Review: The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter

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.

Descend lower. You have not reached the end of the maze, yet.

As part of my ongoing project to reinterpret 20th-century fabulist and pervert Angela Carter through a, frankly, self-serving transgender lens, I picked up The Passion of New Eve. After spending my undergraduate dissertation valiantly reinterpreting ‘Wolf-Alice’ as a genderqueer masterpiece, I thought that Carter’s forced-feminisation novel was a very sensible next step. Bizarre, uncomfortable, unsatisfying yet exactly what I expected, New Eve is a grotesque nightmare in every sense of the word: disgusting, violent, transphobic and decadent, wrapped up in something like a pubescent egg-about-to-crack’s fever dream. I have no idea if I loved it or hated it, if I was disturbed or enchanted – the confusing mix of emotions that keeps bringing me back to Carter again and again.

I first heard about New Eve in a YouTube video I watched years ago, which I remember describing the plot roughly as: a misogynistic Englishman travels to America, and gets turned into a woman by a female separatist cult to make him to atone for his masculine sins. While all of this is technically true, it really only scratches the surface of what on earth is going on in this novel. Fleeing New York after impregnating a Jeanne-Duval-esque sex worker, Leilah, our protagonist Evelyn gets lost in the desert, the post-menopausal part of the earth (a deliciously colonial descriptor), travelling from violent place to violent place because he simply doesn’t know what else to do. Stylistically, New Eve is the kind of strange, meandering adventure novel Carter (sort of) perfected in Nights at the Circus. The narrative is haunted by Tristessa, a Golden Age of Hollywood star who has been variously compared to Greta Garbo and Candy Darling, though I’d like to throw Blanche Dubois into the mix. The priestesses of Cybele model Evelyn’s new femininity on Tristessa’s onscreen persona. The twist? Tristessa is… a man?

I would argue she isn’t and never was, while Eve remains a man until the novel’s very end, but my perspective is coloured by 21st century transfeminism.

I was quite surprised to learn, after a little bit of research on finishing the novel, that Carter was publicly hostile to drag queens (see Mulvey-Roberts¹), citing a reason reminiscent of the modern TERF’s favourite talking point, autogynephilia. Andrea Long Chu explores autogynephilia from a transfeminine perspective in her essay Females, defining the term as ‘a… fundamental erotic investment in the idea of the self as female’.² The term was coined in the 1980s by Ray Blanchard, after New Eve was published. Chu notes that, since its popularisation by J. Michael Bailey in the 2000s, ’the theory has thus become a touchstone for trans-hating feminists looking to cast trans women as male perverts’.³ Always ahead of her time, this is why it confused me to see Carter espousing it. Given her liberal, fascinated attitude to male sexuality in The Sadeian Woman, and indeed throughout her work, this strikes me as quite a discordant bigotry.

The premise of autogynephilia is definitely present in Carter’s portrayal of transfemininity in New Eve. Far from experiencing gender dysphoria after his forced transition, Eve describes his new female body as ‘[his] own masturbatory fantasy’.⁴ He desires Tristessa because her femininity reflects back his own: ‘I saw in [her] face how beautiful I was’.⁵ Eve doesn’t think of himself as a woman, but he’s ambivalent about it; his erotic feelings come as a pleasant surprise, and everything else is simply… there. He occupies a strange, fluid middle ground, where his body isn’t quite his, but he is still capable of feeling the pain that it represents – sexual violence, fear of pregnancy, objectification and condescension. His narration moves between the masculine and the feminine. I wonder if this was the book that made Robert Clark claim Carter writes in ‘male chauvinist drag’?⁶ Eve is Zero’s feminised wife, Tristessa’s feminised lover – and a man on the run. He sees something of himself in the lost, radicalised teenage boys that take him hostage. He is, very convincingly, a man trapped in a woman’s body, bewildered at everything that that represents.

However, Eve hardly lusts over becoming a woman. The possibility doesn’t seem to have ever crossed his mind: ‘Sometimes, I’d amuse myself by tying a girl to the bed before I copulated with her,’ he tells us at the novel’s beginning; ‘Apart from that, I was completely normal.’⁷ After reading Evelyn’s violent sexual relationship with Leilah, I find this so-called sexual normativity debatable, an instance of astute Carter irony. Nevertheless, Eve’s sexuality is not orientated towards his femininity until much later in the story.

