ABSTRACT
In her last three novels, Angela Carter has used the device of a journey, the traditional symbol of a quest, to structure her narrative. Desiderio’s travels in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman1 are explicitly referred to as a ‘quest’ (cf. pp. 76, 94, 141); in The Passion of New Eve2 Evelyn’s restless flight over the North American Continent is called the search for ‘that most elusive of all chimeras, myself’ (p. 38); and Fevvers in Nights at the Circus3 is convinced that she has been ‘feathered out for some special fate’ (p. 39) that will manifest itself in the course of her travels. The adventures these characters encounter on their journeys in the fantastic realm of the imaginary and the symbolic mediate a discussion of the making of the subject in the light of philosophical, psychoanalytical, and feminist ideas. All three novels are complex and multi-faceted, yet each of them deconstructs essentialist, humanist notions of the subject and, as I will show in this essay, explores the constitution of the subject in relation to one dominant aspect, which is at the same time representative of cultural ideas about the subject in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, respectively: desire in Hoffman, gender in Eve, and free womanhood in Circus.
