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“I Am Half Sick of Shadows”: The Tennysonian Intertext in Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love”

Perhaps the most alluring of all Alfred Tennyson’s characters, the Lady of Shalott has inspired over the years painters, writers, and musicians alike. Women writers, in particular, have conjured up her figure in their works, some of which feature female characters that feel as forlorn and oppressed by gender role prescriptions. Elizabeth Stoddard, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Grand, Elizabeth Bishop, Dorothy Hewett, Margaret Atwood, Jessica Anderson, A. S. Byatt, Patricia McKillip, Marion Chesney, and, more recently, Sarah Gridley are part of the genealogy of writers who have been attracted to Tennyson’s Lady.1 Noted for the highly allusive strain in her fiction, Angela Carter’s Gothic reworking of Tennyson’s poem has gone unmentioned in previous studies. Though her short story “The Lady of the House of Love” has received much critical attention, none has been paid to the presence of Shalottian parallels in the text. The theme of the woman enclosed in her chamber (bloody or virginally white) brings together Carter’s story and “The Lady of Shalott” in significant ways. The narrative presents a tragicomic vision of a female vampire who is half sick of her condition and wishes to escape from her “shuttered room” (93) in order “to be human” (95). A British army officer on tourism in Romania stops at her castle. In a volte-face from the poem, he enters the Countess’s place and meets her in person, but, like Sir Lancelot, he breaks unawares her perpetual routine and brings about her death. Cursed to the shadows and banned from historicity, the Countess Nosferatu is a sadly “damned” creature (105) living under the ritualistic obligations of a vampire role she dislikes. Dualistic images of the cursed woman coexist in her that reveal her self-alienation and inner fragmentation: she resembles Sleeping Beauty and the Lady of Shalott, on the one hand, and their inverse doubles, the female vampire and the femme fatale, respectively.2 The Countess dreams of a man who will “free [her] from the shadows” (103). She and the Lady typify polar, yet equally constraining, gender roles that limit both women’s freedom to be someone else. As Jan Marsh argues, the Lady of Shalott’s prisonlike room and the tangled yarn that binds her pictorial alter egos in John William Waterhouse’s and William Holman Hunt’s famed drawings3 serve as metaphors of the “confined and restricted world of the Victorian woman” (152). In Tennyson’s poem and Carter’s short story, the female protagonists are immersed within a patriarchal system that condemns them to a scripted, monotonous, and empty existence. For the Countess and the Lady of Shalott, “all is as it has always been and will be” (97) as long as they acquiesce in their condition. Both characters head straight into tragedy when the fancy of love bedazzles them and insinuates the possibility of liberation. Endowed like Lancelot with a symbolic stature as an emblem of light, the officer’s appearance marks the textual collision between reality and fantasy, allegorized in sexual terms. He embodies “change and time” (the story takes place at the outset of the Great War) in contrast to “the timeless