The Lady of the House of Love: Angela Carter

Introduction

Angela Carter's “The Lady of the House of Love” clearly owes its seductive and destructive vampirism “lady” to a number of precedents in both fantasy and vampire literature. Reading the “house of love” literally as a home for the principal of love provides a far more compelling allusion to Carter's themes of love, death, and sexual awakening. Provocatively, Apuleius's ancient fairy tale “Cupid and Psyche” is located in houses that belong to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and her desirable son, Eros.1 Furthermore, Apuleius's text itself functions as both a gothic narrative (perhaps the original gothic text) and a prototype for the contemporary fairy tale. Carter's metatextual relationship with Apuleius's narrative allows her to invert conventions of both gothic and fairy-tale literature.

Discussion

The story of “Cupid and Psyche” is rife with fairy-tale tropes and gothic themes. Human Psyche, a typical beauty, immediately attracts the attention of her rival, the goddess Aphrodite, by stealing her worshippers. As in gothic narrative, Apuleius uses domestic themes to express Aphrodite's lack of agency: her “shrines were falling into ruin; her cushions were trampled on”; “old ashes” even “lay dirtying the desolate altar” (105).

Aphrodite vows revenge; Psyche is ordered to marry a winged serpent who will bear her away to an incipient devouring and death. Apuleius fuses themes of love and death into a gothic formulation; sexual initiation doubles as destruction. Psyche, tricked, is borne away to Eros's opulent palace filled with mute, ghostly servants; the monster fails to appear. The “house of Eros” corrupts even as it fascinates. Idle Psyche enjoys wealth, jewels, and fine clothes while awaiting the inevitable consummation of her marriage. The house, through the mechanism of its supernatural servants, is complicit in this education. Psyche is provided with “such things as were necessary for her defloration,” a suggestive blend of house, haunting, monster, and sex into one, essentially gothic, configuration. Psyche is led to her “beast,” Eros in disguise, who commands her to never try and see his face. The sexual politics of the Erotic bedroom are predicated on Psyche's willing and participatory blindness. For Apuleius, identity is the secret that must, at all costs, be kept hidden.

Predictably, Psyche violates her husband's commandment and must flee, pregnant with their child, on a quest to recapture her husband's love and trust. After passing through a series of Herculean labors, Psyche must ...