{
  "title": "EMPTY YOUR HEART OF ITS MORTAL DREAM",
  "category": "",
  "article": "PAUL CHARLES SMITH\nThe story The Lady of the House of Love was adapted from a radio play written by Carter for BBC\nRadio 3 in 1976, and as a result isn’t a direct reimaging of any particular fairy tale, but it does\ninvoke ideas from Sleeping Beauty, Jack in the Beanstalk, and vampire folklore. It is about a\nvampire Countess, the orphaned daughter of Nosferatu who lives in an abandoned village in\nRomania in her castle, dressed in her dead mother’s wedding dress with only a caged bird for\ncompany. She repeatedly draws cards from the tarot deck and the result is always the same:\nwisdom, dissolution, and then death, and even though she tries to interpret them in different\nways it always amounts to the same. One day a young English soldier arrives in the town on\nbicycle, exploring Europe before he has to report to the barracks, and on that day the tarot shows\nher a card symbolising the hand of love and death. The Countess has survived thus far by\nseducing men who came to the village, and when the soldier arrives in her castle she begins the\nsame game with him, “Suivez-moi. Je vous attendais. Vouz serez ma proie.” The solider is\ninexperienced, but he is not afraid of the Countess because he does not believe in vampires. She\nrepresents the old Europe, and he is the face of the new changing Europe where the supernatural\nis replaced by the rational. She leads him into the bedroom where she intends to feed on him, but\nshe cuts herself on glass and while she is deep in thought looking at her blood, the solider kisses\nher wound. The solider wakes in the morning to find her slumped at the table where she does her\nreadings dead with a single rose. He loves the village behind him on his bicycle, but takes the rose\nwhere back at the barracks he places it in water to bring it back to life and succeeds, but there is\nstill something unholy about it despite its majesty. The next day after this he is sent to France to\nfight in the Great War. As mentioned earlier, one of the main themes seems to be the new way of\nEurope is the conquering of the old ways with reason, although ironically this leads to war. For a\nstory about seduction, the Countess seems rather desexualised and while the soldier is the virgin\nshe is uncomfortable doing something she should be experienced at. In a subversion of Sleeping\nBeauty, instead of life the kiss brings death, although it is still compassion that provides the\nfemale protagonist with her freedom.",
  "origination": "",
  "duration": "",
  "personnel": "",
  "extant_recordings": "",
  "chronology": "",
  "sources": "",
  "gallery": "",
  "images": []
}