Analysis on “The Lady of The House of Love”

Alyssa Loftus

Professor Ruth Benander

Topics in Literature

13 October 2013

Analysis of “The Lady of The House of Love”

The classification of literature as Gothic leads a knowledgeable reader to anticipate an engaging tale encompassing elements of horror and romance with a dark and dreary setting intertwined with uncomfortable events and drama.  In order to achieve this goal, the authors lead the reader through a dark, barbaric and fictitious tale of villains, victims and heroes filled with calamitous events.

The first element to unfold is generally the setting. The setting of a Gothic novel often starts in darkness and often in a confined space such as a tower, dungeon or secluded outdoor space.  The architecture includes medieval castles with foliage crawling up walls, dimly lit spaces with eerie furniture and moth ridden curtains with cobwebs at every turn.  It often incorporates hidden passage ways, tall and dark staircases going up or down leading to mysterious destinations.  In “Raymond: A Fragment,” Juvenis sets the tone for darkness through, “Night had diffused her darkness o’re the earth, and the moon darted her pale rays on the murmuring rivulet, which twined its narrow road through the fertile needs that surrounded the humble cottage of the unhappy Raymond, who was pensively reclining on a bench at the door of his cot” (Juvenis 23).  The darkness and the eeriness described in this quote reiterates a common setting in this literature.

Following the development of the setting, the author introduces the characters: the villain as an oppressor, the victim as a damsel in distress and potentially a hero as a third primary character. These characters integrated into the setting are used to develop plots.  The villain dominates the damsel in distress to further his agenda of proving scientific theories, extending his family dynasty or simply exerting his power. The plot consists of a problem presented and concludes with a solution to that problem. Through this process, characters often encounter mystical events such as flying helmets, living paintings and statues, and other supernatural characters. Through these plots, social issues of the times including oppression of women, role of religion and the church, political structure and perpetuating their family power are addressed both literally and metaphorically.

The authors engage us through dark and gloomy settings with elements including thunderstorms, death, mourning and supernatural events that lead us into the Gothic plot.   In “The Ruins of Abbey of Fitz-martin,” the tale begins with Sir Thomas arriving at the decaying abbey he inherited that has been abandoned for hundreds of years.  The abbey was last inhabited by Vortimer who secretly married a young woman to deceive the nuns at the monastery into turning the abbey over to him.  He tells a sister in the abbey that one of their nuns has broken her vow and is pregnant. The monastery then tortures Anna who believes that she will be saved by her stranger, Vortimer, but he doesn’t come and she and her baby die.  Vortimer is given ownership of the abbey.  Anna’s ghost, carrying her dead baby in her arms, comes back for revenge while Vortimer is sleeping.  She threatens that she will haunt him even in the ground and then kills him with the yellow lasers that come out of her eyes.  This plot exhibits the supernatural while exploring the role of the church and the villain exerting his power for his own personal gain.

Poe demonstrates many classic gothic tropes in “The Fall of The House of Usher.   He takes

the narrator into a house that is decaying with moth ridden curtains, foliage crawling up the walls and into the house.  The narrator’s friend, Roderick Usher, is mentally and physically ill and is the last of the Usher family to exist.  Usher’s sister was very ill and has supposedly already died, but Usher talks about burying her while she was still alive.  Throughout the story Usher hallucinates about the house shaking, lights going on and off and his dead sister trying to get out of her coffin.  In the end, Usher meets his doom when his dead sister falls on him, the house collapses while the narrator runs for cover.  The metaphorical issue is the house falling apart being a symbol of the family dying off.  The threat or the actual end of a family dynasty is a common theme in many Gothic novels.  The literal issue is Usher’s mind and body deteriorating.

Poe’s Gothic atmosphere of darkness and misery is echoed in “Raymond: A Fragment.” Juvenis starts her story by telling us that Raymond is mourning the loss of his wife.  A thunderstorm comes into the picture and the more miserable Raymond gets, the heavier the storm gets. He is running around in the storm when he hears a shriek.  He goes to check it out and there is a tyrant stabbing a young woman.  The tyrant flees and Raymond goes to her side, but is too late. He then notices her face and says “It’s Miranda,” his supposedly dead wife. The Gothic tropes expressed include darkness, misery, romantic death and torture. The social issue is of Raymond’s perceived persecution and questioning his religion.  “Raymond: A Fragment,” is an important piece in Gothic literature because it emphasizes a classic Gothic setting of darkness and the thunderstorm that mirrored Raymond’s misery.

