Crossing Gender: Andy Warhol’s Candy Darling, America, and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977), a darkly satirical novel which explores the crossing of gender in the context of second-wave feminism. Close connections are made between this literary text and the 1969 visit Carter and her husband made to the United States, where the novel is set. This was a time of momentous social change in America, heralding gay liberation, militant separatist feminism, and the sexual radicalism of drag queens. It will be argued for the first time that a model for Carter’s transgender character, Tristessa, was Candy Darling, one of Andy Warhol’s superstar drag queens. By analysing the intersection of fiction and real-life, the chapter aims to explore how Carter’s characters negotiate their crossings in the borderlands of gender and genre and how she plays with Simone de Beauvoir’s theories, as well as with concepts later theorised by Judith Butler. The novel is also a parody of radical feminist groups, the rising visibility of men in drag, and the clash of the counterculture against reactionary homophobic and transphobic forces.

[T]he novel was sparked off by a visit to the USA in 1969. It was the height of the Vietnam war, with violent public demos and piles of garbage in New York streets. If you remember, it was the year of gay riots in Greenwich Village, when they even chucked rocks; so my scenario of uprisings isn’t all that far-fetched.

—Angela Carter (qtd in Gamble 2006, p. 152)