The Lady of the House of Love is one of the ten stories that make up Angela Carter’s short story collection The Bloody Chamber , a reworking of well known fairy tales and myths, which Lucie Armitt describes as deriving, "...its focus from Carter’s fascination with appetite" (1997, 91). A fascination that finds its logical expression in the figure of the vampire. ¹⁶

Briefly, The Lady of the House of Love dramatises the meeting of of a young soldier, a "being rooted in change and time" (Carter. A, 1979b) with the "timeless Gothic eternity of the vampires, for whom all is as it has always been and will be, whose cards always fall in the same pattern," represented by the Countess ("the last bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler."). Everything about the Countess is as it should be except for her horrible reluctance for the role; "She resorts to the magic comfort of the Tarot pack and shuffles the cards, lays them out, reads them, gathers them up with a sigh, shuffles them again, constantly constructing hypotheses about a future which is irreversible," - the cards always show the same configuration; "La Papesse, La Mort, La Tour Abolie, wisdom, death, dissolution." Then, "One hot, ripe summer..a young officer in the British army, blond, blue-eyed, heavy -muscled...decided to spend the remainder of his furlough exploring the little-known uplands of Romania...He has the special quality of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states: ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia, and furthermore, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance. He is more than he knows - and has about him, besides, the special glamour of that generation for whom history has already prepared a special, exemplary fate in the trenches of France." And now, for the first time, the Countess casts herself a fate involving love; "The waxen fingers of the Countess, fingers of a holy image, turn up the card called Les Amoureux...the lovely cartomancer has, this time, the first time, dealt herself a hand of love and death." The officer rides his bicycle into the village near the Countess’s chateau and an old woman (the Countess’s keeper) invites him in for supper. After eating he is invited to have drinks with the Countess, who, on seeing him says to herself; "When you came through the door retaining about you all the golden light of the summer’s day of which I know nothing, nothing, the card called ‘Les Amoureux’ had just emerged from the tumbling chaos of imagery before me; it seemed to me you had stepped off the card into my darkness and, for a moment, I though, perhaps, you might irradiate it." Before asking, "...could love free me from the shadows? Can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?" Yet for the Countess there is only one kind of consummation, "..the lover whom I dreamed would one day free me, this head will fall back, its eyes roll upwards in a spasm you will mistake for that of love and not of death. The bridegroom bleeds on my inverted marriage bed." However, when she leads him to her bedroom to conduct her fatal ceremony, the soldier’s "fundamental disbelief in what he sees before him" breaks the ritual; "She raises her hands to unfasten the neck of her dress and her eyes well with tears, they trickle down beneath the rim of her dark glasses. She can’t take off her mother’s wedding dress unless she takes off her dark glasses; she has fumbled the ritual; it is no longer inexorable. The mechanism within her fails her, now, when she needs it most. When she takes off the dark glasses, they slip from her fingers and smash to pieces on the tiled floor. There is no room in her drama for improvisation; and this unexpected, mundane noise of breaking glass breaks the wicked spell in the room, entirely." When she tries to gather the fragments of the glass together she cuts her thumb and, "Into this vile and murderous room, the handsome bicyclist brings the innocent remedies of the nursery...He will kiss it better for her, as her mother, had she lived, would have done." By doing so, he grants the Countess her wish of humanity but also destroys her; "In death, she looked far older, less beautiful and so, for the first time, fully human." The officer takes with him a rose he finds on the Countess's bed and returns to Bucharest where there is a telegram recalling him to his regiment. On his arrival he finds, "Curiously enough, although he had brought it so far away from Romania, the flower did not seem to be quite dead and, on impulse...he decided to resurrect her rose...When he returned from the mess that evening, the heavy fragrance of Count Nosferatu’s roses drifted down the stone corridor of the barracks to greet him, and his spartan quarters brimmed with the reeling odour of a glowing, velvet, monstrous flower whose petals had regained all their former bloom and elasticity, their corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendour.
Next day, his regiment embarked for France."

This meeting of two archetypes embodied in the Countess and the officer has lead Hollinger to read the story as, "...a self-reflexive allegory about the disappearance of the fantastic in the face of an intensely smug human rationality whose definitions of the Real are clear-cut and confident, leaving no room for creatures like vampires." (1997, 205) She goes on to describe it as; "...perhaps the most postmodern of all vampire stories...an ironic parody of Stoker’s Dracula which emphases that, in a world defined by the ideology of human rationality, it is, in fact, the vampire - here standing in for the realm of the fantastic as a whole - who is the real victim. ‘The Lady of the House of Love,’ from this perspective, is the fantasy par excellence about absence." (ibid., 205-6). However, what I am particularly interested in is how this ‘fantasy of absence’ might be applied to the psychoanalytic model I have so far presented of both the anorexic and the vampire.

