Thanks, first of all, to Sam K. for bringing my attention back to Angela Carter. (Here's the story she assigned us to read, if you're interested: "The Lady of the House of Love".)
I was first introduced to Carter in graduate school, when I took a 20th Century Brit Lit course and we read through her collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber, which this story comes from. I remember clearly how much I liked (in theory?) her retelling of Bluebeard and her story devoted to Lizzie Borden. Angela Carter's style is lush, overstated, even baroque: she reminds me of Edgar Allen Poe, building phrase upon phrase over the gothic ruins of a horror house. And "The Lady of the House of Love" doesn't disappoint (or depart from) this model -- it's soaked with gothic flourishes, with rotting wood and spider webs, with Tarot cards and eerie bloated beauty -- plus, it's about a vampire, which should draw me in.
I'm a fan, that is, of monster stories, and of fairy tales. I like the way that horror shows us what we fear and loathe paired with what we most desire; the discomfort that such reading or viewing arouses in us feels, physically, like forbidden desire ... because it is forbidden desire, according to most literary and social/psychological theorists. Our disgust = inverted lust.
Once upon a time, I liked the literary flourishes that Victorian prudery built up around these base longings. Looking back, I could read Poe's swirling sentences as evidence of his adolescent (stunted? arrested?) sexuality, as nascent (shuddering) horniness (for lack of a blunter term); I could assign over-writing as a symptom of perverse "binding," and suggest that the (young? arrested?) writer wraps language around and around the bloated rose he's avoiding.
The older I get, the further away from that time in my life when sexuality, the sex act, both fascinated and repelled me, the more I avoid such linguistic crenellations.
I have no ending for this.
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