The entire story is haunted by Tristessa. At first, she appears as a two dimensional character on the cinema screen and a goddess to which Evelyn offers, "a little tribute of spermatozoa." (Carter 1977, 5). However she is the driving force behind Eve and Zero's quests.
We read in Sellers,
Tristessa's allure lies in her passive acceptance of others' projections. Evelyn's journey to America will paradoxically take him to Tristessa, and to the discovery that Tristessa's immaculate femininity depends on his being a man. (Sellers 2001, 110)
Since the desert can be viewed as a sterile and hostile place, Carter uses it to represent Zero's character as well as his medical condition, that of sterility. When Eve first encounters Zero, she says of him,
Zero the poet adored the desert because he hated humanity. He had only the one eye and that was of an insatiable blue; he covered his empty socket with a black patch. (PNE, 85)
His "insatiable" blue eye may be an ironic use of the term, "male gaze" defined by Laura Mulvey in her essay "Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema" (1975, which "started the debate by demonstrating the domination of the male gaze." (Hayward 2000, 179). The irony being that the "woman" he dominates with his gaze is a transsexual and symbolized by his only having one eye. In other words, half a "gaze" is being directed upon a person who is physically a woman but psychologically still a man.
The Evelyn made Eve persona needs Tristessa to reaffirm his/her manhood and Zero needs her to restore his virility. As the character of Eve remarks, "I learned to my incredulity, that this man believed the movie actress had performed a spiritual vasectomy on him." (PNE, 92). Now that Zero is infertile, it could be that Carter suggests he feels less manly and is trying to reassert his masculinity. Even his name, as he says, "I am Zero" (PNE, 102), could be reinterpreted as "I am nothing".
The symbolism of the circle or zero as explained by Carter in her reading of The Sadeian Woman: An exercise in Cultural History by the Marquis de Sade is discussed by Sellers,
In her controversial reading of the pornographic writings of an eighteenth century French Marquis de Sade, The Sadeian Women: An Exercise In Cultural History,
Carter further develops her analysis of myth. The male is positive, an exclamation mark. Woman is negative. Between her legs lies nothing but zero, the sign for nothing, that only becomes something when the male principle fills it with meaning. She attacks this mythic description for dealing in what she calls "false universals since it ignores the complexity of individuals as well as the mutability of history. (Sellers 2001, 108)
However, Eve is now literally a changed person which anticipates the science of genetic manipulation. The grotesque "Mother' has also been changed with surgery and these changes deliver a warning about genetic tampering. It is interesting to note that Carter's character Evelyn is a male in Britain and becomes female whilst in America. The USA is famous for its progress in many areas, designing more efficient military weapons, space exploration, industrialization and medical science. It is perhaps appropriate therefore, that a radical change such as Evelyn's should take place there. The removal of the second half of Evelyn's name reducing it to "Eve" could be seen as a metaphor for his emasculation
Clearly it would be easy to accuse Carter of portraying a disabled man in a negative light. However, she also points to the deformity of "Mother"s' extra breasts. At the time of the novel's publication, many people may have regarded Evelyn's sex change and Tristessa's transvestism as abnormalities. But whatever her reasoning, it is essential to read The Passion Of New Eve with an understanding of its author's innate playfulness if one is to become comfortable with its many levels.
