ABSTRACT
Angela Carter's later fiction was preoccupied with staging the impossibility of occupying a space outside this patriarchal logic, and finding ways of critiquing and subverting this system from within. This chapter investigates two ways in which her work of this stage struggles to wrest feminist agency out of precisely this impossibility: performativity and bricolage. It explains a change of mode in Carter's surrealist aesthetic, from citation of surrealist sources to more revisionist approaches, a change which is emergent in The Passion of New Eve. Carter's grappling with Sade's thought on the liberation of desire, mediated by Xaviere Gauthier, also served her re-appropriation of surrealism, which is given fictional form in The Passion of New Eve. In her fiction after The Passion of New Eve, Carter moves away from using surrealist allusions as a structuring principle of her feminist aesthetics, instead developing her own surrealist erotic imaginary, based on theatricality and performativity.
