Rewritings of fairy tales and myths from alternative perspectives are now so ubiquitous that it’s worth returning to Carter’s collection to grasp just what a challenge her writing represents. ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ is a vampire story, and I love vampires, but the vampire heroine, with her enormous dark eyes and monstrously luscious mouth longs to escape her Nosferatu ancestry and sanguinary appetite. Her next likely victim, a young, blond, British soldier may just offer her salvation. “He has chosen the most rational mode of transport in the world for his trip around the Carpathians. To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion.”
The young soldier thinks the lady of the house is wearing an old wedding dress – shades of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. But she also seems not human, a ventriloquist’s doll or automaton – a favourite figure in Carter – which also evokes Estella, Miss Havisham’s puppet. Like the other stories in The Bloody Chamber, ‘The Lady … ’ foregrounds fairy tale law: the mute crone who offers supper and a bed for the night to the lonely traveller, stark visual polarities, the concealed, vivid presence of the supernatural, and all manner of vampire lore. Above all, it is the patriarchal and determinist logic of fairy tales that Carter dissolves with her characteristic meshing of the critical and the erotic, not to speak of history hidden in plain sight.
Frst published in The Iowa Review, 1975. Collected in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Gollancz 1979 and in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Vintage 1996.
A Personal Anthology 