'And I leave you as a
souvenir the dark,
fanged rose i plucked
between my thighs...'
'A great, intoxicated surge
of heavy scent of red roses
blew into his face...'
'jungle of red roses'
much like the Handsome Prince in
'Sleeping Beauty'- yet inverted as
that prince needs to fight through
the roses to his love, yet here it is
not a barrier
Perhaps representing autonomous
female desire which here should
attract and intoxicate but
traditionally was threatening
'A derelict bedroom where a
cracked mirror suspended from a
wall does not reflect a presence.'
Yet she becomes human and thus visible at the end
Thus, relating to materialism, she
becomes human and visible when she
stops attempting to fulfil the male
gaze?
Femininity associates
freely with narcism.
'pretty, silly, gilt and
wire birdcage'
Reflects how The Countess is trapped also
How the artificial
construct of femininity
is what entraps us
'Under the eyes of her
determined and atrocious
ancestors, each of whom...
projects a baleful
posthumous existence.'
Revenance- can we
be liberated from
outdated
constructs
Characters
The Countess
Femme fatale yet victim
'a girl who is both death and
the maiden'
She cannot help being the way that she is
How she wears an innocent
wedding dress yet is a corruption
of that innocence
'She hovers in a no-man's
land between life and death'
Inhabits a liminal
space of
immortality
'She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her
beauty is an abnormality, a deformity,
for none of her features exhibit any of
those touching imperfections that
reconcile us to the imperfection of the
human condition. Her beauty is a
symptom of her soullessness.'
''Can a bird sing only the song it knows or
can it learn a new song?"'
Revenance- can we
liberated from the
outdated constructs
'Everything about this beautiful and
ghastly lady is as it should be, queen of
the night, queen of terror- except her
horrible reluctance for the role.'
'She drops, now on all fours'
animal imagery
The Soldier
'blond, blue-eyed, heavy muscled'
Purity and
virginity?
'In his youth and strength and
bond beauty, in the invisible,
even unacknowledged pentacle
of his virginity.'
Subversion, the
physical attributes of a
gothic female victim
'He will learn to
shudder in the
trenches'
Sexual imagery of 'shudder',
blurring the sex, violence
boundary
'he will kiss it better for her...'
Imagery of him as a mother
Parenting role rather than seductive
'hero'
'he gratefully washes his feet in the fountain'
religious imagery of
christ- baptism saves
from hell, he is saved
from the Countess
He is The Countess' salvation
Setting
Set in time
period of WW1
Reworking fiction with historic
events blurs the line between
fantasy and reality