Essays

Once again, I am mindlessly scrolling Instagram. Once upon a time, I believed that my loyalty to this app lay in a desire to keep in touch with others, but I admit these days that this is a lie. When you are too worn out to concentrate on anything else, you, too, will understand the appeal of that instant flash of dopamine. I don’t know when the algorithm, the obedient robot that people treat like flesh, pinpointed me as someone easily hypnotised by make-up. It is a quick and satisfying fix. The artists in these videos draw a perfect line from A to B, and they are much better at it than me. They are prettier than me; they are wealthier than me. They always undergo a fairy-tale transformation from beautiful to more beautiful; their bare skin was covered with foundation and concealer before the camera even started to roll. They decorate their faces with the shapes favoured by modern fashion – sharp cheekbones, sharp eyeliner, full lips, thick lashes. They are usually women, and when they are not, they are homophobically harassed for their perfectionistic adherence to a female beauty standard in the comments.

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!