A Feminist Revolt from Within: Angela Carter’s

Excessiveness in The Infernal Desire Machines of

Doctor Hoffman
Mengni Kang

Angela Carter’s postmodern work of fantastic fiction, The Infernal Desire

Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), has a male central protagonist,
Desiderio, but its implied author is not anti-feminist. Carter’s bold
depiction of female sexuality in male-dominant worlds has given rise to
much debate; even nowadays, such unorthodox and detailed pornographic
descriptions are still unsettling.
This paper argues that Carter’s feminism shows a postmodern approach,
which deconstructs the process of signification even as it is subject to it. As
Linda Hutcheon avers, postmodern tactics foreground the politics of the
representation of the body through parody and counter-expectation,
though such feminist rebellion nevertheless remains within the patriarchy.
As such, Carter’s use of irony needs analysis in considering the text’s
effects. In particular, she uses pornography as a critique of asymmetrical
gender relations. Specifically, a notion of excess saturates the novel and
emerges in three aspects. First, there is a large number of female characters
in the novel. In every alternative world Desiderio encounters a woman and
projects his sexual fantasy onto her. Second, the narrative is imbued with
graphic portrayals of sex, including blatant illustrations of sex organs. In
terms of discourse, Carter delivers a stylistic hybridity—a combination of
Gothic, Fantastic and Surreal. These things all act as a potential
counterforce deconstructing male power.

Introduction
Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) is
a work of feminist postmodernist parody. The novel breaks down the
active male/passive female dichotomy by presenting readers with an
array of female characters who, while victimised by the patriarchy,
embody a certain autonomy. In labelling herself as a feminist,
however, Carter has incurred much controversy due to her bold
depictions of female sexuality and her excessive employment of
pornographic discourse. On this point Alison Lee notes that Carter
“called herself a feminist, but her feminism is no more monolithic
than her representations of female sexuality” (x). The text has been
read as clashing with the feminist ethos of the time, since “despite
Carter’s public feminism, her perversely elaborate representations of

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female characters caught in situations of sexual domination and
violence seemed at odds with the dominant wing of the Women’s
Liberation Movement [in the 1970s], which rejected pornography and
the eroticisation of oppression” (Pitchford 410).
But Carter is a demythologiser. She is interested in myths as “they
are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree” and she
considers that “all myths are products of the human mind and reflect
only aspects of material human practice” (Carter, “Notes from the
Front Line” 25; original emphasis). The plethora of sex scenes in
Carter’s novels can be attributed to their embodiment of archetypes
for gender roles privileging masculine order. In The Sadeian Woman,
Carter proposes the concept of “moral pornography”—suggesting
that a “moral pornographer might use pornography as total
demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through
the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man
and his kind” (20). This double-coding process is explicitly inscribed
in Doctor Hoffman.
This essay argues that Doctor Hoffman is a postmodern parody
which deconstructs the process of signification yet can never escape
complicity with the system against which it aims to revolt. Although
postmodernism’s open-endedness and lack of resolution can make it
hard for feminists to achieve activist ends (Hutcheon, The Politics of
Postmodernism 174), both feminism and postmodernism view art as “a
social sign inevitably and unavoidably enmeshed in other signs in
systems of meaning and value,” and share the goal of revealing the
social nature of cultural activity (148). Penetrating to the heart of the
contempt for women distorting culture and entering the realm of true
atrocity, Carter employs a notion of excess to disclose asymmetrical
gender relations. My discussion here is divided into four parts. It first
elaborates on the omnipresence of females and explores how these
characters, while suffering from male chauvinism, exercise their
subjectivity. The following section focuses on overwhelming bodily
descriptions, especially anatomical portrayals of human bodies and
unsettling sex scenes, investigating how Carter disturbingly unravels
the social construction of the body. The next part examines the
heteroglossia of the text. It demonstrates how the multi-voicedness of
the narrative contributes to the deconstruction of masculine discourse.
The conclusion argues that while in Doctor Hoffman the feminist
rebellion remains within male hegemony, the text parodically
foregrounds the politics of the representation of the body.

