To what extent and in what ways does Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve engage with the issue of feminism and reflect upon its contemporary society?  In her article ‘Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?’, Nicola Nixon posits that the 1970s saw a plethora of feminist writers making ‘successful intrusions into the genre of the popular SF novel’, a genre whose readership, she argues, was insularly male and sexist. Nicola Nixon, ‘Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?’, Science Fiction Studies, 19/2 (1992), 219-235 (p.219), in JSTOR < www.jstor.org/stable/4240152> [accessed 10 January 2020]. Nixon continues by suggesting that the distinction between feminist science fiction of the 1970s and 1980s is the former’s preoccupation with utopias and the latter’s resignation to dystopias - ‘barely concealed allegories of feminism’s complacency and failure’. Ibid. p.220. Angela Carter, then, appears to be a soothsayer in the genre, or, at the very least, prematurely cynical. Her novel Heroes and Villains (1969) marks her digression from the ‘charming’ and ‘seductive’ novels that preceded it, moving towards ‘more detached and intellectual’ territory. Sarah Gamble, The Fiction of Angela Carter, 1st edition, (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001), pp. 49-51. Roz Kaveney situates Heroes and Villains as the first of ‘the three novels in which Carter most clearly uses the tropes of SF’, the subsequent two being The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and The Passion of New Eve (1977). Roz Kaveney, ‘Angela Carter and Science Fiction’, in Essays on the art of Angela Carter, 2nd edition, ed. by Lorna Sage (London: Virago, 2007), 184-200 (p. 185). None of these three texts clearly correlates with the quotidian expectations of feminist utopian fiction, as defined by Jean Pfaelzer: The utopian text represents two worlds, the flawed present and the future perfect, which contradict and comment upon each other. One world is feminist and egalitarian. The other world is not. And the world that is not utopian derives from the author’s representation of contemporary gender inequality, sexual repression, and cultural malaise. Jean Pfaelzer, ‘The Changing of the Avant Garde: The Feminist Utopia’, Science Fiction Studies, 15/3 (1988), 282-294 (pp.286 - 287) in JSTOR < www.jstor.org/stable/4239898> [accessed 11 January 2020]. Though this formal template may be imitated or reflected in Heroes and Villains and The Passion of New Eve, it is ultimately subverted, conspicuously in the former and more subtly in the latter. Even though Carter emphatically champions egalitarianism, the feminist utopias depicted in her fiction are unequivocally not egalitarian. In particular, the gynocratic “utopia” of The Passion of New Eve is laced with polemic satire, as Carter wields the tropes and devices of science fiction to optimise her argument. In Carter’s fiction, there can be no feminist utopia because within this environment lies the seeds for societies as autocratic and elitist as the patriarchal hegemony it rails against, at least when adopting certain strains of second wave feminist thought. To a certain extent, the world of The Passion of New Eve can be retrospectively categorised as an ‘ustopia’. The term, devised by Carter’s peer and friend, Margaret Atwood, applies to the novel, in which dystopian and utopian spaces are consistently latent within each other, corresponding with the definition that ‘dystopia contains within itself a little utopia, and vice versa’. Margaret Atwood, ‘Margaret Atwood: the road to ustopia’, The Guardian, 14 October 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/14/margaret-atwood-road-to-ustopia [accessed 11 January 2020]. This essay will explore the ways in which Carter addresses feminist dystopias and utopias in The Passion of New Eve; in particular how she applies science fiction tropes and devices to comment upon the feminist discussion and movement contemporary to the novel. Carter outlines her distaste for archetypes and deifications of femininity in her controversial defence of the Marquis de Sade’s fiction and pornography in The Sadeian Woman (1979), which critically engages with similar territory to that of The Passion of New Eve: ‘All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods.’ Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman, (London: Virago, 2009), pp. 5-6. Indeed, the ‘purity of the virgin’, ‘mother goddesses’ and ‘father gods’ are a mere few of the cultural myths and archetypes that find themselves scorned and deconstructed in The Passion of New Eve. For Carter, it appears that mythology and archetypes, fantasised taxonomies, are the blockages in the river of mainstream egalitarianism. And it is egalitarianism that Carter seeks, as opposed to gynocracy, as she continues to divulge in her appraisal of Sade: ‘Sade creates a museum of woman-monsters. He cuts up the bodies of women and reassembles them in the shapes of his own delirium. He renews all the ancient wounds, every one, and makes them bleed again as if they will never stop bleeding. From time to time, he leaves off satire long enough to posit a world in which nobody need bleed. But only a violent transformation of this world and a fresh start in an absolutely egalitarian society would make this possible. Nevertheless, such a transformation might be possible; at this point, Sade becomes a Utopian. His Utopianism, however, takes the form of Kafka’s: “There is hope – but not for us”.’ Ibid. p. 29. Quite effortlessly, we can recontextualise this passage by substituting ‘Carter’ for ‘Sade’ and applying it as an interpretation of The Passion of New Eve, for which it fits rather well. The single distinction, and perhaps advantage, however, is Carter’s divergence from the Gothic and implementation of science fiction. Sade’s Bluebeardian, mutilating approach to deconstruction becomes that of a scientist and inventor in the Mother, who is a posthuman plastic surgeon and creator of a cyborg. Similarly, Carter herself occupies the role of mad scientist/surgeon for, as well as her persistent deconstruction, Rebecca Munford suggests the novel’s ‘kaleidoscopic intertextuality’ conveys ‘a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, built out of literary fragments and allusions’. Rebecca Munford, Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers, 2nd edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), p. 174. Here, Carter aligns herself with the very origins of science fiction. She also both occupies the Gothic perspective’s condemnation of Frankenstein, as well as, at the very least, an alignment with the scientist who dismembers and patches limbs together in an effort to create something new. It is contradictory but ironically self-aware. Mother clearly represents what Carter perceives to be the worst aspects of feminist doctrine – her dislike of matriarchal hegemony and feminine deification – though the character reflects Carter herself, as a feminist SF author. Furthermore, the ‘violent transformation’ of the satirical dystopia is possible in Carter’s novel, for she can draw upon the SF subgenre of post-apocalyptic fiction, which had seen popularity in the 20th century. Kaveney details science fiction’s historic treatment of post-apocalyptic landscapes as perpetually pertaining to its contemporary conflicts, such as the ‘Cold War fifties’ seeing ‘a golden age for novels about the aftermath of atomic war’. Kaveney, p. 189. In The Passion of New Eve, the post-apocalyptic landscape is clearly imagining future consequences of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970’s, albeit a far more militant rendering. Carter’s issue with the militant feminists of the novel manifests in their absorption of signs that are ultimately constructions of patriarchal mythology, such as the vagina dentata: ‘inscribed on a wall, the female circle – thus: ♀ with, inside it, a set of bared teeth. Women are angry. Beware Women! Goodness me!’. Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve, (Virago: London, 1982), p. 11. The inherent sarcasm of this narration suggests Carter’s own disdain for the ‘consolatory nonsense’ of patriarchal myths of femininity. Evelyn is able to mock the symbol because it is a patriarchal construction, a recognisable sign that has been associated with the feminine throughout Western cultural history. This exploration coalesces fully in the ‘utopian’ space of Beulah. Beulah functions as the site that portrays and subverts the feminist utopia. It is a juxtaposition of mythology and science fiction that is foreshadowed in Evelyn’s narration of its exterior: ‘Beneath this stone sits the Mother in a complicated mix of mythology and technology’. Carter, The Passion of New Eve, p. 