The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“The Lady of the House of Love” is one of the earliest examples of a story about a reluctant monster—a conceit that later developed into a popular literary trope. Carter takes a legendary monster and gives them humanity, exploring the fungible boundary between humanity and monstrosity. (Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire, published just three years earlier, has similar thematic goals.) The title character is a Romanian countess descended from Vlad the Impaler, a historic figure believed to have been the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Through this story, Carter is engaging with a tradition of gothic vampire storytelling. What’s unusual in this telling is that the main character has aged, even though she was born a vampire. She recounts a memory in which her father was murdered by a priest before shouting, “Nosferatu is dead; long live Nosferatu!” (103). This line reimagines the classic “long live the king” line in which monarchical power is passed from one ruler to another in death. In assuming the mantle of Nosferatu after her father’s death, the heroine becomes monstrous.

Despite the woman’s murderous and animalistic nature, she clings to vestiges of womanhood. Her bedroom walls are “hung with black satin, embroidered with tears of pearl” (102), and she wears “an antique bridal gown” alone in her home (101). Even when her victims have been chosen and brought to her lair, she offers them tea and cakes in a ritualistic production of politesse. In small ways, the vampire recreates elements of what her mortal life could have been. The narrator then introduces the naïve, innocent hero of the story, a promising soldier with “the special quality of virginity” (105) and a certain sense of entitlement that makes him believe he’s immune to the horrors of the world. In making a male virgin the potential victim of this much older and more experienced female monster, the story inverts the dynamic of Virginity and Sexual Awakening present in other stories in the collection. The young soldier’s inner goodness echoes that of the prince in Sleeping Beauty (particularly the Disney version, which was released almost 20 years prior to this story). When he meets the vampire countess, he is conflicted between his desire to care for her and his disgust: “Her huge dark eyes almost broke his heart with their waiflike, lost look; yet he was disturbed, almost repelled, by her” (109).

Although the hero is attracted to her, his primary impulse isn’t to sleep with her but to heal her. This is demonstrated most effectively when the countess cuts open her finger and the man kisses it, completely upending her understanding of the world and her place in it. This single act of compassion frees her from her curse, transforming her as many of Carter’s other heroines have transformed; here, however, the transformation from monster to human cannot be accomplished except at the cost of her life: In becoming human again, she also becomes mortal. In a parallel to the title character of “The Snow Child,” the only living thing that remains of the countess is the rose she left for her lover: “the dark, fanged rose I plucked from between my thighs” (116)—an image that directly conflates her sexuality with her capacity to do harm. As in “The Snow Child,” the rose symbolizes the intersection of beauty, danger, and decay. As the man cares for the rose, it moves from the edge of death to life. One interpretation of this ending is that the countess passed on her curse to the man through her death in the way her father passed his on to her; this is even more likely given that the man ingested a small amount of her blood, a folkloric trigger for vampirism. The final line, “Next day, his regiment embarked for France” (117), may indicate that the vampire’s curse, once captive within her crumbling castle, is now making its way into the world. However, it can also be read as the man heading toward his own inevitable death. With him, the age of vampires has fallen beneath the rising tides of modern war.