Angela Carter’s short story “The Lady of the House of Love” opens in an abandoned Romanian village where the queen of the vampires, known as the Countess, lives. Despite living in a castle, the Countess keeps to herself in a dark suite. Her only company is her pet lark and her keeper, an old, mute crone. The Countess despises her un-dead existence in the shadows. She longs to be human, but does not know if this is possible. During the day she lies in her coffin and at night, the Countess’ keeper lets her out to feed. When she was younger she would feed on small creatures but as she grew up she began to feed on unsuspecting male travellers whom her keeper would lure to the castle. The traveller we encounter in this story is a young, virginal, British soldier riding a bicycle through Romania. The soldier is approached by the Countess’ keeper and brought to the castle to meet the lady of the house. The Countess is drawn to the soldier and wishes to consummate her feelings toward him, but the only consummation she knows is to feed on him and so she leads him into her bedchamber where she intends to make him her prey. She is so nervous as she undresses before him that she drops her glasses and they shatter on the floor. As she stoops to pick up the shards she cuts her hand on a fragment of glass. The soldier kisses the gash to make it better and as a result the vampire becomes human. He then awakens on the floor to find the Countess dead. Before she died the Countess left him a rose. He leaves on his bicycle and the tale ends. “The Lady of the House of Love” is very mysterious, even for a gothic story. There are many ambiguities in the narrative left wide open for the reader to interpret. It is made very obvious that the Countess i... ... middle of paper ... ... what she must do to survive so she cannot be considered monstrous at heart. Carter has written her character in such a way so that she is trapped between two identities and thus unable to achieve any form of self definition. Whether she associates herself with the angel or the monster, the woman is made feeble by the harmful alternatives that patriarchal culture offers her. Carter’s Countess destroys herself trying to escape the binary of the angel and the monster. Works Cited Carter, Angela. "The Lady of the House of Love." 1979. Ed. Chris Baldick. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. 483-97. Print. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. "Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship." 1979. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. 1926-938. Print.
Delany, Sheila. Writing Women: Women Writers and Women in Literature: Medieval to Modern. New York: Schocken, 1983.
This essay will attempt to discuss the two gothic tales ‘Carmilla’ and ‘Dracula’ in relation to cultural contexts in which they exist as being presented to the reader through the gender behaviour and sexuality that is portrayed through the texts. Vampire stories always seem to involve some aspect of sexuality and power.
Angela Carter was a writer in the 1970s during the third wave of feminism that influenced and encouraged personal and social views in her writing. This is demonstrated through her own interpretation of fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber. She combines realism and fantasy to create ‘magic realism’ whilst also challenging conventions of stereotypical gender roles.
What used to be a simple home is now a sacred sanctuary, a refuge from all the filth of the world, a place to trap and stifle beauty, adventure, and passion. What used to be a simple woman is now an angel, a pure and domestic celestial being. I live in an era where women are considered most beautiful when isolated, helpless, and even dead; where a lady with passion is scarier than a bitter hag; where feminine is now a synonym for pure, selfless, and submissive; where sexism has put on the fancy dress of romance. And Alfred, Lord Tennyson is a man of his era, grabbing romantic sexism by the hand and enchantingly twirling her around the dance floor.
In her book Deadly Secrets Anne Williams says that "gothic escape fictions provide a virtual reality, and experimental world in which the repressed -- especially the female in all its guises -- might be realized" (96). Society in the eighteenth century operated under staunch patriarchal control which has been dubbed by critics like Lacan as "The Law of the Father". The Law of the father, according to Lacan, is founded on the distinction between male and female and involves the repression of all that is female. Many authors used the experimental world of gothic to explore life under and also life beyond the law of the father. What is woman's role in a world where the female is suppressed? Gothic novelists portrayed the terror women experienced at the hands of a male-dominated culture by creating fictions whereby the institutions of family and marriage are revealed in their most demented form. The family was the seat of sexuality in the eighteenth century. Girls were initiated into womanhood within its protection and received their legacy of powerlessness from their mothers. They learnt that their fathers, and all men, were the "Kings of the Castle" and that they had control of all aspects of their lives. A woman's sexuality was a man's to explore or exploit as he saw fit. The ultimate power that the father could exert over the women in his life resulted in a deep-seated fear of incest, a theme that we see often in gothic novels. In The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole the scene in which Manfred confesses his desire to marry Isabella and have sexual relations with her is very incest-like:
9. Lutz, Catherine. “The Gender Of Theory” reprinted in Women Writing Culture. Univ. of California Press. 1995
Although, according to the author herself, these fairy tales surrounding her public and literary persona `are assumed to be worth more than the are', there is no doubt concerning a certain value of fairy tales in her novel The Passion. In the following essay, I would like to examine the `worth' of fairy tales in this piece of work. That is to say, the numerous fairy tale and mythical elements of the novel shall be discussed, as well as their value for the novel as a whole and the effect they have on the reader.
Throughout the history, women were considered below men. Then it led to believe that only men can write but not women. However, women managed to enter literature world like men did. However, most people believed that only writing style that exists in literature is men’s style not feminine. Almost to the point, people believed that there is no feminine style of writing. Helene Cixous is a writer of The Laugh of The Medusa. This book is about women’s writing from Cixous’s view and explanation of feminine writing. Cixous believed women should write their own style in order to break and destroy male dominated society.
Bram Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu’s texts, Dracula (1898) and “Carmilla” (1872), use gothic tropes in similar ways to captivate readers with horror and terror. This essay will illustrate how, in comparison, both texts include gothic tropes: the New Woman, sexuality and setting, in order to provoke emotions and reactions from the readers. To achieve this, this essay will focus on the women that challenge traditional gender roles and stereotypes, and deconstruct each text in regards to the very strong undertones of homosexuality; specifically between Carmilla and Laura, and Dracula and Harker. By discussing the harshness and darkness of the environments described, including ruined castles and isolated landscapes; this essay will also explore the
Glaspell, Susan. Trifles. Literature and the Writing Process. Elizabeth Mahan, Susan X Day, and Robert Funk. 6th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice, 2002. 977-986
Showalter, Elaine. Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994
“The Wife of Bath’s Tale” is written in an entertaining and adventurous spirit, but serves a higher purpose by illustrating the century’s view of courtly love. Hundreds, if not thousands, of other pieces of literature written in the same century prevail to commemorate the coupling of breathtaking princesses with lionhearted knights after going through unimaginable adventures, but only a slight few examine the viability of such courtly love and the related dilemmas that always succeed. “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” shows that women desire most their husband’s love, Overall, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” shows that the meaning of true love does not stay consistent, whether between singular or separate communities and remains timeless as the depictions of love from this 14th century tale still hold true today.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 2000.
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of
In their book The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar address the issue of literary potential for women in a world shaped by and for men. Specifically, Gilbert and Gubar are concerned with the nineteenth century woman and how her role was based on her association with the symbols of angels, monsters, or sometimes both. Because the role of angel was ideally passive and the role of monster was naturally evil, both limited a woman’s behavior into quiet content, with few words to object.