The Gothic also presents the idea of science being evil and opposed to the church and God. In “Rappuccini’s Daughter,” Hawthorne presents this as the main literal problem when his character, Rappuccini, cares more about his experiments than he does mankind and his own daughter.  This is displayed when Baglioni states, “ He would sacrifice human life, his

own among the rest, or whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge.”(Hawthorne 138)  The loss of Beatrice shows the consequences of taking science too far. Hawthorne expressed the necessity for drawing boundaries to limit harm along the quest for furthering knowledge and science.  This is a principle that needs to be applied today.  The issue of drawing boundaries in science is also addressed in Stetson’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Else is mentally ill and her husband John and his sister Jane confine her to a decaying house in the middle of nowhere.  He insists that she stay in a room with the yellow wallpaper and rest, which he believes will cure her mental illness.  The pattern in the yellow wallpaper and confinement to the room adds to her insanity.  The narrator then escapes into her own mind and becomes the woman in the yellow wallpaper.  She tells John, “I’ve got out at last, said I, in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”(Stetson 263)  His conviction in this method of treatment actually does more harm than good and reinforces the need to not be led blindly by science.

Gothic tropes are also seen in movies including Shrek, Harry Potter and A Series of Unfortunate Events.  In Shrek, Princess Fiona was a damsel in distress who was trapped in a castle guarded by a fire breathing dragon.  There have been many knights that have tried to rescue her from the castle but none prevailed.  Shrek is considered a hero because he succeeds in saving Princess Fiona from the castle. In Harry Potter, Voldemort is known

as the tyrant throughout the series.  He is trying to track down Harry to kill him.  In A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Bauldelaire children’s parents die in a fire.  They have an uncle named Count Olaf, the tyrant, who takes custody of them and he tries to find different ways to kill the children and make it look like an accident.  The tropes expressed were the castle, damsel in distress, hero, tyrant and death. The Gothic is introduced to children in these movies by the medieval architecture of the castle, the ornate design of Count Olaf’s house and the medieval architecture in the Hogwarts school. The Gothic plots in each of these children’s movies are riddled with a series of unfortunate events, the damsel in distress, the hero and a tyrant.  The popularity of Gothic themes portrayed in children’s movies today may cause Gothic genres to become more widely accepted as mainstream literature in the future.

When exploring the definition of the Gothic, it is beneficial to note both similarities and differences to other genres. The Gothic is very closely related to horror in that they both contain blood, gore and tyranny.  They also have differences because horror is more focused on the action of violence and the Gothic is more about the drama in unfortunate situations.  Romance is also closely related to the Gothic in their expression of intense emotions.  Romance and the Gothic differ in that Gothic romance includes an element of horror and mystery that is not present in romance literature.  .

Gothic is not uplifting, true, or highly aesthetic, however, a reader can use their, knowledge of the definition of the Gothic to delve into irrational fears because the mystical characters in this genre are exaggerated and barbaric.  Gothic literature is also a unique opportunity to explore both literal and metaphorical meaning.  The reader can escape to a fictitious world filled with mysterious intrigue, fear and hidden meaning.  Gothic literature stimulates the imagination and allows the reader to travel back to the medieval times.

In “The Lady of The House of Love,” Carter includes many gothic elements: setting, damsel in distress, oppressor and hero. The setting is in an ill-lit medieval castle with fungi and cobwebs at every turn.  The architecture and decrepitude of the castle is characteristic of Gothic literature.  The pictures of her ancestors that sometimes haunt the castle, decorate the main hall.  The only lights in her room are candles.   The room is lined with red wallpaper and contains a bed that has seen many deaths. This scene fits the Gothic genre because it creates a mysterious atmosphere of darkness and uncertainty.  In Gothic Anxieties: Struggling with a Definition, Rintoul states, “The Gothic usually takes the place (at least some of the time) in antiquated space; this space holds some manner of secret important to plot and character development; this space is haunted by blurred boundaries between the natural and the super natural” (703).  The village where the castle is located is desolate except for the two people and ghosts who occupy the castle. There is also the occasional traveler who turns into the Countess’s meal.

