The Fluid Corporeality And Transformation In The Passion Of New Eve

Angela Carter(1940-1992)is a British writer,famous for her unique and peculiar writing style.She is regarded as one of the most outstanding writers in the 20 th century.Her novels mainly focus on fantasy themes,a mixture of postmodernism,feminism,Gothic style and allegory.The Passion of New Eve,one of the representative works,was published by Carter in 1977.In this novel,Carter uses the dystopian model of science fiction to write a socially constructed fable of women,exposing and satirizing the gender myths of Western patriarchal society.This thesis tries to analyze the fluid corporeality of body and transformation of gender and identity with Elizabeth Grosz’s body theory and Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity.The introduction of this thesis includes an introduction of Angela Carter and The Passion of New Eve,literature review and theoretical framework.Chapter one explores the fluid corporeality of the body.The lived experience and corporeal inscriptions affect the corporeality of the subject.Under the influence of lived experience and corporeal inscriptions,the corporealities of characters have changed.Chapter two talks about the transformation of gender and explains two kinds of gender transformation: gender metamorphosis and drag performance.Gender is instituted through a stylized repetition of acts and is an effect of a stylized repetition of performative acts under the specific gender discourse.Chapter three talks about the transformation of identity.With the fluid corporeality of body and transformation of gender,the characters’ identities have also experienced transformations in The Passion of New Eve.By exploring the fluid corporeality and transformation in this novel,the thesis reveals the social construction of sexed body and gender and thinks Carter conveys her views of eliminating gender hegemony and compulsory heterosexuality.