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Written in York Cemetery 22/3/2025.

‘… but his deviant flesh also undeniably creates new life.’

ACTIVITY #1: Put an ice cube into a plastic bag and let it melt around the curve of your thumb. Once it is all water, drink. Cheers; to your health.

That spring, two butterflies lay their eggs in Wallow’s house and by the onset of summer, she couldn’t see her carpet for caterpillars.

Ah, August, a month of reflection, bug bites, and being unbearably sweaty. The month it sunk into me that oh, I really have graduated uni, now, and scrolling a social media site most believe to be dead, rewatching a sitcom that finished airing before I finished primary school, and complaining about how there are no grad jobs is not a great way to spend my time. I decided to get my act together: I sat down, put my English degree to good use and wrote a review for The Passion of New Eve. But where to share my masterpiece? Could it be I should finish setting up that website I started coding way back in March, so that even if I can’t achieve my dream of living off an art career, I can at least pretend I gave it a shot?

Despite being published in 1977 and in retrospect fairly predictable, The Passion of New Eve took me by surprise many times, and the following review will contain spoilers. New Eve also contains some quite brutal transmisogyny, misgendering and degendering, and sexual violence, which this review will discuss.

This essay was originally submitted as my final assessment in an undergraduate English Literature module studying Indigenous literatures written in English, originally titled ‘Dreams of sick horror and exploding pleasure: Wonder, Eroticism and Destabilising Colonial Hierarchies in Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth’ achieving a 78/100 mark. I wanted to share it because I adored Split Tooth and its wonderfully confusing approach to sexuality, and it would be amazing if there was more noise about it both inside and outside of academia. I have edited it a little since it was marked, adding extra bits of context I had to take out due to word count restrictions and making the prose smoother, but please bear in mind the original context it was written in!

This essay was originally submitted as my undergraduate dissertation in English Literature, originally titled ’the new skin that had been born… of her bleeding: Purity, Puberty and Rewriting the Sadeian Fairy Tale in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories’, achieving a 70/100 mark. I decided I wanted to share it on my blog because it is my absolute baby: I put my heart and soul into this essay, and I was super happy to get a First on it. It definitely has its flaws; my main piece of feedback, that the second chapter on ‘Wolf-Alice’ doesn’t fit very well with the rest of my argument, is definitely true. However, since the ‘Wolf-Alice’ chapter was my favourite to write, I’ve left it in. I hope you enjoy reading it!