To describe Carter’s Countess; like so many contemporary vampires, she, "loathes the food she eats" (1979b) and "would like to be human." Here, once again, humanity is seen to promise an end to the eternal vampiric conflict of body and appetite where "...however hard she tries to think of any other, she only knows of one kind of consummation." Further, as in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Little Mermaid (Lewis, 1994) humanity, or more particularly, the human body, is perceived as offering the potential for love, something that cannot be realised within the vampiric form; "She has no mouth with which to kiss, no hands with which to caress, only the fangs and talons of a beast of prey." (Carter A., 1979b). As Melinda Fowl describes it, "To the Countess, humanness offers freedom from gothic timelessness, its repetition of oppressive patterns, of victimisation, unsatisfied hunger, perfect beauty, loneliness, silence and eternal youthfulness...Humanness here is related to the experience of imperfection, change and time." (1991, 77-78)

Although Carter’s Countess does not possess a reflection, and therefore does not share the dense physicality common to so many modern vampires, the sense of being trapped within the vampiric body clearly emerges through her inability to command control over either her body or her destiny; "...she would have liked to take the rabbits home with her, feed them on lettuce, pet them and make them a nest in her red-and-black chinoiserie escritoire, but hunger always overcomes her" / "Now all shun the village below the château in which the beautiful somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes." (Carter, A., 1979b). Here we find the anorexic ideal of an invisible weightless body, being portrayed as something which only further alienates the subject from her body;

"...her voice is curiously disembodied; she is like a doll, he thought, a ventriloquist’s doll, or, more, like a great, ingenious piece of clockwork. For she seemed inadequately powered by some slow energy of which she was not in control; as if she had been wound up years ago, when she was born, and now the mechanism was inexorably running down and would leave her lifeless."

This ‘undead’ self-experience of timelessness, spacelessness and disembodiment is what Wilgowicz’s patient Muriel describes as her state of "unbeing" (1999). In her paper the ‘Listening Psychoanalytically to the Shoah Half a Century On’, the psychoanalyst Wilgowicz accredits this to Muriel being trapped in the image of her mother, where she has no sense of autonomy or power over her own body, to the extent that she would often take on her mother's physical ailments; "...mother and daughter had remained bound together for many years in an infernal medial cycle in which the body of one suffered from the ills of the other...". In  The Lady of the House of Love this entrapment within the mother’s image also presents itself on the physical level and is seen in the Countess’s wearing of her dead mother’s wedding dress; "...he thought of a child dressing up in her mother’s clothes, perhaps a child putting on the clothes of a dead mother in order to bring her, however briefly, to life again."(Carter, A., 1979b).

In order to address the use of clothes to describe the mother-child bond in Carter’s work, I should like to quote from another of her short stories - Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost (1996b), where a girl is visited by the ghost of her dead mother;

"The girl woke up. The dead woman gave her a red dress.
‘I had it when I was your age."
The girl put the red dress on. The dead woman took worms from her eyesockets; they turned into jewels. The girl put on a diamond ring.
‘I had it when I was your age.’
They went together to the grave.
‘Step into my coffin.’
‘No,’ said the girl. She shuddered.
‘I stepped into  my mother’s coffin when I was your age.’
The girl stepped into the coffin although she thought it would be the death of her. It turned into a coach and horses. The horses
stamped, eager to be gone.
‘Go and seek you fortune, darling.’" (396)

This extract is important because it makes clear that it is only by accepting death/loss that the girl is able to escape from the clothes/image of her mother. This emerges in almost all of Carter’s reworking of fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber where the only way to leave or transcend the tale is through some ritual that incorporates loss. ¹⁷

However, what remains constant in the behaviour and comments of anorexic patients and Wilgowicz’s case study is, "the impossibility of separating from her mother" (1999). One of the explanations for this is, because of the phantasy of bodily symbiosis, it is believed that separation will inevitably involve the destruction of one of other of them; "Two beings are joined inseparably, unable either to die or to be born." (Wilgowicz, 1999). Or as Muriel puts it: "If I am the one to choose, she is done for."(ibid.)

In addition, there is a desire to destroy one’s own body in order to separate from the mother in the belief, "based on a disavowal of death and birth alike"(ibid.), that it is possible to transcend physical death. These dual drives, the desire for separation and for fusion, mean that the conflict becomes cyclical; "If I step out of this circle, I feel as if I am dying. I am constantly tossed between two extremes: either dying or killing." (ibid.). Or, in Carter’s words; "...she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit," where, "The end of exile is the end of being." (1979b)

What eventually happens in The Lady of the House of Love is that this circuit is broken when the Countess cuts her finger, that is to say the cycle is disrupted when she is confronted with loss; "She has never seen her own blood before, not her own blood. It exercises upon her an awed fascination." After this acknowledgment of loss predicated upon a wounding, the soldier takes her mother’s place; "He will kiss it better for her, as her mother, had she lived, would have done," the immediate consequence of which is death; "How can she bear the pain of becoming human?
The end of exile is the end of being."

