ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Angela Carter's flirtation with surrealism paradoxically did not deeply influence her own actual writing practice until she found limitations within the various traditions within the movement. She needed enough constructivism to justify her challenge to the concept of gender as a given absolute, but not so much as to preclude feminism's emancipatory goals. The highest truth of surrealism would efface or transcend Aristotelian logic and the laws of noncontradiction. Carter's rejection of Platonic idealism and her disparagement of searches for authenticity highlight a tension in her work that is not easily resolved. In each, Carter analyzes not only patriarchal culture as a function of the history of that culture, but also the patriarch as a function of the Freudian psychoanalytic stages. Carter was first exposed to alchemy during her research into medieval literature, and her 1965 journal is filled with many notes out of the alchemical interests of the authors she studied.
