ABSTRACT
Both Carlos Fuentes’s Aura (1962) and Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love” (1979) deal with duplicity, with reflections of other selves. Each captures the reader directly in the web of history, in the lies and narratives of the past which entrap. In Aura, the research student, historian Felipe, works on the General’s memoirs, himself researched and invited by a focused advertisement to join a mysterious household of beauty, youth and age, which seem too closely entwined. In Carter’s tale, the damned descendant of Dracula sits alone in her castle awaiting the next visitor, pretending hospitality but cursed with the need to consume those lured in by that hospitality. Love is the dangerous lure, that and the fantasies which it encourages in the hapless scholar, the traveling male visitors, and the equally trapped, predatory women. In Fuentes’s Aura, Felipe augments his income by working with the General’s memoirs and papers, for his aging wife Consuelo. He falls in love with the caregiver Aura, a dazzlingly beautiful young woman in an old Gothic house filled with twisty corridors and texts to be interpreted, and mysteries to be revealed. In Carter’s tale, the lovely vampire lady in the iconic Gothic castle is the final victim. Confronted by her own abject self, she is released into death by love.
