The Passion of New Eve: Bisexuality and Fragmentation through Synecdoche
Angela Carter's novel, The Passion of New Eve introduces the reader to a dystopian vision of America. The social upheaval of the 1970's is presented in hyperbole: conflicts surrounding racial and gender equality are boiling over. Rather than describing this compelling vision, The Passion of New Eve rapidly opens with an enormous philosophical assumption. Our narrator, Evelyn, posits:
Our external symbols must always express the life within us with absolute precision; how could they do otherwise, since that life has generated them? Therefore we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, for the symbols themselves have no control over their own fleshly manifestations, however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.
A critique of these symbols is a critique of our lives. (6)
Interestingly, Carter presents this formidable claim on semiotics before the reader has a chance to establish the reliability of the narrator; before the narrator is even named (however, Tristessa is notably present). As we discover, Evelyn is far from impartial. Evelyn harbors a great many biases and assumptions (particularly about gender). His assumption regarding the relationship between symbol and life is subject to some challenging throughout the narrative as demonstrated through the conflicts surrounding gender and its presentation. Carter offers a critique of these symbols and, perhaps, a critique of our lives.
Rubenstein claims that Carter often copes with the issue of gender through synecdoche. Carter attempts to “highlight prevailing social constructions of male power and female powerlessness as, literally, extensions of their genitalia in precisely these contexts of gender-specific anxiety” (106). The gender-specific anxiety Rubenstein references are psychoanalytic in nature: castration anxiety for males and penetration anxiety for females (Rubenstein’s own designated category).
In The Passion of New Eve “the female body depends for its construction on the literal dismemberment of the male body… Castration turns a man into a woman: a complete woman, a woman with ‘all the necessary parts’” (Michie 667). Evelyn’s transformation from man to woman is an act of castration. Ironically, castration by a phallic symbol – the knife. The act, however, is more than simple castration. He is transgendered, it seems, even before the operation. He experiences, in same action, the realization of (male) castration anxiety and Rubenstein's penetration anxiety – both penetrated and castrated by the knife.
Metamorphosed by surgery, Eve[lyn]’s new form elicits an autoerotic response. “I was the object of all the unfocused desires that had ever existed in my own head. I had become my own masturbatory fantasy. And – how can I put it- the cock in my head, still, twitched at the sight of myself” (75). As we see, Carter uses synecdoche to represent Eve’s masculine psychological identify (“the cock in my head”).
However, this moment of autoeroticism (and, again, during Eve and Tristessa’s coupling in the desert) suggests something more than lingering masculine identity. Indeed, there is a strong suggestion of bisexuality. Eve is attracted to himself not only because of his external femininity but also because of his internal masculinity. Carter exposes the fallacy of masculine romantic fantasies of femininity – the desire to be mirrored by the female. This desire is most perfectly enacted by the male in drag, explaining Eve’s lifelong occupation with Tristessa, the secret Hollywood transsexual.
Carter represents bisexuality as a union of opposites, which is perhaps problematic. “The figure of the transsexual or bisexual is a kind of mediating figure invoked to reconcile symbolically these polarized positions” (Rubenstein 106). As a mediator, Carter’s transsexual/bisexual seeks to bridge the gap between the harshly defined genders. However, this gap is established by the rigid definitions presented by Carter. The bisexual and the transsexual must operate between these poles. Neither is afforded the status of hermaphrodite, existing simultaneously as doubly gendered. Instead, each must shift from one gender to the other. Tristessa, the least biologically hermaphroditic is, perhaps, the most genuine of the two because of the destabilization caused by her more fluid gender identity. The bisexual, in this sense, is complementary (as in the hermaphrodite myth) but lacking multiplicity. Each character seems to represent a fairly static state of gender – while these categories may change throughout the novel it is rare that we find them dynamic and fluid in any given scene.
Rubenstein is critical of Carter’s definitions of gender: “Femininity/female is equated with passivity, emptiness, abasement, and terrifying vulnerability, or with voracious, engulfing ‘suction’; masculinity/male is characterized by sadism and sexual violence” (116). Indeed, Carter’s representations are so exaggerated (the nihilistic, sadist Zero; the preposterous Mother Goddess) as to almost seem caricatures of historical and mythical gender.
