Making Silence Heard:A Study Of The Passion Of New Eve From The Perspective Of Feminist Narratology

Angela Carter is one of the most original British writers in the 20th century. Her works are famous for a unique style which combines magical realism, feminism, Gothic element and picaresque fairy tales. Her exotic imagination, magnificent language and carnival imitating attract scholars’eyes. The Passion of New Eve (New Eve) is one of her representative works. Since its publication in 1977, many scholars have analyzed it from different angles, for example, feminism, Jungian mythological theory, archetype criticism and postmodernism, but few works are from the angle of feminist narratology. Based on feminist narratology put forward by the American scholar Susan Lanser, this thesis approaches this novel by looking at its narrative voice, point of view and discourse respectively with a view to revealing how the novel constructs female authority by applying narrative strategies and digging out the potential feminism ideology. This thesis concludes that in the process of creating this novel, Angela Carter intends to promote women’s position by subverting the traditional male and female image. She aims at constructing female position by obscuring bisexual disparity.The thesis firstly analyzes three modes of narrative voice, namely, authorial, personal and communal voice. It points out that the Characters’voices speak out female predicament by taking New Eve’s voice and Zero’s wives voices for an example, and those voices highlight growth of characters and add to the narrative tension and profundity. After obtaining narrative authority, Carter shifts the point of view to reveal the real living condition of women. Afterwards Carter makes Evelyn as the narrator talking about his own life experience, and the protagonist is changed from male Evelyn to female Eve, a gazer to a "gazed", a subject to an object. The misogynist is operated into a real woman, who is endowed with double experience in both male and female world. As for the spatial point of view, it is a reflection of the rich inner world of first Evelyn and later New Eve and reveals Carter’s exquisite creating style. The last chapter focuses on narrative discourse represented by direct discourse, and reveals Carter’s gender politics in building female authority and overturning traditional male narration by analyzing discourse detailedly.On the basis of the above analyses, readers can have a clearer and more profound understanding of the way the novel embodies Carter’s sympathy towards women and her intention to arouse women’s self-ideology. On the one hand, she holds that women should be treated equally as men. She argues that women have the right to develop and enrich themselves on the other. Hopefully, the analysis of this novel from the perspective of feminist narratology can shed light on the novel’s form and creation and enhance reader’s appreciation of Carter’s artistic techniques.