Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve was first published in 1977. It depicts the story of Evelyn, an English teacher who is hired in a university in New York, who will quickly notice that the city is in decay: rats invade the streets, and human beings seem literally disconnected from their own feelings. Now, it is a city of ''desolation'' and ''chaos''. At the beginning of chapter two, we are learned that the hotel where Evelyn is staying catches fire ''in the early hours of the morning''. However, it is said that ''nobody knew how to express panic, in spite of an overwhelming sense of catastrophe''. Here, the citizens appear as not knowing anymore how to deal with feelings, such as fear or panic. Thus, especially at night, the city is depicted through an apocalyptic vision, without any glimpse of civilization, since there is no communication between human beings anymore. However, panic eventually seizes the occupants of the hotel: ''but only after the all-clear was sounded, and only then when it was broad daylight and therefore safe to panic, as if the terror of the night could only be acknowledged in the day, when they did not exist.''
Evelyn appears as a machist male, and one of his first characterization is his fascination for the american silent movie-star Tristessa de St Ange. It is a first-person narrative, so we follow the story through Evelyn's point of view. It is interesting to notice that we scarcely find dialogues throughout the novel. Each scene is mainly reported through Evelyn's words. Thus, it is a very subjective narration and the reliability of the narrator is at stake from the very beginning of the novel. Evelyn appears as the archetype of the machist male, who evokes women as a whole and seems to have no more than sex with her: ''I heard this otherwise forgotten girl murmur my name, ''Evelyn'' and to my surprise, to my furious embarrassment, I discovered she was crying for I felt her tears leak on to my kness. Crying, perhaps, to lose me, was she? How cruel I felt, when I thought that!''
Ultimately, one of the last part of Chapter One somehow reveals the origins of Evelyn's behaviour towards women, from his point of view: ''As far as I can remember, this girl had grey eyes and a certain air of childlike hesitancy. I always like that particular quality in a woman for my nanny, although sentimental, had had a marked sadistic streak and I suppose I must have acquired an ambivalent attitude towards women from her. Sometimes I'd amuse myself by tying a girl to the bed before I copulated with her. Apart from that, I was perfectly normal.'' Here, Evelyn evokes her nanny, which induces the question of the mother: where is she? Actually, the evocation of the nanny stresses the absence of the mother.
Later, Evelyn has a relationship with Leilah, a dancer whom he is deadly attracted to. When they finally have sex, it is said: ''I was nothing but cock''. A few pages later, it is said: ''As soon as I knew she was carrying a child, any remaining of desire for her vanished. She became only embarrassment to me. She became a shocking inconvenience to me''. What a frame for a one-membered male!
This first part of the novel is setting the decaying city of New York, where human beings even shot rats and seem to be alienated from their own body and feelings and do not communicate with each others anymore. It also gives us a big amount of details about the main character's profile, Evelyn, who appears at first sight as a male whom desire and sex lead the life.
The turning point of the novel occures when Evelyn is brung to Mother, a Mother Goddess figure in the subterranean city of Beulah, Arabian desert. Ultimately, Mother transforms Evelyn into a woman by surgery: Evelyn becomes Eve. Later, the new Eve flees the city, for Mother wants to inoculate her her own sperm, in order to give birth to a new kind of Messiah. However, Eve is kidnapped and enslaved and finally raped by a male ''poet'' named Zero who owns a harem where women have pigs for bedfellows. What a lark ! Ultimately, Zero helps Eve finding Tristessa de St Ange, for he is convinced that she is responsible of his sterility... The harem, Zero and Eve get to and destroy Tristessa's glass Palace, for finally discovering that Tristessa... was a male.
The novel literally deals with the reversal of genres. Males and females appear as "interchangeable", for human-beings are literally dismembered. The gender issue is at stake. Angela Carter seems to tell us that there is not such clear boundaries between the one and the other.
The mother figure appears to be another central question of Carter's work. First, we have seen that remembering his childhood, Evelyn does not mention his mother, but his nanny. Second, Evelyn is fascinated by Tristessa de St Ange, whom he considers as divine, especially for ''Tristessa's specialty had been suffering. Suffering was her vocation. She suffered exquisitely''. Finally, Evelyn only shares sex with women. He rejects them when they become literally ''something else'' than an appealing object. Ultimately, the question to be asked could expose to what extent this narrative runs the road of ''Revenge'', for the new Eve is going through a large amount of women's ordeal, as if to say; reduced as a baby-carrier by Mother, or enslaved and raped by Zero. Such as in Takashi Miike's Audition, violence is binary: it comes from females and males become oppressed victims and objects. Male body is reduced, since the only male of the novel –except Tristessa; Zero– has only one eye and one leg... whereas female body is emphasized with Mother Goddess, described as twice Evelyn's size.
Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve eventually evokes the Passion of the Christ. Throughout the novel, Eve(lyn) carries male's guilt (''...hour after hour was devoted to the relation of the horrors my old sex had perpetrated on my new one...'') such as Jesus buries the Croix of "men's guilt". Having suffered from enslavment and rape, she ultimately plunges into the ocean, this ''mother of mysteries (...), to the place of birth.'' Forgiveness, self-forgiveness and understanding between ''genders'' would lead to the birth of a new world. Wouldn't they?
