‘Who’s Afraid of the Female Form?: Deconstructing Mythologies of Gender in Angela Carter’s The...

Who's Afraid of the Female Form?: Deconstructing Mythologies of Gender in Angela Carter's The Passion of

New Eve

Lizzy Welby

Abstract ‘I am the Great Parricide, I am the Castrix of the Phallocentric Universe, I am Mama, Mama, Mama!’1, So thunders Mother, Angela Carter’s terrifying, bounteous, abject creation of womanhood, and in one narrative stroke the author overturns masculine western praxes that represent the fecund female body as diseased, polluted and thus necessarily contained. Set in a disturbing dystopian United States, where vestiges of lives drift among the urban decay, experiencing the world through flashes of primeval emotion, The Passion of New Eve rips through the autocratic authority of a paternal order and unleashes a horror absolute. The male protagonist, Evelyn, an English professor whose emotional attachments with women extend only as far as their vaginas, is captured by a female colony living below the desert sands worshipping their goddess of the feminine, Mother. Carter’s fleshy, multi-breasted earth mother overwhelms the Englishman, subjects him to a humiliating rape, castrates him then carves into his body a bona fide, fully functioning, leaking, seeping womb; a ‘wound that would, in future, bleed once a month, at the bidding of the moon’.2 This surgically-sculpted new Eve(lyn) is thus made to psychically as well as physically experience what it means to be gender positioned on the boundaries of a phallocentric order.

This paper will discuss the notion of female sexuality as the site of men’s terror. By exploring The Passion of New Eve through the theoretical ideas of Julia Kristeva, I hope to demonstrate that the fecund female body, which is frequently contained and constrained in other practices that serve to diminish the maternal authority, in this novel, is a site of man’s horror. The son’s ‘fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother’3 spectacularly comes to fruition by Carter’s monstrous feminine incarnate, Mama. Key Words: Angela Carter, Gender Studies, Female Body, Fertility, Abjection, Monstrous Feminine, Myths of Motherhood, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous.

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Who's Afraid of the Female Form?: Deconstructing Mythologies

of Gender in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve

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And then if I spoke about a person whom I met and who shook me up, herself being moved and I moved to see her moved, and she, feeling me moved, and being moved in turn, and whether this person is a she [un elle] and a he [une il] and a he [une il] and a she [un elle] and a shehe [une ellil] and a heshe [une ilelle], I want to be able not to lie, I don’t want to stop her if she trances, I want him, I want her, I will follow her.4

Although her arms were the paradigm of mothering, they offered me no refuge; that women are consolation is a man’s dream [….] I had reached journey’s end as a man. I knew then, that I was among the Mothers; I experienced the pure terror of Faust.5

Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, published in 1977 is, in Carter’s own words, an ‘anti-mythic novel’, which was ‘conceived as a feminist tract about the social creation of femininity’.6 Three decades on, it has lost none of its shocking rawness with images that are just as potently disquieting today as when they first emerged from Carter’s vitriol-tipped pen. The novel remains an abject entropic cadaver of text, bobbing around in a murky pool of phallogocentric references and illusions. It is, as Carter envisaged, ‘a bitter and quite uncomfortable book to read’.7 Critical acclaim for this eerie picaresque tale celebrates the author’s attempt to create a feminist study of the ways in which gender is constructed within and sanctioned according to the strictures of phallogocentric societal authority. Harriet Blodgett not only lauds Carter as ‘a writer of genuine revisionist fiction who aims at enhancing female power and countering the inscription of patriarchy’,8 but also draws attention to the psychoanalytic preoccupations of the novel. The Passion of New Eve is preoccupied with bringing the speaking (female) body back into signification as well as deconstructing the concept of a cosmetically fabricated feminine,9 a preoccupation Carter seems to share, I would argue, with the French academics Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. The author’s women exist at the centre of a phallocentric panopticon and as such are subject to scrutiny, evaluation and judgment by a distorting male gaze. A discourse of multiple nullifying views of women are held within a unified and static textural space, where a patriarchal discourse insists upon strengthening a debilitating female positioning. The various mythological images of women contribute to specific concretized notions of an idealized

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woman. For example, the Madonna/whore, the Medusa, the sexualized mother, the contaminating menstruating female, the fecund woman seeping jouissance from her psychic borders. As a memetic construct, female sexuality in all its abjected guises is painfully beaten into mind-forged manacles on the anvil of phallocracy that enables negative patriarchal sanctions to enforce what it deems normative ‘feminine’ behaviour. Thus gender, as a social construct in this novel is, in Christina Britzolakis words, ‘locked into a regressive circulation of literary metaphors of fatal, apparitional, mechanical femininity.’10 A sense of the (spoken for) feminine11 remains in the domain of the phallus, the ancestry of which, Roberta Rubenstein argues in her Cixousian discussion of The Passion of New Eve, can be understood and traced through prototypes of history and myth, the sorceress and the hysteric’.12 Merja Makinen celebrates what she sees as Carter’s triumphant textual militancy coupled with the sheer force (destructive or otherwise) of female sexuality.13 Anna Kérchy, however, sees Carter’s text as a ‘strange novel where transsexual hero/ine, New Eve/lyn, redoubled or mirrored by the transvestite Tristessa clearly embodies an inbetween, gender-bender, Tiresias-like destabilizing picaro-picara fusion’.14

The Passion of New Eve is a dazzling, disturbing exploration of the abjectification of the female form and its positing of a fecund corporeality as not only existing outside of the Father’s Law, but also remaining a continual threat to the patriarchal stability of the Symbolic order. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva argues that the authority of our social praxes, religion, morality, ideology and language is founded upon horror. Lurking under a priest’s robes, hidden in a politician’s briefcase, mummified under the wrappings of a lawyer’s language and bound in the straightjacketed contextualization of a Derridan différance, is an abject terror that continually escapes signification. Such a terror can only be verbalized through the ‘language of abjection’,15 the source of which can be traced to the unconscious self that is endlessly repressed in order for one’s ‘own and proper’ self to exist.16 The abject stands at the borders of subjectivity, defying the prohibitions and regulations of the Law. The Symbolic ‘names’ the abject as corrupt, perverse, defiled, that which reveals the always already porosity of the boundaries of the self that reveals the Lacanian Law-of-the-Father as absurd. The Symbolic’s phallic stance is cast in totalitarian iron. It demands submission absolute. The keepers of the paternal word stipulate that, to use Kristeva’s words, ‘[a]n unshakable adherence to Prohibition and Law’ is necessary ‘if that perverse interspace of abjection is to be hemmed in and thrust aside. Religion. Morality, Law’.17 For a society to function under a centralized power structure, the governing body must work hard to maintain boundaries and limits through marginalizing the abject. Kristeva argues that the abject is repugnant. Fragile and precarious though it may be synchronically, when viewed diachronically



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it shakes the very foundations of the Symbolic. Its very horror threatens to overwhelm the subject’s psyche in waves of nausea. Abjection, Kristeva argues, is:

an extremely strong feeling which is at once somatic and symbolic, and which is above all a revolt of the person against an external menace from which one wants to keep oneself at a distance, but of which one has the impression that it is not only an external menace but that it may menace us from the inside. So it is a desire for separation, for becoming autonomous and also the feeling of an impossibility of doing so.18