Eve ponders the implications of gender with consideration for his/her experiences and offers little insight. “Masculine and feminine are correlatives which involve one another. I am sure of that – the quality and its negation are locked in necessity. But what the nature of masculine and the nature of feminine might be, whether they involve male and female… that I do not know” (149-150). Carter (or, perhaps only Eve) is unwilling, or unable, to offer us a category of ‘genderlessness’. We must, instead, deal with a conception of gender located between the poles of masculine and feminine rather than a gender constructed entirely independent of the binarism that seems to be the hallmark of Western metaphysics.
Just as Eve lacks a stable identity, Carter defines Tristessa as having “no ontological status, only an iconographic one” (129). She has no essential characteristics that define her existence, rather she is an icon – a suggestion or a concept. However, Eve’s description of Tristessa is the closest we get to a genderless category: “He, she – neither will do for you” (143). Not two pages later Eve abandons notions of Tristessa’s genderlessness. She thinks of him: “He was a mad, old man with long, white hair like Ezekiel” (145).
Both Eve and Tristessa are “an Other, an object constructed by others – as in a mirror or in another’s gaze – not a subject or self” (Rubenstein 111). Carter’s narrative makes it clear that Eve and Tristessa’s identities (indeed, our own) are not self established but are often ultimately derived from the synecdochal signifier of gender: the penis or vagina. Carter’s synecdochal representation of gender is problematic because this method of discourse fragments the individual, turning the subject into an object. Helena Michie describes this usage of synecdoche as a “semiotic fetish” (663). The two possess “composite identit[ies]” (Johnson 43), assembled from the fragments resultant from the imperfect semiotics of gender.
As Other, Eve and Tristessa are denied identity and means of self-knowledge. Eve reflects on their plight: “You and I, who inhabited false shapes, who appeared to one another doubly masked, like an ultimate mystification, were unknown even to ourselves” (136). Interestingly, Eve and Tristessa are not outsiders as long as they can 'pass' as the gender which their external signs suggest. This works far better for Eve because he possesses all of the physical aspects of femininity. However, Tristessa is met with resistance when her male genitals are uncovered.
Instances of active gender transgression in The Passion of New Eve, particularly Tristessa’s transgression, are met with disgust and violence. Western culture requires that individuals choose a stable sexual identity and maintain it for life. “It is still widely believed that homosexuality and the swapping of gender characteristics are somehow ‘errors’ – that is, Foucault says, ‘a manner of acting that is not adequate to reality’” (Johnson 43).
Zero and his harem react with violent reproach when they become aware of Tristessa’s phallus. They respond by forcing Tristessa into a marriage with Eve. Eve and Tristessa’s wedding is of particular interest when analyzing the signifiers of gender identity. Tristessa is dressed in female garb, contradicting his/her gender (as identified by Zero) whereas Eve is dressed as the groom. Although Eve possesses the requisite genitalia for the role of bride, Zero assigns this role to Eve as a means of degrading Tristessa and Eve. Ironically, Eve is likely the member of this couple that has maintained a masculine identity for the greatest period of time (prior to her/his operation). Gender is actively destabilized in this scene as a multiplicity of gender identities is generated: “it was a double wedding – both were the bride, both the groom in this ceremony” (135).
References
Carter, Angela. The Passion of New Eve. London: Virago, 1998.
Johnson, Heather. “Textualizing the double-gendered body: forms of the grotesque in The Passion of New Eve.” Review of Contemporary Fiction. 14.3 (1994): 43.
Michie, Helena. “Partial Women: Synecdoche, Semiosis, and the Fantasy of the Whole.” Poetics Today. 8.3 (1987): 661-674.
Rubenstein, Roberta. “Intersexions: Gender Metamorphosis in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve and Louis Gould's A Sea-Change.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. 12.1 (1993): 103-118.
Nick Heling
12/03/2006
Showing posts with label queer theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label queer theory. Show all posts
Sunday, June 28, 2009
lost and found: further comments on literature
Gay Vampires Or The Construction of the Other in Dracula
Count Dracula’s terrifying identity is constructed, not as a monster, but as an outsider. He is, in every sense, a foreigner to the (heteronormative) Victorian cast of characters that quest to destroy him. Early in the novel Jonathan Harker almost obsessively comments upon the Count’s strange appearance, eating and sleeping habits and even odor. This pervasive xenophobia reflects the historical context of the novel, written for imperialist England.
