Who's Afraid of the Female Form?: Deconstructing Mythologies of Gender in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve Lizzy Welby Abstract ‘I am the Great Parricide, I am the Castrix of the Phallocentric Universe, I am Mama, Mama, Mama!’ 1 , So thunders Mother, Angela Carter’s terrifying, bounteous, abject creation of womanhood, and in one narrative stroke the author overturns masculine western praxes that represent the fecund female body as diseased, polluted and thus necessarily contained. Set in a disturbing dystopian United States, where vestiges of lives drift among the urban decay, experiencing the world through flashes of primeval emotion, The Passion of New Eve rips through the autocratic authority of a paternal order and unleashes a horror absolute. The male protagonist, Evelyn, an English professor whose emotional attachments with women extend only as far as their vaginas, is captured by a female colony living below the desert sands worshipping their goddess of the feminine, Mother. Carter’s fleshy, multi-breasted earth mother overwhelms the Englishman, subjects him to a humiliating rape, castrates him then carves into his body a bona fide, fully functioning, leaking, seeping womb; a ‘wound that would, in future, bleed once a month, at the bidding of the moon’. 2 This surgically-sculpted new Eve(lyn) is thus made to psychically as well as physically experience what it means to be gender positioned on the boundaries of a phallocentric order. This paper will discuss the notion of female sexuality as the site of men’s terror. By exploring The Passion of New Eve through the theoretical ideas of Julia Kristeva, I hope to demonstrate that the fecund female body, which is frequently contained and constrained in other practices that serve to diminish the maternal authority, in this novel, is a site of man’s horror. The son’s ‘fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother’ 3 spectacularly comes to fruition by Carter’s monstrous feminine incarnate, Mama. Key Words: Angela Carter, Gender Studies, Female Body, Fertility, Abjection, Monstrous Feminine, Myths of Motherhood, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous. *****