The Passion of New Eve
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| The Passion of New Eve | |
 First UK edition |
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| Author | Angela Carter |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Magic realism, post-feminism |
| Publisher | Victor Gollancz Ltd |
| Publication date | 1977 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 191 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0575022477 |
The Passion of New Eve is a novel by Angela Carter, first published in 1977. It is a magic realist post-feminist novel, in which the female characters dominate the males. In the novel, Angela Carter satirises America as portrayed in films, and from her own experience of the United States, particularly in terms of gender.
[edit] Plot summary
At the start of the novel, Evelyn, a male English professor is taking up a new post in a university in New York. His tribute to Tristessa de St Ange, the American silent movie star, on his last night in England is to be given fellatio by a girl he takes to see one of her films.
He arrives in a dystopian New York, a city in its last stages of rotting death, overrun by huge rats and human emotions distilled to their most primeval. He becomes fascinated with Leilah, an exotic young African American night club dancer, and while they have a short relationship he makes no emotional link, seeing her only in terms of sex. He becomes repelled by her when she falls pregnant and abandons her to an abortion.
Evelyn seeks out the clean, clear desert and is captured by a woman from the subterranean female city of Beulah and dragged across the sandscape to encounter Mother, a cruel mother goddess figure who fashioned herself with the surgeon's knife. She changes Evelyn into Eve, ironically the woman who he has always lusted after, and aims to impregnate him with a new Messiah, using his own sperm (harvested from him before the operation).
Evelyn, now Eve, escapes but is enslaved by Zero, a cruel male cult leader and "poet" with only one eye and one leg - a half man who celebrates his degraded self. His harem are all passive, slavish "wives" who he whips unless they talk in grunts and honour their bedfellows, the pigs. Zero rapes Eve and makes her his newest wife. He then leads Eve on a search for the silent film star Tristessa, an embodiment of beauty, sorrow, and loneliness, whom he hates obsessively, because he believes Tristessa has made him infertile. Tristessa was Evelyn's first object of desire in his boyhood, and Evelyn/Eve has her own obsession with this figure.
Zero leads his dungaree clad harem to the glass palace of Tristessa and invades and decimates the beautiful, gothic pile discovering Tristessa herself laid out in a room surrounded by waxwork effigies in coffins. However she is alive and only when Zero tracks her down to the top of one of the towers and cuts her thong do the gang discover that Tristessa is male.
Eve and Tristessa spin the Zero and his harem to death in Tristessa's spinning glass palace and escape back into the desert where they imbibe each others' newly discovered sexuality until Tristessa is shot by a passing band of desert, mafia, teenage boys. Their Colonel is 14 years old and scared of the dark. They "rescue" Eve, but she escapes and encounters Leila in a new guise of Lilith, ragabond rebel leader.
Lilith takes Eve to the coast to see a crazy old lady on a beach - a manifestation of ageing superficiality: dirty, caked in make-up, with piled high golden locks, singing old musical songs and living on vodka and cold tinned food and defecating in the bushes behind her deck chair.
Eve realises that Leilah never objectively existed but was only a mainfestation of his own lusts and corruption.
Lilith tells Eve she must go and meet Sophia and pushes her into a cleft in the rocks that metamorphose into the uterus of time. Eve progresses through the increasingly deep and warm subterranean rock pools to her rebirth. The amber Eve discovers in one of the caves and holds in her hands liquifies into ancient pine forests and primevil species.
Eve is then symbolically reborn, guided by Leilah, and rejects her chauvinistic male past.
Eve emerges onto a beach by Lilith, the wife of Adam who leaves her to go back and fight with her rebels. Eve swaps the gold alchemical on a neck chain that Lilith has given her for the purple skiff belonging to the crazed old woman and launches herself into the ocean.
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