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The omnipresence of females
“While Woman is everywhere present in this novel, women are
conspicuously absent” (Robinson 163). In Doctor Hoffman, female
characters are without exception victims of male chauvinism but, in
one way or another, they make use of their subordinate status to tease
male power and to even transgress prescriptive gender roles. This
section will demonstrate the women’s suffering under patriarchy and
how they utilise their limited freedom and mobility to exercise their
subjectivity.
Carter’s novel is full of female characters, yet they are in no way the
kernel of the story. The whole narrative is voiced by Desiderio, “a
quasi-pornographic writer who enlists an array of misogynist
sentiment and fantasy,” and all the women, to varying degrees, are
transformed into Woman by hegemonic representations of gender
(Robinson 162). All the female characters in Carter’s world are more
or less objectified and victimised by patriarchy. The shape-shifting
Albertina can never establish a concrete existence. Initially she is
deprived of voice and countenance, only appearing in dreams—“She
did not speak; she did not smile” (Carter, Doctor Hoffman 25). Her
reticent and inexplicable presence incurs dread in Desiderio, since
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear and the oldest
and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” (30). Later
Albertina metamorphoses into a black swan, considered as evil and
foolish—“Its vapid eyes were set too close together on its head and
expressed a kind of mindless evil that was quite without glamour . . .
Its elongated neck had none of the grace traditionally ascribed to the
necks of swans but lolled foolishly” (30). Incarnating negativity and
danger, Albertina becomes a conundrum that the emissary tries to pin
down. His desire for Albertina is a conglomeration of voyeurism and
fetishistic scopophilia—attempting to demystify her, Desiderio
projects his own sexual fantasies and transforms her into something
satisfying (Mulvey 811). This is underlined at the beginning of
Desiderio’s mission: “I was nourishing an ambition—to rip away that
ruffled shirt and find out whether the breasts of an authentic woman
swelled beneath it . . . And then? I would fall on my knees in
worship” (DH 41). Thanks to Doctor Hoffman’s desire machines,
Albertina subsequently appears as figments of the emissary’s
masculine imagination. The Ophelia-like Mary Anne, desperate and
forlorn, is treated as a desired object during the intercourse: “I
[Desiderio] led her to the bed and . . . penetrated her sighing flesh . . .
I was aware of a curiously attenuated response, as if she were feeling
my caresses through a veil . . .” (56). Aoi may embody Desiderio’s
pedophilia. Infantile, she yet procures him sexual pleasure in a
businesslike way with considerable dexterity. It later turns out that

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the girl is used as a puppet by The River People to facilitate their
cannibalism. Lafleur, as the valet of the Count, likewise shows “the
submissiveness of the born victim” (124), almost erased by her
subservience. Albertina may escape from the projection of Desiderio’s
unconsciousness, yet she can never get rid of the ubiquitous male
order—unveiling her masks, Albertina is still at the mercy of male
sexism. Lost in Nebulous Time, she is atrociously raped by male
centaurs, and the only reason that the bay apologises to Desiderio
afterwards is that Albertina is his mate, and therefore his property.
Even though Albertina eventually picks up a role as a general, putting
away all her romanticism, she is no more than the Doctor’s agent,
devoid of autonomy. From the city, which is drab and solid, thriving
on bourgeois affluence, to Hoffman’s masculine lab with many
ashtrays and a magazine rack containing Playboy, The New Yorker,
Time and Newsweek, Albertina has always been a female object serving
her father’s totalitarian project. As Robinson observes: “The ‘inherent
symmetry’ turns out not to be a symmetry at all; the male figures in
the text retain power over the female, and put this power into play as
Hoffman’s ‘liberation of desire’ results in increased objectification of,
and sexual violence against, women” (166).
Other women suffer in more or less the same way. The appearance
of Japanese names—Aoi, Nao-Kurai—in “The River People” indicates
an hierarchical society. Carter’s perceptions of Japan exert tangible
influence on her writings: “It was in Japan that she experienced what
she saw as a truly structured, patriarchal system, predicated on a
massive cultural repression, which she then re-read back to English
and American culture” (Dimovitz 63). Women of the river people all
have their faces painted, bodies covered and costumes normalised.
They arouse repulsion in landsmen and are not allowed to appear on
deck whenever reaching a place of any size. Radically, the river
people practise labia stretching as they believe it makes women more
aesthetically and sexually desirable. That women are objectified as
sexual masochists is particularly highlighted in “The Erotic
Traveller.” In the brothel, all the girls are positioned in the cages and
regarded as the goddesses idealised by men: “Each was as
circumscribed as a figure in rhetoric and you could not imagine they
had names, for they had been reduced by the rigorous discipline of
their vocation to the undifferentiated essence of the idea of the
female” (DH 132). What is more unsettling is that their deformed
bodies intensify a sinister and malevolent atmosphere—they are
enclosed as they might be sexually aggressive. But these girls are
actually victims of sexual sadism, as the narrator observes: “And one
girl must have come straight from the whipping parlour for her back
was a ravelled palimpsest of wound upon wound” (133). Similarly,

