy tales (1979), BLOODY CHAMBER (1979), a collection of stories retelling classic fairy tales, and screenpaly for the film THE COMPANY OF WOLVES (1984), a bloodthirsty retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood story, directed by Neil Jordan. BLACK VENUS (1985) featured Carter's fictionalisation of historical characters, such as Lizzie Borden and Baudelaire's syphilitic mistress. WISE CHILDREN (1991) focused on the female members of a theatrical family and was marked by optimism and humor.