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The Passion of New Eve
I know nothing. I am a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman, although I possess a woman's shape. Not a woman, both more and less than a real woman. Now I am a being as mythic and monstrous as Mother herself . . . '
New York has become the City of Dreadful Night where dissolute Leilah performs a dance of chaos for Evelyn. But this young Englishman's fate lies in the arid desert, where a many-breasted fertility goddess will wield her scalpel to transform him into the new Eve.
New York has become the City of Dreadful Night where dissolute Leilah performs a dance of chaos for Evelyn. But this young Englishman's fate lies in the arid desert, where a many-breasted fertility goddess will wield her scalpel to transform him into the new Eve.
187 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
134 people are currently reading
8351 people want to read
About the author
Angela Carter
212 books3,727 followersBorn Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature.
She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982) that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised." She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). She was there at the same time as Roland Barthes, who published his experiences in Empire of Signs (1970).
She then explored the United States, Asia, and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son.
As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in Shaking a Leg. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Wolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003).
At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives.
Her novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature.
Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer. Her obituary published in The Observer said, "She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and reveled in the diverse."
She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982) that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised." She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). She was there at the same time as Roland Barthes, who published his experiences in Empire of Signs (1970).
She then explored the United States, Asia, and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son.
As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in Shaking a Leg. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Wolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003).
At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives.
Her novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature.
Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer. Her obituary published in The Observer said, "She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and reveled in the diverse."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 508 reviews
November 18, 2008
You have to read this book just for the plot which involves, and I'm not making this up, all of the following:
-post-apocalyptic America
-force sex-changed Evelyn (it's British) to Eve
-a tribe of Amazonian super-women
-a goddess with 6 breasts
-a cult of an androcentric self-created demigod
-a love story between an MTF and FTM
-LA in flames
- and a boat.
I mean, come on, how can you not read this.
-post-apocalyptic America
-force sex-changed Evelyn (it's British) to Eve
-a tribe of Amazonian super-women
-a goddess with 6 breasts
-a cult of an androcentric self-created demigod
-a love story between an MTF and FTM
-LA in flames
- and a boat.
I mean, come on, how can you not read this.
January 31, 2015
4.5 stars rounded up
It’s been too long since I’ve read any Carter and after this rollercoaster ride, it won’t be too long before I read more. As always Carter is difficult to pin down and this novel is science fiction, fairy tale, dystopia and much more. It’s crammed full of ideas, challenges, satire and plays a great deal with notions of identity and gender.
There will be minor spoilers; necessary to have any meaningful discussion of the novel; however in many ways the plot isn’t the point, the ideas are. The focus of the novel is Evelyn, an Englishman starting a university job in New York. His travels across the US are Odyssey like and he experiences strange, fabulous and bizarre things. During the journey he becomes Eve, losing more than just the lyn at the end of his name; but learning and becoming, a metamorphosis by surgery. Having been abusive towards a woman in New York called Leilah, Eve now experiences a male world. The gender change was without choice and so implies no change in awareness; consequently there is a male identity in a female body. The experiences that follow result in comprehension rather than integration.
Carter’s America is a dystopia, dividing into factions. There are vigilante groups based on race, an all-female underground city, California has left the Union and is riven by Civil War and there are a variety of groupings in the desert where Eve has a series of traumatic experiences. The urban landscape of New York (where the novel starts) is grim and decaying, illustrated by the language Carter uses; especially the colours (acid yellow, mineral green). As always Carter’s language is rich and detailed, bawdy and vivid. The ideas follow each other with rapidity and Plato’s cave pops up at the end with a good twist. Carter satirises and critiques certain types of matriarchy. Hope Jennings makes an interesting point when she argues;
“Carter’s texts force us to think through the problems that arise when women attempt to assert a specifically feminine/sexual subject while continuing to define themselves according to male representations or symbols of femininity. She reminds us of the risks that accompany a female imaginary when it fails to remain self-conscious or critical of the position and/or premises from which it speaks; when contesting the myths of patriarchy, a feminist discourse must avoid the trap of falling for its own myths that it appropriates or sets up”
The whole is a great ride and the relationship with Hollywood film star Tristessa and the way Carter plays with the Tiresias myth is wonderfully inventive. The plot and narrative are secondary, but Carter manages to startle and amuse at the same time as making the reader think and question; quite an achievement.
It’s been too long since I’ve read any Carter and after this rollercoaster ride, it won’t be too long before I read more. As always Carter is difficult to pin down and this novel is science fiction, fairy tale, dystopia and much more. It’s crammed full of ideas, challenges, satire and plays a great deal with notions of identity and gender.
There will be minor spoilers; necessary to have any meaningful discussion of the novel; however in many ways the plot isn’t the point, the ideas are. The focus of the novel is Evelyn, an Englishman starting a university job in New York. His travels across the US are Odyssey like and he experiences strange, fabulous and bizarre things. During the journey he becomes Eve, losing more than just the lyn at the end of his name; but learning and becoming, a metamorphosis by surgery. Having been abusive towards a woman in New York called Leilah, Eve now experiences a male world. The gender change was without choice and so implies no change in awareness; consequently there is a male identity in a female body. The experiences that follow result in comprehension rather than integration.
Carter’s America is a dystopia, dividing into factions. There are vigilante groups based on race, an all-female underground city, California has left the Union and is riven by Civil War and there are a variety of groupings in the desert where Eve has a series of traumatic experiences. The urban landscape of New York (where the novel starts) is grim and decaying, illustrated by the language Carter uses; especially the colours (acid yellow, mineral green). As always Carter’s language is rich and detailed, bawdy and vivid. The ideas follow each other with rapidity and Plato’s cave pops up at the end with a good twist. Carter satirises and critiques certain types of matriarchy. Hope Jennings makes an interesting point when she argues;
“Carter’s texts force us to think through the problems that arise when women attempt to assert a specifically feminine/sexual subject while continuing to define themselves according to male representations or symbols of femininity. She reminds us of the risks that accompany a female imaginary when it fails to remain self-conscious or critical of the position and/or premises from which it speaks; when contesting the myths of patriarchy, a feminist discourse must avoid the trap of falling for its own myths that it appropriates or sets up”
The whole is a great ride and the relationship with Hollywood film star Tristessa and the way Carter plays with the Tiresias myth is wonderfully inventive. The plot and narrative are secondary, but Carter manages to startle and amuse at the same time as making the reader think and question; quite an achievement.
August 11, 2016
Some Foreground Quotes
“She’s the most imaginative of the post-war writers, linguistically…and in registers of different moods. You pick up a page of Angela Carter, and the flashing of her wit and her intelligence and her imagination just happens in every sentence.”
Marina Warner
"It is a wild night, this marathon night's viewing, in the semi-derelict picture palace of twentieth-century illusion.
"...all becomes a bloody carnival of sex and death…
"[The author] exacts a ... surrender from the reader. There is some exceptionally strenuous image activity ahead in these stories that precisely reactivate the magnificent gesticulations of giant forms, the bewildering transformations, the orgiastic violence that hurts nobody because it is not real - all the devices of dream, or film, or fiction.
"[The author] is also diabolically, obscenely, incomparably funny."
"[In Pynchon, Barth and Coover]...the exuberance and variety of the imaginative life [manifests] itself in all its convulsive beauty..."
Angela Carter
"...surrealist theory is derived from a synthesis of Freud and Hegel that only those without a specialist knowledge of either psychoanalysis or philosophy might have dared to undertake."
Angela Carter
Spoiler Warning
I found it impossible to discuss the themes of the novel that interested me, without revealing two aspects of the plot.
There is no great drama attached to how the plot unfolds. The narrative essentially consists of 12 set pieces that dramatise a number of metaphysical issues. Many of the issues are even foreshadowed in the early pages of the novel.
However, if you want to experience the progression of the plot without prior knowledge, you might want to postpone reading this review or, having read it, forget it before you read the novel.
I Lost/Found/Gained It at the Movies
Angela Carter uses "all the devices of dream, of film and of fiction" referred to in the above quote.
Even the order seems significant, possibly because she encountered and embraced them in her own life in that order.
Here, she uses them to explore three concerns: “the dark room, the mirror, the woman”.
Dream life might be personal and subjective; it reflects what we are, especially when it involves a mirror. However, film, viewed in a dark room, in a cinema, might be more social, if not necessarily more objective (if there is such a thing).
Evelyn, the male narrator, starts the novel with a scene in a London cinema in which he receives a blow job, while watching Tristessa, the most beautiful woman in the world, on screen.
Elsewhere in the same cinema, pairs of queers watch the same actress, identifying with her sadness, pain and suffering. Her gender doesn’t matter to them. She captures their feelings accurately:
Evelyn doesn’t name his partner, she is just “some girl or other”.
The scorn might still have been apparent, if Evelyn had just referred to her as “some girl”. She’s unnamed, anonymous. However, it’s interesting that he/Carter adds “or other”. Not just is she a girl, but you could argue that she is an “other”, an “opposite”, a “negative” of the self (or “positive”) of the narrator. We’re clearly in the realm of philosophy and psychoanalysis here.
This is just happening in the seats. On the screen, Tristessa represents universal conceptions of womanhood and beauty. They define Evelyn’s ideal of feminine beauty, not to mention the nature of a personal and sexual relationship.
Yet, Evelyn observes in retrospect:
As she does elsewhere in the novel, Carter foreshadows much of what is to come. She is not so much concerned with dramatic tension in the telling of her tale as the achievement of psychic reality and truth.
Reflections on Love in Amerika
Evelyn arrives in New York City to take up an academic position, only to find that a civil war has commenced. The war seems to have been started by minority groups: blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, lesbians and trans-sexuals.
He finds “Gothic lurid darkness” everywhere. He pursues his carnal appetites on the street, in the course of which he stalks, meets and fucks a black woman, Leilah. Carter’s description is erotically charged. A relationship of sorts develops. However, both soon tire of each other:
Still, Evelyn learns something about himself, and what it was that really attracted him about his lover:
Out of this realisation, comes an awareness of the nature of love:
Love, it seems, for this male, at least, is defined in terms of antagonism or a siege.
"Introite Et Hic Dii Sunt" ("Enter, For Here Too Are Gods")
Evelyn continues his long journey into night, by heading into the desert.