Even thrust aside, the abject still retains its terrorizing hold on the Symbolic’s fragile boundaries, borders of order where lines of difference and discrimination are drawn on the psychic map, delineating the ‘dark continent’ of the feminised Other as a wild and unspeakable terrain. Reality is categorized by syntax (le nom du père), which breaks apart the undifferentiated fabric of the semiotic where a maternal authority holds sway. The inflexible Word of the Father issues an injunction (le non du père) that forever diminishes the power of the maternal figure. Desire for the maternal figure is, in a (paternal) word, exiled, repressed, abjected. The abject has a host of signifiers that are not only present within the boundaries of the Symbolic, but also disrupt its systematized organization. For example, loathing for an item of food instils feelings of nausea (for Kristeva the sight of a gelatinous membrane that collects on hot milk is particularly horror-filled), the sight of fluids that seep from inside the body such as blood, saliva, vomits, pus and excrement induce repulsion. They attest to the sticky mechanics of viscera and break through a dry, cerebral, conceptualization of corporeality that characterizes a Lacanian symbolization of flesh. The abject is not an object in itself, more it is a relationship to a border. It represents a jettisoned object, what must be cast away in order to be. But it is in the presence of death that the abject overwhelms subjectivity and terrifies the self. For example, the grave space of heavy soil displayed under the transparency of glass terrifies with its soil(ed) smells of organicity. The corpse, ‘without make-up or masks’ is, according to Kristeva, the utmost of abjection, that which has ‘irremediably come a cropper.’19 Bodily waste falls beyond the border of the ‘I’, detaches itself from life that the ‘I’ might ‘be’ but the cadaver is the place where the ‘I’ is situated and thus signifies a ‘border that has encroached upon everything,’ for it is ‘no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled.’20 Thus it is not filth or sickness that causes abjection, more

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it is ‘what disturbs identity, systems, order’21, like the decontextualised mouth of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Not I’ The abject lies on the borders of subjectivity ‘in-between’, ‘ambiguous’ and ‘composite’, threatening and blurring the boundaries between subject and object, ego and unconscious.22

This abject relation with the utmost of material rejection mirrors the child’s difficult relationship with mother’s body. The maternal function in its abjected phase is, according to Kristeva, identified with the mother’s ‘sex’. The child becomes aware that the mother’s vagina, (place of fertility, menstruation and jouissance, in short, all that is out of Symbolic bounds) is the border through which it was brought into a semantic world and is regulated by Symbolic negation. Thus the sex and the birth canal are intertwined, with the child situated interstitially between the Symbolic logic of the maternal function and the material viscosity of the mother’s body, between, in effect, the societal idea of birth and motherhood and the actuality of expulsion from the womb. This is an important juncture in the transition between material rejection and Symbolic rejection, the child must, after all, take its place as a speaking being in society. The mother is thus negated and re-named as a body full of alterity, always already, irredeemably abject. This phase marks the child’s first halting attempts at entry into an independent subjectivity that is bound up with the Father’s lexicon. Embarking upon the process of socialization means surrendering its psychic symbiosis with and physical dependence on the maternal body. However, at this moment in the child’s psychic development, Symbolic borders are precarious and subject to mutability. The difference between mother and child, between materiality and Symbolicity, between the very nature of self and Other, is continually called into question. Try as it might to mythologize the mother and abject the maternal function, the paternal word cannot fully silence the whispers of semiotic bodily drives that can be heard in the textual jolts and breaks that irrupt into Symbolic logic. To identify with the realm of the semiotic is to identify with the maternal body yet for the child to accomplish this feat within a paternal economy needs much skill and effort precisely because it involves a rejection of the (much-desired) maternal body.

In western societies, to abject the mother’s leaking, seeping body and cleave in two the mother/child dyad, is to make of the mother a ‘prototype of the object’ but an object that forever remains fascinating and desirous.23 According to Kristeva, in the nom du père the maternal feminine is split into two incommensurable entities that co-exist with one corporeality. Firstly, is the Kleinian life-giving mother, source of comfort and nourishment and secondly, is the persecuting phallic mother, tied to suffering and terror. In what is essentially a destructive double-bind, this maternal dualism becomes the template by which women are not only imaged, but also have their identities overwritten with a (masculine) narrative. The question of women’s bodies, how they are captured and pinioned within the nullifying lens of a



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phallocentric economy, together with the cultural constraints and sanctions that construct a sexuality and bind women to the strictures of western mores is an extremely complex one. The practice of concretizing power relations is sustained and reproduced in the struggle between the corporeal body and the body politic of women’s sexualized subjectivity. The relationship between centralized state authority and its micro-twin, localized self-regulation, is endlessly reiterated in the quotidian socio-cultural praxes of western society, which, Jano Sawicki argues, is played out ‘in the institutions of marriage, motherhood and compulsory heterosexuality, in the ‘private’ relations between the sexes and in the everyday rituals and regimens that govern women’s relationships to themselves and their bodies.’24 The way in which gender is viewed through the phallogocentric lens of western society, together with the questions of the male/female dialectic, is addressed in Carter’s labyrinthine novel. Her male protagonist is ‘remade’ both physically and psychically as a woman. The troubling site of female sexuality and its unchanging (de)valorized place in a linear historicity whereby myth and history are interwoven and braided into the steely fabric of a patriarchal law, is re-imagined in Carter’s ‘New Eve’:

Myth is more instructive than history, Evelyn; Mother proposes to reactivate the parthenogenesis archetype, utilizing a new formula. She’s going to castrate you, Evelyn, and then excavate what we call the ‘fructifying female space’ inside you and make you the perfect specimen of womanhood. Then, as soon as you’re ready, she’s going to impregnate you with your own sperm.’25

According to Jane Usher, ‘[t]hroughout history, and across cultures, the reproductive body of a woman has provoked fascination and fear’ and is subjected to a curious doubling.26 In an apolitical configuration, the female form is, in a very real way, a cumulative product. The body should be defined by the quantity and distribution of muscle and fat that is attached to the skeletal structure but we rarely see the female body in such undifferentiated terms. In an endless shadow dance of deferral and displacement a woman’s body stands in for an appropriated subjectivity that is defined in terms of a masculine dialectic. A woman’s body becomes the blank page upon which a Symbolic text is inscribed, a sort of somatic Derridean différance, par excellence. Linked inextricably to fecundity, fertile feminine flesh provokes contrary reactions of disgust and fear as well as desire and fascination. Thus when expressing the horror at the fate that awaits him, Carter’s male/female, Evelyn/Eve begs to know ‘of what crime

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had [he] been guilty to deserve such a punishment’ and receives the politically apposite answer ‘Is it such a bad thing’ to become a woman?27

My study of The Passion of New Eve will examine four representations of women as viewed through a poststructuralist methodological lens. First, the dusty, ephemeral (masculine) visualization of an aged and enigmatic femininity as realized in the fading screen idol, the transexual Tristessa. Her/his sexuality is born out of the Symbolic’s configuration of woman and the irony of the phallus hidden beneath her skirt is one of the more poignant points in the novel. Second, the interconnected relationship between the post-menarcheal female and a phallic authority that is narratively realised in the vibrant, sexually-charged Leilah, and her callous, self-absorbed lover, Evelyn. Third, a pre-symbolic maternal authority, which is necessarily suppressed by the strictures of the Symbolic, presented in the novel through the fearsome, self-sculpted goddess of the feminine, Mother. Last, the transformation of the Englishman Evelyn into a newly born woman. Evelyn’s penis is ritually sacrificed and exchanged for a vagina not only to expiate a deeply entrenched phallocentric fear that a woman’s sex represents the beginning and end of all life, commensurate with the abject, but also to experience, from the original source as it were, the imprisoning effect of culturally stipulated sexual stereotyping.

