Anne Rice's Use of Gothic Conventions In" the Vampire Chronicles."

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ANNE RICE'S USE OF GOTHIC CONVENTIONS IN THE VAMPIRE CHRONICLES

Nicole B Tanner

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iv - TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .. vii

CHAPTER ONE: Introduction . 1

CHAPTER TWO: "We Were Lovers, She and I": Incest in the Early Vampire Chronicles.... 5 2.1 "Father and Daughter. Lover and Lover" 7 2.2 "She Was Flesh and Blood and Mother and Lover" 19 2.3 "The Mother and the Son" 28

CHAPTER THREE: "This is My Body, This is My Blood": Cannibalism in the Early Vampire Chronicles....36 3.1 "This is My Body..." 37 3.2 "... This is My Blood" 47

CHAPTER FOUR: "Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned": Catholicism in the Early Vampire Chronicles...57 4 I'T Was a Catholic; I Believed in Saints"...... 61 4.2 "I Rather Like Looking On Crucifixes" 70

CHAPTER FIVE:

Conclusion 82

ENDNOTES 87

BIBLIOGRAPHY 88

v ABSTRACT

This thesis will explore the ways in which Anne Rice uses the Gothic conventions

of incest, cannibalism, and anti-Catholicism in her novels Interview with the Vampire

(1976), The Vampire Lestat (1985), and The Queen of the Damned (1988). Rice's

Vampire Chronicles blend Gothic with the postmodern, and thus she challenges the

Gothic meta-narrative through the revision of these conventions: instead of victimizing

an innocent young girl or horrifying a young man, Rice depicts incest as empowering and

it gives three (vampire) women the strength they need to challenge patriarchy; rather than

evoking feelings of abhorrence, flesh-eating cannibalism is presented as a positive

practice that reveres the dead, and blood-drinking evokes sympathy as it is essential to a

new vampire's survival; and Catholicism, usually a source of horror and terror in

traditional Gothic novels, is a means of comfort for the vampires, who embrace, rather than fear, the religion's holy relics.

vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, I would like to thank Anne Rice for writing The Vampire Chronicles and

Mayfair Witches novels, and thus giving me something to do as a teenager while everyone else was busy destroying brain cells with drugs and alcohol. I would also like to thank Dr. Julia Wright for all of her help and guidance throughout this seemingly never- ending process; for unrelated conversations about the Gothic, horror, and sci-fi; as well as for listening to my rambles, even when they didn't really make much sense to me.

Thanks to my friends and family, who haven't really seen me since I switched my undergrad major to English. I hope to remedy that soon. Thanks to Max and Simon, the most adorable cats on the planet, for their unconditional love and often-conditional patience. And finally, I'd like to thank Glenn for his patience and understanding when my stress was at its worst, and, as always, thanks for The Terminator.

vii CHAPTER ONE:

INTRODUCTION

Since the publication of Interview with the Vampire in 1976, Anne Rice has been a leading figure in modern Gothic and horror literature. In the Vampire Chronicles series,

Rice tells the stories of a group of vampires and their struggles to survive and the moral questions that survival raises. In "Living with(out) Boundaries: The Novels of Anne

Rice," critics Lynda and Robert Haas state that Rice's novels are "an intriguing combination of Gothic literary conventions with a postmodern sensibility about identity formation, sensual/sexual embodiment, and historical perspective" (56). Indeed, while

Rice uses Gothic literary conventions, she also challenges those conventions in new ways. "Beginning in 1976 with Interview with the Vampire," Haas and Haas continue,

"Rice has consistently and successfully combined many of the Gothic conventions initiated by Horace Walpole in The Castle ofOtranto (1763) with her own unique style and with the concerns of postmodern philosophy" (56). The early Gothic emerges in relation to modernity, and therefore Rice's revision of that traditional Gothic, along with her overthrowing of standard views on gender, cannibalism, and other issues, is allied with the postmodern; in fact, she offers a postmodern Gothic in distinction to the modern

Gothic traced by Hogle. In this thesis, I examine Rice's use of three traditional Gothic conventions—incest, cannibalism, and anti-Catholicism—which are significant in the early novels of Vampire Chronicles: Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Vampire

Lestat (1985), and The Queen of the Damned (1988). As Rice challenges these

1 conventions, she subsequently revises the Gothic meta-narrative as she destabilizes patriarchy, gender categories, and boundaries between human and monster.