Here, he encounters a radical women’s movement headed by a woman who calls herself "the Great Parricide…the Great Emasculator…Mother," although her followers label her “Holy Mother”, a god-head to rival the masculine Christian God:
The New Eve
Evelyn soon realises that his fate is also a metamorphosis, to be trimmed by Mother’s obsidian scalpel, until, his penis nullified, abbreviated, made “willy-nilly”, he becomes a “New Eve”.
Evelyn undergoes not just a physical transformation, but a metaphysical one, which s/he associates with the desert experience:
The question is: what is the New Eve? Who is the new self? What gender is s/he?
This transformation allows Carter to examine two metaphysical propositions:
• That the feminine is an absence or a lack of something that is present in the masculine (i.e., the penis); and
• That, in the words of Simone de Beauvoir, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
In a way, the novel documents an experiment in whether “a change in the appearance will restructure the essence.”
Eve anticipates that the surgery will “free me from being, transform my ‘I’ into the other and, in doing so, annihilate it.”
Eve undergoes some psycho-programming, ironically part of which is viewing some of Tristessa’s films.
Initially, she feels that the programming has not been successful:
Psychologically and temporally, this might be true in the case of a male who has undergone a sex change, in a way, to become a new biological construct. However, it doesn’t follow that a female must necessarily be defined in terms of the absence of male sexual apparatus. Male and female are simply different. Neither is intrinsically superior or inferior. Neither is intrinsically present or absent, neither is intrinsically positive or negative.
Carter/Eve describes the differences as “contrarieties”.
Beulah, the “Woman’s Town” in the desert, is a place where ”contrarieties are equally true…where contrarieties exist together.”
The genders are morally equal, but different.
Bonjour Tristessa
This leaves the question as to whether Eve can “become” a woman (in the sense meant by de Beauvoir).
Carter deals with it when Eve participates in heterosexual relationships, one effectively rape, the other consensual.
Eve discovers that Tristessa has retired from the film industry and is living as a recluse in a glass mausoleum in the desert (a la Norma Desmond in her mansion in "Sunset Boulevard").
Eve gets an opportunity to test the views about womanhood that had influenced her via film when she was a male. However, she realises that the world of film is an illusion:
Still, both Tristessa and Eve have experienced the sense of being lost:
"The Vengeance of the Sex is Love"
But Eve discovers one more illusion or deception: Tristessa is actually a male masquerading as an actress modeled on the likes of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.
Gender is neither definitive nor hierarchical:
Still, the two protagonists share the duality of male and female in their nature. Inevitably, in the manner of a fairy tale, they fall in love and consummate their relationship physically. As night comes to an end and the sun rises, so too does the drama (in a reversal of the course of a Greek play, which ends at sunset):
Eve concludes that "the vengeance of the sex is love." Ultimately, gender did not matter in this relationship. On the one hand, what mattered was love, not gender or sex. On the other, it was by way of the mechanism of love that the New Eve truly became a woman and Tristessa became a man. Thus, Carter seems to suggest that the relationship of love is the apotheosis of what is human. Sexual difference still exists (and might even be relatively fluid). However, love is the arena within which it performs. And children might sometimes be its product.
Time, Space, History and Myth
Carter (via the women in the desert) also advances a number of propositions about time and space:
• Time is a man, space is a woman.
• Time is a killer.
• Kill time and live forever.
She relates these propositions to Historicity and Myth.
Man, in the guise of Father Time, “lives in Historicity; his phallic projector takes him onwards and upwards”. However, Historicity does its best to render Myth, which is more feminine, unnecessary.
It's not clear how much these propositions represent Carter's views. However, ultimately, Eve comes to recognise that words and concepts like Time and Duration and Progression are meaningless. Eve no longer experiences the passage of Time. She has entered eternity or timelessness (which she is more than entitled to do, as a fictional character).
Myth, in the sense of literature or story-telling or fairy tales, can be eternal, too, not to mention circular and recurring:”We start from our conclusions.” We end where we began. We return to our place of origin and life starts again:
SOUNDTRACK:
Al Green - "Let's Stay Together" (Live)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVzYx...
A song for Leilah
Plaid [feat. Björk] - "Lilith"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsL56...
Another song for Leilah
Björk - "Venus as a Boy" [Live]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqG6Z...
A song for Evelyn
“She’s the most imaginative of the post-war writers, linguistically…and in registers of different moods. You pick up a page of Angela Carter, and the flashing of her wit and her intelligence and her imagination just happens in every sentence.”
Marina Warner
"It is a wild night, this marathon night's viewing, in the semi-derelict picture palace of twentieth-century illusion.
"...all becomes a bloody carnival of sex and death…
"[The author] exacts a ... surrender from the reader. There is some exceptionally strenuous image activity ahead in these stories that precisely reactivate the magnificent gesticulations of giant forms, the bewildering transformations, the orgiastic violence that hurts nobody because it is not real - all the devices of dream, or film, or fiction.
"[The author] is also diabolically, obscenely, incomparably funny."
"[In Pynchon, Barth and Coover]...the exuberance and variety of the imaginative life [manifests] itself in all its convulsive beauty..."
Angela Carter
"...surrealist theory is derived from a synthesis of Freud and Hegel that only those without a specialist knowledge of either psychoanalysis or philosophy might have dared to undertake."
Angela Carter
Spoiler Warning
I found it impossible to discuss the themes of the novel that interested me, without revealing two aspects of the plot.
There is no great drama attached to how the plot unfolds. The narrative essentially consists of 12 set pieces that dramatise a number of metaphysical issues. Many of the issues are even foreshadowed in the early pages of the novel.
However, if you want to experience the progression of the plot without prior knowledge, you might want to postpone reading this review or, having read it, forget it before you read the novel.
I Lost/Found/Gained It at the Movies
Angela Carter uses "all the devices of dream, of film and of fiction" referred to in the above quote.
Even the order seems significant, possibly because she encountered and embraced them in her own life in that order.
Here, she uses them to explore three concerns: “the dark room, the mirror, the woman”.
Dream life might be personal and subjective; it reflects what we are, especially when it involves a mirror. However, film, viewed in a dark room, in a cinema, might be more social, if not necessarily more objective (if there is such a thing).
Evelyn, the male narrator, starts the novel with a scene in a London cinema in which he receives a blow job, while watching Tristessa, the most beautiful woman in the world, on screen.
Elsewhere in the same cinema, pairs of queers watch the same actress, identifying with her sadness, pain and suffering. Her gender doesn’t matter to them. She captures their feelings accurately:
"Her name itself whispered rumours of inexpressible sadness; the lingering sibilants rustled like the doomed petticoats of a young girl who is dying."
Evelyn doesn’t name his partner, she is just “some girl or other”.
The scorn might still have been apparent, if Evelyn had just referred to her as “some girl”. She’s unnamed, anonymous. However, it’s interesting that he/Carter adds “or other”. Not just is she a girl, but you could argue that she is an “other”, an “opposite”, a “negative” of the self (or “positive”) of the narrator. We’re clearly in the realm of philosophy and psychoanalysis here.
This is just happening in the seats. On the screen, Tristessa represents universal conceptions of womanhood and beauty. They define Evelyn’s ideal of feminine beauty, not to mention the nature of a personal and sexual relationship.
Yet, Evelyn observes in retrospect:
"Tristessa. Enigma. Illusion. Woman? Ah!...and all you signified was false! Your existence was only notional; you were a piece of pure mystification, Tristessa. Nevertheless, [you were] as beautiful as only things that don't exist can be, most haunting of paradoxes, that recipe for perennial dissatisfaction."
As she does elsewhere in the novel, Carter foreshadows much of what is to come. She is not so much concerned with dramatic tension in the telling of her tale as the achievement of psychic reality and truth.
Reflections on Love in Amerika
Evelyn arrives in New York City to take up an academic position, only to find that a civil war has commenced. The war seems to have been started by minority groups: blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, lesbians and trans-sexuals.
He finds “Gothic lurid darkness” everywhere. He pursues his carnal appetites on the street, in the course of which he stalks, meets and fucks a black woman, Leilah. Carter’s description is erotically charged. A relationship of sorts develops. However, both soon tire of each other:
"I grew bored with her...she became a response, not a pleasure. The sickness ran its course, and I was left only with the habit of her sensuality, an addiction of which I was half ashamed."
Still, Evelyn learns something about himself, and what it was that really attracted him about his lover:
"She was a perfect woman; like the moon, she only gave reflected light. She had mimicked me, she had become the thing I wanted of her, so that she could make me love her and yet she had mimicked the fatal lack in me that meant I was not able to love her because I myself was so unlovable."
Out of this realisation, comes an awareness of the nature of love:
"So hypocrites that we were, we spared ourselves the final hypocrisy of love. Or, I saved myself from that most brutal of all assaults, the siege of the other."
Love, it seems, for this male, at least, is defined in terms of antagonism or a siege.
"Introite Et Hic Dii Sunt" ("Enter, For Here Too Are Gods")
Evelyn continues his long journey into night, by heading into the desert.
Here, he encounters a radical women’s movement headed by a woman who calls herself "the Great Parricide…the Great Emasculator…Mother," although her followers label her “Holy Mother”, a god-head to rival the masculine Christian God:
"Mother has made herself into an incarnated deity; she has quite transformed her flesh, she has undergone a painful metamorphosis of the entire body and become the abstraction of a natural principle."
The New Eve
Evelyn soon realises that his fate is also a metamorphosis, to be trimmed by Mother’s obsidian scalpel, until, his penis nullified, abbreviated, made “willy-nilly”, he becomes a “New Eve”.
Evelyn undergoes not just a physical transformation, but a metaphysical one, which s/he associates with the desert experience:
"I left the desert, the domain of the sun, the arena of metaphysics, the place where I became myself."
The question is: what is the New Eve? Who is the new self? What gender is s/he?
This transformation allows Carter to examine two metaphysical propositions:
• That the feminine is an absence or a lack of something that is present in the masculine (i.e., the penis); and
• That, in the words of Simone de Beauvoir, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
In a way, the novel documents an experiment in whether “a change in the appearance will restructure the essence.”
Eve anticipates that the surgery will “free me from being, transform my ‘I’ into the other and, in doing so, annihilate it.”
Eve undergoes some psycho-programming, ironically part of which is viewing some of Tristessa’s films.
