Angela Carter’s Gender View ——A Study Of The Passion Of New Eve From Rhetorical Theory Of Narrative

Angela Carter（1940-1992）is one of the most original British feminist writers in the 20 th century.She has wielded a great influence over contemporary British women’s writing.Most of her works are dedicated to gender relationships,deconstructing gender stereotypes and striking a balance between these gender relationships.Published in 1977,The Passion of New Eve is one of Carter’s masterpieces during the medium term of her writing career.It is characterized by bold imagination of gender relationship,intensively revolving around these factors of sexual transformation,feminist utopia and drag.In The Passion of New Eve,the protagonist narrates the events from dual perspectives of “character-narrator”,containing a complicated narrative communication.However,the narrative mode and communication have failed to receive enough attention from critics.In the past,narrative communication was regarded as a one-way interior response,but James Phelan has integrated a multidimensional,interactive and comprehensive perspective,combining authorial inputs with readerly judgements.In this way,narrative communication has been endowed with multiplying layers of content.Therefore,under the theory framework of rhetorical theory of narrative proposed by James Phelan,the thesis is first to identify conflicts and instabilities of characters in different settings with the progress of Evelyn’s gender identifications accordingly and explore the specific narrative mode adopted by the “character-narrator” in the progression such as unreliability and restricted narration.As such,the thesis will go further in figuring out how Angela Carter implicitly but effectively delivers her gender view to the implied readers and elevates ethical and aesthetic judgements.In turn,as an indispensable part of narrative communication,readers are also required to engage actively in exploring the theme of “passion” in the title,which generates disparate meanings at different stages of gender transformation.The Passion of New Eve reflects Angela Carter’s tremendous efforts at dissecting gender relationships in history.On the one hand,Angela Carter is aware of the negative effects of social factors in gender construction and debunks established gender myths.For another thing,she also recognizes negative effects of extreme feminist movement and discredits the ideal of “feminist utopia”.Through revealing different kinds of harms that imbalance of gender relationship may cause,Angela Carter encourages us to take a right attitude to identify relationship between social and cultural factors and traditional gender identity and build more empathy so as to better pursue an independent pursuit of gender identification and strike a balance between genders.Angela Carter’s anticipation of gender relationship is helpful to promote mutual understanding of both genders,thereby eventually redressing the balance between social gender identification,cultural gender identification and individual gender identification.