In Chapter One, I discuss the significance of incest in Interview with the Vampire,

The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned. Incest is a common concern in the

Gothic novel, as "the ambivalence and complicated feelings of an incestuous exchange are built into the conventions of the standard gothic novel" (Perry 266). My focus will be on the relationships between Louis and bis vampiric daughter Claudia, Lestat's relationship with his mortal mother Gabrielle, and Lestat's relationship with Akasha, the

Mother of all vampires. Contrary to traditional Gothic works, such as Walpole's The

Castle ofOtranto (1764) and The Mysterious Mother (1768), Parsons's The Castle of

Wolfenbach (1793), and Shelley's The Cenci (1819), that "[express] the latitude and longitude of a particular kind of 'evil', namely the fear of and desire for intrafamilial sex"

(Perry 266), incest in Rice's novels is not condemned or deemed perverse; rather, it is represented as an act that empowers the women involved in the incestuous relationships and aids them in their respective rebellions against patriarchy, Claudia, forever trapped in die body of a child, uses her relationship with Louis, her vampiric father, to gain the strength denied to her due to her small frame. She uses this strength in her attempt to kill

Lestat and, eventually, to leave Louis as well to live with her vampiric daughter

Madeleine. Gabrielle is an eighteenth-century woman who is suffocating under the constraints of the patriarchal society in which she lives. Because of their Oedipal relationship, Lestat transforms Gabrielle into a vampire rather than let her die of consumption, and, after spending some time with Lestat as his lover, Gabrielle is able to exist on her own without a male guardian. Akasha, the first and thus Mother of all

2 vampires, uses her relationship with Lestat to manipulate him into helping her destroy patriarchy on earth and establish a matriarchy, where all women will be free from the constraints and violence of male power and authority. While these attempts to rebel are not successful in each case, as both Claudia and Akasha are destroyed for their transgressions against male authority, their incestuous relationships give them the strength to at least struggle against the patriarchal power that controls them.

In Chapter Two, I examine Rice's use of cannibalism in the early novels of The

Vampire Chronicles. As Malchow states, cannibalism "is such an obviously available trigger for sensational emotion that virtually all gothic literature employs some anthropophagic element" (45), and Rice's novels are no exception. However, Malchow states that the act evokes "fear/disgust" (45), as it certainly does in Gothic novels such as

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1846-47), Maturin's Melmoth the

Wanderer (1820), and Stoker's Dracula (1897); yet, the cannibals in Rice's novels evoke sympathy and understanding. My focus here will be cannibalism as the flesh-eating of an ancient tribe of people and the blood-drinking of the vampires. In The Queen of the

Damned, the religious practices of the tribe of Maharet and Mekare include eating the flesh of their dead, and, while this practice is condemned by the King and Queen of

Egypt, it is not condemned by other characters in the novel. In the end, it is the twins' cannibalism that saves the vampires, as Mekare eats the flesh of Akasha, the Queen of the

Vampires, to absorb her power and prevent the destruction of all of the vampires due to

Akasha's death. The blood-drinking of the vampires is similarly viewed sympathetically, as they must feed upon humans in order to survive, not simply for the enjoyment of

3 killing. The need to murder humans for survival is something Louis and, to a lesser extent, Lestat struggle with throughout their immortal lives.

In Chapter Three, I explore Rice's use of Catholicism in the early Vampire

Chronicles. Like many other Gothic writers, Rice foregrounds Catholicism in her works, but, contrary to Lewis's The Monk (1796) or Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, she does not portray it as a superstitious religion overseen by malevolent monks and abbesses, a

"note [that] is struck again and again in . . . Gothic novels" (Varma 171); instead, she depicts the Church as a source of comfort and community. Louis, a Catholic in his mortal life, goes to a church as he struggles to come to terms with his existence as a vampire.

The Church is also a place of comfort and community for Lestat, who was educated in a monastery school as a young boy, and within the monastery walls he felt loved and accepted for the first time in his life. Unlike traditional Gothic works, Rice's novels do not contain cruel and villainous members of the clergy, and the religion is not portrayed as superstitious. Also contrary to tradition, Catholic holy relics, which have a significant role in Dracula, as they are used as protection against the vampire, are embraced by

Rice's vampires. Louis is fond of looking at crucifixes and other holy items, and he even enters a confessional to unburden his tormented soul to a priest. Lestat is able to handle

Eucharist wafers, and he and Gabrielle hide from other vampires in a village church while wearing crucifixes. Because Rice's vampires were created in Egypt millennia ago, they are older than the Christian God and Devil; thus, Catholic holy items have no effect upon them. Rice not only revises the anti-Catholicism of the Gothic meta-narrative, but also revises the vampire meta-narrative as well, and her "blend of old and new places her firmly in the gothic tradition yet opens up new realms for the vampire" (Roberts 147).

