Angela Carter’s The Lady of the House of Love.pdfVIP

Apuleius and Gothic Narrative in Carter’s THE LADY OF THE HOUSE OF LOVE Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love” clearly owes its seduc- tive and destructive vampiric “lady” to a number of precedents in both fan- tasy and vampire literature. However, antecedents for the “house of love” are far more elusive. The “house of love” borrows from astrology, medieval literature, and popular culture with equal fluency, but none of these categories successfully reveal the intricate character of this theme. 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, 1 Eros. 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. 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 agen- cy: 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 monste