ABSTRACT
Angela Carter's feminist libertarian aesthetics in The Passion of New Eve is to a great extent based on gender parody, in particular of the surrealists themselves. The Passion of New Eve is referred to in Carter's journal as a 're-telling of the Oedipus legend', signalling her mission to rewrite the original narrative of gendered subject formation. Through parodic and exaggerated repetition of surrealist representations of femininity, Carter challenges the normative assumptions of both surrealism and patriarchal cultures more broadly. The series of surrealist intertextual allusions in The Passion of New Eve culminates in a burlesque revisiting of Andre Breton's model of ideal love, a concept with which Carter had already engaged in Doctor Hoffman. The Passion of New Eve thus explores and explodes myths about gender identity, myths that in Carter's words are 'extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree'. The Passion of New Eve engages in precisely such a 'parodic proliferation' of gender identities.