4 CHAPTER TWO

"We Were Lovers, She and I":

Incest in the Early Vampire Chronicles

In her novels Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Vampire Lestat (1985), and

The Queen of the Damned (1988), Anne Rice engages the Gothic incest motif in her depiction of the relationships between Louis and Claudia, Lestat and Gabrielle, and

Lestat and Akasha, respectively. However, Rice revises the motif, while relying heavily on Freudian ideas of the Oedipal complex. In the Gothic, incestuous relationships typically occur when older male relatives or guardians prey upon their young female wards as a way to establish or emphasize patriarchal control over the young women.

Although it is rare, incest also occurs in Gothic novels when a mother lusts after her son and the relationship is consummated. In her revision of the incest theme, the incestuous relationships between the characters are not viewed with horror, and lecherous parental- figures do not prey upon their young wards. Instead, Claudia, Gabrielle, and Akasha use their incestuous relationships to gain the strength they need to rebel against patriarchal control. Claudia's relationship with her father-figure Louis enables her to assert her independence from Lestat, and eventually from Louis himself. She attempts to leave patriarchy behind completely when she forms a community of women with Madeleine, but she is unable to escape male power and is punished for trying. Gabrielle's relationship with her mortal son Lestat gives her the strength to leave her husband and family, and she is able to exist on her own without male companionship or guardianship.

Akasha uses her relationship with her vampiric son Lestat to further her plan to end

5 patriarchy on earth and establish a matriarchy in its place, but, like Claudia, her rebellion against male authority is not successful and she is destroyed for her transgressions.

Incest is a common theme in Gothic literature and appears as a central focus in several works. According to Perry, "every Gothic novel is characterized by undercurrents of 'horror' which are sexual in origin" (261). When Gothic fiction emerged in England in the eighteenth century, Perry states, it was widely read because "it registered a real change in family relations, one symptom of which was a significant rise in the incidence of incestuous sexual relations" (261). By the late eighteenth century, there was a change in the basis of kinship, and consanguinity, which was once considered essential in detennining familial relations, became less important, and emphasis was placed more on conjugal relations. Because of this switch, the responsibility that male members of the family, such as fathers and brothers, had for female members, such as daughters or sisters, became less demanding (Perry 261). Instead of the protection once allotted to them, "sisters and daughters came to be seen as sexual prey at the mercy of their male relatives .... [F]athers and brothers saw their female relatives less as extensions of themselves or members of their own clan and more as possessions in their power, hence possible sexual objects: close at hand and available" (Perry 261-62). Ironically, families that relied on consanguinity are by definition incestuous, as families would intermarry in order to keep wealth within the family (Perry 265). However, Perry argues, attitudes towards such incestuous relationships changed drastically in the eighteenth century, and these relationships

came to be invested with the kind of dread and foreboding that one

associates with the gothic novel.... One could argue that the ambivalence

6 and complicated feelings of an incestuous exchange are built into the

conventions of the standard gothic novel.... [T]he gothic novel expresses

the latitude and longitude of a particular kind of 'evil', namely the fear of

and desire for intra-familial sex. (265)

But regardless of its historical significance, Perry argues that the most solid evidence for incest as a Gothic convention is its constant appearance in Gothic novels. The incest trope appears in many Gothic works, including Horace Walpole's The Castle ofOtranto

(1764) and The Mysterious Mother (1768); Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796); Eliza

Parsons's The Castle ofWolfenbach (1793); Mary Shelley's Matilda (1820); Ann

Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries ofUdolpho (1794), and The

Italian (1797); and P. B. Shelley's The Cenci (1819).

2.1 "Father and Daughter. Lover and Lover"

In Interview with the Vampire, Louis and Claudia share a deep love, yet Louis's role in Claudia's transformation into a vampire makes him her father, as does his role as her paternal guardian. But their relationship differs from other incestuous relationships found throughout the Gothic, as it is not one that victimizes Claudia: their love and affection is mutual. Turned into a vampire when she was five years old, Claudia's body remains unchanged over time, while her mind matures into that of a woman; however, her unchanged state enables her vampiric fathers to continue to treat her as if she were still a child. In her relationship with Louis, Claudia is able to assert her sexuality, as well as attempt to escape the patriarchal control of her fathers. However, as a nineteenth- century woman who transgresses paternal law, Claudia is punished for her actions and

7 subsequently destroyed, which demonstrates that there is no way out of her prison of patriarchy.

