‘Violent Operations’: Revisiting the Transgendered Body in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve

Abstract

This article examines representations of the transgendered body in Angela Carter's 1977 speculative fiction The Passion of New Eve. More specifically, it compares the depiction of a post-operative male-to-female transsexual (Evelyn/Eve), who has been subjected to forcible sex reassignment surgery, with a non-operative male-to-female transsexual (Tristessa), who elects to pass as a woman. The writing of Angela Carter (1940–1992) is commonly situated within the context of Second Wave feminism and her preoccupation with the exposure of femininity as an ideological construction is characteristic of this movement. However, Carter's work has more recently been revisited within the framework of queer theory, with Trevenna (2002) describing the ‘Butlerification’ of her writing. Prosser (1998) has noted how the transgendered subject has been figured as a ‘key queer trope’ and Halberstam (2000) has commented on the ways in which the transgendered figure has been read as revealing the ‘constructedness of all sex and gender’; in this context, The Passion of New Eve, with its focus on gender crossing and gender performativity, has been read as anticipating developments in queer theory. However, Carter's novel also features motifs which Prosser and Halberstam have identified as symptomatic of transphobic discourses, including the ‘exposure’ of the transgendered person as inauthentic and the depiction of sex reassignment surgery as an act of material and symbolic violence. Indeed, transgendered lives have been met with suspicion and hostility in some feminist contexts, sentiments given expression in Janice C. Raymond's (1979) assertion that ‘all transsexuals rape women's bodies’. With a focus on textual motifs of sexualised violence, this article seeks to revisit Carter's novel and its reception from the perspective of transgender theory; by questioning the recuperation of Carter's work as anticipating queer theory avant la lettre, this article seeks to explore tensions between feminist and queer positions on the politics of sexed identity.

Keywords:

• transgender
• queer theory
• feminist theory
• Angela Carter
• The Passion of New Eve

Notes

¹Trevenna argues that there are ‘divergences between Carter's overtly theatrical presentation of “gender as performance” and Butler's theories of “gender as performative”’ (Trevenna 2002: 268).

²See Judith Butler's preface to the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble, first published in 1990.

³I will refer to the pre-operative protagonist as ‘Evelyn’ and the ‘post-operative’ as ‘Eve’ to indicate the differently sexed positions to which the narrator is assigned at specific temporal locations in the text. I will refer to Tristessa as ‘she’ throughout, in recognition of her elective gendered identification.

⁴Lilith speculates, ‘What if Tristessa made you pregnant? … Your baby will have two fathers and two mothers’, and Eve remarks that ‘[Lilith] took it for granted that I was pregnant’ (Carter 1977: 187). While Lilith's authority may be in doubt, her supposition is pre-empted by Eve's anticipation of her own ‘tribute to evolution’ (ibid.: 186). The status of Eve's pregnancy is not absolutely resolved at the end of the novel, but the possibility that Eve—as a male-to-female transgendered person—may have conceived serves an important symbolic purpose in distinguishing her from Tristessa.

⁵See Eng et al.: ‘what might be called the “subjectless” critique of queer studies disallows any positing of a proper subject of or object for the field by insisting that queer has no fixed political referent’ (Eng et al. 2005: 3; original emphasis).

⁶Interestingly, Eve is spared a similar exposure as a former man. While the reader is party to this history, Eve is never made vulnerable to the consequences of public knowledge. So convincing is Eve's new body in this speculative novel that the question of her capacity to pass as a woman, in the absence of any subjective feminine identification, is effectively suspended. While Eve is far from safe as a woman, she is never at serious risk as a transgendered person.

⁷Edelman writes that the figure of the child, including the unborn child, has ‘come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust’ (Edelman 2004: 11).