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,
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.
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
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 mar-
riage. The house, through the mechanism of its supernatural servants, is com-
plicit 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.2 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 blind-
ness. For Apuleius, identity is the secret that must, at all costs, be kept hidden.
Predictably, Psyche violates her husband’s commandment and must flee, preg-
nant with their child, on a quest to recapture her husband’s love and trust. After
passing through a series of Herculean labors, Psyche must confront Aphrodite
and beg forgiveness of both mother and son before she can become a god-
dess herself.3 The site of this confrontation is Aphrodite’s home—the “house

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of love.” Psyche’s journey from the “house of eros” to the “house of love” is
reflected in gothic patterns of space where heroines pass through fraught terrain
only to arrive in normalized domestic spaces.
Although “The Lady of the House of Love” is rife with Carter’s extensive
allusions and inversions, specific references to “Cupid and Psyche” can be
found. Carter features female agency and interrogates masculine curiosity by
inverting the Apuleian frame. Unlike Psyche, who bleeds for Eros both when
he takes her virginity and, later, when she is punished at the hands of his
mother, the countess demands the hero’s blood. Carter’s young hero is lured
by love in the guise of the monster, but authority has transferred to the femi-
nine—the countess holds both answer and power. Landscape is also inverted;
whereas Psyche journeys in artificial and interior spaces, the vampire’s vic-
tims return to her garden to bloom in monstrous, but generative, profusion.
Carter departs more forcefully from Apuleius in her treatment of masculine
epistemology. The young man’s desire to know the identity of his countess
is fused with his desire to know her sexually; carnal knowledge and carnal
curiosity become masculine characteristics. For Psyche, knowing the identity
of her lover is less important than determining that he is not a “monstrous,
twining, twisted, coiling, venomous, swollen-throated ravenously gaping-
jawed Serpent” who will devour her (Apuleius 119). Psyche, like her gothic
sisters, sees the beast in her lover and needs to know that her vision is false.
Conversely, Carter’s hero lacks imagination; he is unprepared for the dragon
within his lady Dracula. For Carter, the story’s focus shifts from patient to
agent, from hero to monster
Although Carter’s young hero is clearly intended to mirror Psyche, the
identities of both Lady Nosferatu and the “house of love” are harder to quan-
tify. One possibility is that Carter has simply inverted the gender roles. The
young hero, like Psyche, is brought to a house where mute servants wait on his
pleasure. Therefore, if the hero is like Psyche, the countess is the god in dis-
guise. Certainly countess Nosferatu, daughter of Dracula, hides her monstros-
ity with humanity, whereas Apuleius’s Eros hides, under the guise of monster,
his divine power. The common ground for both Eros and the countess is the
power sexual desire and sexual passion can provide. It is her overwhelming
desire for the young man that leads Countess Nosferatu to her sexual initiation
and death. Likewise, Eros’s only injury occurs post coitus: Psyche holds up
a candle to glimpse her lover’s face, and a drop of wax falls on his shoulder.
Eros, by tasting love, also tastes the injury and pain common to mortals,
just as the countess becomes “fully human” only in death (Carter 107). This
reading, although present, is limited. Apuleius provides three strong charac-
ters—hero Eros, heroine Psyche, and the powerful and terrible mother Aphro-
dite—and two houses, Eros’s and Aphrodite’s. For Carter, there are really only
two major characters: the vampire and the lover. If the countess is Psyche, her