Deep below the earth in her city of Beulah, populated entirely by women, a ‘place where contrarieties exist together’28, Angela Carter’s ink-and-paper protophallic acolyte of the Symbolic Father, Evelyn both physically and psychically begins the process of readjusting his appropriating male gaze to incorporate a female perspective. The penetrator thus becomes, quite literally, the penetrated. In addition to a psychoanalytic exploration of sexual difference, this chapter will explore the notion of an ambivalent female sexuality as the site of men’s desire, terror and revulsion. By exploring Carter’s explosive novel through the theoretical ideas of Julia Kristeva, I hope to demonstrate that the female body, which is frequently contained and constrained in other practices that serve to diminish the maternal authority, in this novel, is not only exhibited as a psychic locus for horror, but is conversely re-translated in a feminist discourse as a site of defiance. The son’s ‘fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother’29 spectacularly comes to fruition by Carter’s monstrous feminine incarnate, her phallic mother, Mama. However, as the complexity of her oeuvre demonstrates, Carter is rarely so one-dimensional a writer. For the lacuna in her exploration of the appropriating male gaze is filled with an iconoclastic stance on the myth of feminine sexuality, which in this novel, I would argue, concerns the tropes of earth goddess (Mother), the whore (Leilah, later Lilith), the Virgin (Eve[lyn]) and as a substratum that bubbles through the narrative, Mother Nature (city/desert/ocean).



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Set in a disturbing dystopian United States, where the ragged vestiges of broken lives drift among the urban decay, experiencing the world through flashes of primeval emotion, The Passion of New Eve rips through the autocratic authority of a paternal order and unleashes a horror absolute. The novel’s main protagonist links the nullifying phallogocentric notions of women and the female body, turns them inward as he is forced to confront the shortcomings of his sex in its grubby relation to women. Eveyln is due to leave England to take up a teaching post at a university in New York. The patronizing but rather cowardly Englishman travels through Carter’s post-apocalyptic America, encountering scene after scene of gruesome violence that is, in its minutiae, directed toward women. The tone of the novel is set out in the first sentence. Carter writes:

The last night I spent in London. I took some girl or other to the movies and, through her mediation, I paid you a little tribute of spermatozoa, Tristessa.30

Evelyn, whose emotional attachments with women extend only as far as their vaginas, is spending his last night in London at cinema watching old re-runs of Tristessa De St Ange movies (an actress he has adored since puberty) amid catcalls and jeers that are ‘sibilantly hushed by pairs of sentimental queers’.31 During the course of the film, some nameless ‘girl or other’32 performs a fellatio that will bring him to orgasm. The baseness of his behaviour is reinforced, in case we are left in any doubt as to the sordidness that informs his psychic and physical relationship with women, with callous cruelty. He displays a remarkably ‘ambivalent attitude toward women’ learned, he lazily reflects, from his nanny, whose sentimentality is shot through with sadism.33 This ambivalence manifests itself in the amusement with which he occasionally ties a ‘girl to the bed before copulating with her.’34

The act of fellatio is intimately connected to not only the scenes of suffering that are flickering on the screen in front of the Englishman, but also to moments in his childhood. Memories of being taken by his nanny to the movies, sensually (masochistically) enjoying the ‘sweet sting’ of an ice-cream are fused with Evelyn’s ‘flaming, pre-adolescent heart and the twitch in [his] budding groin of the spectacle of Tristessa’s suffering.’35 Within the syntactic landscape of the novel, the past rushes up to meet the present in the girl with the ‘grey eyes and a certain childlike hesitancy’,36 grubbing amongst the litter between adult Evelyn’s legs. He recreates his adolescent masturbatory pleasure by watching a screen whilst the unseen and unnamed woman is on her knees in the darkness below him, exiled from his affections

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by his supreme indifference. In this sense, the troubling aspect of female sexuality – its fertility, which in turn is connected to a mother-child relationship in the semiotic, is concealed by a masturbatory fantasy with a two-dimensional screen image of an almost forgotten movie star. A fantasy that is realized by the oral ministrations of his companion who is relegated to a discarded, abjected object commensurate with the rubbish that lies scattered on the cinema floor.

Although she is marked by anonymity, her tears belie the strength of her attachments to her unresponsive lover. But she is imaged as abject, kneeling on the ‘dirty floor of the cinema, among the cigarette ends and empty potato crisp bags and trodden orangeade containers’.37 The detritus that lies scattered on the cinema floor recalls a Kristevan notion of bodily waste matter, characterized as filth, that represents what is beyond the borders of the clean and proper self and what must be ceaselessly cast out in order for the ‘I’ to exist as a functioning social entity.38 Into this abject, rubbish-strewn setting, this unnamed woman is inserted and positioned according to her sexuality; indeed valorized only as a faceless, defiled sexual gratifier. Her sexuality is seen in contrast to the enigmatic Tristessa whose stardom functions in the novel as Lacanian mirror of negated feminine sexuality. S/he is an illusion, an abyss that contains only the blankness of oblivion. Her/his persona is a culmination of iconic Hollywood film characters defined by sensual suffering, Madame Bovary, Scarlett O’Hara, Catherine Earnshaw to name but a few.

Born out of a discourse that weaves a patriarchal mythology of masochistic female pain with the retrospective fear of pre-Symbolic loss, Tristessa is the embodiment of the repressed or excluded Other. Tristessa is the screen upon which Evelyn can replay, without fear of a father’s reprisal, the male’s incestuous desire for his mother.39 In this respect, Evelyn can have his Freudian cake and eat it too because the castration anxiety is assuaged by a travesty of the maternal feminine who has turned ‘himself’ into a ‘lucid [female] object, with no ontological only iconographic status’40. In one momentous psychological stroke, Evelyn banishes his infantile desires for his biological mother to the void and thus seemingly escapes the father’s threat of castration. However, Carter’s majestic sleight of writer’s hand reinstates the castration complex, not with the Father of Symbolic Law but with the terrifying phallic mother incarnate, Mama. In an ironic role reversal, it is the Mother (wielding her phallic surgical instrument) and not the Father who brings the threat to fruition by swiftly dispatching Evelyn’s penis with one swipe of a materially arcane, obsidian knife, while ‘all the women in the world’, it seems to him, look on.41

One of the more original and interesting aspects of the novel is Carter’s iconoclastic exploration of the myth of motherhood. In Evelyn’s history his biological mother is conspicuously absent (his decidedly phallic



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nanny and not his mother looms large in his childhood development). Without a secular or religious discourse on motherhood that can include the abject, abjection is repositioned within all women. Absent though she may be within the psyche of Evelyn, the mother is a constant reminder that men were once within the body of the mother. The myth of the maternal container, site of infantile desire, whose manifestation ghosts across the cinema screen in the form of the timeless Virgin, Tristessa, who is defined as: ‘Enigma. Illusion. Woman [...] ‘dream itself made flesh […] real but not substantial’,42 enables the child to attain autonomy. Without the neutralizing repository of myth, the maternal body poses a threat, both to a man’s subjectivity and his sexual identity. How can his phallicity be concretized in the realm of the Symbolic if he was once part of his mother? Better to abject all women than suffer the collapse of phallic power. The possibility of pregnancy is a both a conceptual and physical reminder of the connection to the mother. The risk of reproduction, however, is foreshadowed and foreclosed during the act of fellatio with the nameless and defiled woman by Evelyn idly contemplating the ‘hieroglyph of plastic in the neck of her womb’ that will ‘prevent conception.’43 This sordid opening to the novel is an illustration of the Englishman’s dismal attitude toward women as well as an indication of the emotionally disconnected sexual relationship that Evelyn will subsequently form in America with the black cabaret stripper, Leilah. Yet it is merely a prologue to the overarching catalogue of masculine indifference, cruelty and violence toward women that will be the novel’s leitmotif. Evelyn sets out for a new land armed with what his ‘delicate instrument’, transformed into a ‘weapon’ by a phallic discourse.44

