A Vampire in Plato’s Cave: Mimesis, Anamorphosis, and Simulacra in Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love”

Abstract

I argue that Plato’s parable of the cave is one of the intertexts employed in Angela Carter’s short story “The Lady of the House of Love.” The protagonist, a female vampire, is likened to a prisoner condemned to live in the shadows under the obligations of her role. Drawing on Luce Irigaray’s reading of Plato’s allegory, I will explore Carter’s critique of femininity as a condition associated with mimetic processes that imprison women. The protagonist mirrors several female characters that mime and ventriloquize the male desires. However, she imitates her intertextual predecessors in anamorphic ways. In Platonic terms, she can be considered a “bad copy” of the original models. Yet, as I will argue, it is her imperfection, or bent intertextual mirroring, that opens the way for her liberation.