48. The adjective ‘complicated’ is significant for it establishes Beulah’s feminism as problematic; it is not glorifying, it is not condemning, simply problematising. Carter’s satire increases as Evelyn describes the inscription upon its exterior, which is written in Latin: ‘ENTER, FOR HERE THE GODS ARE’. Carter, The Passion of New Eve, p. 48. The Latin capitalisation of self-aggrandisement encapsulates the very feminine deification Carter rails against in The Sadeian Woman. The hyperbole continues as Evelyn details the titles and rituals of Beulah: It is the home of the woman who calls herself the Great Parricide, also glories in the title of Grand Emasculator; ecstasy their only anaesthetic, the priests of Cybele sheared off their parts to exalt her, ran bleeding, psalmodising, crazed through the streets. Ibid, p. 49. The tone is farcically Gothic, dressed in religious language. It also suggests Carter’s condemnation of matriarchy through the debasement of Mother’s followers, illustrating how the feminist ‘utopia’ can reflect the tyrannical potential of patriarchy. In addition, these hyperbolic descriptions of Beulah’s mythic profundity are consistently undermined by implementation of SF devices. Evelyn describes how ‘the room had a curiously artificial quality… a triumph of science and hardly anything about it is natural’. Ibid. p. 49. This continues after ‘the sullen flash of Holy Mother’s obsidian scalpel’, as Evelyn notices the floor is ‘covered with a shiny, plastic substance’ and Mother’s voice is emitted from ‘a loudspeaker concealed somewhere’. Ibid. p. 50. The appearance of Beulah is described as a ‘science fiction chapel’. Ibid. p. 50. Here, science fiction functions as an agent of demystification. It is the grounding of genre that reveals the mythic, surreal qualities of the gynocracy to be artifice. This functions as the weapon with which Carter deconstructs deification and mythology; it is the author’s ‘obsidian scalpel’ with which she castrates the archetypal hegemony of semiotics that she perceives as deceptive and detrimental to egalitarian utopianism. It is reminiscent of the scene in The Wizard of Oz (1939) in which the great and terrifying Wizard is revealed to be merely a man operating machinery. Interestingly, in his eulogy to Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie claims The Wizard of Oz to be one of Carter’s favourite films and titles her ‘a very good Wizard’. Salman Rushdie, ‘Angela Carter, 1940-92: A Very Good Wizard, a Very Dear Friend’, The New York Times, 8 March 1992, http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/98/12/27/specials/carter-rushdie.html [accessed 12 January 2020]. Though possibly unintentional, we again see the mirroring of Carter and the Mother, intensifying not only the contradiction, but the suggestion that Carter views mystification as intrinsic to the authorial process of fiction, and science fiction functioning as a demystifying agent. This is similar to Atwood’s interpretation of her own style of science fiction: ‘things that really could happen but just hadn't completely happened when the authors wrote the books’. It is potentially problematic how Carter fiercely employs science fiction, which was viewed as an intrinsically male-dominated and even misogynistic genre by feminist writers of the time, to antagonise the feminist SF notions of utopia that were emerging in the period. Akin to her reclamation of Sade, we could kindly interpret this as Carter’s self – empowerment as a female writer, wielding whatever genre she sees fit, despite its unpleasant associations, and repurposing it for her own uncompromising integrity of individual philosophy. Furthermore, Aidan Day argues that Carter scorns and parodies these myths of the ‘essentialist matriarchy’ because it ‘simply reconfirms patriarchal bias of the old myth[s]’; it is a pastiche of the ‘construction of the male gaze’. Aidan Day, Angela Carter: The Rational Glass, 1st edition, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) p. 117. Her deconstruction of ‘essentialist matriarchy’ also manifests in the architecture of Beulah, which Nicoletta Vallorani describes as ‘built on analogy to a womb’. Nicoletta Vallorani, ‘The Body of the City: Angela Carter’s “The Passion of New Eve”’, Science Fiction Studies, 21/3 (1994), pp. 365-379 (p. 372) in JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4240372 [accessed 8 January 2020]. This argument is clearly plausible and appears intentional of the Women, as their technology serves to illustrate this: ‘I lay on a pallet on the floor of a dim, white room lit only by a fringe of pinkish luminescence at the foot of the wall. This room was quite round, as if it has been blown out, like bubble gum, inflated under the earth’. Carter, The Passion of New Eve, p. 49. This interpretation can be collaborated with Papatya Alkan Genca’s article ‘Grotesque Bodies and Spaces in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve’, in which she divulges the origins of the term ‘grotesque’: ‘and they were called grotesque after the Italian word grotto, which denotes a small cave, because they were assumed to be underground. This allusion the [sic] cave within the word itself ties it to such concepts as “low, hidden, earthly, dark, material, immanent, visceral” (Russo 1). Today, the grotesque is used as an adjective to describe anything that is ugly, distorted, weird, or hideous.’ Papatya Alkan Genca, ‘Grotesque Bodies and Spaces in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve’, Celal Bayar Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 16 (1/2) (2018), 119-128 (p. 121) in DergiPark Akademik, https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/cbayarsos/issue/37006/424070 Here, we can see how the very origins of the term emerges from one of the most enduring archetypal symbols of the womb: the cave; a symbol also incorporated in The Passion of New Eve as the architecture of gynocracy. Perfectly, this illustrates how patriarchal dominance of semiotics has perpetually essentialised the female as the negative ‘Other’. Thus, the feminist utopia of Beulah is nothing more than a confirmation of patriarchal myth. The artificiality of the architecture serves to further drive this point. Carter also uses the model of the ‘posthuman’ to deconstruct antiquated ideas of femininity and gender, as well as how the SF imagination can transform the stale cultural binaries into a utopian vision. There are arguably at least two posthuman characters in the novel: the Mother and Eve. Of the two characters, the latter exemplifies the novel’s anticipation of Donna Haraway’s influential poststructuralist and posthumanist feminism in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985), which advocates the ‘cyborg’ as ‘a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves’. Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ in Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature, ed. by Donna Haraway, (New York: Routledge, 1991), 291-324 (p. 316). The ‘cyborg’ is defined as ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism’. Ibid. p. 291 This description complies with Eve, who is fitted with an artificial vagina. Eve also complies with the utopian potentiality of Haraway’s cyborg. Haraway posits that: ‘Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends)’. Ibid. p 315 Therein lies the irony of the posthuman cyborg Eve. Eve chooses to reject her initiation into the ‘unitary identity’ of the ‘Messiah of the Antithesis’ as Mother intends, too rejecting the antagonistic dualisms of gender all together, occupying an equivocal space of post-gender identification: ‘I am a tabula erasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg’. Carter, The Passion of New Eve, pp. 67, 83 Mother, on the other hand, is not ‘a hybrid of machine and organism’ but ‘her own mythological artefact; she had reconstructed her flesh painfully, with knives and with needles, into a transcendental form as an emblem’. Ibid. p. 60 Mother is not a cyborg, she is purely a composition of flesh. Thus, she affiliates herself with the ‘antagonistic dualisms’ of patriarchal mythology and archetypes. Her self-construction with the evidently phallic tools of knives and needles perhaps symbolises this. Mother is narcissistic and despotic in her posthumanism, she seeks the ‘unitary identity’ of a tyrannical goddess: ‘I am the Great Parricide, I am the Castratix of the Phallocentric Universe, I am Mama, Mama, Mama!’