Literary Criticism

Androgyny is significant factor in Anne Rice’s writing, particularly in her Vampire Chronicles. In the 1970s, discourses surrounding gender laxness and bodily reinvention arose around the heightened dieting culture and control of women’s bodies through eating disorders with a focus primarily on transforming into a “new person”. Anne Rice incorporates these discourses into her work Interview With the Vampire through vampires, expressing different parts of the discussions through different characters. Through Louis, the first narrator of the vampire series, anorexia is re-imagined as vampire tendencies with the idea “that the ever-diminishing substance of the female body, far from producing a new kind of body, will simply conclude with the body vanishing.”, which mirrors Louis’s resolute defiance towards feeding off of living humans, settling for alley mice and cats because he cannot part with his mortal beliefs for his immortal life, continuing to believe that any kind of manslaughter is wrong. Louis’s eating habits mirror that of many people who struggle with anorexia nervosa; resorting to eating little or, if any, foods with little nutritional value out of a fear of gaining weight, or in Louis’s case, fear of sinning by committing manslaughter. Rice also imagines the liberation movements of the 1970s through a queer lens, as the “animals” of the story, the vampires, are subtly portrayed as gay or unisex. Lestat, who is the vampire who turned Louis, is loved in the novels for his androgynous beauty. He is described as a very handsome man who is popular with all sexes. There is also a noticeable lack of female figures in Interview With the Vampire, as Claudia, Louis and Lestat’s fledgling daughter, is the only prominent female character throughout the entire novel. In the scene that Claudia is introduced in, she is described along with her mother, who is dead and rotting. As Lestat comes upon Louis feeding on Claudia, he falls into a fit of hysterics and humiliates the mother’s already dead body by dancing and singing with it. Afterwards, Lestat tells Louis “I am like a mother ... I want a child!”. This scene portrays Louis and Lestat as both mother and father of Claudia, violently replacing her biological, human mother, with two male vampires. Although maternal figures are excluded from the novel, maternal symbolism is strewn throughout the novel as vampire tendencies have an oral focus on receiving nourishment through others’ bodies. Rice’s exclusion of female characters emphasizes the importance of androgyny in the vampire world, as the male characters often act as the mothers of each other and new vampires.

A significant metaphor in Rice’s vampire series is the idea of othering, as it happens to the vampires with the concept of them being a metaphor for homosexuality, as well as being blatantly involved with homosexual tendencies, as well as a metaphor for race. Lestat, a blonde white male with blue eyes and a eurocentric attractiveness, is known to favor New Orleans as his home. New Orleans is known to be a cultural melting pot, though it has a large focus on black and African cultures. It is mentioned in this article how Rice endorses homosexuality as the victim of othering in the vampire world where race is a more appropriate stand-in. However, Rice’s novel Tale of the Body Thief confronts this lack of race subject. One of the main vampires of this novel is David Talbot, a white British male who is turned into a vampire by Lestat and switches bodies with a young Brazilian male body who he has fed off of and killed. Talbot relishes in this new exotic body and finally succeeds in his attempt to “go Brazilian”. Talbot’s specific choice of bodily transformation can be read as a metaphor for colonialism, specifically symbolizing colonialism as rape in this novel, as stated in the article, “Remarkably, it is with an image of penetration that Talbot describes this inability to find full answers: “I only penetrated so far” (67). His metaphor for knowledge is both sexualized and grounded in geography,..” - “...a tapestry approach to racial harmony that in effect conceals the rapacious trajectory of this particular line of flight—a deterritorialization of vampire embodiment and British embodiment to be sure, but a reterritorialization on the colonized body of India as well.”. Along with the colonial reading of Tale of the Body Thief, there is also a queer reading to be done in this novel. For Lestat’s body switch, he switches to a human body with living human functions as he inhabits it. He finds this new body strange and uncomfortable, even becoming repulsed by it when he eventually needs to pee, a human bodily function he has not had to do in over two hundred years. The analogy of Lestat feeling out of place and uncomfortable in this male body is similar to the idea of transsexualism, as well as a challenge towards heteronormativity as, “What is atypical is the manner in which the male, human body is no longer taken for granted as a norm.”. In this novel, Lestat represents a more queer idea of the vampire through a transgender lens, instead of a homosexual one. Tale of the Body Thief continues Rice’s challenge towards heteronormativity through the culture of vampires, as well as introducing a new confrontation towards colonial ideas and the erotic nature of colonial beliefs.

