The Modern English Visionary: Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2000 by Edward J. Ahearn

Beulah is an artificial underground city combining futuristic science and feminist revisions of myth. Its emblem is "a stone cock [...] in a state of massive tumescence" but "broken off clean in the middle" (47). Amid references to eggs, wombs, seas, the subterranean, the abolition of time (equated with the masculine), revisions of the Oedipus story, satirical expositions of feminist doctrine, and Wittiq-like chanting of the names of female personages and divinities, (10) Evelyn is raped, castrated, and surgically turned into a woman. Mother, the ruler of this realm, is naked, wears a false beard like Queen Hatshepsut, has a head "as big and as black as Marx's head in Highgate Cemetery," two rows of nipples, and screams "I am the Great Parricide, I am the Castratrix of the Phallocentric Universe, I am Mama, Mama, Mama!" (59, 67). Near the end Eve is presented with "the set of genitals which had once belonged to Evelyn" (187).

Amid the parodic violence, Evelyn, then Eve, pursues a winding path toward a revised sexual identity-"the linear geography of inwardness, a tracing of the mazes of the brain itself and I am Ariadne in the maze" (56).

Prominent among many transformations of sexual myth are the allusions in the name Beulah itself--Biblical, Bunyanesque, and Blakean: [11]

There is a place where contrarieties are equally true. This place is called Beulah. (Blake 129)

As in Blake, Beulah here is the site of an apocalyptic transformation of self: "It will become the place where I was born"; "And here I am in Beulah, the place where contrarieties exist together" (47-48).

Eve's later enslavement by Zero and her encounter with Tristessa, the supposed actress Evelyn had adored, continue the parodic, often brutal allegory of sexual self-discovery and enlargement of being. Tristessa is revealed to be a (very reluctant) man, a revelation that leads to rape, sodomy, and Eve and Tristessa's escape and beautiful love making, after which Tristessa is murdered by the young fascists who style themselves the scourge of Christ. This is outlandish, but tragically close to recent history, as the sexual atrocities of recent wars and the murders of homosexuals in the United States remind us. And yet, against these destructive forces, Carter presents the sexual union of Eve and Tristessa as beautiful. Carter focuses on Eve's newfound sexual enjoyment as a woman, "the swooning, dissolvent woman's pleasure I had, heretofore, seen but never experienced" (147). But she also shows Eve's new realization of the social constructedness of femininity: "although I was a woman, I was now also passing for a woman, but, then, many women born spend their whole lives in just such imitations" (101).

Tristessa, on the other hand, has always denied his masculinity, and his concealment of his genitals in his anus (something of an obsession in the book [37, 141]) is interpreted by Lilith as "the uroborus, the perfect circle, the vicious circle, the dead end" (173)--which recalls one of the symbolic implications of Dyer's serpent devouring its tail. Tristessa discovers his maleness, but the first forced intercourse with Eve leaves her unsatisfied.