The Count’s appearance is so profoundly alien that the characters cannot help but comment upon it. Mina Harker’s description of the Count:
I knew him at once from the description of the others. The waxen face; the high aquiline nose, on which the light fell in a thin, white line; the parted red lips, with the sharp white teeth showing between; and the red eyes that I had seemed to see in the sunset on the windows of St. Mary’s Church at Whitby. (292-293)
Although Harker is at times repulsed by the Count’s otherness, and upon allying against Dracula the company certainly demonizes him, the characters cannot help but feel seduced by his features and mystique throughout the novel. In many ways the Count’s otherness, a kind of orientalism per Said, is fetishized by Stoker and for the benefit of his reader. Everything about the Count is established to confirm the Western conception of identity by acting as a foil – a confirmation of binary power structures, of East and West, of good and evil.
The conversion of Lucy is perhaps the most profound example of the Count’s seductive powers. Lucy is posited to be the model of pure, virginal, English femininity; both frivolous and helpless. Lucy finds herself unable to resist the allure of Count Dracula and quickly succumbs to his influence (though Mina, a less traditional example of femininity and a kind of new-heroine introduced by Stoker, resists and eventually overcomes Dracula’s seduction). We find that the only solution to the Count’s seductive grasp upon Lucy is an elaborate and extremely suggestive murder-ritual mirroring phallic intercourse performed with group-sex overtones. The men would rather sacrifice monogamy and the life of one of their women than lose her to a foreign influence.
Throughout the text, though particularly in the early stages of the narrative, there exists an unspoken sexual tension between Harker and the Count. This tension is first made fully apparent when Harker cuts his neck shaving and the Count reacts strongly with desire: “his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury”.
This homosexual desire is manifested as heterosexual displacement when Harker encounters the three female vampires in the Count’s castle:
All three had brilliant white teeth, that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. (51)
Harker’s passivity, as is demonstrated by his feigned swoon, is a drastic inversion of Victorian gender roles. In every other instance Harker is very much a man-of-action and this instance of passivity, in spite of danger, suggests his (and the Victorian male’s) desire for some kind of passive role in the sexual economy of England. Stoker’s careful description verifies this assertion as is evidenced by the mounting sensuality of the scene:
Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat… I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of the two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a langorous ecstasy and waited – waited with a beating heart. (52)
The women-vampires demonstrate an active sexual appetite, subverting the role of the proper Victorian lady, whereas Harker becomes passive and eagerly awaits the moment of penetration. The penetration of the vampire’s teeth on the neck is undoubtedly a phallic image, though Stoker finds it necessary to couch this homoerotic imagery in heterosexual eroticism through the use of the three women.
The unspoken homosexual desire existing between the Count and Harker becomes apparent upon the intercession of Dracula: “How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me” (53; emphasis added). However, Dracula (and perhaps Stoker) is unwilling to permit a homoerotic coupling, vampiric or not. The mere suggestion of such a thing is enough to frighten (and titillate) the Victorian readers.
This unrealized homoeroticism coupled with Dracula’s apparent preference for women throughout the rest of the novel presents a situation equally (if not more) troubling to the Victorian English: bisexuality. The vampire is by nature bisexual and perhaps transgendered. The vampiric act is one of phallic penetration coupled with the reception of vital fluid. (One must note that in many psychoanalytical readings of this text blood and semen are often interchangeable.) Women who have been converted to vampirism become “masculine” through their sexual aggression. Unfortunately, Stoker does not offer us a male vampire apart from the Count so we must rely on his early and unrealized impulses towards Jonathan Harker for evidence of homosexual desire.
The Count’s transgendering is demonstrated during his final seduction of Mina:
His right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white night-dress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare chest which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child force a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink. (288)
This scene presents us with an inverted maternal scene. Dracula is nursing Mina from his breast as a mother to a child (reducing Mina’s sexuality to an infantile status). Stoker further classifies Dracula as other by confusing his gender. Dracula’s protean nature (and sexuality) would indeed be terrifying to Stoker’s audience. In a culture of well defined binary opposites (“brave men and good women”) ambiguity is perhaps the greatest threat.
Works Cited:
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York: Signet, 1965.
Stevenson, John Allen. “A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula.” PMLA 103.2 (1988) 139-149.
Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie. “Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’”. Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. 2.3 (1977) 104-113.
Craft, Christopher. “’Kiss Me With Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”. Representations. 8 (1984) 107-133.
Nick Heling
10/29/2006
Count Dracula’s terrifying identity is constructed, not as a monster, but as an outsider. He is, in every sense, a foreigner to the (heteronormative) Victorian cast of characters that quest to destroy him. Early in the novel Jonathan Harker almost obsessively comments upon the Count’s strange appearance, eating and sleeping habits and even odor. This pervasive xenophobia reflects the historical context of the novel, written for imperialist England.