The characters are a gothic element because the Gothic has a consistent story line with the damsel in distress, the oppressor and the hero. The countess, the damsel in distress, is a resentful vampire who is imprisoned in a single room in the castle with her pet lark.  She likes to hear the lark announce that it can’t escape. Countess Belle is waiting for her tarot cards to reveal a destiny of love. She wears the only dress she owns, her mother’s lace, blood stained wedding dress. The crone, the oppressor, doesn’t speak and only lets the countess out on moonless nights to hunt. She shows unfortunate young men a deceivingly friendly smile and invites them in for supper, coffee and then their death. The countess draws the card of love and death. One day a soldier, the hero, comes along on his bicycle and changes everything. The two occupants are very Gothic because both the countess and the crone bring out the fear of the unknown.  In the “Introduction” of Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft states, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” (1) The countess is gothic because she appears so young and innocent. Her beauty and seductive voice are deceiving because she uses them to lure her victims into the bedroom to kill them. Belle, being a vampire, makes her a part of the supernatural world included in Gothic literature. The crone is Gothic because she controls the countess’s every move and has that creepy smile.   The soldier is a hero because his innocence and rationality prevent him from believing in vampires. When he catches a glimpse of the Countess, he doesn’t notice a vampire he just sees a beautiful young lady. His innocent love for Belle, not only saves him, but cures her by allowing her to die peacefully.

Both oppression and transgression are common themes in a Gothic novel.  The oppression in this story includes the physical oppression of Belle being a slave to her identity as a vampire and the oppressor, the crone.  Being a vampire is an oppressor because she can’t see unless she is in dimly lit rooms and is confined to darkness because exposure to light will kill her.  In Gothic Videogames, Survival Horror, and the Silent Hill Series, Kirkland states, “This feature embodies an important Gothic element, being a preoccupation with two co-existing worlds: one the familiar external world of light, the other an unfamiliar internal world of darkness.” (108)The two co-existing worlds are particularly apparent in “The Lady of The House of Love,” because of the external world of light of the soldier and the unfamiliar internal dark world of the Countess. She also wishes she were a human and is disgusted with herself when she kills someone.  The other oppressor is the crone because the crone is the gatekeeper of the house.  She doesn’t let Belle out of the castle except on moonless nights to haunt. She also confines her to her bedroom when the sun is up and only provides a pet lark as a companion. The transgression in the story is the countess, Belle, sucking out the blood of her victims for her gain.  The crone also takes away the soldier’s bike.

As a genre, Gothic draws on metaphorical and literal meaning and there are a couple of literal and metaphorical meanings in “The Lady of The House of Love.” The first is the soldier and his reluctance for the crone to take his bicycle. The bicycle represents reason because, “To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion” (Carter 487). This fits in with Baldick’s description in the “Introduction” in the Oxford book of Gothic Tales, “Long after they disappeared into the ethnic melting pots of Northern Mediterranean, their fearful name was taken and used to prop up one side of that set of cultural oppositions by which the Renaissance and its heirs defined and claimed possession of European civilization: Northern versus Southern, Gothic versus Grecco Roman. Dark ages versus the Age of Enlightenment, medieval versus civility, superstition versus reason” (xii).  The second metaphor is the pet lark being trapped in its cage not being able to get out. The literal meaning is the countess, Belle, being trapped in the castle not allowed out or to communicate with anyone. The third metaphor is when the soldier lets the lark go fly away from the castle. This is a symbol of freedom. The literal is the countess dying after being exposed to sunlight. She is also freed from the burden of being imprisoned in the castle.  This use of metaphor shows the effects of being oppressed for an extended amount of time and that the characters are willing to do anything even die to escape this horrible fate.

In Carter’s “The Lady of The House of Love,” the setting reflects Gothic style with darkness, decay and ill lit rooms. It takes place in an isolated decrepit castle filled with cobwebs, dark hallways and dimly lit rooms.  The setting in this Gothic story included dark, eerie, isolated spaces filled with supernatural beings.  Each story included a damsel in distress and an oppressor.  The plots all incorporate a tortured soul wanting to escape the dark world that is the Gothic.  Each story includes an element of death.  Gothic literature allows the reader to travel back in time and explore our deepest fears of the unknown.  Darkness and death are inescapable realities that Gothic literature exaggerates allowing the reader to experience through Gothic characters and phenomenon beyond their control. It also allows the reader to explore the dark side of human nature, the battle of good and evil that exists in the real world. The reason people need Gothic literature, according to Lovecraft, is because it gives relief from the reader’s normal life.  People need a way to be distracted from reality and be immersed in a world of mystery and wonder that is the Gothic Literature.

 

 Work Cited

Baldick, Chris. “Introduction” The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. University Press , 2009. xi-xxiii Print.

Baldick, Chris. “The Lady of The House of Love” The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. University Press,  1979. 483-497. Print.

Lovecraft, HP. “Introduction” Supernatural Horror in Literature. 2006: 1. Print.

Rintoul, Suzanne. “Gothic Anxieties: Struggling with a Definition” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 17, (2005): 703. Print.

Kirkland, Ewan. “Gothic Videogames, Survival Horror, and the Silent Hill Series” The Manchester University Press,(2012):108. Print

 

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