The Lady of the House Of Love

Symbols
1. Roses
  1. 'And I leave you as a souvenir the dark, fanged rose i plucked between my thighs...'
  2. 'A great, intoxicated surge of heavy scent of red roses blew into his face...'
  3. 'jungle of red roses'
    1. 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
      1. Perhaps representing autonomous female desire which here should attract and intoxicate but traditionally was threatening
2. 'A derelict bedroom where a cracked mirror suspended from a wall does not reflect a presence.'
  1. Yet she becomes human and thus visible at the end
    1. Thus, relating to materialism, she becomes human and visible when she stops attempting to fulfil the male gaze?
  2. Femininity associates freely with narcism.
3. 'pretty, silly, gilt and wire birdcage'
  1. Reflects how The Countess is trapped also
    1. How the artificial construct of femininity is what entraps us
      1. '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        Revenance- can we be liberated from outdated constructs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
1. The Countess
  1. Femme fatale yet victim
    1. 'a girl who is both death and the maiden'
      1. She cannot help being the way that she is
    2. How she wears an innocent wedding dress yet is a corruption of that innocence
  2. 'She hovers in a no-man's land between life and death'
    1. Inhabits a liminal space of immortality
  3. '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.'
  4. ''Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?"'
    1. Revenance- can we liberated from the outdated constructs
  5. '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.'
  6. 'She drops, now on all fours'
    1. animal imagery
2. The Soldier
  1. 'blond, blue-eyed, heavy muscled'
    1. Purity and virginity?
      1. 'In his youth and strength and bond beauty, in the invisible, even unacknowledged pentacle of his virginity.'
    2. Subversion, the physical attributes of a gothic female victim
  2. 'He will learn to shudder in the trenches'
    1. Sexual imagery of 'shudder', blurring the sex, violence boundary
  3. 'he will kiss it better for her...'
    1. Imagery of him as a mother
      1. Parenting role rather than seductive
  4. 'hero'
  5. 'he gratefully washes his feet in the fountain'
    1. religious imagery of christ- baptism saves from hell, he is saved from the Countess
      1. He is The Countess' salvation
Setting
1. Set in time period of WW1
  1. Reworking fiction with historic events blurs the line between fantasy and reality
    1. How true monstrosity lives in the human world
2. 'cobwebs, worm eaten beams... endless corridors...winding staircases'
  1. Labyrinths and stereotypically gothic setting
3. Set in the Carpathian mountain region in central Europe
Form and Structure
1. Subversion of Sleeping Beauty
  1. Except she is not passively sleeping, but preying on men
2. Narrative fragmented by interjections from Jack and The Beanstalk
3. Constantly shifts tense- The Countess is lost in time
4. Mostly in 3rd person until' you have such a fine throat m'sieu'

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The Lady of the House Of Love

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	Created by Robyn Horne over 9 years ago