In the character of Tristessa is where it gets muddy. We finally meet Tristessa at the novel’s halfway point, and quickly learn that she is biologically male. Before that, her Hollywood persona, fragile femininity incarnate, hangs over the text. She is central to the education of Eve in his desire for women, then in womanhood itself. She is the object of Zero’s extreme misogyny. The revelation that Tristessa has a penis is the novel’s central, brilliant irony. But Tristessa herself is an uncomfortably 1970s portrayal of transfemininity.

That was why he had been the perfect man’s woman! He had made himself into the shrine of his own desires, had made of himself the only woman he could have loved! If a woman is indeed beautiful only in so far as she incarnates most completely the secret aspirations of man, no wonder Tristessa had been able to become the most beautiful woman in the world, […] How could a real woman ever have been so much a woman as you [Tristessa]?⁸

She is stripped naked, objectified, sexually humiliated, misgendered and degendered, forced to perform sex by Zero, then, dubiously, by Eve. Ultimately, she is shot dead for her perceived perversions. It is not uncommon for Carter to portray her women through the lens of sexual violence and objectification (her alleged feminism was never straightforward), but Tristessa’s characterisation lacks a level of introspection that would render her sympathetic. She is a difficult character to read, far more symbol than woman.

And yet, in spite of New Eve’s TERF-y take on transfemininity, Carter leaves one question unanswered: why is becoming a woman Eve’s punishment? In a world where female separatist, misandrist groups are, ostensibly, some of the most powerful in America, is it really subjugation to turn men into women if women are now the people in charge? Furthermore, if Tristessa’s femininity is nothing but a male fantasy of female masochism, why do so-called radical feminists hold her on a pedestal? According to the priestesses of Cybele, in order to be a woman one must suffer under patriarchy. But why? How can defining womanhood as pain ever be anything other than a male fantasy? Carter’s satire of female separatism exposes its ideological circularity: its deepening of gender binaries masquerading as escape.

I wish radfems really had gone down the ideological route of forced transition.

I want to highlight Carter’s Orientalism, which serves as a not-insignificant backdrop to the story. Carter approaches black characters voyeuristically, under the weak veneer of satire. While Leilah’s characterisation is established through Eve’s biased narration, and ultimately revealed to be a ruse, Leilah, like Tristessa, exists as more symbol than woman, more object than character. Why is the only possibility for a black woman in this novel to be the daughter of a many-breasted fertility goddess? In New Eve, black womanhood is synonymous with sexuality, fertility and the feminisation of white men. I am, additionally, frustrated with Carter’s approach to the desert as a wasteland designed to trap and change a white man. The possibility of an Indigenous future is completely absent from this apocalypse, oddly, I feel, given that the plot is driven by the restructuring of a colonial social hierarchy.

The Passion of New Eve is not the transfeminist fantasy novel of my dreams. But I’m glad I read it; I definitely gained something from it. It affirmed to me that, while we may be able trace the roots modern TERF and transphobic views back to the radical feminism of the 70s and 80s, we can’t wholly blame TERFism on the 20th century, because it is an ideology entirely dependent on cultural context. What can the strange ramblings of one weirdo from the 70s prove to us about transphobia and feminism? With Carter clearly completely wrong on what male-to-female physical transition actually entails here in the 21st century, evidently not a great deal. But this leaves the novel - and indeed, other 20th century texts like it - fascinatingly open. As Carter herself famously claimed, the reader is as much in control of the production of meaning as the writer.⁹ The novel’s final note on Eve’s gender is ambiguous: she is presented with the penis that was removed in Beulah, and she turns it down. Her gender no longer centres the symbol that her masculinity previously relied on. Carter, I think, is suggesting that Eve has become, through her experiences, a woman – thus ending the story on a pretty pro-trans note. It’s definitely in this moment that I finally began to read Eve as a woman.

But I want to write another meaning into the ambiguity of her decision. What if, through her experiences, Eve learnt to open herself up to a world where the phallus is just… there? Not a symbol of anything: not of masculinity, power, fertility, not even violence towards women? In rejecting the phallus, she also rejects a male definition of womanhood, one where Woman is defined by what the phallus is to her. Eve, the tabula rasa, is ready to inscribe her own meanings into her body, outside of patriarchal ideals of gender altogether.

I originally read the scene where Eve and Tristessa have sex as an example of Eve fetishising her female body by focusing her desire entirely inward, on her body’s capacity to be done to. I’ve changed my mind. Yes, the scene suffers the same issues of misgendering as the rest of the novel, but it’s a beautifully written scene of female-centred eroticism. Eve loses herself, for the first time, in the capacity of her body for real desire: her ability to want, and to be wanted; to see and be seen. No longer the violent man of the novel’s beginning, desire, not pain, teaches New Eve to be a woman.