ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffmanand The Passion of New Eve allegorize psychoanalytic stage theory as a temporal progression both schematically and structurally. The transition to Dr. Hoffman her first serious novel was a major development for Angela Carter that came after her becoming radicalized in Japan. The landscape, once again, functions as the projection of the psyche, and the Oedipus complex links, as always with Carter, to the Biblical Fall. The arrival of the acrobats of desire signals the Lacanian mirror stage, which the novel conflates with the beginning of the Oedipus complex proper, in which desire is transformed within the symbolic order of language and symbol systems. Carter's historical materialist stance viewed such definitions as a self-perpetuating delusion, as all people are subject to the socioeconomic and historical factors that structure them. Carter's interest in temporal inversion as an exploration of the personal and cultural unconscious has a number of sources.