Initially, she feels that the programming has not been successful:
"… where I remembered my cock, was nothing. Only a void, an insistent absence, like a noisy silence."
Psychologically and temporally, this might be true in the case of a male who has undergone a sex change, in a way, to become a new biological construct. However, it doesn’t follow that a female must necessarily be defined in terms of the absence of male sexual apparatus. Male and female are simply different. Neither is intrinsically superior or inferior. Neither is intrinsically present or absent, neither is intrinsically positive or negative.
Carter/Eve describes the differences as “contrarieties”.
Beulah, the “Woman’s Town” in the desert, is a place where ”contrarieties are equally true…where contrarieties exist together.”
The genders are morally equal, but different.
Bonjour Tristessa
This leaves the question as to whether Eve can “become” a woman (in the sense meant by de Beauvoir).
Carter deals with it when Eve participates in heterosexual relationships, one effectively rape, the other consensual.
Eve discovers that Tristessa has retired from the film industry and is living as a recluse in a glass mausoleum in the desert (a la Norma Desmond in her mansion in "Sunset Boulevard").
Eve gets an opportunity to test the views about womanhood that had influenced her via film when she was a male. However, she realises that the world of film is an illusion:
"You were an illusion in a void. You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my own emptiness with marvelous, imaginary things as long as, just so long as, the movie lasted, and then all would vanish… [You yourself would live only] as long as ‘persistence of vision’."
Still, both Tristessa and Eve have experienced the sense of being lost:
"She had wandered endlessly within herself, but never met anybody, nobody…She who has been so beautiful consumed me. Solitude and melancholy, that is a woman’s life."
"The Vengeance of the Sex is Love"
But Eve discovers one more illusion or deception: Tristessa is actually a male masquerading as an actress modeled on the likes of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.
"When I saw Tristessa was a man, I felt a great wonder since I witnessed, as in a revelation, the grand abstraction of desire in this person who represented the refined essence of all images of love and the dream."
Gender is neither definitive nor hierarchical:
"Masculine and feminine are correlatives which involve one another. I am sure of that - the quality and its negation are locked in necessity. But what the nature of masculine and the nature of feminine might be, whether they involve male and female...still I do not know the answer to these questions. They bewilder me."
Still, the two protagonists share the duality of male and female in their nature. Inevitably, in the manner of a fairy tale, they fall in love and consummate their relationship physically. As night comes to an end and the sun rises, so too does the drama (in a reversal of the course of a Greek play, which ends at sunset):
"We folded ourselves within a single self in the desert…We now projected upon each other’s flesh, selves – aspects of being, ideas – that seemed, during our embraces, to be the very essence of our selves; the concentrated essence of being, as if, out of these fathomless kisses and our interpenetrating, undifferentiated sex, we had made the great Platonic hermaphrodite together, the whole and perfect being to which he, with an absurd and touching heroism, had, in his own single self, aspired; we brought into being the being who stops time in the self-created eternity of lovers."
Eve concludes that "the vengeance of the sex is love." Ultimately, gender did not matter in this relationship. On the one hand, what mattered was love, not gender or sex. On the other, it was by way of the mechanism of love that the New Eve truly became a woman and Tristessa became a man. Thus, Carter seems to suggest that the relationship of love is the apotheosis of what is human. Sexual difference still exists (and might even be relatively fluid). However, love is the arena within which it performs. And children might sometimes be its product.
Time, Space, History and Myth
Carter (via the women in the desert) also advances a number of propositions about time and space:
• Time is a man, space is a woman.
• Time is a killer.
• Kill time and live forever.
She relates these propositions to Historicity and Myth.
Man, in the guise of Father Time, “lives in Historicity; his phallic projector takes him onwards and upwards”. However, Historicity does its best to render Myth, which is more feminine, unnecessary.
It's not clear how much these propositions represent Carter's views. However, ultimately, Eve comes to recognise that words and concepts like Time and Duration and Progression are meaningless. Eve no longer experiences the passage of Time. She has entered eternity or timelessness (which she is more than entitled to do, as a fictional character).
Myth, in the sense of literature or story-telling or fairy tales, can be eternal, too, not to mention circular and recurring:”We start from our conclusions.” We end where we began. We return to our place of origin and life starts again:
"Ocean, ocean, mother of mysteries, bear me to the place of birth."
SOUNDTRACK:
Al Green - "Let's Stay Together" (Live)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVzYx...
A song for Leilah
Plaid [feat. Björk] - "Lilith"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsL56...
Another song for Leilah
Björk - "Venus as a Boy" [Live]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqG6Z...
A song for Evelyn
April 10, 2013
Should come with a trigger warning for rape, sexual abuse, forced surgery, paedophilia and transphobia.
Do I think this book is important? Perhaps. Well written? Probably. Did I like it? Not even a little. Am I glad I read it? I'm not sure, but I'm leaning towards 'no'. The symbolism is so overt that I'm not sure it can even actually be called symbolism - it's like getting symbolism tipped over your head, or funneled straight into your throat so that you can't miss any of it. Slightly subtle intertextual moments are explained pages later as obviously as possible.
This is a very second-wave book, and as such it reproduces and reinforces many of the problems with second wave feminism.
Do I think this book is important? Perhaps. Well written? Probably. Did I like it? Not even a little. Am I glad I read it? I'm not sure, but I'm leaning towards 'no'. The symbolism is so overt that I'm not sure it can even actually be called symbolism - it's like getting symbolism tipped over your head, or funneled straight into your throat so that you can't miss any of it. Slightly subtle intertextual moments are explained pages later as obviously as possible.
This is a very second-wave book, and as such it reproduces and reinforces many of the problems with second wave feminism.
March 8, 2016
I think I didn't like Passion of New Eve, but I also know that I read it in two sittings and was always curious about what would happen next. Maybe the best way to describe it is ORLANDO meets MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, with a whole lot of brutal Freudian dream imagery thrown in. In dreams, symbolic/metaphorical tropes are often over the top and on the nose. (I've had so many dreams that I don't mention to my therapist because they're too obvious.), and this somewhat exonerates Carter for some of the moments I struggled with here, particularly the seeming transphobia. Gender fluidity is a key component of sexual dreams, but the the contemporary reader must wince over the conflation of gender identity and biology here.
In terms of the feminism, I thought that much of the over-the-topness here can be somewhat explained by Carter's parroting of the heterosexual male voice. Carter is trying to make a point about the minor sadism at play in heterosexual relationships, and extrapolating from that, it means Eve's mistreatment in the novel's second half represents the other side of the coin from Evelyn's callousness. The choice of America (and the focus on the silver screen), has me thinking about the role of American movies in the performance of gender. Consider Laura Mulvey's essay on the gaze: movies perpetuate stereotyped gender behavior by objectifying women and privileging the male perspective. And then consider that the late 70's were a very, very American peak in movie making, and almost all of the big hits (Rocky, Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Star Wars, Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter) are dude movies, and some of the decisions in this book begin to make more sense.
Again, I didn't LIKE this, but it definitely is interesting. And it does have the best castration scene I've read, so that's an achievement.
In terms of the feminism, I thought that much of the over-the-topness here can be somewhat explained by Carter's parroting of the heterosexual male voice. Carter is trying to make a point about the minor sadism at play in heterosexual relationships, and extrapolating from that, it means Eve's mistreatment in the novel's second half represents the other side of the coin from Evelyn's callousness. The choice of America (and the focus on the silver screen), has me thinking about the role of American movies in the performance of gender. Consider Laura Mulvey's essay on the gaze: movies perpetuate stereotyped gender behavior by objectifying women and privileging the male perspective. And then consider that the late 70's were a very, very American peak in movie making, and almost all of the big hits (Rocky, Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Star Wars, Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter) are dude movies, and some of the decisions in this book begin to make more sense.
Again, I didn't LIKE this, but it definitely is interesting. And it does have the best castration scene I've read, so that's an achievement.
July 10, 2020
I'd read Carter's debut Magic Toyshop and it's solid, engaging, well-constructed -- but didn't bowl me over with Carter's reputation as a master fantasist exactly. Now, though there's this one. Here, Carter plays the deft but perhaps half-crazed mythologer, weaving all manner of feminine theology and legend into one cohesive but ever-evolving rope, coiling ever downwards, downwards, through every manner of spiral and tunnel. An apocalyptic America festers, burns, and disintegrates, symbologies overlay and multiply, gender shifts and is redefined under a searing prismatic light.
I read this largely over a road trip which served as fitting parallel map. We left New York just as Carter's young British protagonist Evelyn callously fled his unconsidered actions there, wound through the desert as Evelyn did and stood by primal lakes as he sank into the womb of the sands, emerged towards the California coast as he did, though perhaps less obviously altered by our experiences (Maya and I have retained our genders).
Even without that fortuitous context, this is amazing. Gleaming, dark, and meticulously tethered to its global story-system origins, this feels almost all encompassing, not just of the American landscape it traverses, but of the span of human identity and self-reflection. Packaged in rapid, ornately poetic bursts for maximum piercing impact. A new favorite.
I read this largely over a road trip which served as fitting parallel map. We left New York just as Carter's young British protagonist Evelyn callously fled his unconsidered actions there, wound through the desert as Evelyn did and stood by primal lakes as he sank into the womb of the sands, emerged towards the California coast as he did, though perhaps less obviously altered by our experiences (Maya and I have retained our genders).
Even without that fortuitous context, this is amazing. Gleaming, dark, and meticulously tethered to its global story-system origins, this feels almost all encompassing, not just of the American landscape it traverses, but of the span of human identity and self-reflection. Packaged in rapid, ornately poetic bursts for maximum piercing impact. A new favorite.
March 28, 2013
I don't really get the pleasure of reading Angela Carter. Her writing is powerful, passionate (except where intentionally deliberate and emotionally parched), every word is perfectly chosen. I can imagine the editing that goes into it. But I just can't enjoy them. It makes me laugh when people say they don't get it because it's a literary text, and sort of assume that an English Lit graduate could manage it. 'fraid not. I find Angela Carter's work nigh on unpalatable, and would much rather read half a dozen Norse sagas instead.
And psst -- a secret: I hated the Contemporary Women's Writing module. I audited it, because I know this is a gap in my understanding, and I came to love Jeanette Winterson and Carol Ann Duffy and writers like that. But Angela Carter is apparently the point where I grumble and say that learning Anglo-Saxon is easier. (It is.)
