Neither Patriarchy nor Matriarchy : The Birth of New Eve in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve

Abstract

My reading of Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve concerns the way the novel engages itself with the current feminist discourse. In my view, Carter in The Passion of New Eve not only criticises the patriarchal definition of women by parodically rewriting the traditional images of women in Judaeo-Christian culture such as Eve, Lilith, and Virgin Mary, but also questions the kind of feminist thought that invokes the ancient figure of the mother goddess as an empowering image for women. For Carter, to return to matriarchy only ends up in the inverted form of sexism, and to do so means to be caught up again in the system of binary oppositions. In this novel about a man who involuntarily undergoes a physical and psychological transformation into a woman, Carter suggests that the possibility of freedom for both women and men should lie only in the constant interchange between the two, i.e., man and woman, father and mother, consciousness and unconsciousness, self and the other, and so on.