The Count’s appearance is so profoundly alien that the characters cannot help but comment upon it. Mina Harker’s description of the Count:
I knew him at once from the description of the others. The waxen face; the high aquiline nose, on which the light fell in a thin, white line; the parted red lips, with the sharp white teeth showing between; and the red eyes that I had seemed to see in the sunset on the windows of St. Mary’s Church at Whitby. (292-293)
Although Harker is at times repulsed by the Count’s otherness, and upon allying against Dracula the company certainly demonizes him, the characters cannot help but feel seduced by his features and mystique throughout the novel. In many ways the Count’s otherness, a kind of orientalism per Said, is fetishized by Stoker and for the benefit of his reader. Everything about the Count is established to confirm the Western conception of identity by acting as a foil – a confirmation of binary power structures, of East and West, of good and evil.
The conversion of Lucy is perhaps the most profound example of the Count’s seductive powers. Lucy is posited to be the model of pure, virginal, English femininity; both frivolous and helpless. Lucy finds herself unable to resist the allure of Count Dracula and quickly succumbs to his influence (though Mina, a less traditional example of femininity and a kind of new-heroine introduced by Stoker, resists and eventually overcomes Dracula’s seduction). We find that the only solution to the Count’s seductive grasp upon Lucy is an elaborate and extremely suggestive murder-ritual mirroring phallic intercourse performed with group-sex overtones. The men would rather sacrifice monogamy and the life of one of their women than lose her to a foreign influence.
Throughout the text, though particularly in the early stages of the narrative, there exists an unspoken sexual tension between Harker and the Count. This tension is first made fully apparent when Harker cuts his neck shaving and the Count reacts strongly with desire: “his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury”.
This homosexual desire is manifested as heterosexual displacement when Harker encounters the three female vampires in the Count’s castle:
All three had brilliant white teeth, that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. (51)
Harker’s passivity, as is demonstrated by his feigned swoon, is a drastic inversion of Victorian gender roles. In every other instance Harker is very much a man-of-action and this instance of passivity, in spite of danger, suggests his (and the Victorian male’s) desire for some kind of passive role in the sexual economy of England. Stoker’s careful description verifies this assertion as is evidenced by the mounting sensuality of the scene:
Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat… I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of the two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a langorous ecstasy and waited – waited with a beating heart. (52)
The women-vampires demonstrate an active sexual appetite, subverting the role of the proper Victorian lady, whereas Harker becomes passive and eagerly awaits the moment of penetration. The penetration of the vampire’s teeth on the neck is undoubtedly a phallic image, though Stoker finds it necessary to couch this homoerotic imagery in heterosexual eroticism through the use of the three women.
The unspoken homosexual desire existing between the Count and Harker becomes apparent upon the intercession of Dracula: “How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me” (53; emphasis added). However, Dracula (and perhaps Stoker) is unwilling to permit a homoerotic coupling, vampiric or not. The mere suggestion of such a thing is enough to frighten (and titillate) the Victorian readers.
This unrealized homoeroticism coupled with Dracula’s apparent preference for women throughout the rest of the novel presents a situation equally (if not more) troubling to the Victorian English: bisexuality. The vampire is by nature bisexual and perhaps transgendered. The vampiric act is one of phallic penetration coupled with the reception of vital fluid. (One must note that in many psychoanalytical readings of this text blood and semen are often interchangeable.) Women who have been converted to vampirism become “masculine” through their sexual aggression. Unfortunately, Stoker does not offer us a male vampire apart from the Count so we must rely on his early and unrealized impulses towards Jonathan Harker for evidence of homosexual desire.
The Count’s transgendering is demonstrated during his final seduction of Mina:
His right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white night-dress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare chest which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child force a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink. (288)
This scene presents us with an inverted maternal scene. Dracula is nursing Mina from his breast as a mother to a child (reducing Mina’s sexuality to an infantile status). Stoker further classifies Dracula as other by confusing his gender. Dracula’s protean nature (and sexuality) would indeed be terrifying to Stoker’s audience. In a culture of well defined binary opposites (“brave men and good women”) ambiguity is perhaps the greatest threat.
Works Cited:
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York: Signet, 1965.
Stevenson, John Allen. “A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula.” PMLA 103.2 (1988) 139-149.
Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie. “Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’”. Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. 2.3 (1977) 104-113.
Craft, Christopher. “’Kiss Me With Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”. Representations. 8 (1984) 107-133.
Nick Heling
10/29/2006
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