In 1977, Angela Carter contributed one of her more playful post-modern texts, The Passion of New Eve. In this chapter, mechanisation in industry, post-modernism, continued discrimination and The Passion Of New Eve will be examined.
It could be argued that, if anything, the nature of an industrialised society works in favour of people with disabilities. Work that previously required manual skills is being carried out by machinery. For example, the widespread use of computers in factories, motorized wheelchairs and the employment of robot arms in the process of car manufacturing. However, it is the physical manipulation of the human body and mind that form the central plot of Angela Carter's The Passion Of New Eve.
She portrays one of her characters, Zero, as not only disabled, in that he had only one leg and one eye, but he was also impotent, insane and violent to the women he kept in a harem-like situation. These are curious aspects to assign to a disabled man when we realize that Carter was not particularly prejudiced. Hermione Lee cites John Bayley's comment,
Indeed if there is a common factor in the elusive category of the postmodernist
novel it is political correctness: whatever spirited arabesques and feats of
descriptive imagination Carter may perform she always comes to rest in the
right ideological position. (Lee in Sage 1994, 309)
So, Carter sticks to the "party line" of post-modernism as far as being politically correct is concerned. It might be that the term "politically correct" as cited by Lee only refers to equal rights for women and does not extend to the representation of people with disabilities. However it still seems odd that Carter would make such an obvious attempt to express disablist views. It has been stated by Carter, "One of the snags is that I do put everything in a novel to be read [...] on as many levels as you can comfortably cope with at the time." (Carter in Gamble 2001, 90). That is to say, there are many layers to this nightmarish, bizarre vision of the world. Carter also seems to suggest that there are levels with which the reader might not be immediately able to cope.
The transformation of Evelyn into Eve gives the character aspects of the male fantasy of a "perfect woman". A woman, who nevertheless, partially retains her male psyche and this, in turn, arouses both the woman and man in Eve / Evelyn. The discovery of Tristessa in a revolving building expresses, perhaps, the dizzying uncertainty of Carter's world. In this unstable world lives a person who might be regarded as deformed, Tristessa - the woman, who is found to be a man. Evelyn as Eve finally achieves his dream of making love to Tristessa. Even that ambition is turned on its head and they do make love but with Tristessa as the male and Evelyn the female. Eve's pleasure is cruelly curtailed by Tristessa's almost instantaneous ejaculation leaving her unsatisfied.
Confusion of identity, uncertainty and fear about the future are symbolized in
Carter's writing. Which takes us back to Carter's attitude to a disabled man - why are two disabilities linked to a mad, women-beating, sterile self-proclaimed poet?
I suggest that Carter uses Zero in juxtaposition to Eve. In other words Eve, although physically a woman has retained part of her / his masculinity, but is now sterile as far as fathering a child is concerned. Zero's character is an extreme portrayal of male aggressiveness but is, like Eve, incapable of impregnating a woman.
The phallus of Zero's wooden leg is contradictory to his half-blindness. The phallic symbol denotes male power and the partial sightedness portrays castration, or in Zero's case, sterility. Interpreting a scene from A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess. Bolt states,
Indeed, the phallic signification of power is no greater than when the milk bottle smashes into Alex's face, which marks the very onset of his blindness. . . the phallus is in Alex's possession when he is the sighted perpetrator of a brutal attack, a symbolic rape, but not when he becomes the blind victim of a comparable violation. (Bolt 2004, 7)
These symbols of virility and sterility therefore cancel each other out. The insistence that his poetry should be delivered in animalistic grunts and that his harem should no longer communicate with words is interesting. It seems to symbolise the gradual regression of Zero to the animal state, he appears to want his sexual partners to travel the same path. Of the main protagonists, Zero, Evelyn and Tristessa; Zero is the only one to have not been changed with a view to improving his character. Whereas Eve has become almost a cyborg and represents the evolution of the human race using genetic engineering.
