CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE TECHNOLOGICAL MYTHMAKING IN ANGELA CARTER’S THE PASSION OF NEW EVE SELIN YILMAZ I, in my sumptuous flesh, was in myself the fruit of the tree of knowledge; knowledge had made me, I was a man-made masterpiece of skin and bone, the technological Eve in person. —Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve 1 Angela Carter is regarded as one of the most multi-dimensional authors of twentieth-century British literature. The prominent characteristic of her writing is the integration of various literary genres such as fairytales, fantasy, gothic and science fiction into her short stories and novels. Her fictional writings are also suffused with references to myths, history, popular culture and other works of literature. This considerable amount of intertextuality makes the plots of Carter’s novels complex, but also dynamic; however, she uses references to other texts not just to add dynamism or diversity to her novels. What she mostly does is re-write myths and fairytales by subverting their plots in order to expose the ideologies behind their construction. Her aim is to show how effective myths and fairy tales are in constructing social and sexual roles of individuals in societies. In other words, Carter is involved in making postmodern interrogations of certain totalising narratives with universal claims, and accordingly, as Aytül Özüm points out, she makes references to sophisticated postmodern theories of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes in her writing. 2 As a postmodern author, Carter sees myths as more than just folk stories that speculate on the creation of the world, or tell stories about gods, goddesses and heroes. Her understanding of myth parallels with that of Roland Barthes, who sees it as a type of speech, whose task is “giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal.” 3 For Barthes, myths justify totalising ideological claims such as that of French imperialism, and make them seem natural and