Carter nihilistic vision of the United States is a menacing metropolis where fires burn, rape is commonplace, murder is habitual and entropy reigns. Contrary to what he imagined, Evelyn finds New York a ‘lurid, Gothic darkness that closed over [his] head and became [his] world’.45 His pre-supposed notions of the city are aligned with the masculine totality of the Symbolic order; he imagines a ‘man’s’ world of dominance and structured signification. In the semantic landscape of his mind’s eye the city is representative of a monolithic edifice of patriarchal hierarchy, architecturally created with autarchic blueprints. He envisages, in effect, a Symbolic city of ‘hard edges and clean colours’ whose female inhabitants are epitomised by the spectre of the Englishman’s base imagination, ‘a special kind of crisp-edged girl with apple-crunching incisors and long, gleaming legs like lascivious scissors’.46 The image of an ‘apple-crunching’, Eve-like woman endowed with the double threat of castration (the vagina dentate complete with vicious incisors and scissor legs) is overlaid with the fetishism of sadistic pleasure, thus its threat of castration is diminished, absorbed into a

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sadomasochistic narrative. However, Carter sets this desire against the backdrop of a city on the brink of anarchy and thus these imagined signifiers, which in other psychic spaces guarantee the stability of the Symbolic, have been overturned in her malevolent vision of the city. In an observation that eerily foreshadows the gender transformation of Evelyn, New York is, he says ‘an alchemical city’ characterized by ‘chaos, dissolution, nigredo, night’.47 Nigredo, as Evelyn learns from a Czech alchemist who lives in the same building, is ‘the stage of darkness, when the material in the [alchemist’s crucible] has broken down to dead matter’. It is a moment, he goes on to say, that ‘embraces all opposing forms in a state of undifferentiated dissolution’.48

In this respect, ‘nigredo’ is a metaphor for collapsing boundaries between self and other, between included and abjected, and between gender roles. Roberta Rubenstein argues that Carter’s use of alchemical metamorphoses ‘underscore[s] the potentially transformative nature of events’. Evelyn’s gender transmutation, painfully performed by Mother, is a pertinent, if look-away grotesquely gruesome, example of Rubenstein’s point.49 Signifiers are skewed and buckled. The streets that had once been ‘designed in clean, abstract lines, discrete blocks, geometric intersections’50 point to a Symbolic realm in ruin where chaos and filth are emblematic of abject horror and are expressive of transgressive irruptions from the semiotic into the symbolic. Traditionally positioned as outcasts according to the white man’s colonising edicts, the blacks seize Harlem and begin to construct a wall, to ring-fence their non-observance of the white man’s ‘law’, so to speak. The wall, in itself, is thus a terrifying marker not only of the Symbolic in disarray but also attests to the visibility of its hitherto excluded black community. Cross-cultural experiences, like Evelyn’s sexual relationship to Leilah, pose a potentially dangerous threat to the white man’s self-defined superiority and must be absorbed into a western system and interpreted by an image of exclusion, in the case of Leilah, a ‘bedizened […] mud Lily’.51 Kristeva argues that a nation-state functions by excluding its ‘foreign’ citizens. Exclusion on a state level, she argues, parallels the private exclusions that occur in the formation of identity. Such a totalitarian system tends to encourage exclusions. The white man’s self-definition is dependent upon generating exclusions of his opposite Other. Put bluntly, one’s identity, like group identity, is constructed on the exclusion of one’s inner Other, which is then projected ‘out’ onto the image of the foreign Other.52 But in Carter’s text, the black community refuses to stay bound by the straps of their culturally constructed straightjackets and begin the process of reinterpreting their territory to terrify the white man:

Discreetly, almost unobtrusively, at the beginning of August, the blacks began to build a wall around Harlem, so slowly, brick by inconspicuous brick, that hardly anyone



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noticed [….] Lately, a revolutionary Puritanism had seized them and this defensive wall, their machine guns, their target practice and a fashion for rolling down Park Avenue in tanks indicated that they had taken fresh stock of an embattled position in the ghettos and decided to make of it a tactical advantage. They abandoned dandyism and narcotics; to a man, they put on battle dress.53

The myth of the white man, stretching like a rope across the nineteenth century and pulled taught by writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle, is shown to be decrepit, corrupt and diseased and, like the British Empire in its death-throes, is exposed as precarious and fragile in its grip on authority.

Similarly, a violent group of female activists, collectively known as the ‘Women’, patrols the city as snipers ready to shoot men who peruse pornographic images outside movie theatres. The anonymous Women threaten the white male’s tenuous grip on the values that underpin his supposed authority and sense of superiority, which can be read, in a Cixousian sense, as the fragility of the paternal authority at the centre of a phallogocentric system.54 These alarming women are said to infiltrate prostitutes who frequent Times Square as a ‘kamikaze squad of syphilitic whores’55 In a disturbing parody of the carnivalesque, Carter’s outcast women overturn the ruling epithets of a phallocentric economy and the actions of a hitherto suppressed gender serve to not only perturb a ruling authority, but also profane what has until now remained the self-propagating truths of the white man. In a Bahktinian sense, the actions of the Women and the militants among New York’s black community de-privilege the narrative of hegemonic ideology and thus not only destabilize authority, but also become glaring ensigns of resistance to it. In this atmosphere, which both repulses and enthrals him, Evelyn meets Leilah, the ‘profane essence of the death of cities, the beautiful garbage eater’,56 whom he subsequently interacts with and defines only in terms of (what he sees as) her debased sexuality. The Englishman’s first description of her is centred solely on her corporeality. She is wearing shiny black leather high-heeled shoes, black fishnet stockings and is encased in a fox fur. His male gaze sees her sexuality in terms of a grubby pornographic titillation and her identity is viewed through the mirror of a bestial lust that needs to be slaked. The fox-fur image serves to debase her sexuality further, reducing it by degrees to animalistic solipsism and shackling her fecund body irretrievably to Evelyn’s desire.

Her seduction of the Englishman is manifested, he tells us, in her ‘lascivious totter’ that morphs into a ‘stumbling dance’, her ‘vague song’ and

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the ‘hot animal perfume she exuded’.57 She is reduced to a synecdochic heap of crumpled signifiers that speak to the man’s libidinous impulses. Yet her vitality bespeaks of a pulsing energy that moves amongst the dead and corrupted detritus of the city. She exudes vibrant corporeality in a violent landscape where men fight like animals and women are summarily, almost casually, raped among this ‘arid world of ruins and abandoned construction sites’. However, within a phallogocentric dialectic of binary opposition, Leilah’s assigned role is that of a ‘whore’. Evelyn ties her to the bed for hours while he wanders the streets. Returning to find she has defecated on the sheets in defiance - mingling abject faecal matter with the sexual space – he then beats her for dissent. Leilah’s fecund female body in this phallogocentrically-organised structure is aligned with a bestial, frightening corporeality and is thus contained and brought under Evelyn’s (male) jurisdiction.58

Evelyn’s understanding of Leilah is marked by an always already interpretation of sexual women as signifiers of pollution, sources of degeneration and potential debilitation, manifestations of the monstrous feminine within. Evelyn’s casual violence upon Leilah’s psychic and physical states of being can be thus seen in almost ritualistic terms, that of containing the fecund female body, restraining and pathologizing the female form. Leilah’s enjoyment of her own sexuality subverts and frustrates Evelyn’s attempts to restrain female desire and in doing so Carter makes visible that which societal mores deem taboo. In a post-modern and psychoanalytic discourse, Carter juxtaposes fragments of phallogocentrism with explicit details of female bodily corporeality to deconstruct and subvert traditional images of idealized femininity, those aspects that are, in a Kristevan configuration, created and sustained by, amongst other things, the cult of the Virgin Mary. By denying Mary the women her jouissance, she is elevated into the intellectualised Blessed Virgin Mary. It is thus the Mother of God, immaculate and divine, who inconceivably conceives an omnipotent foetus, without the primal sexual scene. In this narrative, the woman’s body, and the heterogeneity to which it attests is subsumed within the signifier of the Symbolic. Carter creates an alternative narrative that will put into the text women’s embodied experience, beyond the reach of the paternal word and thus unsignifiable. The lengthy preparations that Leilah undertakes in order to ready herself for an objectifying male gaze at the strip club where she works contain a spectacular sense of male lack embedded within, what is to all intents and purposes, a beautification specifically designed to catch the male eye. Evelyn observes that:

These preparations extended over some hours. To decorate the other was her sole preoccupation at these times; she did not hear me if I spoke to her. When at last she assumed the



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darkly luminous appearance of Lily-in-the-mirror, she became her; everyday Leilah disappeared immediately. My Leilah was now wholly the other one. She turned to kiss me quickly, with an absent-minded dignity that she only acquired through the mirror; the mirror bestowed a grace upon her, now she was her own mistress (emphasis mine).59

This telling passage helps us to understand how (if not why) women are not only in Carter’s world, but also in a sexual discourse, imaged as abjection personified, which ultimately becomes attributed to their corporeality. Everyday signifiers disappear through the looking-glass as Leila’s Other self emerges from it. In a temporal as well as spatial setting, Leilah has become her own embodied experience that exists for and of itself, she is, in effect jouissance made word and taboo reanimated in flesh.

However, her dominating lover peripherally glimpses an ambivalence of subject positioning in the abjection and jouissance that marks his relationship with, what is textually imaged as, the desirous, debased black stripper. Indeed, he comes to understand that Leilah’s ‘voracious, insatiable’ sexuality masks a more powerful cerebral drive toward self-signification and the sexual act, for her, becomes an ‘exorcism by sensuality’.60 From a Kristevan point of view, her sexual abstraction collapses the borders between designated gender roles and highlights a more archaic (masculine) ‘temptation to return, with abjection and jouissance, to that passivity status within the symbolic function where the subject, fluctuating between inside and outside, pleasure and pain, word and deed, would find death, along with nirvana’.61 She is represented here as a split subject and her fragmented and disconnected self evokes the novel’s concerns with not only the destructive power of the male gaze, but also the potential liminality of gender-identity. ‘I would lie on the bed like a pasha’ says Evelyn, ‘watching, in her cracked mirror, the transformation of the grubby little bud who slumbered all day in her filth; she was a night-blooming flower’ and in the process brings ‘into being a Leilah who lived only in the not-world of the mirror and then became her own reflection’.62

Evelyn describes her as ‘black as the source of shadow’ with a skin that is ‘far too soft, so that she seemed to melt in [his] embraces’.63 She is a liminal being, a curious mix of tenderness and ferocity, both childlike and womanly64. Such a borderline creature shakes the very foundations of the linear logic of the Symbolic. Even her syntax will not comply with any grammatical structure and it is delivered in a voice that sweeps from one pitch to another, never staying in one octave for long. Her guttering ‘expostulations’ take precedence over calmer, less wild sentences ‘for she

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rarely had the patience or the energy to put together subject, verb, object and extension in an ordered and logical fashion’.65 In Kristevan terms, Leilah’s mode of speech resembles the indistinct echolalia of the infant that enables one to ‘rediscover […] the voiced breath that fastens us to an undifferentiated mother’.66 She is variously described as a ‘mermaid’, a ‘lorelei’, a ‘ghetto nymph’, a ‘marsh-fire’, ‘subtle as a fish’.67 These fluctuating, relational images evoke a Cixousian fluidity that is intimately connected to the mother. The mother, in Cixousian topography, is fused to the sea.68 Its fluidity characterises a ‘feminine’ elsewhere that lies outside the borders of the phallocentric economy. The aqueous mother, according to Cixous, is a potent marker of alterity. Like her mirror-double, Leilah’s speech defies containment in a masculine discourse, indeed both image and speech lie beyond the semantic borders of the phallotext.

In an attempt to gain control over the fear that this Other Leilah of the cracked mirror instils in him, Evelyn creates a narrative that will go some way toward explaining her sexual, passionate self. He thinks of the myth of the succubus and sees her as a witch, a she-devil who will sap the potency from the man while he sleeps. Coupled to this disturbing jump onto a train of thought that brings this rather medieval superstition into the realm of ‘logic’ to counteract a fear of a woman’s sexuality, Evelyn connects Leilah to an animalistic corporeality. He says: that Leilah, like ‘Rahab the Harlot but armoured with an impregnable plating of corrupt innocence […] would fling yet another fur […] around the extraordinary sloping delicacy of her bare shoulders and trot off […] into the diabolic cleft of the night’.69 The uncontained female body in its systemically carnalised form, scented with ‘dark perfumes that enhanced […] the lingering odour of sexuality’70 stands as the antithesis of Evelyn’s clean and proper (male) body as yet despoiled by fecundity. In Carter’s topography, the female form is not abject or corrupt, it is positioned as a site of abjection by an objectifying male gaze. The implication for defining a woman in such phallogocentric terms is such that the female body becomes a site of danger and perversion precisely because of her fecundity, as Evelyn is about to find out. Mary Douglas argues that ‘a polluting person is always in the wrong’, for this individual ‘has developed some wrong condition or simply crossed over some line that should not be crossed and this displacement unleashes danger for someone’.71 Positing the sexualized female form as monstrous gives rise to fecundity as threatening to male subjectivity. This fear is augmented in the state of pregnancy, where swelling breasts and expanding uterus pays testament to the species debt to nature. The disgust manifested toward a body that seems to distend and irrupt into the very borders of the Symbolic acts as a metaphor of, to use Kristeva words, a ‘fear of the archaic mother’, that ‘turns out to be essentially fear of her generative power’.72



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Eventually and unsurprisingly, Leilah becomes pregnant. Any feeling that Evelyn felt for her vanishes once he is confronted with her fertile body. Fertility is linked to the abject through Evelyn’s discourse. Expulsions represent abject matter, and the humiliation at the vomiting that her morning sickness induced, brings the abject across Symbolic borders. Her breasts swell painfully; she is, according to Evelyn, psychically ‘unhinged’. As soon as she becomes pregnant, he loses all desire for her; she is merely ‘an embarrassment’, ‘a shocking inconvenience’.73 She has a backstreet abortion, haemorrhages in the back of a taxi on her way home, and the disgruntled Englishman is forced to take her to a clinic, all the while wondering how he will pay for her treatment and which moment might prove opportune for him to slip away. He momentarily falters with responsibility, renaming her as a genderless object, an it. He says ‘the broken thing lay in my arms with its life oozing out of its abused femininity, I felt only that I was the cause of it all’ (emphasis mine).74 But the guilt and horror that he feels is quickly buried by making a conscious effort not to feel for her at all. At this point in the narrative, Evelyn has plumbed the depths of his egocentric masculinity but his actions will figuratively and literally unman the man.