Carter presents the Countess’s death in three different forms, firstly in the "lace négligé light soiled with blood, as it might be from a woman’s menses", secondly in the body of the Countess ("In death, she looked far older, less beautiful and so, for the first time, fully human."), and thirdly, in rose the officer finds left on her bed ("the dark, fanged rose I plucked from between my tights, like a flower laid on a grave. On a grave.")

In the first instance we see the notion of clothes as a layer of a skin, something which, in being discarded, signifies the end of a cycle, the loss of a life. In the second example this metaphor is extended to the body itself. Here Carter’s description evokes the body, not as a three-dimensional organism, but again as a skin, now aged and withered without the Countess’s supernatural presence to animate it.

That the vampire body does not function in a three-dimensional way, can be seen throughout vampire fiction by the phenomena where, when in need of blood, the body becomes nothing more than a shrivelled skin. As Lestat describes it in The Vampire Lestat; "...if I’m starved for blood I look like a perfect horror - skin shrunken, veins like ropes over the contours of my bones." (Rice, 1985, 9) This can be seen to suggest that there is no depth to the vampiric body, that it is essentially nothing more than a skin. Similarly, one of the effects of the anorectic’s campaign of starvation is the destruction of the internal organs - the body literally begins to eat itself from the inside out resulting in bradycardia (impaired heartbeat), infertility and death. In fact, through her manipulation of her body the anorexic not only draws attention to this notion of the body as a skin - she becomes it; "Her facial bones look as though they are trying to break through her stretched and fragile-looking skin...Yet she might present herself as being well, as though this state of extreme thinness is not connected to her as a person at all, or if it is, it is a desired, not unwanted state." (Farrell, 1995, 7) Or as Joan Smith has remarked; "Starvation exposes what we can rarely bear to think about, which is the skull beneath the skin..." (1997, 2). This might also be seen to explain the phenomena where, for the anorexic, there is always the desire to loose more weight, for, in trying to turn her body into a skin, she is oblivious to her external appearance and continues to attempt to loose weight from inside the body. As one patient describes it; "At one time I remember feeling I was so up really out of my body...that I remember sort of looking in the mirror and being actually surprised that I saw a form in the mirror...and not just nothingness" (Malson, 1998, 133). ¹⁸

In his summation of Wilgowicz’s paper Paul Williams (1999) says of Muriel; "She felt she carried her mother under her skin." In this context it is possible to see the anorexic’s phantasy about transcending death not as a phantasy of omnipotence but as rooted in the perception of the body as a layer instead of a three-dimensional entity. In this scenario the body may be shed like an animal skin without harming what is perceived as the ‘person’. In The Lady of the House of Love this concept finds its expression in the third and final description of the dead Countess, where she continues to exist through the "baleful splendour" of the rose. Here we find Hollinger’s "fantasy par excellence about absence." (1997, 206) - the anorexic phantasy of discarding the skin of the body and transcending death.

Melinda Fowl has suggested that, "...the roses function...to intoxicate and to seduce...When she plucks the single rose from between her thighs, the Countess is removing the means by which she seduced. The need to seduce has disappeared because she is no longer the hungry vampire." (1991, 78). However, I do not think that Carter’s conclusion is nearly so straightforward nor so optimistic, and I would suggest that what is in fact presented is a hunger made even more monstrous in the absence of the body. The horror of finding (yet again) that appetite is stronger than the body. Instead of a weightless sexless body, the Countess has become nothing but appetite. Or as Marguerite Duras described her husband on his return from prison camp at the end of the war; "He has gone and hunger has taken his place. Emptiness has taken his place." (Smith, 1997, 40)

The Countess’s ‘reincarnation’ as pure appetite is expressed through Carter’s linking of the roses to the Countess’s mouth by their both being fanged and their shared colouring; "...red roses...almost too luxuriant, their huge congregations of plush petals somehow obscene in their excess, their whorled, tightly budded cores outrageous in their implications" / "...her extraordinarily fleshy mouth, a mouth with wide, full, prominent lips of a vibrant purplish-crimson, a morbid mouth. Even - he put the through away from him immediately - a whore’s mouth." In addition they are linked by their sexually carnivorous nature - while the Countess feeds upon the blood of her victims, the roses fed upon their bones, which give them, "...their rich colour, their swooning odour, that breathes lasciviously of forbidden pleasures."

