Subvers(Eve): Technology and Gender Embodiment in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s L’Ève Future (1886), and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977)

The present study's purpose is to explore the intertwining of technology and embodiment in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve and Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's L'Ève future, two novels radically opposed in their ideological views on genders. It unpacks the similarities and the differences between the two works focusing on the of embodiment. An analysis of the economies of female bodies, or artificially feminized bodies will reveal two radically opposite understandings of embodiment—the incarnation of an essential and disembodied femininity for Villiers, and a materialist conception of gendered subjectivity for Carter. It assumes that Villiers maintains gender essentialism because it only pictures the literal meaning of embodiment through the ideal incarnation of the droid Hadaly, a passive (and feminized) bodily receptacle. Reversely, Carter deconstructs various symbols of eternal femininity, the universal experience of womanhood common to all women, or the total autonomy of a mind independent from its bodily reality. She unveils their artificiality and the social impact of these constructions grounded in Western cultural and philosophical traditions. Furthermore, it explores how Carter appropriates hegemonic masculinity through her references to Villiers's work Villiers as an emblematic of the male literary canon and through Evelyn's phallocentric narrative voice. Lastly, this study charts back the wider reproduction of hierarchical gender relations in the technological imagination. It unpacks the fetishist feminization of machines and the technicality of feminine archetypes