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Essay / Analysis of gender crossing and performativity in “The Passion of New Eve”
The Passion of New Eve, with its emphasis on gender crossing and gender performativity, has been interpreted as an anticipation of the developments of queer theory. This essay will examine how the novel explores the idea of gender as a social construct. To do this, he will also discuss the concept of gender as performative and draw on feminists such as Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir and Jeanette Winterson.Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essay In his 1923 article “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” TS Eliot hailed James Joyce as the inventor of “ mythic method,” asserting that “Mr. Joyce’s parallel use of the Odyssey is of great importance. This has the importance of a scientific discovery. This draws on the tendency of writers to borrow from ancient myths to rewrite the world for their contemporaries. To some extent, Carter does this herself when writing texts such as the collection The Bloody Chamber, in which she rewrites fairy tales, turning them upside down. However, since Carter considers all myths to be "extraordinary lies designed to make people slaves to freedom", she identifies herself as being more generally "in the business of demystification". This is evident in The Bloody Chamber in the fact that although it borrows from old fairy tales, it turns them on their head and rewrites them from an entirely new perspective. In The Passion of New Eve, it could be argued that Carter demystifies the concept of gender as it is commonly known and understood by the general public. The novel deals with the sensitive issue of gender confusion, the study of identity and self-discovery. In The Passion of New Eve, Carter identifies the fact that gender is viewed through a Western phallocentric lens and discusses issues of the male/female dialectic. It challenges social norms of gender binarism by promoting a more enlightened idea of gender identity, linking it to psychological and emotional factors rather than the physical characteristics that usually assign people a gender at birth. Sigmund Freud in his new introductory lectures on psychoanalysis quotes: “when you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is “man or woman”? Therefore, is it possible to make a binary distinction with “uncertainty without hesitation” or are gender and sexual identity more performative than visible? There is no doubt that there are physical differences between the sexes; it is not disputed. But it's almost certain that gender and biological sex are not the same thing, and more and more research is being done on this topic every day. Judith Butler argues that gender "is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a very rigid regulatory framework that congeal over time to produce an appearance of substance" in her book Gender Troubles. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir says: “We are not born a woman, but we become one”. Angela Carter appears to agree with these writers when she questions and ultimately appears to reject the norms of gender binarism. “She works in a genre constructed as the antithesis of rationality and reason” and this lends itself well to the representation of gender and sexuality in The Passion of New Eve. Angela Carter "criticizes the conceptual simplifications inherent in such binaries because they presuppose the assumption of universal or "natural" concepts of "woman" and "man", and she therefore seeks to "deconstruct this discourse.