The Passion of New Eve

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Literary Fantasy Parcel, # 2: Metamorphoses

 

I’m almost finished with the holiday gift fuss.  I’m  assembling book parcels, tied up with a ribbon and tucked into  cotton bookstore bags.  Every year I organize my book parcels by theme, hoping a stack of themed books will entice readers.   I am happy if my friends read one or two of the two-to-three books in the parcel.  (See yesterday’s post.)

This year’s theme is “Literary Fantasy.”  Why?  It has been a strange year. Reading fantastic literature teaches us about our conscious and unconscious selves, and can make us see our world differently.   We are still mourning the election, and our society doesn’t seem to be going in the right direction.  And so let’s read some fantasy.

Literary Parcel, # 2:  Metamorphosis

Woolf penguin Orlando+cover1. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. 

Orlando is one of Woolf’s lightest books, dedicated to Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West. In Alexandra’ Harris’s Virginia Woolf, a wonderful short book about Woolf’s life and work, she says that Woolf’s teasing novel is a a fanciful biography of Vita Sackville-West, with a tip of the hat to her ancestors. And it had the tone of Woolf’s playful letters to Sackville-West. The hero, Orlando, is a beautiful androgynous man, a courtier, and an aspiring poet. He lives for more than three centuries, first as a man and then as a woman.  There’s too much whimsy in this fantasy for my taste, but Woolf’s writing is gorgeous, especially her description of a Renaissance winter festival on the frozen Thames. You can read my post on Orlando here.

2. Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 

Ovid’s epic poem, a collection of Greek and Roman myths linked by the theme of metamorphosis, is the most brilliant fantastic comedy I have ever read.  As Ovid describes the clash between gods and ovid-metamorphoses-folio-mtsgoddesses, and their bizarre obliviousness and frequent violence toward human beings, we begin to understand our own reality and, beyond that, change and entropy.  We witness the extent of Ovid’s joyousness in his mythic exploration of metamorphosis in an imperfect world.  His style  is bubbly and elegant at the same time. His  descriptions of nature are charming and lovely, and his characters jump out of his vivid verbal sketches. There is much absurdity in Ovid:  Apollo, struck by Cupid’s arros, falls in love with the  nymph Daphne and asks her  to run a little slower so he can catch  her, but she prefers to turn into a tree than “marry” him, because she is a virgin dedicated to the goddess Diana.  At the same time as we laugh at Apollo, we imagine the nymph Daphne’s terror as she prays to her father, who tries to persuade her Apollo would be a good match.  In the end she turns into a laurel tree, which Apollo obnoxiously claims as his own.  So she gets away, but does she?

Here is an excerpt from Apollo’s comic complaint to Daphne

…But I, who follow,
Am not a foe at all. Love makes me follow,
Unhappy fellow that I am, and fearful
You may fall down, perhaps, or have the briars
Make scratches on those lovely legs, unworthy
To be hurt so, and I would be the reason.
The ground is rough here. Run a little slower,
And I will run, I promise, a little slower.
—Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translated by Rolfe Humphries

 

humphries-ovid_meta1Like Apollo, many of the gods are bullies and even rapists, but the goddesses can be equally violent: in the moving story of Ceres and Proserpina, Ceres punishes the world with drought as she searches the earth for her lost daughter.  She turns an insolent boy into an owl to vent her rage at a rude remark. Finally she learns that Hades, king of the Underworld, abducted Proserpina. Ceres appeals to Jove, who is Proserpina’s father, but he believes Hades is a good match for her.  Ceres brokers a deal whereby Proserpina lives half the year above ground (and that’s how we get spring and summer).

As Woolf in Orlando, Ovid is also fascinated by the blurring of gender and the sexes. The story of Tiresias is short and strange:  he sees two serpents mating and strikes them apart and then is turned into a woman for seven eyars; seven years later he sees them again and does the same thing so he can turn back into a man.  It does not end well:  Jove and Juno have argued about who has more sexual pleasure, men or women, and Tiresias says women do.  Juno, furious that he disagreed with her, blinds him as a punishment, but Jove tries to compensate by giving him the gift of prophecy. Some compensation, some of us would think.

Ovid understands the randomness of fate. A lucky, lucky reader will get this in her Christmas parcel.

The Passion of New Eve angela carter 51BAQglKXzL._SX319_BO1,204,203,200_3. Angela Carter’s The Passion of the New Eve.  At the British Library, I saw the manuscript of Carter’s The Passion of the New Eve in a display case, and decided I wanted to read it.  A few blocks away at Skoob, a used bookstore, I found a copy.  I cannot pretend it is my favorite book by Carter, but it does fit in well with Orlando and Ovid.

In The Passion of New Eve, a surreal novel rich with symbolism and satire, she walks a fine line between feminism and tedium. In Carter’s mordant exploration of what it means to be female in a post-apocalyptic society, the ideal woman is defined by men in Hollywood, or by a cult of militant Earth-worshipping female plastic surgeons.

