Transgenderism. A female empowerment movement against systemic harassment and sexual abuse by men. The son of a multiple-married Florida millionaire with a messianic complex who only drinks Coke enabled by extremist puritanically right-wing militia members out to take back their rightful authority in America while spreading rumors of a holy war in California launched against African-Americans, socialists, and militant gays and lesbians. And the Colonel leading this revolution does not just act like a spoiled teenager, but actually is just a 14-year-old.
Those reading Angela Carter’s 1977 novel at the dawn of the third decade of the new millennium be forgiven for experiencing a sense of déjà vu. What one has in their possession when reading The Passion of New Eve is one those rare but extremely satisfying examples of a work of creative imagination (fiction) that was ahead of its time when originally released to the public, but which time has finally managed to catch. Like the original film version of The Manchurian Candidate, The Passion of Eve was just a little too startlingly unconventional and took too much of a break from longstanding traditions to really make a mark in the mainstream. (The 1966 film Lord Love a Duck is an example of a work of creative imagination that is still struggling to catch up with the time in which it should have been made, to offer one example.)
The story contained within The Passion of Eve seems far less a work of bizarre fantasy or dystopian fiction in 2017 than it did forty years earlier. The most obvious aspect of the novel requiring the passage of time and the progression of societal norms are the circumstances of the protagonist. Though Evelyn has all but completely dissipated as name for boys, it coincidentally re-entered the top ten list of most popular baby names around 2019. Evelyn just so happens to be the name of the male college professor to whom the reader is initially introduced as the leading character of the story. Long before the story draws to a close, Even has been forcefully transformed into a woman via castration and the implantation of female sexual reproductive organs.
But wait, there’s more. As a man, Evelyn was fascinated by a silent movie star named Tristessa de St Ange, loosely based on Greta Garbo but with an obvious helping of Marlene Dietrich thrown in for good measure. This particular associated is only gradually made clear with the revelation that Tristessa was actually all along an androgynous disguising himself as a woman.
At the time of publication, these more outrageous aspects of the story met colluded with the book’s rather unapologetic obsession with sadomasochistic sex to the point that it was easily dismissed by critics as a lesser example of Carter’s considerable talents for reinterpreting mythic figures and fairy tales to make a statement about contemporary society. The story actually indulges in some rather more operatic scenes of outrageousness ensuring its entry into the mainstream would be a difficult one at best. Although certain elements do seem to fit in much more easily with the Covid-19 generation than disco generation, it is still bizarre enough to warrant being termed more experimental than most of the author’s more famous work.
Of course, that assertion can actually be interpreted to mean just one thing: the book still remains slightly ahead of its time, but it is merely a matter of waiting before it will eventually be able to slide easily right into the mainstream.
