“The Lady of the House of Love” and “The Scarlet House” by Angela Carter: Historical Knowledge and Plato's Cave
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5944/epos.37.2021.28828Keywords:
"The Lady of the House of Love", "The Scarlet House", Angela Carter, philosophy of history, Plato's cave, memory, palimpsestAbstract
Angela Carter’s work has been usually studied from the perspective of feminism and postmodernism. Without denying this fact, this paper wants to underline the importance of History in Angela Carter’s work focusing on the analysis of her short stories “The Lady of the House of Love” and “The Scarlet House”. Carter´s ideas on this issue, most of them framed in postmodernity, can find a suitable place among different approaches within the philosophy of History, something which will allow a historical reading of these two short stories. This type of interpretation was admitted by Carter herself when she accepted the multiplicity of readings for the same literary work. Since the protagonists of both stories are confined to spaces they wish to abandon, the relevance of Plato’s cave stands out in this context.
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