Leaving his Leilah to the anguish of her botched abortion, Evelyn escapes into the desert with the intention of taking a road trip. Like a latter-day imperial adventurer suffering from the malaise of a Modernist artist, Evelyn decides that the city must be the origin of his depravity and the open landscape his salvation, He feels the thrill of the colonizer, the exhilaration of the open road, exclaiming:

At first, I was exhilarated. I thought I left behind a fatal sickness that had been bred of the city; yet the darkness and confusion were as much my own as that of the city and I took the sickness with me since I was myself infected, or had brought it from the Old World to the New World with me, and was myself a carrier of the germ of a universal pandemic of despair’.75

Carter’s ironic voice rings through the narrative as Evelyn is actually about to embark on a road trip into his masculinity. He believes that ‘the slow delirious sickness of femininity’ has ‘infected’ him.76 The female form, and more specifically, the seeping vagina from which an aborted foetus emerges in a torrent of blood, evokes a horror of the polluting potential of the womb, its status as abjected abyss through which the male is birthed. Barbara Creed notes that ‘[i]mages of blood, vomit, pus, shit, etc., are central to our culturally/socially constructed notions of the horrific’ for such images

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‘signify a split between two orders: the maternal authority and the law of the father’.77 And in the bloody, damaged vaginal space of Leilah, Evelyn is forced to confront the signifying borders in resounding technicolour, with his own fragile subjectivity hovering between the two states. Having stalled on his road trip by lack of petrol, cigarettes, food and water, the desperate Evelyn is captured by one of Mother’s fanatical priestesses, Sophia. It is a journey that sees his manhood abandoned like the broken car he leaves behind in the desert. As the teeming, densely populated city represents a horrifying transgressive space that is intimately linked to Leilah’s fecundity, so the desolate, almost uninhabited desert represents a cessation of reproductive possibility. Imaged as an atrophied feminine space, the desert is an arid, barren wasteland where the promise of fertility has long-since departed. It is described as ‘an abode of enforced sterility, the dehydrated sea of infertility, the post-menopausal part of the earth’.78 Evelyn’s journey toward the monstrous Mama and his eventual castration begins in this transformed landscape, an abject, heart of darkness, a ‘wasted inner-city moon to which pollution lent a mauvish tinge’. In this respect, Carter illuminates Freud’s ‘dark continent’ of female sexuality, providing plottable co-ordinates on the Symbolic map. The semiotic space, abjected in accordance with the Word of the Father and stored in the substratum of the unconscious, can thus be inserted into language even as it remains within the phallotext where binary oppositions of male and female are still in place.

However, this place will not kneel before the will of the phallogocentric economy so easily for it hides a subterranean place of terror for the man. The city of Beulah and its creator is the ‘Great Parricide […] the Castrix of the Phallocentric Universe […] Mama’.79 She is Mother, Carter’s terrifying, bounteous, abject creation of womanhood and in one narrative stroke the author overturns the masculine western praxes that represent the fecund female body as diseased, polluted and thus necessarily contained. Evelyn’s arrival in Beulah marks the end of his manhood, although the Englishman fails to take note of the desecrated totem of manhood, the enormous statue of on erect phallus riven deliberately in two, the top half laying purposefully in the sand beside the plinth on which it rose from the yielding flesh of mother earth. From this burrow underground, an abject, cavernous space, the female deity Mother has excavated a colony. Beulah represents a psychic site of terror for the male, a ‘profane place’ where the borders of the Symbolic are penetrated and breached. It is a place where ‘contraries are equally true.’80 This Amazonian city marks the place where the transgendering of Evelyn will take place, although at the moment he crosses its threshold, his horror-filled fate escapes him. Only retrospectively does he understand that the broken phallus signifies a ‘cruel and circular logic that did not operate in terms of this [phallocentric] world’.81 In a Kristevan topography, Beulah, together with Mother are representative of the



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archaic mother and the generative power of her parthenogenetic womb that operates outside of the Symbolic logic.

Evelyn’s arrival at Beulah is marked with Christ-like images of the passion. S/he (for it is written retrospectively) tells us that the soles of his feet are ‘raw and covered with bleeding blisters’; he has been ‘comprehensively grilled, […] beaten’ and ‘lashed’ by the elements that his eyes are ‘sore and clogged with dust’.82 The plinth on which the gargantuan broken phallus stands falls back to reveal a ‘yawning opening in the sand’ through which he is driven ‘down a paved throat of sand into the depths of the earth.’83 Evelyn enters via the penis but his passage into Beulah is via the mouth and throat of the phallic mother, a devouring, cannibalistic mother that quite literally has the power to castrate. The vagina dentata is terrifyingly present in the opening to the city and is psychically paralyzing, not because it represents a Freudian castrated feminine corporeality but precisely because it so palpably castrates. Beulah and the malevolence that Evelyn feels in its menacing spirals that descend into its underworld evoke the archaic mother, what Roger Dadoun characterises as:

a mother-thing situated beyond good and evil, beyond all organized forms and all events. This is a totalizing and oceanic mother, a ‘shadowy and deep unity’, evoking in the subject the anxiety of fusion and of dissolution; a mother who comes before the discovery of the essential béance, that of the phallus.84

Evelyn lies trapped in a uterine prison ensconced in the ‘humid

viscera’ of the earth, in an ‘inhuman silence of the inner earth, save for the voices of women who sing a ‘lulling chorus like the distant sound of the sea’.85 It seems that the oceanic mother earth is displaced onto the phallic mother, the ‘Great Parricide’, Mother, who will perform the act of Evelyn’s castration. The omnipresent maternal figure imaged in the womb/cave of Beulah is transposed onto the semiotic mother, who will go further than just possessing a imaginary Lacanian phallus, Carter’s Mother will take Evelyn’s phallus with an obsidian knife and in this sense she hands back a literal phallus to the oceanic mother. At the end of the novel, Eve(lyn) casts his ice-preserved penis to the waves, finally accepting the loss of his masculinity that was so brutally cut from him.

Through labyrinthine tunnels whose uterine walls are ‘unnatural, slippery, ertsatz [and] treacherous’, Evelyn’s is taken to meet Mother. His descent, which entails moving ‘[d]own, down, down an inscrutable series of circular, intertwining, always descending corridors’ is not only representative

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of the downward climb to his unconscious, but also a move back to the mother’s womb, where the maternal body has yet to be abjected and all desires are fulfilled in this intimate union with the mother. In Kristevan terms, Evelyn has retraced the path through the undifferentiated coalescence of the semiotic realm, further back to the point of origin, the source of all life. Mother says, ‘[t]he garden in which Adam was born lies between my thighs’.86 For the sexually abusive Englishman, Carter’s subterranean city is a place of disquiet. ‘I knew I was at the greatest possible risk to myself in these convoluted passages’ he says. At the end of this psychological descent waits Mama, ‘where I’d exiled her, down in the lowest room at the root of my brain’.87 The repressed image of the mother figure is retranslated in Carter’s symbology as a post-menopausal woman, who, far from being the desiccated crone of western popular culture,88 is a powerful matriarch frighteningly out of control (of Symbolic edicts) and hence the Lacanian law of the father. Her visible fecundity contravenes traditional western representations the menopausal woman as being ineffectual and desiccated, a body full of decay. In her powerful, Medusa-like incantation, Mother is terrifying. She is a ‘sacred monster’ of ‘personified and self-fulfilling fertility’ with a ‘false beard [like] Queen Hatshepsut […] fully clothed in obscene nakedness’ and ‘breasted like a sow’.89

Carter’s treatment of Mother is complex and defies singular representation. She is both ancient and modern, a ‘complicated mix of mythology and technology’.90 She is the archaic mother of the primordial abyss. She exists in a spatial time where the Symbolic had yet to be initiated. She comes before the semiotic mother, who is imaged in accordance with le non and le nom du père. Carter’s Mother is a pre-phallic mother who exists in a psychic space that is ‘beyond time, beyond imagination, always just beyond’,91 beyond, in short the authority and strictures of the Father of the Law. Yet, the iconoclastic Carter refuses to merely replace a masculine deity for a feminine one. The description of this self-made goddess, matriarch of the cult of Cybele, whose acolytes shear off their breasts in adoration of their maternal feminine figure, is as silly as it is terrifying. She has grafted an extra set of breasts to her gigantic form but her nipples comically leap about like ‘bobbles on the fringe of an old-fashioned, red plush curtain’.92 Carter seems to be suggesting that replacing a paternal god with a maternal goddess is ineffective, a notion that is given weight in the light of Mother’s rather ignoble end. At the novel’s conclusion, she becomes a grotesque parody of Leilah’s sexualized corporeality, gaudy, smudged make-up, a comic polka-dot bikini stretched across her flabby, over-sized torso. Once statuesque and commanding, she is reduced to a cacophonous alcoholic, defecating al fresco at world’s end against a backdrop of civil war. However, her underground city, while it is in operation, is potent place of abject terror. This womb-like place, burrowed into the insides of the earth, is representative of a Freudian



