Angela Carter's Transformative Gender Myths in The Passion of New Eve.

The contemporary British author Angela Carter in The Passion of New Eve (1977) creates a discourse that exposes, critically revises and rewrites patriarchal myths of femininity including the Christian myth of origin, and the myth of hermaphrodite. More specifically, this study shows Carter's impetus to demythologize the false "universals" of archetype of motherhood, womanhood and manhood in an attempt to unsettle categorical polarizations of feminine and masculine. Carter's The Passion of New Eve illustrates the way gender ambiguity and sexual fluidity is constructed by the revision of the mythical material, which allows the reader to question gender dynamics and reconsider the categories of sex and sexuality with variation in mind. Then, this study will briefly give the answer for the following question: what stimulates this twentieth century women novelist to construct an alternative discourse, reflecting upon non-normative identification and its implications in the mainstream society. Her critique of reality created by the "social fictions" of patriarchal order formulates the argument that gender is not a biologically determined essence, but an illusion, a repeated and learned imitation of heterosexual ideal regulated by gender performance. Accordingly, this study foregrounds continual fluidity, becoming and ambiguity between genders as a way of dismantling sexual and gender polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]