And psst -- a secret: I hated the Contemporary Women's Writing module. I audited it, because I know this is a gap in my understanding, and I came to love Jeanette Winterson and Carol Ann Duffy and writers like that. But Angela Carter is apparently the point where I grumble and say that learning Anglo-Saxon is easier. (It is.)
September 18, 2023
"Masculine and feminine are correlatives which involve one another. I am sure of that-the quality and its negation are locked in necessity. But what the nature of masculine and the nature of feminine might be, whether they involve male and female, if they have anything to do with Tristessa's so long neglected apparatus or my own factory fresh incision and engine-turned breasts, that I do not know. Though I have been both man and woman, still I do not know the answer to these questions. Still they bewilder me."
Mad Max meets Myra Breckinridge meets Sunset Boulevard with some Charles Manson thrown in. How's that for for a cavalcade of comp titles? This is Angela Carter's version of stranger (Briton) in a strange land (America), and then some. Both Isherwood and Waugh (in A Single Man and The Loved One), among others, tackled the subject but not even Waugh managed such excess.
Angela Carter has created a topsy-turvy, hellishly beautiful Wonderland. Her America is a wasteland, factious and violent, and the Women soon turn Evelyn (not Waugh) into New Eve. She clearly has a bone to pick, but she's never didactic, besides which the book is a damn entertaining romp and one hell of a love story. Gender has never meant so much and so little all at once, and America is never far from the nightmare she imagines. It seems that my passion for Winterson's The Passion a few years ago has evolved into an even greater passion for The Passion of New Eve. What's next? All Passion Spent? The Passion According to G.H.?
My thrift store copy came annotated with a ballpoint pen, and here are just a few of the gems it offered:
men suck :(
so emo...what has he [Evelyn] to be depressed about, really?
what is natural?
now that he is female, he is empathetic?
Masterful! (I obviously mean the book and not the annotations, which thankfully and unsurprisingly petered out at about the halfway mark.)
June 14, 2019
"The Rocky Horror Picture Show" meets "Mad Max" - with a touch of "Barbarella".
Basically, tranny ultraviolence in Paco Rabanne.
Angela Carter's humour is pure, cruel bad taste. Which is exactly what we deserve.
I had never read any of her novels before. I vaguely knew her writing style was pretty much on the Neo-baroque side, very refined but also very graphic and weird; I seemed to recall she was highly praised and died young; but I actually had no real interest in finding out whether her work was indeed so outrageous as they say.
Not with a ton of outrageous books piled up in my room for future reading. Moreover, female authors seldom convince me; my literary taste is strictly heterosexual. The thing is that in my opinion we girls can be many things when it comes to writing - sexy, provocative, clever, sensual... but not outrageous. We generally lack that lust for artistic and intellectual destruction aiming to a new, monstrous creation. With the exception of Kathy Acker, who had a genuinely subversive intellect, women who want to cross that line usually end up being just gross.
I repeat: this is MY OPINION. As I'm neither going to run for president nor marry a Third World dictator (wait, that might actually be an option) please respect it. Because I'm about to tell you how I changed my mind... for once.
To a certain extent, that is.
An Englishman named Evelyn moves to the States: he's supposed to work in a NY university and plans to tour the country, but things get terribly wrong for him.
New York is a nightmarish dump contended by rats and criminals, plagued by pollution and junk; the blacks are turning Harlem into a fortified citadel; the feminists' aggressive rhetoric has degenerated into vicious, often murderous attacks and, last but not least, California is seceding from the Union and the oil crisis is undermining the national economy. Our hero ends up with no job, no money and no intention to leave the New World and its dangerous temptations.
His troubles begin when his teenage black girlfriend gets pregnant, the Haitian voodoo abortionist (yep) botches the job and the girl finds herself half dead and abandoned in a hospital bed: without the slightest sense of guilt, Evelyn leaves the city and sets off on a journey through the desert, craving more adventures.
That's when the plot gets REALLY fucked up. Because Carter seems to have devised for her character the longest - and craziest - poetic revenge ever.
To make a long story short, Evelyn is kidnapped by a female commando, worshipers of a black female surgeon and self-proclaimed goddess who turns him into a woman (Eve). He escapes the feminist commune only to be enslaved by a crippled, demented misogynist who's set up a menagerie of women and sows; more rape, madness, degradation (Carter's writing is indeed surprisingly explicit and graphic).
Eve's misadventures aren't over though. During her wanderings she's also captured by an army of white supremacist kids roaming the desert on a Children's Crusade, she becomes the unwilling witness of an apocalyptic, all-American civil war, marries a... oops, I'm talking too much.
Anyway, this is just part of the story.
Just to give you an idea.
No doubt what initially got me interested in Angela Carter's "The Passion of New Eve" was the Fucked Up Plot + Cool Cover Art combo.
However, long before I turned page 5, I was already enjoying the truly baroque elegance of her prose, with its streak of artistic vulgarity which is the opposite of smut and only belongs to the greatest. In fact her writing has a visionary quality, an amazing sense of the atmosphere and a penchant for the Doomsday Grotesque (definition is mine) reminding me of some of my favourite authors, e.g. Boris Vian, Gore Vidal, Supervert and, obviously, the aforementioned Kathy Acker.
Also, it's hard not to enjoy the biting satire of a decade - the 70s - in which any sort of socio-political struggle was being either repressed or cunningly exploited: pacifism, feminism, environmentalism, the Civil Rights Movement... all going astray in a downward spiral of street violence and shallow ideology. Only political depravity and urban decay were thriving in the years Carter parodies in this novel.
I definitely preferred the first part of the novel: more violent, raw, explicit, and yet very clever with regards to both the style and the meaning. Then, towards the end, the author gets way too close to magic realism - not exactly my cup of tea. I found the change in the rhythm too abrupt, and the imagery unsatisfying and not quite fitting.
What I really loved in this book is the way it turns the stereotypes of its time against themselves. Carter's satire is violent, brutal, ferocious... that's why it works. It makes you laugh and feel an asshole for laughing. But you laugh nonetheless.
Basically, tranny ultraviolence in Paco Rabanne.
Angela Carter's humour is pure, cruel bad taste. Which is exactly what we deserve.
I had never read any of her novels before. I vaguely knew her writing style was pretty much on the Neo-baroque side, very refined but also very graphic and weird; I seemed to recall she was highly praised and died young; but I actually had no real interest in finding out whether her work was indeed so outrageous as they say.
Not with a ton of outrageous books piled up in my room for future reading. Moreover, female authors seldom convince me; my literary taste is strictly heterosexual. The thing is that in my opinion we girls can be many things when it comes to writing - sexy, provocative, clever, sensual... but not outrageous. We generally lack that lust for artistic and intellectual destruction aiming to a new, monstrous creation. With the exception of Kathy Acker, who had a genuinely subversive intellect, women who want to cross that line usually end up being just gross.
I repeat: this is MY OPINION. As I'm neither going to run for president nor marry a Third World dictator (wait, that might actually be an option) please respect it. Because I'm about to tell you how I changed my mind... for once.
To a certain extent, that is.
An Englishman named Evelyn moves to the States: he's supposed to work in a NY university and plans to tour the country, but things get terribly wrong for him.
New York is a nightmarish dump contended by rats and criminals, plagued by pollution and junk; the blacks are turning Harlem into a fortified citadel; the feminists' aggressive rhetoric has degenerated into vicious, often murderous attacks and, last but not least, California is seceding from the Union and the oil crisis is undermining the national economy. Our hero ends up with no job, no money and no intention to leave the New World and its dangerous temptations.
His troubles begin when his teenage black girlfriend gets pregnant, the Haitian voodoo abortionist (yep) botches the job and the girl finds herself half dead and abandoned in a hospital bed: without the slightest sense of guilt, Evelyn leaves the city and sets off on a journey through the desert, craving more adventures.
That's when the plot gets REALLY fucked up. Because Carter seems to have devised for her character the longest - and craziest - poetic revenge ever.
To make a long story short, Evelyn is kidnapped by a female commando, worshipers of a black female surgeon and self-proclaimed goddess who turns him into a woman (Eve). He escapes the feminist commune only to be enslaved by a crippled, demented misogynist who's set up a menagerie of women and sows; more rape, madness, degradation (Carter's writing is indeed surprisingly explicit and graphic).
Eve's misadventures aren't over though. During her wanderings she's also captured by an army of white supremacist kids roaming the desert on a Children's Crusade, she becomes the unwilling witness of an apocalyptic, all-American civil war, marries a... oops, I'm talking too much.
Anyway, this is just part of the story.
Just to give you an idea.
No doubt what initially got me interested in Angela Carter's "The Passion of New Eve" was the Fucked Up Plot + Cool Cover Art combo.
However, long before I turned page 5, I was already enjoying the truly baroque elegance of her prose, with its streak of artistic vulgarity which is the opposite of smut and only belongs to the greatest. In fact her writing has a visionary quality, an amazing sense of the atmosphere and a penchant for the Doomsday Grotesque (definition is mine) reminding me of some of my favourite authors, e.g. Boris Vian, Gore Vidal, Supervert and, obviously, the aforementioned Kathy Acker.
Also, it's hard not to enjoy the biting satire of a decade - the 70s - in which any sort of socio-political struggle was being either repressed or cunningly exploited: pacifism, feminism, environmentalism, the Civil Rights Movement... all going astray in a downward spiral of street violence and shallow ideology. Only political depravity and urban decay were thriving in the years Carter parodies in this novel.
I definitely preferred the first part of the novel: more violent, raw, explicit, and yet very clever with regards to both the style and the meaning. Then, towards the end, the author gets way too close to magic realism - not exactly my cup of tea. I found the change in the rhythm too abrupt, and the imagery unsatisfying and not quite fitting.
What I really loved in this book is the way it turns the stereotypes of its time against themselves. Carter's satire is violent, brutal, ferocious... that's why it works. It makes you laugh and feel an asshole for laughing. But you laugh nonetheless.