Therefore, unlike Hans Andersen’s Little Mermaid who, in dying for love becomes transformed into a spirit of the air;

In death Carter’s Countess becomes only a lingering appetite even further entombed in the image of her mother. For, if we again consider the significance of the roses, planted by the Countess's dead mother which, "..have grown up into a huge spiked wall that incarcerates her in the castle of her inheritance," and which are sustained by the bones of the Countess’s victims.What is found is the vampiric phenomena where the child’s body serves/supports and is therefore imprisoned by the mother’s. Where the daughter, in acting out rituals to sustain the mother, becomes her mother’s ghost; "She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening." Or as Williams summaries it "She constantly had to sacrifice a part of her psyche to her mother in order to keep her alive....For Muriel to be healed the vampiric circulation had to give way through a cutting of the umbilical cord of deadly repetition." (1999)

At the beginning of The Lady of the House of Love the Countess poignantly asks; ‘Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?’, at its conclusion the answer seems to be no, the vampire must always kill or die.

However, there is some optimism in Carter’s tale, for what the narrative can also be seen to demonstrate is the impossibility of being a (female) subject without appetite. Here the moral seems to be that the body only exists because of its appetite. The wish to obliterate or surrender desire/hunger, in any form, leads only permanent entombment within maternal image.

A: ‘I wonder if perhaps there might be another aspect: that you make it possible for your mother to survive.’" (Wilgowicz, 1999)

"Nursery fears made flesh and sinew; earliest and most archaic of fears, fear of devourment. The beast and his carnivorous bed of bone and I, white, shaking, raw, approaching him as if offering, in myself, the key to a peaceable kingdom in which his appetite need not be my extinction." (Carter, A., 1995a, 67)

The solution Wilgowicz offers is that Muriel needs to, "...grow a second, thicker skin.’" (1999). Which is exactly what happens in The Tiger’s Bride;

"And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shinning hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur." (Carter, A., 1995a, 67)

Here we find the notion of discarding, instead of annihilating one skin - indicating an acceptance of loss, and the growing of a new skin. Of moving deeper into body instead of further out of it. As Elizabeth McCracken describes it in her short story It’s Bad Luck to Die;

"I felt like a ghost haunting too much space, like those parents who talk about rattling around the house when the kids move out. I rattled. It’s like when you move into a new place, and despite the lease and despite the rent you’ve paid, the place doesn’t feel like home and you’re not sure you want to stay. Maybe you don’t unpack for a while, maybe you leave the walls blank and put off filling the refrigerator. Well, getting a tattoo - it’s like hanging drapes, or laying a carpet, or driving that first nail into the fresh plaster: it’s deciding you’ve moved in." (1994, 186)

In this brief study, I have tried to show how some of the central themes of the vampire myth, as written by Angela Carter, echo some of the unconscious phantasies and conscious ideas of the anorexic. In particular I have addressed those surrounding the perception of the body and the mother-child bond which might best be described as an ‘umbilical cord’, a psychic entity uniting both parties in a fate where they are "unable either to die or to be born" (Wilgowicz, 1999). The desire to break this mother-child membrane is expressed through the anorexic desire to make the body into a skin, something that can safely be discarded without destroying the person.

Conclusion

In this thesis I have used some psychoanalytic concepts to demonstrate the universal significance of food, blood, biting and the oedipus complex to the vampire novel, as a means of better understanding the vampire myth and our relation to it. By examining modern fiction the links between the vampire and eating were elaborated to take account of the contemporary vampire's reluctance to feed and how this might be interpreted in relation to psychoanalytic understandings of eating disorders. To draw these elements together I then examined Angela Carter’s short story The Lady of the House of Love where phantasies of bodily absence find their representation in the figure of the Countess and the presentation of her death. One way of expressing this phantasy was in the comprehension of the body as a skin where the notion of moving into, rather than out of the body, or growing a second, thicker skin provided a metaphorical means of thinking about the acceptance of loss and the reintegration of mind and body.

16. Carter went on to develop a radio play Vampirella (1997) from The Lady of the House of Love, and was in negotiations to produce a film script on the same theme at the time of her death. The vampire myth also features in another of her short stories, The Loves of Lady Purple (1996a). ^

17. Carter has received considerable criticism for this theme, in describing The Lady of the House of Love Patricia Duncker has suggested; "In fact what the Countess longs for is the grande finale of all ‘snuff’ movies in which the woman is sexually used and ritually killed, the oldest cliché of them all, sex and death." (1984, 9). In defence, Fowl has suggested; "Gender difference and sexual identity are important in these experiences precisely because difference and identity are sites of ambivalences and insecurities, not static unites, and hence are sites of negotiation." (1991, 76) While Armitt simply concludes; "...consolations are alien to the pleasures of this text." (1997, 90) ^

18. Here it is interesting to note that the self-destructive behaviour of anorexic patients may take the additional form of self-mutilation, burning, cutting and scratching (Farrell, 1995), all of which express a preoccupation with the skin of the body. ^