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female Amazons are deprived of sexual autonomy. Believing that
women are ruthless, passing far beyond all human feelings, the
chieftain and his surgeons excise the clitoris of every girl so that not a
single female of the African village has ever experienced the ecstasy
and pleasure of sex.
People may wonder how a text depicting such misogyny is a
feminist critique. Does Carter’s narrative, minutely recording the
various perverted representations of females, reinforce a denial of
female autonomy? As I have mentioned, Carter’s feminism can be
identified with Hutcheon’s concept of the postmodern parody. A
postmodernist feminist text, she argues, “parodically inscribes the
conventions of feminine representation, provokes our conditioned
response and then subverts that response, making us aware of how it
was induced in us.” In this sense, “we have to feel the seduction in
order to question it and then to theorise the site of that contradiction”
(Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism 150). The complicity of this
approach is manifested in Carter’s discussion of Sade. Analysing
Justine and Juliette, both of whom are at the mercy of patriarchy, the
writer says: “If Justine is a pawn because she is a woman, Juliette
transforms herself from pawn to queen in a single move and
henceforward goes wherever she pleases on the chess board” (The
Sadeian Woman 79). While Juliette’s subjectivity is ultimately limited
by male power, her promiscuity indeed brings her certain freedom
and mobility (Munford 66). The following reading of Carter’s female
characters reveals that they are in no way reduced to complete
passivity.
Albertina’s indeterminacy actually entails more leeway to exert her
power upon Desiderio. As an apparition she has successfully incited
the emissary’s curiosity and a desire which haunts his whole life.
Albertina exhorts Desiderio to be amorous and mysterious in dreams;
as a black swan she sends erotic messages; in disguise of the
Ambassador she fascinates the man. But Desiderio’s final object—to
consummate his love for Albertina, to gratify his sexual desires—is
forever out of reach. Albertina’s presence might be elusive, but her
impact on Desiderio is lingering. The first overt tease of Desiderio’s
male power occurs when Mary Anne interprets the man’s name as
meaning “the desired one”—for the girl, Desiderio becomes the one
objectified. Interestingly, Richard Schmidt points out that “Desiderio
is the Italian word for wish, longing, desire; that is, it is the active
form, not the passive one which the somnambulist Mary Anne gives
as a translation of his name, calling him ‘the desired one’” (57). From
this perspective, as Mary Anne’s inaccurate translation is deliberate,
her role as an active desirer is subversive. Desiderio’s interaction with
Aoi is also not without a loss of power. The girl frequently comes to

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Desiderio’s room and constantly seduces him, yet refuses to gratify
his sexual desires. Aoi’s tactics are gradual. At the beginning she only
helps to procure Desiderio orgasms; then she allows him to caress her
genitals; assuming that his desire may finally be fulfilled on the
wedding day, the emissary feels cheated to realise that the girl is no
more than a part of Nao-Kurai’s murder plan and that his desire will
never be satisfied. Carter’s depiction of the young Aoi as sexually
active and professional is indeed unorthodox, yet a frustration of male
desires in such morally unsettling scenarios cannot be overlooked.
This deferral of gratification continues even when Albertina has
disclosed her identity and the two have confessed their love to each
other. Either the process is interrupted by external forces, as in “The
Erotic Traveller” where Desiderio has to escape from the police, or it
is unilaterally terminated by Albertina who keeps saying “the time
was not yet ripe” (DH 187). Desiderio’s desire will never be fulfilled
as he kills Albertina, and the rupture between the signifier and the
signified can never be fixed. The death of Albertina, however, does
not mean the erasure of her presence. Fifty years after the murder,
Desiderio is still consumed with the desire to see her again.
By comparison, free from Desiderio’s fantasies, other women assert
more autonomy than Albertina and this is foregrounded in a
contravention of traditional gender roles. In Doctor Hoffman, the
dichotomy of the male as the desirer and the female as the desired is
at risk. Both Madame la Barbe and Mamie Buckskin are overtly
androgynous. The bearded Barbe is “immensely handsome, widely
travelled” (105). She has abundant adventures: With no families to
rely upon, she prematurely achieves independence and travels all
over the world, from Shanghai to Valparaiso, Tangiers to Tashkent.
Desiderio does not find her ambiguous identity repulsive: “She
[Barbe] was a perfect lady. She had the wistful charm of a flower
pressed inside a perfectly enormous book” (106). Mamie Buckskin
rejects femininity even more. She is “a fully phallic female with the
bosom of a nursing mother and a gun, death-dealing erectile tissue,
perpetually at her thigh” (108). She utilises her sex to fight against
worldly odds—taking back family properties and freedom by
seducing and killing. What is even more rebellious is her
indeterminable sexual orientation. Despite a sexual preference for
women, as the narrator notes, Buckskin makes Desiderio her sex
partner. That the man is “the desired one,” as marked by Mary Anne
earlier, is further foregrounded here. During their intercourse,
Desiderio is in total passivity: “she morosely made do with me and
these nights were as if spent manning a very small dinghy on a very
stormy sea” (109). Desiderio is not oblivious to the intrusion upon his
masculinity, yet the sense of crisis is equivocal. On his sex with

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Mama, the narrator mentions that: “I screwed the toy’s grandmother
up against the wall. I began to feel like a love slave” (85). Here the
juxtaposition of “screw” and “slave” is ambivalent. While it is hard to
pin down whether Desiderio is the active practitioner or the passive
recipient, the deconstruction of sexism is noticeable. More
iconoclastically, the novel’s feminism is voiced in outrageous rapes
imposed by and upon men. Carter does not go so far as to recast
females as absolute manipulators in sex relations, but presenting
males as potential victims of male chauvinism is a powerful way to
unveil the artificiality of gender norms. For instance, the Moroccan
acrobats’ appearance is tinged with femininity: “They gilded their
finger and toenails and rouged their lips a blackish red” (133).
Treating Desiderio as a desired object, they barbarically rape him
without encountering resistance. The episode critiques the
assumption that males are naturally entitled to sexual subjectivity.
That Desiderio, as a male, is raped by males, noticeably denaturalises
the established gender categories.
Both in the masculine Barbe and Buckskin, and in the effeminate
acrobats, performative aspects of gender are explicitly highlighted.
Carter prefigures the concept of “gender as performance”—that
achieved prominence in the 1990s and is generally employed “to
analyse constructs of femininity and masculinity in society and to
discuss forms of role-play in the lesbian and gay community”
(Palmer 24). By interrogating the construction of the feminine role and
foregrounding its artifice, Carter’s depictions of the above characters
anticipate poststructuralist approaches to gender current in the 1980s
and 1990s. For Judith Butler, gender is constituted through a set of
“discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body
through and within the categories of sex” (x) and “[t]he replication of
heterosexual constructs in non heterosexual frames brings into relief
the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original”
(31); according to Luce Irigaray, who put forward the strategy
“playing with mimesis” (76), women can expose the artificiality and
inauthenticity of femininity by parodically mimicking conventional
images of it.