February 6, 2022
Absolutely original, shocking and moving and beautiful
I have just started my Angela Carter journey but the density of ideas on gender and domination and self and subjugation and rebirth etc is just way too daunting for me to do justice to in a GR review, and I see some are academic-style in approach, which drains all the fun. This book is absolutely bursting with intense and shocking and yet achingly beautiful imagery and events, there is nothing else like this it, totally absorbing and original, and while a product of its volatile times in the 1970s, it also transcends them with its challenging explorations of enduring philosophical themes.
I have just started my Angela Carter journey but the density of ideas on gender and domination and self and subjugation and rebirth etc is just way too daunting for me to do justice to in a GR review, and I see some are academic-style in approach, which drains all the fun. This book is absolutely bursting with intense and shocking and yet achingly beautiful imagery and events, there is nothing else like this it, totally absorbing and original, and while a product of its volatile times in the 1970s, it also transcends them with its challenging explorations of enduring philosophical themes.
April 27, 2017
oof. that was just... unnecessary. I could've gone a long time without reading that. I feel like I should say something about this story and how it hinges on an exceptionally transmisogynist trope of violent forced feminization and much could be said about how, to Carter, a woman seems to be defined solely by the degradations she endures at the hands of men because it really ended up hitting me in a surprisingly personal place, primarily because of the way in which her trans girl internalizes the message of abuse she endures as valid and deserved, recompense for her past life.
Having seen firsthand all too much of the bitterness and violence that some feminists whose awareness was cemented during the late seventies rise of exclusionary radical feminism and the expulsion of radical trans women like Carol Riddell or Sandy Stone from the groups they'd long called home, can and still do espouse towards trans women, I know full well that Carter isn't writing Eve's story as an affirmation of her womanhood. It's smarmy torture porn that reads so much like "how can I make this tr*nny suffer more?" that snuck in under my radar, cloaked in the well regard of its author, and managed to uncomfortably disturb me. I don't know why this work of hers was so highly acclaimed because even leaving aside the problematic portrayals elaborated above, the entire story, such as it is, is reconstituted "secret drug/sex cult conspiring to birth the messiah to usher in a new age as the old falls to pieces" pablum that's been served better dozens of times before from the likes of Pynchon or Ismael Reed. And Honestly? Even as smut, it's pretty lackluster. I've read far better on fictionmania. I loved Carter's fairy tale retelling in The Bloody Chamber, but this is just execrable.
Having seen firsthand all too much of the bitterness and violence that some feminists whose awareness was cemented during the late seventies rise of exclusionary radical feminism and the expulsion of radical trans women like Carol Riddell or Sandy Stone from the groups they'd long called home, can and still do espouse towards trans women, I know full well that Carter isn't writing Eve's story as an affirmation of her womanhood. It's smarmy torture porn that reads so much like "how can I make this tr*nny suffer more?" that snuck in under my radar, cloaked in the well regard of its author, and managed to uncomfortably disturb me. I don't know why this work of hers was so highly acclaimed because even leaving aside the problematic portrayals elaborated above, the entire story, such as it is, is reconstituted "secret drug/sex cult conspiring to birth the messiah to usher in a new age as the old falls to pieces" pablum that's been served better dozens of times before from the likes of Pynchon or Ismael Reed. And Honestly? Even as smut, it's pretty lackluster. I've read far better on fictionmania. I loved Carter's fairy tale retelling in The Bloody Chamber, but this is just execrable.
January 8, 2018
“Quale retorica intossicante!”
Ho concluso il 2017 commentando un libro che ho apprezzato molto. Non un romanzo ma un testo che, a cavallo tra il memoir e l’intervista, dispiega differenti esperienze di donne che hanno lottato.
Apro, dunque, il mio nuovo anno di letture con questo fil rouge che mi lascia sul sentiero femminile/femminista. O, perlomeno, io mi ero illusa di aver teso un filo d’unione.
Pubblicato nel 1977, “La passione della nuova Eva” gioca sulle maschere ed i travestimenti.
Le differenze uomo/donna (fisiche o di ruolo) sono rimesse in discussione, ribaltate, sottoposte ad un processo di fusione che non fa più distinguere i confini costruiti da una società patriarcale.
Il testo stesso si presenta apparentemente come romanzo ma, in realtà, ha i toni e l'andamento di un pamphlet.
Il protagonista è un uomo di nome Evandro che ci conduce in un viaggio allucinante che dall’Inghilterra lo porterà alla corrotta terra d’America. Sesso, violenza ma, soprattutto, un’artificiosa costruzione letteraria dove la Carter adatta gli archetipi di genere costruendoci attorno una storia.
Un risultato macchinoso, pesante, nauseante che vuole rappresentare la nascita di nuovi ruoli che vanno al di là dei recinti del genere. Eva fu l’alba ed Eva è il tramonto.
La nuova Eva è la donna rigenerata perché prende coscienza dei suoi limiti ma soprattutto di quelle capacità che le erano negate.
Lettura per me pessima.
Mille volte preferisco leggere un saggio piuttosto che un romanzo dove la fantasia non è libera ma incatenata a forme di pensiero razionale.
Non so se mi spiego…
Ho concluso il 2017 commentando un libro che ho apprezzato molto. Non un romanzo ma un testo che, a cavallo tra il memoir e l’intervista, dispiega differenti esperienze di donne che hanno lottato.
Apro, dunque, il mio nuovo anno di letture con questo fil rouge che mi lascia sul sentiero femminile/femminista. O, perlomeno, io mi ero illusa di aver teso un filo d’unione.
Pubblicato nel 1977, “La passione della nuova Eva” gioca sulle maschere ed i travestimenti.
Le differenze uomo/donna (fisiche o di ruolo) sono rimesse in discussione, ribaltate, sottoposte ad un processo di fusione che non fa più distinguere i confini costruiti da una società patriarcale.
Il testo stesso si presenta apparentemente come romanzo ma, in realtà, ha i toni e l'andamento di un pamphlet.
Il protagonista è un uomo di nome Evandro che ci conduce in un viaggio allucinante che dall’Inghilterra lo porterà alla corrotta terra d’America. Sesso, violenza ma, soprattutto, un’artificiosa costruzione letteraria dove la Carter adatta gli archetipi di genere costruendoci attorno una storia.
Un risultato macchinoso, pesante, nauseante che vuole rappresentare la nascita di nuovi ruoli che vanno al di là dei recinti del genere. Eva fu l’alba ed Eva è il tramonto.
La nuova Eva è la donna rigenerata perché prende coscienza dei suoi limiti ma soprattutto di quelle capacità che le erano negate.
Lettura per me pessima.
Mille volte preferisco leggere un saggio piuttosto che un romanzo dove la fantasia non è libera ma incatenata a forme di pensiero razionale.
Non so se mi spiego…
June 14, 2007
you ARE a heretic.
burn, heretic, burn!
burn, heretic, burn!
December 28, 2010
I'm (very) slowly making my way through Carter's oeuvre, & The Passion of New Eve was my next pick, on the advice of my old thesis advisor. There are certain things you can count on with Carter: lush, ornate, 'high' prose; bawdy humor & an obsessive regard of the 'vile' qualities of the body and of human nature, post-apocalyptica (at any rate, in a number of the novels--this one, Heroes & Villains, Infernal Desire Machines); a wildly vivid & unexpected imagination-in-action; numerous intertextual echoes--to fairytales, to literature, to cultural icons, to philosophy & lit theory, &co&co.
This might be called Carter's ode to America; or if not that, at least to the obsession in this country with fame. The protagonist, Evelyn, is a bit of British rake, who arrives in NYC as the city is under siege ('black' revolutionaries, guerrilla women). Evelyn, as is probably self-evident from the title and is hardly a spoiler, becomes in the course of the novel, the New Eve. Gender & body politics ensue in wonderfully fascinating ways--Carter really presages later theorists like Wittig, Butler, Sedgwick &co in her refusal to facilitate the coherence of the 'I,' of the self, of gender, of the sexed body. Evelyn is, moreover, consumed by a passion for Tristessa, a Hollywood product who's played Catherine Earnshaw, Emma Bovary, and various other vibrant, beautiful, suffering heroines of literature. Tristessa comes to play a quite surprising role in the novel, & I'll leave that for you to discover, dear reader.
You can't quite pin the novel down, in the end, though. It's got a bit of everything, including a particularly bizarre handling of Plato's cave in the conclusion. The thing, I think, that separates Carter's great work from her truly brilliant work is a distinction in emphasis; this novel, like Heroes & Villains and The Infernal Desire Machines, is a novel OF ideas. Her best works are novels or stories WITH ideas. As such, there are times when you may feel you're putting too much brain-investment into the reading of a novel like this one, and perhaps not enough emotional or 'feely' investment--she refuses to give you that luxury, which I think is deliberate and powerful but, finally, is not for everyone. You've got your work cut out for you with anything Carter & at times, the payoff doesn't seem to be comparable to the effort. Nevertheless, I think Carter is a sorely underappreciated author--really a philosopher in many ways, and is well-worth that effort if you're willing to put it in. She's just fucking brilliant--read her, read her, read her, is all I can say.
This might be called Carter's ode to America; or if not that, at least to the obsession in this country with fame. The protagonist, Evelyn, is a bit of British rake, who arrives in NYC as the city is under siege ('black' revolutionaries, guerrilla women). Evelyn, as is probably self-evident from the title and is hardly a spoiler, becomes in the course of the novel, the New Eve. Gender & body politics ensue in wonderfully fascinating ways--Carter really presages later theorists like Wittig, Butler, Sedgwick &co in her refusal to facilitate the coherence of the 'I,' of the self, of gender, of the sexed body. Evelyn is, moreover, consumed by a passion for Tristessa, a Hollywood product who's played Catherine Earnshaw, Emma Bovary, and various other vibrant, beautiful, suffering heroines of literature. Tristessa comes to play a quite surprising role in the novel, & I'll leave that for you to discover, dear reader.
You can't quite pin the novel down, in the end, though. It's got a bit of everything, including a particularly bizarre handling of Plato's cave in the conclusion. The thing, I think, that separates Carter's great work from her truly brilliant work is a distinction in emphasis; this novel, like Heroes & Villains and The Infernal Desire Machines, is a novel OF ideas. Her best works are novels or stories WITH ideas. As such, there are times when you may feel you're putting too much brain-investment into the reading of a novel like this one, and perhaps not enough emotional or 'feely' investment--she refuses to give you that luxury, which I think is deliberate and powerful but, finally, is not for everyone. You've got your work cut out for you with anything Carter & at times, the payoff doesn't seem to be comparable to the effort. Nevertheless, I think Carter is a sorely underappreciated author--really a philosopher in many ways, and is well-worth that effort if you're willing to put it in. She's just fucking brilliant--read her, read her, read her, is all I can say.
