Sadeian Tragedy: The Politics of Content Revision in Angela Carter’s “Snow Child”

Marked by its rich revision of the stepmother archetype and ambitious attempt to infuse the classic fairy-tale structure with feminist subtext, Angela Carter’s “Snow Child” provides a significant opportunity to move beyond current heroine-focused analyses of the postmodern fairy-tale genre. This study closely examines Carter’s model of revision for “Snow Child,” which attempts to deconstruct fairy-tale and pornographic archetypes simultaneously by tracing their origin to the same source. By using Carter’s The Sadeian Woman as a companion text, we can determine her success in using subtext to dismantle three binary archetypes hidden in the Snow White tales: mother-daughter, sister-sister, virgin-whore