The plethora of physical presentations

Carter’s bold employment of pornography, which is traditionally
regarded as sexist, has incurred much controversy in feminist
discussion. In this aspect, Doctor Hoffman, characterised with an excess
of graphic representations of sex, is a case in point. This section will
testify to Carter’s role as a moral pornographer. The discussion will
lay out different stances towards pornography within feminism as
well as Carter’s postmodern, parodical approach to it, followed by a

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detailed analysis of how the author inscribes pornographic discourse
and in the meantime reveals its constructedness, thereby rejecting
pornography as ideologically loaded.
Pornography has been such an important part of feminist debate
largely because of the insistence, avers Lynne Segal in the
introduction to Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate, “that
sexuality was the primary, the overriding, source of men’s oppression
of women, rather than the existing sexual division of labor,
organisation of the state or diverse ideological structures” (3; original
emphasis). John Stoltenberg also argues that “Pornography tells lies
about women. But pornography tells the truth about men” (106–7).
The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a peak of the feminist debate on
pornography. Throughout the 1970s feminist scholars paid serious
attention to media constructions of women’s roles and argued that
representations confining women to the domestic domain created and
maintained conditions of gender inequality. In the mid-1980s, the
anti-pornography movement culminated with the introduction of
anti-pornography ordinances treating pornography as a form of sex
discrimination, thanks to radical feminists, among whom Catharine
MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin are key figures (Bronstein 1–2).
While it is imprudent to claim that all feminists are opposed to
pornography, definitions of feminism, pornography and censorship
are called into question. Dworkin and MacKinnon are two
representatives of the “feminist-fundamentalist axis” (Strossen 13).
For Dworkin, pornography is “a social, material practice amid a
network of related and mutually constitutive practices whose
organising meanings and values resonate with and sustain one
another” (qtd in Mason-Grant 19). Her critique of pornography is
founded on a repudiation of the fantasy/reality dichotomy: “At the
heart of the female condition is pornography: it is the ideology that is
the source for all the rest; it truly defines what women are in this
system—and how women are treated, issues from what women are.
Pornography is not a metaphor for what women are; it is what
women are in theory and in practice” (Dworkin, Right-Wing Women
221; original emphasis). MacKinnon likewise avers that pornography
strengthens the patriarchy: “Pornography, in the feminist view, is a
form of forced sex . . . an institution of gender inequality . . .
[P]ornography, with the rape and prostitution in which it participates,
institutionalises the sexuality of male supremacy” (325). It should be
noted that radical feminism condemns not only the consumption of
pornography, but also pornography itself as “a sexual concept or
sexual ideology embodied in the form of words or images” (Schussler
70)—“It [pornography] is not outside the world of material reality
because it happens to women, and it is not outside the world of

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material reality because it makes men come” (Dworkin, Pornography
xxxviii). Reacting against radical feminists, Nadine Strossen points
out that the stance of pornophobic feminists tends to conflate the
suppression of women’s sexuality with the suppression of women’s
equality: “This dangerous equation of sexual expression with gender
discrimination, which is at the heart of the feminist antipornography
movement, is a central reason that movement is so threatening to the
women’s rights cause” (24–25). Defending the right of free speech,
Strossen and other pro-sex feminists consider freedom of speech and
equal opportunity to be mutually reinforcing, and that “suppressing
pornography would subvert, rather than promote, efforts to counter
misogynistic violence and discrimination” (35). Similarly, Wendy
McElroy insists on the principle of self-ownership: “a woman’s body”
is “a woman’s right” and women should be “free to choose,
regardless of the content of their choices” (73). Individualist feminists
therefore hold that “pornography brings a freedom of the feminine
gender at both cultural and political level, since it dissolves certain
taboos and interdicts on female sexuality” (Schussler 70–71).
Differently from the above feminists, Susanne Kappeler adopts a
more poststructuralist approach, arguing that a feminist cultural
practice “would be dialogic, multi-logic, an end to the porno-logic”
(222). In other words, in the context of feminism, censorship,
pornography and erotica, “the competing voices and arguments
create a dialogic process that is revealing rather than reductionist”
(McPherson 74).
Carter’s attitude towards pornography is ambivalent. At one point,
she maintained that the issue was “staunchly matter-of-fact,” as
“there were so many more pressing social issues to worry about”
(Gamble 99). Once, in an interview, she said: “I don’t think it’s nearly
as damaging as the effects of the capitalist system” (qtd in Harron 10).
Interestingly, in The Sadeian Woman, Carter criticises pornography
since it “involves an abstraction of human intercourse in which the
self is reduced to its formal elements” (4). Carter does not doubt that
Sade is pornographic and misogynist, and “she is not trying to save
him for future generations by protesting his liberation of sexuality
from cultural restraints” (Lee 8). What makes Sade so compelling to
Carter might be his straightforward representations “that free
women’s sexuality from a purely reproductive function”: “If sex is
power in Sade, then women too can have that power” (10). Sade does
not stop at describing “sexual relations in the context of an unfree
society as the expression of pure tyranny” (SW 27); furthermore, he
encourages women “to fuck as actively as they are able, so that
powered by their enormous and hitherto untapped sexual energy
they will then be able to fuck their way into history and, in doing so,