53
house of murder and hunger is also a gloss to spirit and anima.4 However, if
the countess is Aphrodite, mother of Eros, new possibilities emerge
Traditionally, the vampire is also, always, mother—capable of forming
new and different life in a parody of birth filled with androgynous potential.
All vampires, male or female, can “sire”; nurturing and patriarchal potential
are therefore displaced from traditional gender roles. Birth is figured as a
penetrative rather than a gestational act. Lady Dracula provides us with two
possible readings of birth. The first reading, human and natural, is filled with
death. Sexual congress is enough to kill the countess, mirroring, perhaps, the
real risks of childbirth. The second option is a vampire who can re-create her
lover as her child. In this interpretation, mother-goddess recaptures child-Eros
without the need of an intermediary figure. For Carter’s vampire, the ashes are
already swept from her altars and cobwebs from her torn cushions; the “house
of love” is restored.
The implications for reading Countess Nosferatu as goddess center in the
power of this figure to combine both authority and femininity. However, Apu-
leius uses both Psyche and Aphrodite to reinscribe, rather than invert, patri-
archal modes. Although Psyche has her moments of heroism, she becomes,
at the end of the story, a “sleeping beauty” cursed by Aphrodite’s spell to
wait for Eros’s restorative embrace. Aphrodite, for all her power as terrible
mother, is silenced by Zeus and forced to accept Psyche: her son rebels and
her father commands. All of the power in Apuleius’s text lies with Eros,
who holds sexual knowledge, physical salvation for his chosen bride, and
the ability to appeal and override his mother’s decisions. Carter’s use of the
goddess/dragon/countess is provocative in that death and desire are figured
in a particularly feminine context. However, the ending of Carter’s text is, in
its own way, equally disappointing. Feminine power and terror fall victim to
masculine alchemy: The lady becomes one of her own roses, kept carefully
in the pocket of a man’s body—admired, enclosed, and conquered.5 Symboli-
cally, the goddess is reduced to her hymen, the flower he has tried to deflower.
Clearly, there is little in the ending of Carter’s narrative to suggest that any-
one, even vampire-countesses, can resist both the fairy tale and the gothic’s
inevitable reinscription of patriarchal roles.
A return to mythological precedent can provide some relief. Aphrodite was
famous for being able to recapture her lost virginity simply by bathing in the
waters that surround her island home. Aphrodite presents the possibility of
an escape from these easy metonymies of women and hymen, virginity and
identity. Furthermore, Carter’s hero has not, himself, escaped death. Unlike
Psyche, who is brought by an immortal lover into immortality, the hero
is already under a death sentence in the “trenches of France” (Carter 97).
Regardless, the death of the hero mitigates only slightly the need for Carter’s
text to silence its monster-goddess. For all of Carter’s inversions, at this last

54
juncture, she falls, despite herself, into gothic-as-normal and normative nar-
rative. Countess Dracula meets the fate of any Aphrodite or Rebecca who
chooses to control the men who try and possess her—death through love:
simultaneously, inseparably, gothically.

—KATHERINE A. HAGOPIAN, North Carolina State University

Copyright © 2007 Heldref Publications

KEYWORDS

Apuleius, Cupid and Psyche, “The Lady of the House of Love”

NOTES

1. I will refer to Venus as “Aphrodite” and Cupid as “Eros” throughout this essay as I think the
Greek names reveal the allegorical nature of these character far more easily than their Latinate
counterparts.
2. Lindsey’s translation reads this scene as the ghostly attendants offering aid to Psyche after
her first sexual encounter. This alternative is from the Adlington translation of 1566. Either inter-
pretation reveals the relationship among haunting, domestic space, and the erotic enlightenment
of Psyche.
3. Clearly, aristocracy has come to replace divinity as an ideal state that gothic heroines aspire
to but seldom attain. Although our contemporary gothic heroines dream about meeting British
nobility, their classical sisters were trying to become gods.
4. A traditional reading of “Cupid and Psyche” is allegorical in nature. The marriage of Cupid
(Eros = desire) and Psyche (spirit, anima) gives birth to their child, named Pleasure. The tale is
generally read as a philosophical exordium to combine both body and spirit, passion and soul.
5. It seems likely that the ending of “The Lady of the House of Love” is a gloss to the alchemi-
cal principal of the “Specter of the Rose”—the alchemist burns the seed of a rose and then,
through a complex process, can produce its specter, a ghost-rose inside a glass bottle that will
bloom fully when heated and vanish when cooled.

WORKS CITED
Apuleius. The Golden Ass. Trans. Jack Lindsey. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1960.
Carter, Angela. “The Lady of the House of Love.” The Bloody Chamber. New York: Penguin,
1993. 93–108.

Anorexia as a Path to Redemption: An Examination of Boland’s

ANOREXIC

Eavan Boland’s poem “Anorexic” explores the connections between Judeo-

Christian mythology and destructive treatments of women’s bodies through
allusions to the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis. Although the Irish con-
text of “Anorexic” is important,1 I focus instead on the connections between

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