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primal scene, presided over by the parthenogenetic Mother and characterized by images of blood, darkness and transformation. This Dantesque infernal mother of the underworld overwhelms the Englishman, subjects him to a humiliating rape, castrates him then carves into his body a bona fide, fully functioning, leaking, seeping womb; a ‘wound that would, in future, bleed once a month, at the bidding of the moon’.93 This surgically-sculpted new Eve(lyn) is thus made to psychically as well as physically experience what it means to be gender positioned on the boundaries of a phallocentric order. As Carter’s New Eve discovers, Leilah and her Mother are linked by more that a biological connection for the fecund young woman who offered the false promise of lascivious sex ‘had lured […] out of the drug-store, into the night, toward her bed, she had organised the conspiracy of events that involved the desert, the dead bird, the knife, the sacrificial stone’ to atone for the sins of his gender.94

Carter’s ‘New Eve’ will cross the border of gender once the first menstrual cycle takes place. Menarche marks the crossing of borders that separate childhood from adulthood and position the body in a sexual discourse. Ussher argues that menarche signifies the moment at which childhood is ‘swapped for the mantle of monstrosity associated with abject fecundity’.95 It also marks the moment when women are scrutinized by a (sexualised) male gaze and the female form is henceforth a site of both temptation and taboo. At the other end of the age bracket stands the post-menopausal woman whose aging reproductive body provokes horror and disgust and as such is frequently positioned as abject. This potent matriarch poses a threat to the phallogocentric economy that our western discourse is founded upon. However, Barbara Creed argues that powerful phallic woman can represent the Kristevan notion of a pre-symbolic maternal authority. As a threat to the stability of the patriarchal symbolic, whose paternal law is dependent on the abjectification of the maternal body, her image is retranslated in, for example, the horror genre as a terrifying negative force with the power to castrate.96

In her maternal metaphorizations of the fecund female form, Carter offers a terrifying retort to traditional western ideology that identifies maleness with dominance, superiority, culture and reason. Such a subject positioning encloses women within a self-defining phallogocentric cage that superimposes instinctual sensory responses onto their negated discourse and renders them as, to use Cixous’ forceful phrase, ‘always childlike, always savage’.97 In The Passion of New Eve, Carter not only uncovers the dichotomy of a binary distinction between male logicality, desire and sovereignty and female materiality, sexuality and fecundity but devises a feminine ‘elsewhere’, imaged in the Amazonian city of Beulah, where Plato’s

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cave is redefined as the ultimate symbol of creation, the womb-like, oneiric space of creativity and imagination. Carter’s wild, surreal, violent vision of the breakdown of an annihilating phallocracy extols the heterogeneity of the maternal feminine and the fecund female form. In this respect, the author castrates, with Mama’s vagina dentate, her protophallic father, Freud, whose nom du père has been responsible for the colonisation and mapping of the ‘dark continent’ of female sexuality as a terra incognita filled with wild uncontrollable she-devils. The hermaphroditic New Eve thus, in Cixousian terms enters ‘the domain where you can reclaim your nursling […] threading your way into its entrails, into the black continent where women don’t kill their dead […] woman proceeds black in the black/feminine’.98 Carter in her irrepressibly surreal novel makes ‘a start on the feminisation of Father Time.’99

Notes

1 A Carter, The Passion of New Eve, Virago Press, London, 1982, p. 67. 2 ibid., p. 71. 3 J Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, L Roudiez (trans), Columbia University Press, New York, 1982, p. 64. 4 H Cixous, ‘Tancrède Continue’ in Etudes Freudiennes, 21-22, 115-132, p. 118. 5 Passion, p. 57 6 A Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’, in On Gender and Writing, M Wandor (ed), Pandora Press, London, 1983, pp. 69-77, p. 71. 7 J Haffenden, ‘An Interview with Angela Carter’, in Novelists in Interview, Methuen, London, 1985, pp. 76-96, p. 86. 8 H Blodgett, ‘Fresh Iconography. Subversive Fantasy in Angela Carter’, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 94. Vol 14. Issue 3, pp. 49-54, p. 49. 9 Corporeal degeneration, particularly for women, is connected to abjection.It is no wonder that women are tied into a discourse on decay, which sees an increasing number turning to the surgeon’s knife and hypodermic needle to diminish atrophic borders of being. Jane Usher writes that those women who reject such paralyzing precepts on femininity are able to free themselves from the site of horror that is associated with post-menopausal bodies, moreover, these women were able to see the ageing process as a ‘place from which power and authority spring, not despite the process of change and ageing, but because of it’. J Ussher, Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Reproductive Body, Routledge, New York, 2006, p. 159. 10 C Britzolakis, ‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’, in The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism, J Bristow and T L Broughton (eds), Longman, London, 1997, pp. 43-59, p. 50.



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11 I use the term ‘feminine’ from a French rather than Anglo-Saxon viewpoint. That is to say, that feminine (feminine) in French relates more to a woman’s corporeality as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon term, which Anne-Marie Smith argues, connotes a ‘culturally imposed gender difference [that] stands in opposition to feminist’, A Smith, Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable, Pluto Press, London, 1998, p. 10. Julia Kristeva, after Freud, maintains that men were once within their mothers’ bodies and must learn to include the ‘feminine’ in their psyches. In this respect the feminine and the pre-symbolic maternal realm (what Kristeva calls the semiotic) are inextricably bound together. For a more detailed explanation of the linguistic complexities of French and Anglo-Saxon feminism, see Speaking the Unspeakable, pp. 8-13. 12 R Rubenstein, ‘Intersexions: Metamorphosis in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve and Lois Gould’s A Sea-Change, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 103-118, p. 103. 13 M Makinen, ‘Sexual and Textual Aggression in The Sadeian Woman and The Passion of New Eve’, in Britzolakis, op. cit., pp. 149-166. 14 A Kérchy, ‘Fantastic Freakings: Decomposing Narrative and Deformed Femininity in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, Magyar-irodalom.elte.hu/palimpszeszt/24_szam/09.html accessed 02/10/2011. 15 J Kristeva, Desire in Language, T Gora, A Jardin and L Roudiez (trans), L Roudiez (ed), Columbia University Press New York, 1966, pp. 205-206. 16 Powers, p. 53. 17 ibid., p. 16. 18 ‘Interview with Julia Kristeva’, in Women Analyze Women, E Baruch & L Serrano (eds), New York University Press, New York, 1988, pp. 135-36. 19 Powers of Horror, p. 3. 20 ibid, p. 4. 21 ibid. 22 ibid. 23 ibid., p. 32. 24 J Sawicki, ‘Feminism, Foucault and “Subjects” of Power and Freedom’ in The Later Foucault: politics and philosophy, J. Moss (ed.), Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, London, 1998, p. 93. 25 Passion, p. 65. 26 J Usher, Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Reproductive Body, Routledge, London and New York, 2006, p. 1. 27 Passion, p. 65. 28 Ibi.d, p. 48. 29 Powers of Horror, p. 64.