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change it” (31). This is where Sade and Carter converge—stressing
sexual relations as a social reality. As a moral pornographer, Carter
presents sexual cruelties and acts of violence devoid of eroticism; she
foregrounds the subversive potential of pornography by introducing
all contextual issues (Lee 10). As a practitioner of postmodernism, she
does not rest in any one ideological position (12). Carter employs
pornography paradoxically—amplifying its critical potential for
gender relations and seeking to refute it by using its very ideas. In this
way, the presumed violent and misogynist nature of pornography is
utilised for rebellious purposes.
While not all feminists are against pornography, Carter’s bold
reappraisal of Sade in light of feminism is too bold to be welcome to
many. Responding to The Sadeian Woman, Kappeler believes that
elevating Sade “as artist and writing subject” rather than criticising
his position as a “multiple rapist and murderer” (134) is unacceptable;
Dworkin likewise dismisses Carter’s discussion of Sade as a
“pseudofeminist literary essay” more interested in celebrating Sade
than investigating implications of the asymmetrical gender relations
underpinning pornography (Pornography 84). Carter’s practice as a
moral pornographer is also under attack. She is described by Amanda
Sebestyn as “the high priestess of post-graduate porn” (38); in the
same vein Robert Clark thinks that “Carter’s belief that a ‘moral
pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current
relations between the sexes’ . . . [is] mistaken, the ideological power of
the form being infinitely greater than the power of the individual to
overcome it” (152–53). In the following section, I will defend Carter as
a moral pornographer, showing how the novel voices a denouncing of
pornography’s sexism by using its very features.
In terms of narrative, a dominant definition of pornography is that
it “depicts sexuality as transgressively obscene” and it includes
explicit or implicit portrayals of genitalia. Compared to erotic works,
pornography is lacking in emotional elaboration (Herman, Jahn and
Ryan 444). One of the most underlined features of Carter’s
pornographic discourse is anatomical sexual delineations. Peep-show
samples are full of segmented bodies. In one scene Desiderio sees the
lower body of a woman: “The feet were decorated with spike-heeled,
black leather pumps . . . The dark red and purple crenellations
surrounding the vagina acted as a frame for a perfectly round hole
. . .” (DH 44); in another one he is confronted with a murdered body:
“Her arms stuck out stiffly on either side of her . . . The right breast
had been partially segmented and hung open to reveal two surfaces of
meat . . .” (45); there is also a mechanical exhibit of love-making scene:
“The man’s face was moulded into the woman’s neck and so could
not be seen but the head of the woman was constructed so as to

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oscillate in the socket of her neck . . .” (46). All these drawings are
stripped of coherence—there is no way to retrieve origins and ends as
wholeness is replaced by fragmentation. Negating the correspondence
between the signifier and the signified, these samples deliver a world
full of signs, a world mediated by representations. Such
anatomisation may remind readers of Sigmund Freud’s notoriously
phallocentric view that “anatomy is destiny,” to which Carter made a
response in The Sadeian Woman, commenting that Freud’s point “is
true enough as far as it goes, but ambiguous” (4). Disavowing Freud’s
reductionism, Carter says: “My anatomy is only part of an infinitely
complex organisation, my self. The anatomical reductionalism of
graffiti . . . extracts all the evidence of me from myself and leaves
behind only a single aspect of my life as a mammal” (SW 4). The
feminist message encoded in these anatomical depictions is that while
physical aspects of a body are used to define sex, they should never
be the basis of gender norms. Gender as culturally and historically
constructed should be separated from the biologically determined sex.
Carter’s critique is intensified in Desiderio being raped by the
acrobats. Ironically, the victimised man shows certain admiration for
the perpetrators’ virility: “They gave me the most comprehensive
anatomy lesson a man ever suffered, in which I learned every possible
modulation of the male apparatus and some I would have thought
impossible” (DH 117). This scenario discloses the constructedness of
supposed gender roles—what happens to Desiderio and the acrobats,
who are biologically male, undermines the sexual relationship as
naturally heterosexual and male-dominated.
Another feature of Carter’s pornographic discourse is to substitute a
variety of metaphors for parts of the body, which, according to
Gregory J. Rubinson, is the most recognisable language convention of
pornographic literature (722). Desiderio describes his sex with
Madame la Barbe as tumbling into “the morass of satin limbs and
flailing hooves” (DH 110) and the process is so long that it might
explode a clock; the Count’s penis is of monstrous size, standing “as
resolutely aloft as an illustration of satyriasis in a medical dictionary”
(129); in Hoffman’s lab, a girl’s lower part is referred to as “the brown
ringlets of a plump, dimpled, pink and white English rosebud” (214).
Yet Carter goes beyond just inscribing pornographic language—she
criticises the essentialism of pornography reducing people to genitalia
by constantly highlighting the dehumanising facets of sexual acts
(Rubinson 722). Desiderio’s sex with Mamie reeks with pawing and
clawing, and he feels disrupted as the scene resembles peep-show
samples “showing a girl trampled by horses” (DH 110); with genitals
emphasised and humanity erased, the Count and Desiderio are led to
“the Bestial Room” (130); the couple in the Hoffman’s lab are “icons of