October 14, 2020
This was so hard to rate, because it was every star possible. At one hand it was a five stars but it was also a confused two stars and a repulsive 1 stars. The story is by far the weirdest I've ever read and I somehow loved it but it was so strange and wasn't afraid the get bizarre and very uncomfortable. Don't know how to feel but I ended up giving it 4 stars
December 15, 2017
America is imploding along fault lines of race and sex. Into the lawless chaos of New York City arrives the young British man Evelyn, who soon shacks up with a teenaged exotic dancer named Leilah. A familiar dark story transpires and he leaves town, abandoning her, and sets out across the vast middle of the country, headed toward the desert, where eventually his car stalls out, dry of gas, with nowhere to refuel. He is captured...but why spoil the fun in telling you by whom. If you plan to read the book, the less you know up front the better. Beneath the desert floor, deep in the bowels of the Earth, Evelyn will undergo an unwilling transformation and emerge as Eve. Foiling the future plans of the architects of this transformation, Eve escapes into the desert, only to fall into another type of bondage, this time at the hands of a one-legged sadist. Freedom eludes Eve for long, desperate months. And yet Eve transcends with growing aplomb each new stage of advancement toward possession of a new identity. Self-knowledge and hence self-confidence burgeon, even amid endurance of the worst inhumanities. The story is cyclical, embodying as it does Eve(lyn)'s destiny. Characters recur, sometimes shifting form, as the plot in turn unwinds itself and rolls back inward. Along the way, Carter dissects gender constructs, plumbing how they relate to traits of the feminine and the masculine. Her imaginative prose anchors itself in ancient myth brought forth into contemporary relevance. Published in 1977, this work is unlikely to tarnish anytime soon.
March 13, 2025
My least favourite Carter novel of the 4 I've read.
I missed her customary wit, this felt overly polemical for my tastes, at the expense of the plot
I missed her customary wit, this felt overly polemical for my tastes, at the expense of the plot
November 30, 2009
I didn't particularly enjoy reading this book. I found it to be distastefully pornographic, violent, and, to the degree that colour matters to the protagonist, racist.
The book is set in an alternative reality, and that annoyed me. The protagonist is a young man, Evelyn, who arrives in New York from England to take up a teaching post in a University, but New York is extremely violent, the University is in the control of armed men (armed black men to be specific, so presumably it is a racial uprising), so Evelyn has no job. The book was first published in 1977, and in 1978 I went to New York and had a lovely peaceful family holiday as a young teen, so my memories of that visit were clashing horribly with the descriptions in the book.
The sequence of the book goes from one sexual experience to another. Evelyn meets a woman, Leilah, in a chemist, and follows her to her flat where they have a truncated relationship in which he abuses her and lives on her money until he gets her pregnant, organises an abortion, takes her hemorrhaging to a clinic, and flees from New York. Although originally intending to go to New Orleans, after the disaster of the abortion Evelyn heads instead into "the desert", where the car runs out of petrol, and Evelyn, parched, waits to die.
The remainder of the book could be a hallucination. Evelyn is captured for the first time (he is captured four times in all) and subjected to a sex change that makes him female (Eve) - not only does he/she look perfect, but he/she is able to reproduce. The second capture puts him/her in the control of a deranged man who repeatedly rapes him/her, and meets him/her up with a faded old movie star who he/she has long been interested in, whereupon he/her discovers that this faded beauty is a transvestite, and falls in love with him/her. He/she has one night of love with this man/woman movie star (becomes pregnant) and is captured again, his/her capturers killing the movie star. He/she escapes for a brief period of freedom, before he/she is again captured, this time by Leilah, now a freedom fighter in a war torn California - most of which has fallen in the sea - and taken to a safe place to have his/her baby.
What to make of all this? The cover has a drawing of two women dancing, one naked, one in evening dress, both with waxed moustaches, behind them the world in flames, a snake curling towards them. I find myself studying the picture, and think it is in an effort to find a key to help me understand the book.
On Wikipedia it states "Cater's writings are intertextual webs." Wikipedia states also that "Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts." After Evelyn leaves New York he learns that a crisis has occurred there - called "the Siege of Harlem". I looked this up to find it was the title of a book printed in 1964, by Warren Miller, a book described as "a serious fairy tale" by one review that I read. I cannot identify the other texts that need to be consulted to work out the meaning of this book - it's possible they are out of vogue, and out of print.
I have read some reviews of this book on Amazon, something I do not normally do until after I have written mine. One person says to not over analyse this book, that it's strength is in its meaning. But I cannot discover the meaning. Another review says that the book is about a man suffering the treatment that he dished out to women - and yes, part of the book, a small part, is about that - but what of the rest?
For instance I wonder what to make of the fact that Evelyn lost his desire for Leilah when she became pregnant, and that when Eve became pregnant, the copious sex forced on her vanishes - she is captured by children, religious children, old enough to be sexual, but who want only her mothering. And what to make of the fact that when the movie star transsexual is forced to penetrate Eve he falls in love with her - becoming, I suppose, the man he never was, by sleeping with a woman who is in fact a man? Well, it's all a mystery to me.
I find Carter helped write a film called "The Company of Wolves", based on other works of hers, and I have seen, and enjoyed that film. I was however mystified by it. I am obviously not on Carter's wavelength.
The book is set in an alternative reality, and that annoyed me. The protagonist is a young man, Evelyn, who arrives in New York from England to take up a teaching post in a University, but New York is extremely violent, the University is in the control of armed men (armed black men to be specific, so presumably it is a racial uprising), so Evelyn has no job. The book was first published in 1977, and in 1978 I went to New York and had a lovely peaceful family holiday as a young teen, so my memories of that visit were clashing horribly with the descriptions in the book.
The sequence of the book goes from one sexual experience to another. Evelyn meets a woman, Leilah, in a chemist, and follows her to her flat where they have a truncated relationship in which he abuses her and lives on her money until he gets her pregnant, organises an abortion, takes her hemorrhaging to a clinic, and flees from New York. Although originally intending to go to New Orleans, after the disaster of the abortion Evelyn heads instead into "the desert", where the car runs out of petrol, and Evelyn, parched, waits to die.
The remainder of the book could be a hallucination. Evelyn is captured for the first time (he is captured four times in all) and subjected to a sex change that makes him female (Eve) - not only does he/she look perfect, but he/she is able to reproduce. The second capture puts him/her in the control of a deranged man who repeatedly rapes him/her, and meets him/her up with a faded old movie star who he/she has long been interested in, whereupon he/her discovers that this faded beauty is a transvestite, and falls in love with him/her. He/she has one night of love with this man/woman movie star (becomes pregnant) and is captured again, his/her capturers killing the movie star. He/she escapes for a brief period of freedom, before he/she is again captured, this time by Leilah, now a freedom fighter in a war torn California - most of which has fallen in the sea - and taken to a safe place to have his/her baby.
What to make of all this? The cover has a drawing of two women dancing, one naked, one in evening dress, both with waxed moustaches, behind them the world in flames, a snake curling towards them. I find myself studying the picture, and think it is in an effort to find a key to help me understand the book.
On Wikipedia it states "Cater's writings are intertextual webs." Wikipedia states also that "Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts." After Evelyn leaves New York he learns that a crisis has occurred there - called "the Siege of Harlem". I looked this up to find it was the title of a book printed in 1964, by Warren Miller, a book described as "a serious fairy tale" by one review that I read. I cannot identify the other texts that need to be consulted to work out the meaning of this book - it's possible they are out of vogue, and out of print.
I have read some reviews of this book on Amazon, something I do not normally do until after I have written mine. One person says to not over analyse this book, that it's strength is in its meaning. But I cannot discover the meaning. Another review says that the book is about a man suffering the treatment that he dished out to women - and yes, part of the book, a small part, is about that - but what of the rest?
For instance I wonder what to make of the fact that Evelyn lost his desire for Leilah when she became pregnant, and that when Eve became pregnant, the copious sex forced on her vanishes - she is captured by children, religious children, old enough to be sexual, but who want only her mothering. And what to make of the fact that when the movie star transsexual is forced to penetrate Eve he falls in love with her - becoming, I suppose, the man he never was, by sleeping with a woman who is in fact a man? Well, it's all a mystery to me.
I find Carter helped write a film called "The Company of Wolves", based on other works of hers, and I have seen, and enjoyed that film. I was however mystified by it. I am obviously not on Carter's wavelength.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 29, 2018
*Rated 3.5/5 stars
March 4, 2020
'Where can we go, poor things, flotsam of time? We are on the beach of elsewhere, Eva.'
A violent and picaresque satire; a brilliant response to the Greek myth of Tiresias, The Passion of New Eve challenges the absurdity of gender stereotypes and archetypes of modern femininity.
Set in the hedonistic world of an apocalyptic New York, Carter conceives a sprawling tale of sexual identity and body politics: Evelyn, a British womanising rake, is captured by a feminist cult hiding out in the desert and surgically transformed into a woman, as punishment for his behaviour. It is by turns as repulsive, enchanting, intelligent, overwrought and intensely moving as it sounds.
The plot is pacey - despite dragging a little in the second third - twisty and ambiguous. Carter’s writing is as visionary as it is pyrotechnic and I was pleasantly surprised by the palatability of this one; the novel seems to mark Carter’s transition from the profane and disturbing works of her early career towards the more lush, bawdy and quite frankly more enjoyable pieces of later years.
The Passion of New Eve is a Kafkaesque work of towering imagination, and strangely empowering if you come at it more laterally.
A violent and picaresque satire; a brilliant response to the Greek myth of Tiresias, The Passion of New Eve challenges the absurdity of gender stereotypes and archetypes of modern femininity.
Set in the hedonistic world of an apocalyptic New York, Carter conceives a sprawling tale of sexual identity and body politics: Evelyn, a British womanising rake, is captured by a feminist cult hiding out in the desert and surgically transformed into a woman, as punishment for his behaviour. It is by turns as repulsive, enchanting, intelligent, overwrought and intensely moving as it sounds.
