The Passion of New Eve

""The current work aims to analyse the characters’ quest for the self and their process of growth throughout the narratives. This work is composed of an introduction on the similarities and the intertextual connections between the novels and the literary genres at issue, a chapter about the characters’ self-development as related to the concept of Bildungsroman alongside the concept of quest narrative and finally a chapter about gender ambiguity."

RAMOS, Rodrigo Viriato — Quest for the Self in The Passion of New Eve and
in Sexing the Cherry. Tese de mestrado. Universidade de Aveiro, 2010."

This article studies two novels of involuntary sex change in order to critique the trope of bodily entrapment. In Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve (1977) and Thierry Jonquet's Mygale (1984), the protagonists are forced to become female, but they do not remain men trapped in women's bodies. By highlighting the trans, female, and narrative reembodiments in these two novels, I argue that the two texts unsettle the notion of sex/gender dimorphism embedded in the discourse of being trapped in the "wrong body." Together, the specific reembodiments in the two novels suggest a paradigm shift from genital, binary, and identitarian concepts of sex and gender to open-ended, contingent, but not necessarily post-binary concepts of sex and gender.

There has been an interaction between postmodern fiction and science fiction since the emergence of postmodern tendencies in literature. Postmodern authors’ willingness to incorporate elements from science fiction differentiates them from their Victorian realist and modernist predecessors, who did not include science fiction tropes and motifs in their novels. The shift from indifference to interest towards science fiction in British literature requires a thorough analysis. As such, this thesis first gives information about the histories and definitions of postmodernism and science fiction, and then investigates the exchanges between postmodern fiction and science fiction by making references to the studies of scholars and critics who also focus on this subject.

As examples of the appropriation of science fiction elements in postmodern fiction, this thesis analyzes Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods. It examines the employment of spatiotemporal science fiction motifs such as future-world, (post)apocalypse, space travel, and various science-fictional technologies in both novels. Ultimately, it argues that science
fiction elements are appropriated in The Passion of New Eve and The Stone Gods because they provide the best means for making postmodern interrogations of timespace, progress metanarratives, social norms, and traditional dichotomies.

Key words: postmodernism, postmodern novel, science fiction, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, The Passion of New Eve, The Stone Gods

Angela Carter is noted for her rewritings of well-known myths and fairytales, whose plots she deconstructs and reconstructs through her unique writing. Her postmodern novels also have references to myths, history writing and other literary texts. As a postmodern author, Carter integrates various literary genres and tropes into her work, such as fairytales, fantasy, gothic fiction and science fiction. Among these genres, science fiction is important in providing Carter with new technological possibilities in her postmodern experimentations with metanarratives such as myths. In her novel The Passion of New Eve (1977), Carter exhibits a myth-making process in a future setting, with an underground laboratory that can create myths and mythical beings with the help of advanced technology. Through technological operations such as surgery and personality programming, Carter exposes the construction process of myths; how their makers integrate their ideologies into their stories and characters. She criticizes both the patriarchal myths and equally rigid radical feminist (rewritten) myths for imposing social and gender roles on people. Carter also includes contemporary myth-makers such mass media and Hollywood to indicate that myths are still produced to instil certain ideologies into people’s minds. In the light of all these, this paper analyzes the use of science fiction elements in The Passion of New Eve and argues that these elements enable Carter to expose the ideologies behind myth-making as they provide settings and technologies for re-enacting the process.

Angela Carter's subversive narrative techniques help her establish an authentic narrative atmosphere in which she is able to demythologise and dephilosophise traditional codes. Among these techniques, the grotesque is considered to be the most groundbreaking one through which Carter rejects the classical body concept. By the grotesque, Carter is able to represent her sense of parodic and ironic depiction of the female body whose perverse and subversive qualities demolish "an ideal woman-image." Therefore, it is possible to see the grotesque characteristics in Carter's The Passion of New Eve. This study hereby explores the 'grotesque' as one of the major literary ways of the Carterian expression and explains how the ideal woman image is demolished when it passes through the filter of Carter's politics of the grotesque in her The Passion of New Eve.

The paper deals with The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter. Both writers show dystopian regimes which reconstruct Biblical myths since, as it is suggested in their fiction, totalitarian states abuse myths to represent women as passive victims and objects of desire and rescue. And because demythologizing involves remythologizing, Atwood and Carter attempt not only to refuse the representations of the past literary and mythological tradition but also to declare subjectivity for their heroines; women are represented in Nancy Roberts’ words “as rescuers rather than victims” . Margaret Atwood uses the genre of speculative fiction to depict the nightmarish Gilead, a fundamentalist totalitarian regime reconstructed from patriarchal narratives of the Bible and American Puritanism. The leaders of Gilead value women for their reproductive function as ‘two-legged wombs’. Atwood’s protagonist, Offred, although she has no real power to rebel against patriarchal prescriptions, claims her body and her memory as her own territory. Through her narrative she undermines Gilead’s myth of the silent passivity of women. Offered not only survives the oppression, she also re-writes the story of ‘walking ovaries’ into her own story of identity, denying the role of nameless Handmaid. In Angela Carter’s speculative fiction The Passion of New Eve, the Biblical myth of the creation of Eve from Adam’s body is remythologized by Mother, the leader of a group of militant feminists. A British man, Evelyn, is kidnapped and transformed through surgery into “the new Eve” by Mother, who is a genius surgeon as well. I focus here on intertextuality, which offers Atwood and Carter a strategy for reconstructing the gaps inherent in Biblical myths related to reproduction, creation of woman and infertility.

Diane Elam argues that feminism’s reliance on a universal notion of women is a drawback for its politics and proposes that women need to embrace a “collective uncertainty” which does not deny differences and has a place for a “groundless solidarity” that is based on “undecidability.” Within this frame, I argue that Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve and Fay Weldon’s Praxis call for a “groundless solidarity” which has place for differences and multiplicity, and embrace undecidability as a thematic and narrative strategy. I propose that the novels’ transgressive, unstable and indeterminate characters are endowed with a grotesque power as they shatter the boundaries of normativity generated by both patriarchal and feminist attitudes. Thus, the indeterminacy incited by grotesque representations encourages a space of undecidability featuring a subversively vibrant feminist stance, which is reinforced through the playful narrative strategies adopted in these texts.

Working at a local level in a global context - what does this mean? What methods appear to be appropriate to ways of life where global communications mean that the most distant is as reachable and hence manipulable as the closest?  In such a context decisions can be taken in one locale that have consequences in another.  Global capitalists can switch funds from one locale to another without ever thinking in terms of the lives of the individuals affected.  Indeed, transactions are managed by ‘intelligent software’ responding in preprogrammed ways to particular market circumstances.  As a researcher I want to know what methods best serve my purposes in this kind of globalised context to local action.  First, therefore, I want to make clear as much to myself as to others some key aspects of my intentions in doing research.
    It seems to me that this is an age when control seems both so ubiquitous and so absent from the lives of individuals. Thus, most if not all my research has a focus on action and the extent to which individuals are able to enhance the quality of their lives in ways that contribute to the quality of the lives of others.  It seems important to me that research is conceived as not disinterested, but as always suffused by interests that have to be explored, critiqued and argued.  This means that research is always a political action.  Thus, what kind of politics seems to offer the most conducive framework for research that aims at enhancing freedom and quality of life for all? Without foreclosing too much on possible political frameworks it seems to me that Chantel Mouffe (1993) is right when she argues that democracy is an incomplete revolution and that its development is still the best approach available.  The radical possibilities of democracy to enhance the quality of life have yet to be worked out fully for the contemporary age.