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perpetual motion” and “they knew nothing but the progress of their
static journey towards willed, mutual annihilation” (215). Carter’s
pornographic discourse in many cases implicates an association of sex
and violence, thereby calling attention to power relations behind such
graphic sexual depictions. Another critique lies in that such excessive
sexual desires strip the characters of their subjectivities and reify them
into machines. In contrast with such overwhelming sensuality is a
lack of emotional pleasure. Desiderio notes that the acrobats, after the
rape, “showed no signs of satiation or weariness, only of conclusion”
and they seemingly treat the atrocity no more than “a gymnastic
exercise” (117); as to the centaurs’ ritualistic sexual perpetration, the
narrator observes that “the males clearly did not know it was a rape”
(180), showing neither enthusiasm nor gratification. The alienation of
the body and the soul is further enhanced by a distant narrative voice.
Throughout the narration Desiderio keeps a subdued tone. His
unnatural voice is especially underscored in recalling his own
sufferings: “I ceased to count my penetrations but I think each one
buggered me at least twice” (117); “I was interested to see he
interpreted my involuntary cry as one of outraged protest . . .” (177).
Desiderio’s immoral voice is hard to handle: how can a victim retrieve
his trauma in such an impersonal way? By highlighting the separation
of the physical and the mental Carter reveals that human bodies are
socially constructed and that corporality is often the target of some
specific caste, be it patriarchal, aristocratic or colonial (Costantini 15).
Her materialism—questioning and investigating what constitutes
material reality—is consistent with Michel Foucault’s point that the
body is codified. Upon the politics of the body, Foucault remarks that
“[t]he body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and
dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the
illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual
disintegration” (148). In Doctor Hoffman, the body is the medium
through which patriarchy claims its authority; more specifically, it is
exploited by Hoffman to materialise his totalitarianism.
The iconoclastic potential of Carter’s moral pornography also
notably emerges in Gothic portrayals of the body, which dismantle
the rigidification of a polarised system, exploring alternative
discourses and knowledges (Costantini 15–16). The girls in the
brothel, while reduced to the idea of the female—“the girls towered
above us like the goddesses of some forgotten theogeny locked up
because they were too holy to be touched” (DH 132), paradoxically
demonstrate a lack of femaleness: “when I [Desiderio] examined them
more closely, I saw that none of them were any longer, or might ever
have been, woman” (132). The intention to conform them to male
fantasies in fact leads to a crisis of gender norms. The girls become

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something indefinable and therefore subversive: one girl has “furred,
golden shoulders”, one has “the striped face of a zebra and a cropped,
stiff, black mane bristling down her spine” (132), and another has
“clusters of roses growing in [her] armpits” (132–33). Their grotesque
bodies produce epistemological anxiety, as Desiderio says that “they
seemed to me nothing but malicious satires upon eroticism” (135).
These metamorphosed objects implicate a deconstruction of the
antithesis of the male body as torturing and evil, and the female body
as victimised and good. Demonstrating the violence on female bodies,
Carter’s narrative reveals “the negativity and the absurdity of a social
structure based on fixed positions and subjectivities” (Costantini 16).

The hybridity of style

Carter’s rejection of Platonic idealism and disparagement of
authenticity is also reflected in a structural heterogeneity, and this
section will elaborate how Carter’s hybridity of style disintegrates
masculinist discourse. In Doctor Hoffman, corresponding to the
recasting of gender roles within patriarchy in theme, structural
subversions are likewise performed within conventions: different
genres are registered only to be deconstructed later; a unified voice is
substituted by a polyphony of voices, as Carter’s language is
objective, visualised and flowery at the same time; the narrator’s
ambiguous narration also dismantles male discourse and focalisation,
introducing potential resistance.
Carter claims that “the emergence of the women’s movement, and
all that implies, is both symptom and product of the unravelling of
the culture based on Judaeo-Christianity, a bit of Greek
transcendentalism via the father of lies, Plato, and all the other bits
and pieces” (“Notes” 26–27). For the writer, “the problem of
authenticity localises around the issues of gender and sexuality” and
she needs 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” (Dimovitz 71–72). Carter’s dedication to
revealing the artificiality of gender roles allies her with Simone de
Beauvoir, who asserts that there is no essence to women and a woman
is defined by her actions. Here the difference between saying that
women, like men, are defined individually by their actions, and that
all definitions and actions are themselves nothing but appearances
needs to be underscored (72). For Carter, the goals of agency and
personal autonomy are indispensable for women’s emancipation. As
Patricia Waugh points out, while Carter uses postmodern aesthetic
strategies of disruption to reimagine the world, she resists the
nihilistic implications of the theory (198). Her rejection of Platonic
idealism and disparagement of authenticity is conveyed in a

