Angela Carter’s 'The Passion of New Eve' (1977): Sexual Transmutation as Psycho-physical Exile

Angela Carter’s The Passion o f New Eve revolves around a journey which is both literal and metaphorical. In this picaresque novel whose setting shifts from London, to New York, to the American desert and the Pacific Ocean, the reader is led on a voyage into the nature of gender identity, which is also a quest for a kind of sexuality that might be liberating for women. Conventional narratives of exile are often driven by a journey away from what is constructed as ‘home’, and it is this journey that enacts the character’s sense of displacement. The centrality of the journey in The Passion o f New Eve sanctions a reading of the protagonist’s gender-transgressive experience in terms of exile - an exile in which self-alienation is core, and whose fracturing effects will only be mitigated when the various stereotyped embodiments of sexuality that people the novel have been demystified.