Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!
Interpretation
Marriage can feel like a confined situation, much like moving from one bad situation to another.
Angela Carter's quote compares marriage to a form of prostitution, suggesting that both involve a similar compromise of freedom and autonomy. The metaphor of moving 'out of the frying pan into the fire' highlights the idea that individuals may leave one undesirable situation only to step into another that could be equally or more detrimental, emphasizing the potential pitfalls of romantic commitments and societal expectations surrounding marriage.
In practice
In a discussion about modern relationships, one might quote Angela Carter to illustrate the complexities of marriage.
She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver.
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.
For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written β heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.
Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.
To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.
The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.
It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.
Many employer-employee relationships are built on a lie that starts from the first interaction: neither party automatically conceives of the relationship as something that will last a lifetime, but both interact as if it is. This lie of omission bases the relationship on distrust.
I get so tired of people acting like, you know, black men and women never help each other, never support each other.
Women are interested in relationships and how other societies manage those relationships. They may have been constrained in what roles were open to them, but they could question and observe, and they could write it down.
Let us be kinder to one another.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.