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structural tension in Doctor Hoffman which can hardly be resolved.
This may evoke one of postmodernism’s most paradoxical
conventions: “its art forms (and its theory) at once use and abuse,
install and then destabilise convention in parodic ways” (Hutcheon, A
Poetics of Postmodernism 23). Surreal, Fantastic, Gothic—all these
genres are registered yet none of them can fully account for the whole
narrative. By fusing various styles, Carter establishes a multi-voiced
text that breaks down masculine discourse.
The narrative’s subscription to surrealism is reflected in overturning
old conventions and traditions serving no purpose, as surrealists
believe that a primary move is “an initial removal of belief in all
metanarrative systems before constructing belief in something else”
and “to create as much confusion as possible” (Dimovitz 67). We may
immediately think of Hoffman’s initial attack on the city—“the
Cathedral expired in a blaze of melodious fireworks” (DH 29)—and
the demise of the House of Anonymity in “The Erotic Traveller.”
There are also blasphemous descriptions echoing surrealism’s
aesthetics of perversion. André Breton emphasises the importance of
anticlericism in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism: “Everything
remains to be done, every means must be worth trying, in order to lay
waste to the ideas of family, country, religion . . . it must be stressed that
on this point there is no room for compromise” (128–29; original
emphasis). This tradition is given credit by Carter, who once praised
George Bataille’s iconic novel Story of the Eye (1928), which is marked
with a French surrealist anticlericism, as a “marvelous, scatological
fairytale about the omnipotence of desire,” in that it was “about
fucking as existential affirmation against death, who is also God”
(Carter, “George Bataille” 69). In the chapter “Lost in Nebulous
Time,” blasphemy is first underlined by a religionisation of centaurs’
rituals: The bay “began a sacerdotal song or hieratic chant something
in the style of the chants of orthodox Jewry”; in centaurs’ theology,
“every event in the physical world depended solely on the ongoing
mercy of the Sacred Stallion and on his congregation’s ongoing
atonement for the unmentionable sin at the dawn of the time that
recurred inexorably every year” (DH 172). The desecration is further
enhanced by depictions of excrement: “Music was the voice of the
Sacred Stallion. Shit signified his presence among them. Their Holy
Hill was a dungheap” (173). Nevertheless, as a socialist, Carter’s
historical materialist worldview is incompatible with surrealism’s
belief in a deeper reality unifying binary systems and reconciling
contradictions: For Breton and his followers, surrealism aims for “a
higher understanding of the world that synthesised the greater truth
of the unconscious and the material world,” an effacement or
transcendence of “Aristotelian logic and the laws of

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noncontradiction” (Dimovitz 67–68). Accordingly, while Doctor
Hoffman may embody the surrealist ideal merging the dream world
with the real, his final destruction negates the canon of surrealism.
Doctor Hoffman might be labelled as a fantastic novel. Indeed, the
narrative is full of larger-than-life images and scenarios: the shape-
shifting Albertina, the fragmented bodies of the acrobats, the peep-
show samples being materialised, the inexplicable alternative worlds
in which Desiderio gets trapped. However, as I have stressed, as a
demythologiser, Carter rejects metaphysics. Brian McHale points out
that typically, the fantastic is less a genre than a transient state of texts
belonging to either the genre of the uncanny or that of the marvellous;
epistemological uncertainty is, accordingly the underlying principle
of the fantastic (74). However, a closer reading of the novel shows that
this code keeps being challenged. More than presenting the tension
between the normal and the paranormal, the narrative heightens and
foregrounds the existing clash, thereby turning epistemological
uncertainty into ontological oscillation. The agonistic struggle
between the Minister and the Doctor is literal, as both the Minister’s
resistance to Hoffman’s invasion and the Doctor’s assaults on the city
are systematically organised. If Doctor Hoffman is a fantastic novel, it is
definitely a postmodern variant.
The novel follows the Gothic tradition by portraying dilapidated
architectures and female victims: The neglected and forsaken house in
the Chapter, “The Mansion of Midnight;” the bloodless Mary Anne,
with “the waxen delicacy of a plant bred in a cupboard” (53); the
corpse of Albertina’s mother in Hoffman’s room. Notwithstanding
these Gothic elements, the fiction contravenes the genre grammars;
the linearity of Gothic, detective or hard-boiled plots, founded upon
mechanisms of suspense, is substituted by an anti-climactic ending
(Costantini 22). At the end of the story, renouncing any Master,
denied the sexual gratification in Albertina, Desiderio is reduced to
total disorientation. The most dramatised war between Desire and
Reason is left unresolved. The novel’s feminism—the persistent
presence of female characters and the violations of gender roles—
likewise disavows the patriarchal authority in canonical Gothic
literature.
Carter’s discourse is an exemplification of heteroglossia,
interweaving different registers in the text, serving as “the vehicle for
the confrontation and dialogue among world-views and ideologies in
the novel” (McHale 166). This typical postmodern strategy—the
polyphony of voices—structurally contributes to weakening a unified
voice by injecting various language registers into a homogeneous
discourse-world. Cornel Bonca regards Desiderio’s style as an
unsettling combination of English empirical exactitude and a fevered-

