Novel: The Passion of New Eve

Overview

Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve is a bold, unsettling exploration of gender, identity, and power framed as a dark, allegorical odyssey. The narrative centers on a man named Evelyn who, after a violent encounter, is forced to undergo a sex change and reemerges as Eve. What begins as a grotesque physical transformation quickly blossoms into a psychological and cultural journey across a fractured, dreamlike America where myth, politics, and desire collide.
Carter uses lush, often savage prose to interrogate the stories that shape sex and identity. The novel overturns biblical and literary archetypes while simultaneously staging a trenchant critique of patriarchal fantasies and the violence they both conceal and enact.

Plot

Evelyn starts as a self-absorbed male protagonist whose experiences and fantasies entangle him with a charismatic performer and the darker currents of American society. After being betrayed and mutilated, Evelyn is remade into Eve. This forced conversion is neither simple redemption nor mere punishment; it propels Eve into a bewildering, episodic journey through cities and hinterlands that have lost their bearings.
Eve's travels expose a landscape populated by fanatics, survivors, and theatrical figures who enact extreme roles of domination and submission. Encounters range from grotesque displays of authoritarian masculinity to secretive female communities that offer both refuge and new forms of constraint. Each episode functions as a test of identity and agency, blurring the boundary between victim and participant as Eve searches for a voice and a self beyond imposed narratives.

Themes

The novel interrogates the construction of gender as performance, history, and myth. Carter refuses to treat the sex-change episode as purely medical or liberatory; instead she uses it to dramatize how bodies are inscribed with cultural stories and how violence often underwrites the power to name and command. Biblical motifs, particularly the figure of Eve, are refracted to question origins, sin, and the cost of rebirth.
Power and language are central concerns. The protagonists' encounters reveal how rhetoric and spectacle produce authority, and how narratives of romance, revolution, and paternal protection can mask exploitation. Sexual politics, sadomasochism, colonial iconography, and the commodification of desire all arrive as overlapping metaphors for control. Carter's satire is at once erotic and political, refusing neat moral summaries while insisting on the real-world stakes of imagination.

Style and Reception

Carter's prose in The Passion of New Eve is baroque, ferocious, and playfully intertextual, blending fairy-tale logic with pulp, myth, and feminist polemic. The book shocks and seduces in equal measure, using grotesque imagery and rhetorical excess to destabilize received categories and to force readers into uncomfortable reflection.
Critics and readers have long valued the novel for its daring formal leaps and its uncompromising willingness to take feminist questions into transgressive, sometimes disturbing terrains. Responses range from admiration for its imaginative power and sharp critique to discomfort with its explicit violence and sexualized cruelty. The Passion of New Eve endures as a provocative, hybrid work: a cautionary fable, a bitter satire, and a lyrical indictment of any culture that tries to fix people into simple, immutable roles.