The alchemy of the self in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve.

The deconstruction of the myths of gender pervades Angela Carter's most iconoclastic novel, The Passion of New Eve (1977). The narrative explores primarily "the social creation of femininity" and targets the culturally sacred discourses that regulate its notional and material constitution, such as cinema, psychoanalysis, mythology, and religion. In an interview by Anna Katsavos in 1988, Carter explained that the "demythologising business" (Carter, "Notes" 71) to which she subscribes ideologically consists in finding out "what certain configurations of imagery in our society, in our culture, really stand for, what they mean, underneath the kind of semireligious coating that makes people not particularly want to interfere with them" (Katsavos 12). I suggest in this article that Carl Jung's assumptions concerning the archetypal feminine and the androgynous self fall within the range of "semireligious" discourses that Carter satirically demythologizes in The Passion of New Eve. The novel reproduces many of the principles on which Jungian psychology is based in order to subvert them. For example, Carter ironically equates the unconscious with the feminine and consciousness with the masculine. The representations of the feminine also vary from the romantic or erotic anima figures to the powerful and menacing Mother whom the male ego (the center of consciousness) has to fight and from whom he should liberate himself. The inclusion of the anti-Jungian framework in Carter's novel not only dismantles these traditional stereotypes that Jung's archetypal theory helps sustain, but it also attacks the foundational notion of archetype, which, as Carter argues in The Sadeian Woman (1979), bears "a fantasy relation" to reality and truth (6).

The demythologizing of Jung in The Passion of New Eve coincides with the critical revision of his theories by feminists and archetypal psychologists, particularly James Hillman, in the 1970s, a circumstance that may account for the presence of this intertextual thread in Carter's novel. Early in the decade, Jungian experts Ann Belford Ulanov and Irene Claremont de Castillejo already opposed Jung's persistent use of a predetermined language that stereotypically identifies Logos and reason with the male principle and Eros and feelings with the female. Ulanov and Castillejo regarded the assertion that in women "Eros is an expression of their true nature, while their Logos is often only a regrettable accident" (Jung, Aion 14) as reductive, inexact, and "destructive" (Ulanov 338). As Ulanov wrote in 1971, "in Jung's typology.... woman is clearly the feeling type. This is confusing ... [and] an inaccurate use of terms. Women have no more monopoly of the feeling function than men have of the thinking function" (337). Irate opposition to Jung came in the 1970s from the ranks of feminism. Naomi R. Goldenberg proposed a challenge to "the veneration of Jung himself" (444) as the first necessary step in the critique of his thought. (1) Jung's categorization of women as Eros and anima reeks of sexism, Goldenberg remarked. Moreover, his defense of the psychic marriage of the masculine and feminine, one of the leading principles of his philosophy, is "more beneficial to men than to women," for, while men are urged to embrace their repressed Eros, "women are by no means encouraged to develop Logos, since they are thought of as handicapped by nature in all Logos arenas" (447). Jung's vindication of psychological bisexuality met with equally unfavorable comments from Carol Christ and Mary Daly.

Throughout the 1970s some celebrated the notion of an androgynous personality as a model of gender identity and the solution to the integration of the sexes in harmonious conviviality (see Morgan). Jung's defense of psychological bisexuality was as controversial as his association of woman with feelings. Mary Daly, a former advocate of androgyny, condemns Jung's theories as "pernicious traps" for women (253), particularly his notion of androgyny. Goldenberg relies on irony to disparage the androgyne, "that marvelous unseen creature ... [and] modern-day unicorn, ... said to be out there somewhere, running around but nearly impossible to catch" (446). She further notes that Jungians fashion the archetypal feminine out of the "subjective selection of mythological material to document preordained conclusions" (447-48), an opinion that Carol Christ endorsed. For Christ, the feminine appears in the works of many Jungians as "a secondary and compensatory aspect of the male psyche and is derived from the analysis of myths and literatures created by males" (66). This circumstance brings Christ to state persuasively that "much of the Jungian writing about 'the feminine' tells us more about how men see women than about how women see themselves" (69).

Even though determinant in the construction of The Passion of New Eve, the anti-Jungian frame has remained unexplored so far by critics. As I will show, the satiric challenge to myths that control the novel includes the heterodox treatment of Jung. Carter employs the same structures and allegories that Jung employs in order to mock his tenets. Structurally and thematically, the text hangs on a narrative of individuation and the stages of the alchemical work on which Jung relied to illustrate the individuation process, or the evolution of man toward selfhood. (2) The battle for deliverance from the Mother and the search for the anima (the feminine side of man's psyche) are Jungian models of development that Carter deploys allegorically in the novel. She introduces these motifs in a comic, picaresque narrative of self-quest that satirizes the symbolic marriage of the masculine and feminine on which individuation and alchemy rest, suggesting that such a union of opposites bears no effective relation to the psychic reality of individuals. Additionally, the alchemical imagery becomes an alternative means through which Carter's feminist ideology finds expression in the text. Not only are the archetypes into which Jungian theory splits the Feminine--the positive and negative anima, the Good Mother, the Terrible Mother and the Great Mother--subject to derision, but they are also contaminated with the vocabulary of the nigredo, the stage in alchemy akin to darkness, death, and putrefaction.

The myth of Tiresias, which Virginia Woolf had already adapted in Orlando, forms the basis of Carter's approach to the theme of the search for identity, a classic of second-wave feminism. In the futuristic setting of a United States on the brink of secession and civil war, a feminist guerrilla captures male chauvinist Evelyn, a young lecturer come from England, and transforms him into a woman (Eve). The surgeon and leader of the group, Mother, plans to inseminate Eve with Evelyn's sperm after intensive lessons in feminine sensibility; but the protagonist manages to escape from the commune. Nonetheless, once she is out, circumstances force her to rethink her former (male) identity and start a search for a new self. Eve(lyn)'s quest (3) draws largely on the mythic descent of the hero into the underworld, which archetypal theory interprets as the descent of the male ego into the feminine unconscious, a dangerous journey because, as Jung explains, the unconscious may devour the conscious mind and disintegrate the personality (Psychology 337). When a man embarks on the process of individuation, he needs to confront the feminine and come to terms with it. Eve(lyn)'s journey across the States contains such an allegory. The unconscious is variously represented by Leilah, Mother, the harem, and Tristessa. These characters function as material projections sprung from the patriarchal collective unconscious, which identifies the feminine with "darkness, nothingness, the void, the bottomless pit ... and hell" (Neumann, Origins 158). (4) The novel ironically reproduces these similes as a mirror that reflects back the stereotypical images of the feminine that men create and then project onto women. After introducing alchemy and some relevant notions of Jungian theory, I will examine the way in which Carter deconstructs the archetypal feminine and makes it into the site of the nigredo in the episodes dealing with Leilah, Mother, and Tristessa. I will further pay attention to the influence that the alchemical process has on the structure of the novel. Finally, I will focus on the protagonist's climactic fight against Mother for liberation and the ultimate dismissal of gender myths.

For many adepts and laymen, alchemy simply means chemical experimentation; but for others, this practice has a substantial mystic component that Jung also underscores. The lengthy refinement of base metals in the crucible until gold was obtained parallels the purification of the alchemist's soul. This spiritual evolution is central in mystic or philosophical alchemy, which uses the chemical process as a simile. The alchemist aspires to create gold or, alternatively, to discover the formula for the philosopher's stone, the elixir that joins to base substances and transmutes them into gold. Three main phases precede the creation of this metal, each symbolized by a color. The ...