Fake Women

Abstract This chapter is an inquiry into the idea of the “fake” that emerges in Carson’s essay, “Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God,” and its companion piece, the libretto “Decreation: An Opera in Three Parts.” The chapter explores Carson’s striking gloss of the term “fake woman” (pseudo-mulier), which reorients it from a term of indictment—in the inquisitorial case against the mystic Marguerite Porete—to a descriptor of radical psychological insight. Carson’s twin interpretive forms, essay and opera, reprise the contradictions of these “fake women,” first by describing them, and second, by performing their strong consequences for writing and re-telling. The chapter closes with a discussion of “fake women” from across the Carson oeuvre, and confronts one of the most well-known critiques of Carson herself to date: the charge of imitator, phony, fraud.