Scott A. Dimovitz

“In her otherwise largely realist fiction before Japan, Carter often used a male protagonist, her feminism consisted mainly of female characters’ exploitation and final destruction or violently taking the role of the male characters. This binary, as it happens, informs Carter’s analysis of Sade’s work, where women are classified into two types: Justine, passively suffering, the martyr at the hands of patriarchy; and Juliette, replicating the male libertines in their brutality towards women, the woman who learns to run with the wolves.”