The Passion of New Eve (1977) is a
Dystopian novel by
Angela Carter.
It's about a British man, Evelyn, who is, well,
castrated by Militant Feminists and made into "a New Eve". It's a satire on Feminism in general, Freudianism, and all other sorts of things. Also features a Dystopic America in the process of caving in on itself.
Tropes in The Passion of New Eve:
- All Psychology Is Freudian: Mother's reverse-Oedipal philosophizing
- All There Is To Know About The Crying Game
- Amazon Brigade
- Angry Black Man: They rove in gangs through the Big Applesauce, in tanks. They just bombed Grand Central Station, and they're putting blockades up around Harlem...
- Apocalypse How
- Bait-and-Switch Lesbians: Actually, there's hardly any lesbianism in the book, but "Bait-and-Switch", there's plenty of
- Big Applesauce: In all the worst ways. And then some.
- Body Horror: A lot of it, but the blue ribbon goes to Mother—the self-created Fertility Goddess. Her army of Amazons have each sacrificed a breast to her, which she has grafted onto herself, so she has two giant rows of tits.
- Brainwashed and Crazy
- Closer to Earth
- Does Not Like Men: Parodied
- The End of the World as We Know It
- Fan Disservice: So, so much.
- Female Misogynist: Angela Carter, in writing this.
- Gonk: Mother.
- It Got Worse: It really, really does.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Just when the Evelyn/Eve joke has been made one too many time, the narrator (at this point, just post-castration, "turned into my own diminutive, Eve, the shortened form of Evelyn") says
"Perhaps, I thought, they had utilised my tender body because they couldn't resist the horrid pun of my name, with all its teasing connotations."
- Marshmallow Hell: This trope is inadequate to encompass Carter's description of Evelyn being sMothered by Mother's gargantuan mammarian underworld.
- Meaningful Name: Duh.
- Moral Myopia
- No Name Given: Mother.
- Quintessential British Gentleman: Evelyn starts out as this. Sort of.
- Rape Is OK When It Is Female on Male: Not in ANY way.
- Scary Black Man
- Squick: The sex-scenes in this book are crimes against Nature. They're hysterical. Which is to say, they might drive someone into fits of hysteria.
- Straw Feminist: Featured ohhhh so very prominently.
- Too Dumb to Live: Evelyn. Seriously.
- Transsexual: Evelyn —> Eve...
- Willing Suspension of Disbelief: The whole surgery, turning Evelyn into Eve in a couple months. Of course, this was written in 1977, so I think that might actually have been even more science-fiction then than it is now.
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