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30 Passion, p.1. 31 ibid., p. 5. 32 ibid. 33 ibid. 34 ibid. 35 ibid., p. 4. 36 ibid., p. 5. 37 ibid., p. 9. 38 Kristeva argues that ‘[t]hese bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death’. Powers of Horror, p. 3. 39 Freud argues that the male child ‘begins to manipulate his penis and simultaneously has fantasies of carrying out some sort of activity with it in relation to his mother’. J Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vintage, London, 2001, p.155. 40 Passion, p. 126 41 ibid., p. 66. 42 ibid., pp. 2, 4. 43 ibid., p. 5. 44 ibid., p. 62. 45 ibid., p. 10. 46 ibid. 47 ibid., p. 17. 48 Ibid,. p. 14. 49 Rubenstein, op. cit., pp. 103-118, p. 108. 50 Passion, p. 16. 51 ibid., p. 25. 52 J Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, L Roudiez (trans), Columbia University Press, New York, 1991, p. 98. 53 Passion, p. 13. 54 According to Hélène Cixous, phallogocentricism is, amongst other things, ‘a universal battlefield. Each time, a war is let loose Death is always at work. Father/Son Relations of authority, privilege, force […] Master/Slave Violence. Repression. We see that ‘victory’ always comes down to the same thing: things get hierarchical.’ H Cixous and C Clément, The Newly Born Woman, B Wing (trans), University of Minnesota Press, Mineapolis, 1986, p. 64. As we see in the novel, Evelyn is psychically at war with not only renegade (black) sons and (dispossessed) daughters of a white hierarchy, but also his own pre-supposed sense of himself as subjugator and master, sexually or otherwise. 55 Passion, p. 17.



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56 ibid., p. 18. 57 ibid., p. 21. 58 Western epistemologies have highlighted the split between the logical human intellect and its animal corporeality in the social and dialectic organisation of our world. It is beyond the scope of this paper to examine the implications of the split between the intellect and sensory perception on the formation of identity. For an excellent study see, J Mason, ‘Animal Bodies: Corporeality, Class and Subject Formation in ‘The Wide, Wide World’, in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 54, No. 4, March 2000, pp. 503-533. 59 Passion, p. 24. 60 ibid., p. 18. 61 Powers of Horror, pp. 63-64. 62 Passion, p. 28. 63 ibid., p. 18. 64 Evelyn refers to her as ‘a Baby Ruth’ adorned with ‘purple lipstick on her mouth’, ibid., p.19. 65 ibid. 66 Desire in Language, p. 195. 67 Passion, pp. 21-24. 68 Using the homophony between mer/mère, as well as inserting the French terre (earth/terrain), Cixous proclaims ‘it’s my mother! The sea floats her, ripples her, flows together with her daughter, in all our ways. Then unseparated they sweep along their changing waters, without fear of their bodies, without bony stiffness, without a shell […] and sea for mother (mer pour mère) gives herself up to pleasure in her bath of writing’. Quoted in The Poetics of Gender, N K. Miller (ed), Columbia University Press, New York, 1986, p. 169. 69 Passion, pp. 26-27. 70 ibid., p. 25. 71 M Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Ark Publications, New York, 1966, p. 18. 72 Powers of Horror, p. 78. 73 Passion, p. 28. 74 ibid., p. 31. 75 ibid., p. 33. 76 ibid. 77 B Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Routledge, London and New York, 2007, p. 13. 78 Passion, p. 40. 79 ibid., p. 67.

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80 ibid., p. 44. 81 ibid. 82 ibid., p. 43. 83 ibid., p. 44. 84 R Dadoun, ‘Fetishism in the Horror Film’, in Fantasy and the Cinema, J Donald (ed), BFI, London, 1989, pp. 39-61, p. 53. 85 Passion, p. 49. 86 ibid., p. 60. 87 ibid., p. 58. 88 For a more detailed analysis of the representation of post-menopausal women and the ageing reproductive body as an epitome of the abject see Ussher, Managing the Monstrous Feminine, pp. 126-160. 89 Passion, p. 59. 90 ibid., p. 44. 91 ibid., p. 56. 92 ibid., p. 61. 93 ibid., p. 71. 94 ibid., p. 58. 95 Managing the Monstrous Feminine, p. 19. 96 The female is, Creed argues, often imaged as a ‘voracious maw, the mysterious hole that signifies female genitalia’. The Monstrous-Feminine, p. 27. 97 The Newly Born Women, p. 57. 98 H Cixous, Souffles, quoted in J Allen, I Young (eds), The Thinking muse: feminism and modern French philosophy, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989, p. 167. 99 Passion, p. 67.

Bibliography

Baruch E. & L. Serrano (eds), ‘Interview with Julia Kristeva’. Women Analyze Women, New York University Press, New York, 1988. Blodgett H., ‘Fresh Iconography. Subversive Fantasy in Angela Carter’. Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 94. Vol 14. Issue 3. Bristow J. and T L Broughton (eds), Femininity, Feminism. Longman, London, 1997, pp. 149-166.



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Britzolakis C., ‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’. The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism, J Bristow and T L Broughton (eds), Longman, London, 1997, pp. 43-59. Carter, A., The Passion of New Eve. Virago Press, London, 1982. ----- ‘Notes from the Front Line’. On Gender and Writing, M Wandor (ed), Pandora Press, London, 1983, pp. 69-77. Cixous H. and C. Clément, The Newly Born Woman. B Wing (trans), University of Minnesota Press, Mineapolis, 1986. Cixous H., ‘Tancrède Continue’. Etudes Freudiennes, 21-22, 115-132. -----, Souffles. quoted in J Allen, I Young (eds), The Thinking muse: feminism and modern French philosophy, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989. Creed B., The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Routledge, London and New York, 2007. Dadoun R., ‘Fetishism in the Horror Film’. Fantasy and the Cinema, J Donald (ed), BFI, London, 1989. Douglas M., Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Ark Publications, New York, 1966. Haffenden J., ‘An Interview with Angela Carter’. Novelists in Interview, Methuen, London, 1985, pp. 76-96. Kérchy A., ‘Fantastic Freakings: Decomposing Narrative and Deformed Femininity in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve. Magyar-irodalom.elte.hu/palimpszeszt/24_szam/09.html accessed 02/10/2011. Kristeva J., Strangers to Ourselves. L Roudiez (trans), Columbia University Press, New York, 1991. -----, Desire in Language. T Gora, A Jardin and L Roudiez (trans), L Roudiez (ed), Columbia University Press New York, 1966.

Lizzy Welby

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-----, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. L Roudiez (trans), Columbia University Press, New York, 1982. Makinen M., ‘Sexual and Textual Aggression in The Sadeian Woman and The Passion of New Eve’. The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Mason J, ‘Animal Bodies: Corporeality, Class and Subject Formation in ‘The Wide, Wide World’. Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 54, No. 4, March 2000. Miller N. K. (ed), The Poetics of Gender. Columbia University Press, New York, 1986. Rubenstein R., ‘Intersexions: Metamorphosis in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve and Lois Gould’s A Sea-Change. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring, 1993. Sawicki J., ‘Feminism, Foucault and “Subjects” of Power and Freedom’. The Later Foucault: politics and philosophy, J. Moss (ed.), Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, London, 1998. Strachey J. (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Vintage, London, 2001. Smith A., Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable. Pluto Press, London, 1998. Ussher J., Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Reproductive Body. Routledge, New York, 2006. Lizzy Welby is a Creative and Critical writer and an elected Council Member of The Kipling Society, London, United Kingdom. Her latest publications include ‘Solar Midnight: Traversing the Abject Borderline State in Rudyard Kipling’s “The City of Dreadful Night”’, in The Domination of Fear, ed. by Mikko Canini (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2010), pp. 147-171 and the Introduction to a selection of Rudyard Kipling’s verse for the Collector’s Library Series (CRW publishing, forthcoming). She is currently working on her first book entitled Out of Eden: Mapping Psychic Spaces In Kipling’s Fiction.

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