Maternity in Anne Rice’s vampire novels is deeply underrepresented, even though vampires could be seen as a metaphor for some kind of maternal figures through an oral fixation on nourishment, similar to an infant sucking on a mother’s breast for its nourishment. What is commonly found in Gothic literature, especially those that have a vampiric focus, tend to have a fear of motherhood, often villainizing the maternal figure within the story. Throughout Interview With the Vampire, the main female character, Claudia, is constantly battling the two men of the story for the rewriting of her own life to be an independent woman and grow for herself. She is constantly cut down from these opportunities and is constrained into a life as a young girl, forever seen as a baby girl doll, delicate and fragile like a porcelain doll. The next two novels in Rice’s vampire series, The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned, have “an increased emphasis on the vampire’s attachment to preoedipal pleasures of sucking, biting, and symbiosis.”. Rice’s vampire novels have a strong oedipal focus, and often have a Freudian effect with her female vampires. In The Vampire Lestat, Lestat’s mother Gabrielle is seen to experience an intense amount of penis envy, an idea from Freud where girls feel disappointed with their lack of a penis and envy their male peers, also a step towards the girl child connecting more to her mother. Gabrielle, after being turned into a vampire by her son, begins to experiment with gender expression, dressing in male costume and appearing as a male alongside her son. Gabrielle’s penis envy manifests in her newfound ability to express the same promiscuity that the men in her family have been allowed to show. Furthermore, before both of their vampiric transformations, Gabrielle encourages Lestat to become close with his friend Nicolas in Paris, and eventually moves him out to the city to live alongside his close friend, and lover. Rice reinforces the Freudian concept that homosexuality comes as a result of overidentifying with the mother, as this relationship was egged on by Lestat’s mother and further supported. Another Freudian idea that is explored in The Vampire Lestat is the gothic topic of oedipal mother-son incest. During Gabrielle’s vampiric transformation, Lestat describes the experience in a way that frames his mother as a maternal figure and a lover, fixating orally as he sucks the blood from her neck, mimicking sucking milk from her breast. This drives the idea of the sadomasochism between vampires comes from when the oral and oedipal stages of life merge, as “sadomasochistic fantasies which permeate sexual imagery in our culture reflect conflicts between the desire for individuation and for merging: dominance, she says, is a desire for autonomous mastery and submission is the desire to efface the self.” The roles are gendered, as the male vampire is the sadist, and the female is the willing masochist victim. These concepts frame women suffering as a result of male power, as well as a focus on Freudian and oedipal maternal symbolism represented through vampires.

Anne Rice’s representation of homosexuality is of of the biggest draws towards her vampire series. Vampires most obviously represent homosexual tendencies, the othering of homosexuals in the 1970s, and controversial psychological reasonings for homosexuality in The Vampire Chronicles. In the second novel in the series, The Vampire Lestat, Lestat unfolds his rebirth into the world as an undead vampire, similar to the “coming out” declaration of gays and lesbians. Much later in his life, in the 1980s, Lestat reawakens from his self-dug grave to become a famous rockstar, shamelessly flaunting his vampire identity. Lestat’s prideful exhibition of his true identity is met with extreme backlash and calls for his destruction, mirroring the negative feedback of homosexuals, especially with the belief that many rock stars are secretly gay or lesbian. Furthermore, the transformation of Claudia into a vampire by both Louis and Lestat reflects the image of gay male adoption. In the third installment of the vampire series, The Queen of the Damned, Rice portrays one of the many controversial psychological reasonings for homosexuality, which is “that homosexuals are self-destructive and will inevitably be consumed by their own inner natures.” through Akasha’s desire to destroy other vampires. Rice’s portrayal of homosexuality within her novels is the reason that her works are so popular among gay and lesbian readers, as they portray gothic concepts and deeper symbolisms of homosexuality and culture surrounding homosexuality and transsexualism. Through these metaphors and symbols, Rice compels readers to dig deeper into social concepts and sexual divisions.