154 • HECATE
brow Gothic decadence whirling with emotional tumult (59–60). On
the one hand, Doctor Hoffman is permeated by an apathetic and distant
tone. Apart from the elaborate and anatomical depictions of tableaux,
the narrative is marked with literal transcriptions—the record of the
Ambassador and the Minister’s meeting, lists—the charges on
Desiderio and on Hoffman’s theories, and scientific discourse—the
quoting from Freud: “In the unconscious, nothing can be treated or
destroyed.” These highly organised styles enhance the sense of
objectivity. On the other hand, a habitus of sensuality is also
embedded in the discourse. Accompanying the introduction of
carnivalised elements such as sideshows and fairs is the visualised
language, exemplified in presenting the grotesque imagery of the
human body. Carter further diversifies her style by somewhat
abruptly interpolating fairy-tale discourse. “Lost in Nebulous Time”
starts with “There was once a young man named Desiderio who set
upon a journey and very soon lost himself completely” (DH 166);
enchanting illustrations of landscapes form a sharp contrast with the
upcoming tragedies—the rape of Albertina. By juxtaposing different
repertoires of styles, the novel voices the critique of a monological
world of discourse.
Another counter-force is the narrator’s voice. Although Desiderio’s
alliance with the two patriarchs, however tenuous, is undeniable, his
ambiguous narration hints at an alternative voice aiding in Carter’s
project of deconstructing male discourse and focalisation. The
narration starts with a sense of certainty: “I remember everything . . . I
remember everything perfectly” (11). Most of the time, the narrating
Desiderio is conscious of retaining his credibility. In some cases where
his knowability may incur suspicion, the narrator takes the trouble to
clarify the source. For instance, the detailed conversation between the
Ambassador and the Minister is not based on Desiderio’s memory,
but recorded as taped documents—the narrator uses transcripts to
show the objectivity of his words. Even so, ambiguity is detectable.
The frequent appearance of locutions such as “seem,” “perhaps,” “as
if,” “suppose” and “might” indicates a certain room for an alternative
voice. Such suspicion is further foregrounded near the end of the
narrative. When the story gets close to the death of Hoffman and
Albertina, the narrator gradually loses control of the narration:
Initially he says he killed Hoffman because he was a hypocrite; later
he notes “Perhaps I killed him out of incomprehension” (209); a few
pages later he claims the killing of the Doctor as an unintentional
accident; as for the murder of Albertina, he is “almost certain” that it
is for self-defence. Clearly Desiderio’s authenticity as the narrator is
greatly undermined by these equivocal statements. The textual unity
is additionally weakened by a shift of perspective. While mostly the

HECATE • 155
narrator stays behind the curtain, observing the demarcation between
the narrating “I” and the experiencing “I”, metalepsis still occurs. In
the highly unnatural scenarios that the old Desiderio directly
communicates with the young Desiderio, and that the old Desiderio is
referred to as a third person, the narrative hints at an alternative voice
from a higher diegetic level.

Conclusion
While Desiderio eventually makes a choice between order and chaos,
he is haunted by the “insatiable regret with which we acknowledge
that the impossible is, per se, impossible” (221). All the seemingly
binary oppositions that are inscribed: reason and desire, reality and
fantasy, empiricism and idealism, turn out impossible to be pinned
down. Ultimately, desire destroys both its subject and its object.
Desiderio fails to find any Master, since both the Minister and the
Doctor emerge as the slaves of totalitarianism, or the object of his
fantasies, since Albertina has to be killed to accomplish his mission
and engender him as a hero (Robinson 172). The demolition of binary
oppositions engages Desiderio, as well as readers, in a world where
antitheses prove to be paradoxical interpenetrations.
Based upon the notion of excess, this essay has examined the
omnipresence of women, the plethora of physical descriptions and the
hybridity of style in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman;
presenting how it reinstates show normative constructions of Woman
and simultaneously deconstructs such representations. It is concluded
that the novel is representative of Carter’s postmodern practice in that
it at once uses and abuses, installs and destabilises convention in
parodic ways (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 23). Radically, the
novel depicts women within the male chauvinist tradition, yet by
endowing them with certain mobility and stressing the artificiality of
gender roles, the work demystifies the patriarchal representations of
Woman, thereby dismantling the process of signification. In this
sense, Carter’s feminism dovetails with postmodern parody in its
complicity with the grand narrative it attempts to disintegrate—
masculine discourse. It is a subversion from within.

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