wildcat

The violent indoctrination of Eve(lyn) into the Wives of Zero recalls us to the City of the Dreadful Night, but from a different angle, and Eve sees Zero's behaviour from a perspective she may share with Leilah's perceptions of Evelyn. Zero reminds me of Mother, actually - the acts of domination and removal of self-determination always accented with the idea that it's for your own good, or the world's good, or both. Mother and Zero may be the divided concepts of Feminine and Masculine

The division of the two suggests the merging of the two is necessary, and it's implied by that hermaphrodite image at the beginning of the book - alchemy's marriage of opposites - and with Eve(lyn). As it stands, round about Chapter Nine, Evelyn still consider himself as wearing Eve like a glove and the two aren't yet integrated into one.

Zero boards his helicopter with Eve and the other wives, in search of the reclusive Tristessa. He has found the loctaion of her secret Shangri-La in the desert.

The Women of Beulah are the Amazons, with Mother as Hippolyta or Antiope. The Wives of Zero are the Amazons once dominated by Hercules, and consequently still share Amazon qualities (as exemplified by the late-night lesbianism).

Evelyn's description of entering the house and meeting Tristessa is interesting in light of his encounter with Mother. Mother is violently physical, fleshly, whereas Tristessa is ghostly, illusory, and fleeting:

I went toward you, as towards my own face in a magnetic mirror, but when, in accordance with all the laws of physics, you came towards me, I did not feel a sense of homecoming, only the forlorn premonition of loss.

I exhibited all the symptoms of panic when I met you-- pallor, shallow breathing, a prickle of cold sweat. It was like finding myself on the brink of an abyss but the giddiness that seized me and shook me and would not let me go sprang from a cause I did not understand, then-- that abyss on which you opened was that of my self, Tristessa.

Evelyn stands before the moment of revelation upon entering Tristessa's house, like a held breath, and the shifting tense and point of view -- Evelyn addresses Tristessa directly, and I was reminded that not only has Evelyn obsessed over the actress since boyhood but that her nascence as Eve was accompanied by the Beulah Women playing images of her over and over again, incantatory. The description of entering the house and feeling Tristessa's presence is the collapse of Evelyn's persona, his ego-death before experiencing the Godhead.

The ego-death's happened to him before, obviously, which is why we have Eve. Zero never breaks Eve in the way he thinks he does, nor does he truly break the rest of his wives -- they believe in him only out of neccessity. Mother breaking Evelyn is violent and the choice has been taken from him; when he enters Tristessa's house the process is a natural one that makes him realize the emptiness within (the womb -- Eve's blank persona -- etc).

Evelyn's telling the story of New Eve to Tristessa, even when he talks about Tristessa in the third person; he's relating to her "Tristessa the Idea." Match that with Norma Jean "becoming" Marilyn Monroe in front of her friend, on the Avenue.

On Tristessa, again: "This world had never been sufficient for you; to go beyond the boundaries of flesh had been your occupation and so you had become nothing, a wraith that left only traces of a silver powder on the hands that clutched helplessly at your perpetual vanishings." Tristessa doesn't need to be bodily, that's what Mother's there for. Carter strikes me as oddly gnostic in this novel, or Evelyn does at any rate -- physical concerns are all slightly grotesque. On the other hand, Beulah proves flesh to be as infinitely flexible as spirit, so it's more of a two sides/same coin deal than a gnostic (matter is dirty) thing.

Tristessa's house matches her essence -- mostly-invisible pieces of glasswork everywhere.

I could listen to Carter's descriptions of Tristessa for days:

When I heard the faint music made by the house itself, I felt myself already in the presence of Tristessa, as i she were one of those super-sensitive ghosts who manifest their presence by only a sound, an oudour, or an impression of themselves that they leave on the air behind them-- a sense, a feeling that, for no definable reason, penetrates us with a pure anguish, as if they were telling us, in the only way left to them, that is, by a direct intervention on our sensibilities, how much, how very much they want to be alive and how impossible it is for them to be so.

Angela rocking the paragraph-long sentence and the ripe abundance of commas, one of her stylistic quirks which I love very much and have tried to perfect in my own writing. Or at least use in my own writing.

Tristessa's house is a house of glass, filled with dust and ephemeral fan-magazines from her acting days. The passages are mostly silent, even Zero holding his tongue in this Hallowed Place. Christian made some reference to Tristessa being Marilyn Monroe (which I agree with, as above) but I still picture her as Marlene Dietrich in Blue Angel, with the overhead lighting. Dietrich got to walk around with her own lighting directors.

Because, as Mother is the violent wrenching birth-queen goddess of life, Tristessa's the death-goddess and Eve is Inanna walking down into the Underworld. So, you know, that's why there are the waxworks of dead blonde bombshell actresses like Monroe and Sharon Tate, in coffins and cast as they were upon their death-discoveries.