. Ibid, The Passion of New Eve. p. 67 Her body is nothing but a ‘map of power and identity’, drawing upon ‘consolatory myths’ and archetypes to inflate her authority. It is her absence of the cyborg hybridity, the SF element, that renders her dystopic and denies her entrance into the conclusion’s suggested utopia. Thus, we return to Carter’s penchant for the Sadeian notion of utopianism, in particular the notion that, ‘There is hope – but not for us’, and that ‘violent transformation’ is necessary to implement a utopia. Utopia is inaccessible in The Passion of New Eve, but it is not unreachable. The novel’s ending does imply a utopian future that complies with Atwood’s observation, Sade’s postulation and Haraway’s assertion. From the second chapter of the novel, it is foreshadowed that the dystopia will eventually cease, ‘the entropic order of disorder’. Carter, The Passion of New Eve, p. 15 Mother peacefully passes away as the Women detonate a nuclear bomb, and Eve travels to sea, ‘Ocean, ocean, mother of mysteries, bear me to the place of birth’. Ibid, pp. 15, 191 The ‘entropic order’ informs the reader that this post-apocalyptic chaos has a linear propulsion and a destination to be reached. This destination is death and, subsequently, ‘birth’. It is a climax that fertilises new life. Alongside the Sadeian connotations of this overtly sexual trajectory (as well as echoes of his best-known quote, ‘It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure’), we are reminded of Atwood’s ‘ustopia’. The implied survivor of this nuclear war is Eve, for she travels out to ‘the place of birth’. We can assume this is a conviction of the cyborg’s utopian potential. Even though Carter’s novel predates Haraway’s theory by almost a decade, the two radical feminists appear to agree on the necessity to diverge from the essentialist cultural myths and archetypes that haunt not only our understanding of gender but equality and utopianism, and the route to utopia can be found in science fiction, through its more achievable mythology of posthumanism, post-apocalyptic landscapes and cyborgs. Carter dissects and disassembles what she sees to be the flaws in feminism contemporary to the novel and, like Frankenstein, patches together a new radical model. As Haraway remarks in her conclusion to the manifesto, ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’. Haraway, p. 316 Bibliography Alkan Genca, Papatya ‘Grotesque Bodies and Spaces in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve’, Celal Bayar Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 16 (1/2) (2018), 119-128 (p. 121) in DergiPark Akademik, https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/cbayarsos/issue/37006/424070 [accessed 8 January 202] Atwood, Margaret, ‘Margaret Atwood: the road to ustopia’, The Guardian, 14 October 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/14/margaret-atwood-road-to-ustopia [accessed 11 January 2020]. Carter, Angela, The Passion of New Eve, (Virago: London, 1982), p. 11. Carter, Angela, The Sadeian Woman, (London: Virago, 2009), pp. 5-6. Day, Aidan, Angela Carter: The Rational Glass, 1st edition, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) p. 117. Gamble, Sarah, The Fiction of Angela Carter, 1st edition, (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001), pp. 49-51. Haraway, Donna ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ in Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature, ed. by Donna Haraway, (New York: Routledge, 1991), 291-324 (p. 316). Kaveney, Roz, ‘Angela Carter and Science Fiction’, in Essays on the art of Angela Carter, 2nd edition, ed. by Lorna Sage (London: Virago, 2007), 184-200 (p. 185). Munford, Rebecca, Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers, 2nd edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), p. 174. Nixon, Nicola, ‘Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?’, Science Fiction Studies, 19/2 (1992), 219-235 (p.219), in JSTOR < www.jstor.org/stable/4240152> [accessed 10 January 2020]. Pfaelzer, Jean, ‘The Changing of the Avant Garde: The Feminist Utopia’, Science Fiction Studies, 15/3 (1988), 282-294 (pp.286 - 287) in JSTOR < www.jstor.org/stable/4239898> [accessed 11 January 2020]. Rushdie, Salman, ‘Angela Carter, 1940-92: A Very Good Wizard, a Very Dear Friend’, The New York Times, 8 March 1992, http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/98/12/27/specials/carter-rushdie.html [accessed 12 January 2020]. Vallorani, Nicoletta, ‘The Body of the City: Angela Carter’s “The Passion of New Eve”’, Science Fiction Studies, 21/3 (1994), pp. 365-379 (p. 372) in JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4240372 [accessed 8 January 2020].