Detailed and comprehensive notes of 'The Lady of the House of Love' from Angela Carter's anthology 'The Bloody Chamber'. These A* level notes select key quotations from the story and analyse them in depth, in a clear layout, making up all the foundations for a powerful essay.
The Lady of the House of Love
Context
- notion of a strange woman living alone in an old house wearing "an antique bridal gown"
lends to the gothic elements of Great Expectations, and in particular the mysterious
character of Miss Havisham
- elements of Sleeping Beauty, Carter takes influence from fairy tales and extracts the "latent
content" (as she puts it) from them in order to fuse them with the gothic genre. Both
Sleeping Beauty and the Countess need some kind of release and are 'trapped' in their
particular situations. both characters are released with a kiss - it releases Sleeping Beauty
from her entrapment, and it releases the Countess from life. Carter later says that "a single
kiss woke up the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood."
- also intertextual references to Jack and the Beanstalk: "Fee fie fo fum / I smell the blood of
an Englishman." This contrasts the allusions made to Sleeping Beauty - the Countess is not
just a trembling victim; she is also a monstrous predator.
- “curiouser and curiouser” – Alice in Wonderland
Analysis
- Ironic title - innocent men are devoured due to the self-loathing nature of the Countess, the
"beautiful queen of the vampires" - that doesn't fit most people's definitions of love
preposition of 'of' (as in The Lady of the House...) suggests that the Countess has ownership
and power. / immediately presented as a typically domestic and passive woman seen in
gothic literature.
“timeless Gothic eternity of the vampires”, always dealing the same tarot cards, symbol of
perpetual stasis and entropy “system of repetitions, closed circuit”
- "both death and the maiden". As well as being a play and a quartet, death and the maiden
may link more closely to the oil painting of the same name by Hans Baldung
sets up the gothic oppositions of life and death - the Countess is both alive and dead, young
and old, beautiful and horrendous, at the same time. She is the predator and the prey. Being
"both death and the maiden" - gothic antithesis.
- Stuck in her mother’s dress, second wave feminists attempted to escape patterns of
behaviour that mothers were caught up in
Hates her own appetite- links to inherent ideas about female sexuality (Stoddart)
- Presented as typical victim archetype of gothic women – “her hair falls down like tears” ,
“sobbing in a derelict bedroom” “girl with the fragility of the skeleton of a moth”
- Contrasted by animalistic imager, links to Company of Wolves: “her claws and teeth have
been sharpened”, “all claws and teeth”
- Carter subverts typical beauty – “so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality”
“beautiful and ghastly lady” – gothic antithesis
- Countess also keeps birds trapped in her house with her, Erl-King reference. She asks the
question, "'Can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?'" This question
is repeated twice in the story, and appears to be indicative of the Countess's situation; will
she only live the life she knows how to live, or will she ever break free of it?
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