The plot is pacey - despite dragging a little in the second third - twisty and ambiguous. Carter’s writing is as visionary as it is pyrotechnic and I was pleasantly surprised by the palatability of this one; the novel seems to mark Carter’s transition from the profane and disturbing works of her early career towards the more lush, bawdy and quite frankly more enjoyable pieces of later years.
The Passion of New Eve is a Kafkaesque work of towering imagination, and strangely empowering if you come at it more laterally.
May 21, 2024
Sometimes with books, I reach the end and think that in an ideal world I would go straight back to the beginning and read it again, because I only started to understand it or appreciate its wavelength about a third of the way through - I felt that way about Naked Lunch and I felt the same about this.
I think it's important to appreciate that "Passion" in this title covers all its meanings both the usual modern meaning but rather more importantly in its older meaning - the meaning in 'Passion of the Christ', 'St Matthew's Passion' - of "to suffer". So this is largely the suffering of New Eve.
The tale is loose and feels rambling, but Carter's prose, as always, forces you to read slowly, to taste the words and marinade the ideas. I can't say that I understood much of it (most of it) but a tale that involves a forced sex change, transvestite film stars, a mad max style civil war and a house made entirely of glass, it's unique and quite quite bonkers.
I think it's important to appreciate that "Passion" in this title covers all its meanings both the usual modern meaning but rather more importantly in its older meaning - the meaning in 'Passion of the Christ', 'St Matthew's Passion' - of "to suffer". So this is largely the suffering of New Eve.
The tale is loose and feels rambling, but Carter's prose, as always, forces you to read slowly, to taste the words and marinade the ideas. I can't say that I understood much of it (most of it) but a tale that involves a forced sex change, transvestite film stars, a mad max style civil war and a house made entirely of glass, it's unique and quite quite bonkers.
June 14, 2010
Wow - her writing is pyrotechnic - it says on the cover - and its a bloody good way of describing it!
The story involves a futuristic, apocalyptic world where the main character travels from London to New York to take a job as a college lecturer. This is the last we hear about the job because from then on he is on the weirdest road trip I have every read of, across the States. He is compelled to leave a doomed lover in New York and head for the desert. At this point without giving away too much, the following elements enter the picture: masked gangs of feminist terrorists,underground labyrinths inhabited by a creature who has had her form altered to that of a many breasted fertility goddess worshiped by fanatical hand maidens, sexual encounters and fantasies, reversal of genders and its unexpected results, enforced sex change operations, a violent one-legged war veteran with a harem of deluded wives, drunken helicopter flights across the terrain seeking out an aging lesbian iconic movie star, a gang of deeply religious 14-year old militant boys whose leader has Leonardo's Last Supper tattooed on his chest. This is all set in the backdrop of an imminent civil war and a path bend on arriving in California where anarchy is about to be unleashed in the 'godless state'. It's completely mad.
'When I was a man, I could never guess what it would be like to be inside a woman's skin, an outer covering which records with such fidelity, such immediacy, each sensation, however fleeting. His kisses exploded like tracer bullets along my arms. I had lost my body :now it defined solely by his. Yet even then I saw fragments of old movies playing like summer lightning on the lucid planes of his face, the shadow show upon the bare bones beneath - I'd know your bones on Golgotha, although you seem to have a hundred faces, so many moods cover it so quickly. '
It is so well written that Carter creates a really vivid nightmare world and made me feel totally engrossed and entertained. I remember the film of one of her other novels, 'A Company of Wolves' and this is in keeping with her amazing story telling powers. It had a hint of the worlds so vibrantly created by the likes of Neil Gaiman and David Lynch. You just need to detach yourself from reality and hang on to your hat!! I loved it and I will be reading more of her work, for sure.
The story involves a futuristic, apocalyptic world where the main character travels from London to New York to take a job as a college lecturer. This is the last we hear about the job because from then on he is on the weirdest road trip I have every read of, across the States. He is compelled to leave a doomed lover in New York and head for the desert. At this point without giving away too much, the following elements enter the picture: masked gangs of feminist terrorists,underground labyrinths inhabited by a creature who has had her form altered to that of a many breasted fertility goddess worshiped by fanatical hand maidens, sexual encounters and fantasies, reversal of genders and its unexpected results, enforced sex change operations, a violent one-legged war veteran with a harem of deluded wives, drunken helicopter flights across the terrain seeking out an aging lesbian iconic movie star, a gang of deeply religious 14-year old militant boys whose leader has Leonardo's Last Supper tattooed on his chest. This is all set in the backdrop of an imminent civil war and a path bend on arriving in California where anarchy is about to be unleashed in the 'godless state'. It's completely mad.
'When I was a man, I could never guess what it would be like to be inside a woman's skin, an outer covering which records with such fidelity, such immediacy, each sensation, however fleeting. His kisses exploded like tracer bullets along my arms. I had lost my body :now it defined solely by his. Yet even then I saw fragments of old movies playing like summer lightning on the lucid planes of his face, the shadow show upon the bare bones beneath - I'd know your bones on Golgotha, although you seem to have a hundred faces, so many moods cover it so quickly. '
It is so well written that Carter creates a really vivid nightmare world and made me feel totally engrossed and entertained. I remember the film of one of her other novels, 'A Company of Wolves' and this is in keeping with her amazing story telling powers. It had a hint of the worlds so vibrantly created by the likes of Neil Gaiman and David Lynch. You just need to detach yourself from reality and hang on to your hat!! I loved it and I will be reading more of her work, for sure.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 7, 2012
What.
Wait. Hang on.
... What.
Okay, so yes. This in an interesting book. A bizarre, hallucinatory, interesting book that explores sex and gender and mythology. And...
What.
So yes. A man gets kidnapped on his way across an America which is about to decay into civil war by a group of women who turn him into a woman. Then... forget it, you'll just have to read it.
I'm going to apologize here for not writing a very structured review; I think this book would defy any attempt on my part to do so.
I know nothing about feminist literature whatsoever, but I think this one falls into post-feminism? I don't know what that means, but it makes for a strange read. My first thought about this book was that it was very wordy, but I got used to the style a few pages in, and actually liked it. This doesn't seem like the kind of book you can breeze over; it's fairly rife with references to mythology and other things, some strange words (any excuse to get a dictionary out though, huh?), symbolism and... well, things.
Jeez, I don't really know what to say. If it wasn't due back at the library (I am the kind of person who will get a book and not read it until two days before I have to bring it back then finish the whole thing) I think I'd have to read it again, or at least go back through and think about everything that's happening. In short, I really liked it, but what a long strange trip it was. I might revisit this review after my brain has had a chance to sort through everything, and maybe provide some more insight into it to help you fellow Good-readers make informed decisions about which post-feminist book you might pick up at the library today, but for now, I'll just leave you with a quote:
"I am the avenging phallic fire."
Wait. Hang on.
... What.
Okay, so yes. This in an interesting book. A bizarre, hallucinatory, interesting book that explores sex and gender and mythology. And...
What.
So yes. A man gets kidnapped on his way across an America which is about to decay into civil war by a group of women who turn him into a woman. Then... forget it, you'll just have to read it.
I'm going to apologize here for not writing a very structured review; I think this book would defy any attempt on my part to do so.
I know nothing about feminist literature whatsoever, but I think this one falls into post-feminism? I don't know what that means, but it makes for a strange read. My first thought about this book was that it was very wordy, but I got used to the style a few pages in, and actually liked it. This doesn't seem like the kind of book you can breeze over; it's fairly rife with references to mythology and other things, some strange words (any excuse to get a dictionary out though, huh?), symbolism and... well, things.
Jeez, I don't really know what to say. If it wasn't due back at the library (I am the kind of person who will get a book and not read it until two days before I have to bring it back then finish the whole thing) I think I'd have to read it again, or at least go back through and think about everything that's happening. In short, I really liked it, but what a long strange trip it was. I might revisit this review after my brain has had a chance to sort through everything, and maybe provide some more insight into it to help you fellow Good-readers make informed decisions about which post-feminist book you might pick up at the library today, but for now, I'll just leave you with a quote:
"I am the avenging phallic fire."
July 12, 2020
This was easily the weirdest book I've ever read and I loved every minute of it. I'd picked it up when I was considering writing an English paper on fluidity of gender in novels, which was a very bold move for me at the time. I'd read a few novels and short stories of Angela Carter's before and she was fast becoming my favourite author. This sounded wild enough for me to enjoy. Needless to say, I can see where a reader might be turned off by a story about a man kidnapped by rabid feminists who surgically turn him into a woman, but I admire Angela Carter's unapologetic way of writing about such huge taboos (and having written in the 1960s-1970s, this was very taboo back then) as if it's just an ordinary thing. This story was utterly insane in the best way possible. There were kidnappings, pirates, movie stars, drag queens, it had the whole shebang. I thoroughly enjoyed every mad twist and turn.
November 27, 2016
cw: rape, racism, transphobia, rape, rape
NO THANKS, ANGELA
NO THANKS, ANGELA
Read
August 27, 2024"But what the nature of masculine and the nature of feminine might be, whether they involve male and female, if they have anything to do with Tristessa's so long neglected apparatus or my own factory fresh incision and engine-turned breasts, that I do not know. Though I have been both man and woman, still I do not know the answer to these questions. Still they bewilder me."
I can honestly say I have never read anything like this. My first Angela Carter. I found her prose pretty unbelievable; stylish and over the top, and impossible to put down despite its nihilism. Moments of this book genuinely moved me. Others made me genuinely sick, and not always in ways I was okay with. I think it’s fair to say Carter lacks tact in the politics presented here, although whether I choose to hold her personally responsible for a lack of education, I don’t know. I saw somewhere in passing that Carter referred to The Passion of New Eve as a feminist black comedy, and if I take true issue with her for anything, it’s for disregarding the emotional and cultural value of her own thought experiment. It’s kind of a trend I’ve noticed in other proto-trans novels (like Orlando): The reader holds their breath, on the brink of a breakthrough, but instead of reaching out and grasping it, the author waves it away with a wink and a grin. Of course, the reader is allowed to read it however they want, so it doesn’t really matter. Or does it?
