Analysis of Gender Crossing and Performativity in 'The Passion of New Eve'

The Passion of New Eve, with its focus on gender crossing and gender performativity, has been read as anticipating developments in queer theory. This essay will look at how the novel explores the idea of gender as a social construct. To do this, it will also discuss the concept of gender as performative and draw on such feminists as Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jeanette Winterson.

In his 1923 article ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth,’ T. S. Eliot hailed James Joyce as the inventor of the ‘mythic method’, saying that ‘Mr Joyce's parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has the importance of a scientific discovery’. This draws on writers’ tendencies to borrow from ancient myths in rewriting the world for their contemporaries. To an extent, Carter does this herself when writing such texts as the collection The Bloody Chamber, wherein she rewrites fairy tales, turning them upside and inside out.

However, since Carter regards all myths as 'extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree', she identifies herself as being more generally 'in the demythologising business'. This can be seen in The Bloody Chamber in the fact that although she does borrow from the old fairy tales, she does turn them on their head and rewrites them from an entirely new perspective. In The Passion of New Eve, it could be argued that Carter demythologises the concept of gender as it is commonly known and understood by the mainstream. The novel deals with the sensitive matter of gender confusion, the study of identity and self-discovery. In The Passion of New Eve, Carter identifies the fact that gender is viewed through a western phallocentric lens, and debates the questions of the male/female dialectic. She challenges social norms of gender binarism by promoting a more enlightened idea of gender identity, linking it to the psychological and emotional factors rather than the physical characteristics that usually assign people a gender at birth.

Sigmund Freud in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis quotes ‘when you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is ‘male or female?’’ Therefore, is it possible to make a binary distinction with ‘unhesitating uncertainty’ or are gender and sexual identity more performative than visible? There’s no doubt that there are physical differences between the sexes; this isn’t in dispute. But it’s almost certain that gender and biological sex are not the same things, with more research into this happening every day.

Judith Butler argues that gender ‘is the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance’ in her book Gender Troubles. In her The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir says, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’. Angela Carter appears to agree with these writers when she challenges and ultimately seems to reject the norms of gender binarism. ‘She works in a genre constructed as the antithesis of rationality and reason’ and this lends itself well to the representation of gender and sexuality in The Passion of New Eve.

Angela Carter is ‘critical of conceptual simplifications inherent in such binaries because they presuppose the assumption of universal or 'natural' concepts of 'woman' and 'man,'’ and so she seeks to ‘deconstruct this discourse by denaturalizing 'woman.'’ instead, turning ‘woman’ and ‘man’ into interchangeable entities in her novel. This is visible in both the character of Evelyn/Eve and Tristessa, and to a certain extent in the supporting characters also.

Simone de Beauvoir calls women the ‘second sex’, and by this, she means that the man is considered to be the standard, whereas the woman is defined in relation to the man. In Passion of New Eve, Evelyn becomes a woman; he was originally a man. Therefore Eve’s identity as a woman is defined as by no longer being the man she was as Evelyn. Her new identity is in relation to who she was as a man, and only in relation to this. Gender is constructed in relation to a phallogocentric societal authority that we, in general, accept as the norm.

Angela Carter, like Simone de Beauvoir rejects the idea of an essential and natural gender identity and stresses that masculinity and femininity are socially constructed, and therefore performed. She argues, through the characters in The Passion of New Eve that the identification of a gender should not be stigmatised with beliefs of the popular culture, but rather should be based on an individual’s feelings and behaviours. When Carter says that all myths are 'extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree' she also means the myth of gender. Carter believes that ‘all myths are products of the human mind and reflect only aspects of material human practices’ and this could be applied to the ‘the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions [that] is obscured by the credibility of its own production.’ The concept of gender as being traditionally binary is only a product of its own making. It is binary because one has become ‘entranced by their own fictions whereby the construction compels one's belief in its necessity and naturalness’ rather than because of anything compelling in nature.

The women in The Passion of New Eve exist in the middle of a phallocentric panopticon and, being so, are subjected to scrutiny, evaluation and judgment by a distorting male gaze. This can be seen when Eve has just been created, in the way Evelyn looks and reacts to this new body. The character of Eve, just after the operation has just been performed, is still Evelyn, but just in a ‘female’ body. Psychologically, he is still Evelyn, the man. Although he is quite aware of the change in the body, his mindset of a male being is still kept. He feels ‘a discrepancy between outward female appearance and a sense of himself as internally male’. He initially intends to reverse the surgery and therefore ‘reacts to the new female body as a garment he will wear only temporarily’. The Mother also knows that he needs to be programmed into performing as a woman and that the mere act of being in a female body is not enough to make someone a woman. She ensures that Evelyn, as Eve, is subjected to having to sit through hours upon hours of female related propaganda and similar things until Eve is fully conditioned to understand female suffering. It’s almost as if until Eve has the experiences that women have grown up dealing with, and readjusts his appropriating male gaze to include a female perspective, she cannot truly be a she, despite having all the necessary biological parts. Being in a female body is not enough to ensure femininity and until she has undertaken the programming, she lives in a liminality of gender-identity.

The Passion of New Eve can arguable be included in what is known as the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s in the United Kingdom. This focused very much on sexual identity and the idea of ‘coming out’ as an act of ‘authenticity, honesty and confession;’ defining ‘identity primarily in terms of sexuality’. Women at the time were focused less on trying to conform, but instead on a ‘stable understanding of difference which could be used to establish a consistent definition of alternative gendered or sexual identity capable of challenging the status quo’.

The Passion of New Eve illustrates the kind of reevaluation of gender roles and identities that an analysis of gender as performative encourages through its constant references to those stereotypical gender roles and what it means to be a member of those genders.