Angela Carter's story “The Lady of the House of Love” opens in an abandoned Romanian village where the vampire queen, known as the Countess, lives. Despite living in a castle, the Countess stays apart in a dark suite. His only company is his lark and his keeper, a mute old hag. The Countess despises her undead existence in the shadows. She wants to be human, but doesn't know if that's possible. During the day she lies in her coffin and at night the Countess's caretaker lets her out to feed. When she was younger she fed on small creatures, but as she grew older she began to feed on unsuspecting male travelers that her keeper lured to the castle. The traveler we meet in this story is a young British soldier, a virgin, cycling through Romania. The soldier is approached by the countess's guardian and taken to the castle to meet the mistress of the house. The Countess is attracted to the soldier and wishes to consummate her feelings towards him, but the only fulfillment she knows is to feed on him and so she leads him to her bedroom where she intends to make him her prey. She's so nervous while undressing in front of him that she drops her glasses and they shatter on the floor. As he bends down to pick up the shards, he cuts his hand on a shard of glass. The soldier kisses the gash to make it better and as a result the vampire becomes human. Then he wakes up on the floor and finds the Countess dead. Before dying the Countess left him a rose. He goes away on his bicycle and the story ends. “The Lady of the House of Love” is very mysterious, even for a Gothic story. There are many ambiguities in the narrative left open for the reader to interpret. It is very obvious that the Countess I... middle of the card... what she has to do to survive, so she cannot be considered monstrous at heart. Carter wrote his character in such a way that he is trapped between two identities and therefore unable to achieve any form of self-definition. Whether she associates herself with the angel or the monster, the woman is weakened by the harmful alternatives that patriarchal culture offers her. The Countess of Carter destroys herself trying to escape the combination of the angel and the monster. Works Cited Carter, Angela. "The Lady of the House of Love." 1979. Ed. Chris Baldick. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. 483-97. Print.Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. "The infection in the sentence: the writer and the anxiety of authorship". 1979. The Norton anthology of theory and criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. 1926-938. Press.