I can honestly say I have never read anything like this. My first Angela Carter. I found her prose pretty unbelievable; stylish and over the top, and impossible to put down despite its nihilism. Moments of this book genuinely moved me. Others made me genuinely sick, and not always in ways I was okay with. I think it’s fair to say Carter lacks tact in the politics presented here, although whether I choose to hold her personally responsible for a lack of education, I don’t know. I saw somewhere in passing that Carter referred to The Passion of New Eve as a feminist black comedy, and if I take true issue with her for anything, it’s for disregarding the emotional and cultural value of her own thought experiment. It’s kind of a trend I’ve noticed in other proto-trans novels (like Orlando): The reader holds their breath, on the brink of a breakthrough, but instead of reaching out and grasping it, the author waves it away with a wink and a grin. Of course, the reader is allowed to read it however they want, so it doesn’t really matter. Or does it?
June 25, 2017
Evelyn, a young Englishman from a somewhat privileged background, is a cad when it comes to women. Carter’s novel opens with Evelyn in a cinema receiving a blowjob from a young woman whose name he does not remember. They are in a crowded revival house, and the oral sex is a parting gift, for Evelyn leaves the next day for an academic appointment in New York City. The film on view stars Tristessa, a star of the silent age and early sound movies who seems to be an amalgamation of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and every other celluloid diva of the period. Tristessa and her melodramatic performances have loomed large in Evelyn’s life, and during the course of the novel she will play a seminal role. He considers his ejaculation an offering to her magnificence.
Evelyn arrives in a New York City that is a phantasmagoria of filth and violence. (Carter’s novel is from 1977. Her one visit to NYC almost a decade before had left her unimpressed, but still…) Both African American and feminist militias stage open warfare on the streets. Cockroaches swarm an inch deep on apartment floors, and squadrons of rats begin devouring sniper victims before they are fully dead. When Evelyn reports to Columbia University to take up his position, the Black Militants who have control of the university get one whiff and his plummy British accent and order him to clear out or get shot. He slinks back to his miserable walk up on the Lower East Side, wires home for money, and decides to see what will come his way.
On a risky nocturnal trip to the supermarket, Evelyn encounters Leilah. Leilah is black and dressed in whorish magnificence that sets Evelyn’s libido aflame. He trails her back to her apartment and begins a sexual relationship that surpasses his most priapic fantasies. By night she supports them by stripping at low dives and fancy clubs, and during the day she does not object if he leaves her tied to the bed. Soon she is pregnant, and Evelyn uses money from home to pay for an abortion. But Leilah blows it on a witch doctor and finds herself in hospital. Evelyn drops another wad of cash at the nurse’s station, rents a car, and hightails it for the Great American West.
At this point, Carter’s novel starts to get really strange.
He is captured first by a band of radical feminists with a predilection for experimental surgery. They are led by Mother, a being who has surgically transformed herself into the image of an multi-breasted fertility figure. (In a later interview, Carter said that we no more need Mother Goddesses than do Father Gods.) From the title of the book you can guess where this is headed. Evelyn is both horrified and fascinated by the transformation into his own masturbatory fantasy. At one point he marvels that the clitoral implant has been an unqualified success.
But the novel is barely half over. There will be escapes, further imprisonments, and terroristic attacks. Imagine Gulliver’s Travels infused with the spirit of the Marquis de Sade. Telling the story in Evelyn/Eve’s voice allows Carter to gloriously overwrite the narrative. It is at times obscene, at times exhausting, and consistently very funny as it careens to its visionary conclusion.
Evelyn arrives in a New York City that is a phantasmagoria of filth and violence. (Carter’s novel is from 1977. Her one visit to NYC almost a decade before had left her unimpressed, but still…) Both African American and feminist militias stage open warfare on the streets. Cockroaches swarm an inch deep on apartment floors, and squadrons of rats begin devouring sniper victims before they are fully dead. When Evelyn reports to Columbia University to take up his position, the Black Militants who have control of the university get one whiff and his plummy British accent and order him to clear out or get shot. He slinks back to his miserable walk up on the Lower East Side, wires home for money, and decides to see what will come his way.
On a risky nocturnal trip to the supermarket, Evelyn encounters Leilah. Leilah is black and dressed in whorish magnificence that sets Evelyn’s libido aflame. He trails her back to her apartment and begins a sexual relationship that surpasses his most priapic fantasies. By night she supports them by stripping at low dives and fancy clubs, and during the day she does not object if he leaves her tied to the bed. Soon she is pregnant, and Evelyn uses money from home to pay for an abortion. But Leilah blows it on a witch doctor and finds herself in hospital. Evelyn drops another wad of cash at the nurse’s station, rents a car, and hightails it for the Great American West.
At this point, Carter’s novel starts to get really strange.
He is captured first by a band of radical feminists with a predilection for experimental surgery. They are led by Mother, a being who has surgically transformed herself into the image of an multi-breasted fertility figure. (In a later interview, Carter said that we no more need Mother Goddesses than do Father Gods.) From the title of the book you can guess where this is headed. Evelyn is both horrified and fascinated by the transformation into his own masturbatory fantasy. At one point he marvels that the clitoral implant has been an unqualified success.
But the novel is barely half over. There will be escapes, further imprisonments, and terroristic attacks. Imagine Gulliver’s Travels infused with the spirit of the Marquis de Sade. Telling the story in Evelyn/Eve’s voice allows Carter to gloriously overwrite the narrative. It is at times obscene, at times exhausting, and consistently very funny as it careens to its visionary conclusion.
August 13, 2024
“Masculine and feminine are correlatives which involve one another. I am sure of that - the quality and its negation are locked in necessity. But what the nature of the masculine and the nature of feminine might be, whether they involve male and female, if they have anything to do with Tristessa’s so long neglected apparatus or my own factory fresh incision and engine-turned breasts, that I do not know. Though I have been both man and woman, still I do not know the answer to these questions. Still they bewilder me.”
Each time I read Angela Carter, I find myself trapped in the psychedelic (and very sexual) current of her writing, and reemerge hungry for more. The Passion of New Eve is very subversive, but Carter has laced intention into each passage of the plot. Eve’s transfigurations do not offer her the answers she expects, and she realizes that, in very Simone de Beauvoir fashion qua “one is not born, but becomes a woman”, she must embark into the literal depths of the primordial sources of feminine energy to truly uncover womanhood.
I recommend this novel to anyone who has had complex experiences with their own gender expression, sexual objectification, and derealizing moments during intimacy; who is not easily triggered by violence and misgendering of a character (that is likely a reflection of Eve’s own misunderstanding of gender v sex, but very well could also be Carter’s myopic lens on the matter) but rather, believes it is through facing our world’s harsh realities with obdurate self-love that we can liberate our bodies and minds to experience the womb-like shield of self-preserving femininity.
***Editing to add that I just read A.G. Cook’s blog post for Sophie, describing how “Over the last few weeks I've been reading The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter, a novel published in 1977 that resonated so deeply with Sophie that on a few occasions she mentioned wanting to adapt it into an opera someday.”, which makes me love this book even more ❤️
Each time I read Angela Carter, I find myself trapped in the psychedelic (and very sexual) current of her writing, and reemerge hungry for more. The Passion of New Eve is very subversive, but Carter has laced intention into each passage of the plot. Eve’s transfigurations do not offer her the answers she expects, and she realizes that, in very Simone de Beauvoir fashion qua “one is not born, but becomes a woman”, she must embark into the literal depths of the primordial sources of feminine energy to truly uncover womanhood.
I recommend this novel to anyone who has had complex experiences with their own gender expression, sexual objectification, and derealizing moments during intimacy; who is not easily triggered by violence and misgendering of a character (that is likely a reflection of Eve’s own misunderstanding of gender v sex, but very well could also be Carter’s myopic lens on the matter) but rather, believes it is through facing our world’s harsh realities with obdurate self-love that we can liberate our bodies and minds to experience the womb-like shield of self-preserving femininity.
***Editing to add that I just read A.G. Cook’s blog post for Sophie, describing how “Over the last few weeks I've been reading The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter, a novel published in 1977 that resonated so deeply with Sophie that on a few occasions she mentioned wanting to adapt it into an opera someday.”, which makes me love this book even more ❤️
August 8, 2019
This is the first novel I've read by Angela Carter (I'm gradually reading all her short stories on the side) and it was fantastic! Although a short book just under 200 pages it took us on a long journey.
The book is a parody of many American social and cultural ideas and events going on in the late 70s and early 80s. Some of this parodying is funny and some of it is thought provoking. Carter overall criticizes the concepts of gender that were prevalent at the time: The first is, obviously, patriarchy embodied by the desert brute Zero and Evelyn in which women are nothing more than objects for men's fantasies and projections for all their prejudices of them. This is shown with how Evelyn mystifies Leilah. The second is gynocentrism and matriarchy, embodied by Mother and her Amazon-like followers. These ideas were prevalent during second-wave feminism and were born from the renewed interest in ancient goddess worship and many feminists' separatist response to men. Carter shows neither of these as liberating for women (or men even). Both essentialize men and women into unequal roles and statuses based on rather basic and outdated reasons.
Carter was certainly ahead of her time. The novel discusses how gender is a performance based on language and learning long before Judith Butler ever got on stage (and is more fun to read than Butler).
I also enjoyed Carter's usage of Biblical and other religious imagery and language to and how she employed them to undo traditional patriarchal conceptions of women and reproduction.
The book is a parody of many American social and cultural ideas and events going on in the late 70s and early 80s. Some of this parodying is funny and some of it is thought provoking. Carter overall criticizes the concepts of gender that were prevalent at the time: The first is, obviously, patriarchy embodied by the desert brute Zero and Evelyn in which women are nothing more than objects for men's fantasies and projections for all their prejudices of them. This is shown with how Evelyn mystifies Leilah. The second is gynocentrism and matriarchy, embodied by Mother and her Amazon-like followers. These ideas were prevalent during second-wave feminism and were born from the renewed interest in ancient goddess worship and many feminists' separatist response to men. Carter shows neither of these as liberating for women (or men even). Both essentialize men and women into unequal roles and statuses based on rather basic and outdated reasons.
Carter was certainly ahead of her time. The novel discusses how gender is a performance based on language and learning long before Judith Butler ever got on stage (and is more fun to read than Butler).
I also enjoyed Carter's usage of Biblical and other religious imagery and language to and how she employed them to undo traditional patriarchal conceptions of women and reproduction.
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