Elements of the Gothic - Notes from 'The Lady of the House of Love' from 'The Bloody Chamber'

THE LADY OF THE HOUSE OF LOVE

Confinement

The central question which lies behind the process of transformation is brought up by Carter in her short story “The Lady of the House of Love”. “Can a bird only sing the song it knows or can it learn a new song?” This is a powerful metaphor for the question of whether it is possible for women to break free of their old, rusty roles and reinvent themselves. This question is essential for Carter and her fiction.

Justice and Injustice

Gothic writers reintroduce the injustice perpetrated by a previous generation on the current generation, until the injustice is righted. Thus, sin in doubled and doubled until it is corrected.

Setting

Here the castle is the manifestation of a seemingly masculine power, but this flaunted power is shown to be illusory. Thus the castle, can act as a challenge, a test of resolve that women can triumphantly pass.

The castle represents a threatening, sexually rapacious masculine world. If the images of locked and unlocked doors within the Gothic castle often signify the sexual vulnerability of women, gender roles are reversed.

The castle seems to represent both physically and metaphorically the darkness at the heart of the Gothic. The lower regions of the castle represent fear and entrapment. The darkness of the cavern becomes a metaphor for the darkness of the mind.

Male/Female Roles

The Female Victim/Monster – Countess Nosferatu
The protagonist in “The Lady of the House of Love” has an ambiguous role: on one hand, she is a blood-thirsty vampire who murders and devours her victims, yet on the other hand, she is a typically passive and unconfident illustration of the vampire who has a “horrible reluctance for [her] role”. She is completely controlled by the expectations of her “atrocious ancestors”. She does not kill the young virgin soldier, which would have been the expected course of action by her ancestors, but decides to let him live. This is a brave decision, as it entails her own death. Countess Nosferatu manages to free herself from her puppet-status and is successful in taking an important decision for herself, symbolic of her freedom from the bird-cage by “singing a new song”. Nevertheless, she cannot make much use of her newly-won freedom, because “the end of exile is the end of being”, where the reward for freedom is death.