Lady of the House of Love - Critical Extract F

[Carter believed that] the Gothic should be placed and was beginning to be placed, she concluded, in relation to reals in literature ad the visual arts and at the sae time associated with fantasy and the fantastic with the realms of imagination ad desire: novels needn't deal with domestic everyday life experience after all' their truth could lie elsewhere. The genre may have started life with Horace Walpole and neo-medivalism - a haunted castled, giant pieces of armour, an avenging ghost, a disputed inheritance - but the Gothic had since turned into something more pervasive: an aesthetic. This aesthetic had strong links with the realist-sentimental novels of Abbe Prevost, Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau which preceded it […] but it was beginning to be seen as standing in stark opposition to 'safe' literary realism. Angela Carter was delighted to see, as she put it, that 'fin in this particular siecle was beginning rather earlier than usual. For, as she added, 'we live in gothic times…'

Christopher Frayling, 'Introduction', in The Gothic Reader - A Critical Anthology. (Tate, 2006).

Carter's 'Lady of The House of Love' derives from classic fairy tales Jack and the Beanstalk and also Sleeping Beauty to portray how enlightenment and death are two inseparables for the 'unhealthy beauty' of the Countess. This is evident as one kiss was sufficient to awaken Sleeping Beauty, and we are reminded that the Countess, like the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, is the natural antagonist of mankind. Ultimately, these elements of 'fantasy and the fantastic' with 'realms of imagination' contribute to the gothic convention of 'blurring of reality' as it is difficult to decipher, as the reader, the metaphysical state of the Countess. 

Frayling describes how people may dismiss the gothic as it is not representative of the life in which we live - 'novels needn't deal with the domestic life and everyday experience' as the as the fact that the gothic doesn't need to be realistic to communicate a message, which in this story can be said to be true. This is because whilst the story is set in a conventional gothic castle, the story is revenant to todays society, as Carter wished ('we live in Gothic times'), by the incorporation of 'the soldier'. 

Nevertheless, the fact that Carter has described 'we live in Gothic times' is evident throughout the collection of stories in 'The Bloody Chamber' as disparity between men and women. 'The Lady of the House of Love' is a prime example of this disparity. The gothic 'entrapment' of the vampire is caused by the Countess' 'unhealthy beauty' and eventually leads to her eternal sadness. Moreover, her eternal sadness is consequential of her 'unhealthy beauty' and the fact that men only objectify her - not fall in love with her.