This novel is Carter’s homage to the myth of Tiresias, the Greek prophet who spent part of his life as a man and part as a woman. (Naturally, being a woman was best.) Well, the story is part Tiresias myth anyway: the rest is Caitlyn Jenner crossed with Charlie’s Angels.

You can read the rest of this post here.

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Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve

The Passion of New Eve angela carter 51BAQglKXzL._SX319_BO1,204,203,200_I read a lot of literature by women, and when I am over-tired, as I have been lately, I read little else.

Why?  Because I understand it perfectly.  It expresses what I feel.  It explores psychological issues that interest me.

But an excess of feminine consciousness can be a burden even for us feminist readers.

Angela Carter has written exquisite masterpieces, and she has written uneven novels. Her baroque style is hypnotic; her imagery is colorful and original.  In The Passion of New Eve, a surreal novel rich with symbolism and satire, she walks a fine line between feminism and tedium.   In Carter’s mordant exploration of what it means to be female in a post-apocalyptic society, the ideal woman is defined by men in Hollywood, or by a cult of militant Earth-worshipping female plastic surgeons.

This novel is Carter’s homage to the myth of Tiresias, the Greek prophet who spent part of his life as a man and part as a woman.  (Naturally, being a woman was best.)   Well, the story is part Tiresias myth anyway: the rest is Caitlyn Jenner crossed with Charlie’s Angels.

The gender issues that dominate the text are apparent from the opening page.  When we first meet the narrator, Evelyn, a selfish, sexist young  Englishman  who has long been obsessed with a movie star, Tristessa, he is about to move to New York City.  He describes his last night in London at a Tristessa film with “some girl or other” (this is typical of his attitude) while paying a tribute “of spermatazoa” to the actress via the mediation of his companion.   He adores but is also cynical bout Tristessa, who has  “executed her symbolic autobiography in arabesques of kitsch and hyperbole yet transcended the rhetoric of vulgarity by exemplifying it with a heroic lack of compromise.”

virago carter-passion_of_new_eveThis lack of compromise sums up what  Evelyn looks for in the very feminine women he pursues. When he arrives in New York to peddle his scholarship at a university, the teaching job no longer exists, because the university has been seized by a group of black radicals. New York is riddled by rats, race riots, violent radical feminists, crime, and gunfire.  On his first night in New York, there is either a fire or just a fire alarm at the hotel:  it’s hard to tell. Even after his only friend, an alchemist neighbor, is murdered outside a store, Evelyn spends  time in the streets.  One night he unwisely follows home Leila, an African-American dancer with painted nipples. He says he has never met  such “a slave to style.”  When she isn’t combing her hair or putting on makeup, they have torrid sex, and sometimes he leaves her tied up to the bed until she defecates.  After she has an abortion by a witchdoctor and almost bleeds to death, he gives her money at the hospital and says good-bye. Then he takes a road trip.  His destination:  the desert.

Carter’s descriptions of his adventures are psychedelic and indelibly printed on my brain because of the colorful imagery.  Her prose is also threaded with flamboyant humor.

On a road that ran into an insane landscape of pale rock, honeycombed peak upon peak in unstable, erratic structures, calcified assemblages of whiteness and silence where jostling pebbles marked the paths of rivers that dried up before time began, where snakes and lizards rustled in the grey sand, where buzzards floated in the sky.  I ran out of gas and so found myself entirely at the desert’s mercy.

If you like her style, you like it.  If you don’t, you don’t.  I admire her prose, but find the story a little lacklustre, if often very funny.

After Evelyn’s  car breaks down in the desert, Evelyn is abducted by a cult of militant one-breasted women, a la Amazons,  to an underground city.  They surgically change  him into the women of their dreams.  Well, of somebody’s dreams anyway.  They castrate him, build a vagina, and enhance his breasts.  She looks like a perky Charlie’s Angel by the time they’re done with him.  They have saved a sample of his sperm and hope to impregnate him with it.

Angela Carter

                   Angela Carter

But as you can imagine, this scene of Evelyn’s transformation is ghastly and terrifying, despite Carter’s black humor.  After he recovers from the surgery, he escapes.  Not for long, though.  He is out only a few hours when he is  abducted by yet a worse cult led a misogynist named Zero, who has  seven women slaves.  Zero is as obsessed with  the movie star Tristessa as Evelyn is.  When Zero finally finds Tristessa’s hideout, the actress is as melancholy as her name.  Zero intends to kill Tristessa, but Tristessa has a side to her nature that no one was aware of…  Evelyn and Tristessa almost escape.

All the American women characters are caricatures, it would seem, and when Leila turns up again, she is no longer a dancer but a militant. (It’s a long story.)   Leila helps Evelyn accept being the new Eve.  Still, Eve isn’t going to be a passive object for one of the cults. She has her own idea of what to do with her life.

But what is Carter getting at?  In this satire, men are the perfect male-identified women. Are men better women than women are?    Militant women are just as bad as men in Hollywood about pursuing their myths.  In the end, only Evelyn is sympathetic. Is that the joke?

Carter knew what she was doing, and I’d have to read it twice to comprehend her meaning entirely.   It is good in its way, but unfortunately I don’t like it enough to reread it.