While incest plays a role in Interview with the Vampire, it can be a bit tricky to establish the relationships as incestuous as they are not related in the traditional, mortal sense where consanguinity is based on reproductive lines rather than the physical transfer of blood. When Claudia is a child, Louis feeds on her by biting her with his fangs; due to their ability to penetrate, a vampire's fangs are phallic, and so Louis and Claudia's initial encounter can be viewed as sexual as well (Benefiel 262). Louis leaves Claudia for dead, and Lestat later gives her his blood, which transforms her into a vampire. Thus, as they each had a hand in her vampiric rebirth, both Lestat and Louis are Claudia's parents; as

Louis tells her, "I took your life.... He gave it back to you" (Rice, Interview 116).

While Claudia and Louis are not related in the mortal sense, they are related through ties of consanguinity: since Lestat also sired Louis, Lestat's blood flows through both of their veins, making them not only father and daughter but also brother and sister. Of course, this also makes Louis and Lestat father and son, and thus an incestuous relationship exists between them as well, and critics have discussed the sexual dimension of their relationship. Haggerty, for instance, views Lestat's transformation of Louis as homoerotic and suggests that they share a coffin afterwards to "consummate the intimacy" that is not explicit in the novel (195). Gelder suggests that Louis and Lestat are a gay couple and both fathers to Claudia in a "'queer' family" (113). However, the blood ties that bind them into a father-son pair have been relatively ignored. According to

Benefiel, incest between vampires can be traced to Dracula, as Dracula lives in his castle with his three brides who are also his daughters:

8 As the vampire turns its lover into its child, the relationship is oddly

incestuous, a configuration that carries over into the portrayal of the

vampire family. In the bulk of vampire fiction, a master vampire functions

as father, mother, and husband, with other younger vampires as

children/lovers. No biological mother is necessary, and the vampire

"family," isolated from human society from its extreme longevity and its

essential otherness, becomes an intensely inwardly directed unit, and the

blurring of normal familial relationships creates unnatural tensions. (263)

While Louis and Claudia are father and daughter, these ties are ignored because of the vampire family's isolation from society. Because the three vampires only have each other, the blood ties are blurred and relationships form due to proximity. But regardless of the connection due to their vampiric blood, the rules of incest still apply to Louis and

Claudia, as Louis is Claudia's guardian, and thus a paternal figure recognized within the

Gothic as an incestuous threat.

According to Townshend, in the Gothic, a character's family relations are often unknown or lost, and this often occurs in the form of a young girl who is an orphan or who simply does not know her true parentage; thus, without a family to prey on her, incest can be difficult to establish in such a text. In order to reconcile this, "the Gothic sets about the fabrication of a range of surrogate families, familial structures which not only stand in for the absent original, but which also serve as the site in which the narrative will locate the horrific traces of incest" (Townshend 183). This form of incest occurs in Walpole's Castle ofOtranto, as Manfred intends to divorce his wife in order marry Isabella, a young woman who was supposed to wed Manfred's son Conrad.1

9 Isabella views Manfred and bis wife Hippolita as her parents, even after Conrad's death renders any familial connection to them invalid: "I shall always cherish his memory, and regard your highness and the virtuous Hippolita as my parents" (Walpole, Otranto 80).

She is horrified when Manfred declares his incestuous intention to divorce his wife

Hippolita to marry her: "At these words he seized the cold hand of Isabella, who was half dead with fright and horror. She shrieked, and started from him" (Walpole, Otranto 80).

Although they are not related, Isabella sees marrying Manfred as incestuous, a marriage that "divine and human laws forbid" (Walpole, Otranto 142).

Just as a relationship between Isabella and the man she views as a father is deemed incestuous, so is the relationship between Louis and Claudia. They begin as father and daughter, and Louis sees her as a child who he needs to protect, especially from Lestat's temper (Rice, Interview 97). But as she begins to mature intellectually,

Louis starts to view her as a sensual figure:

more and more her doll-like face seemed to possess two totally aware

adult eyes, and innocence seemed lost somewhere with neglected toys and

the loss of a certain patience. There was something dreadfully sensual

about her lounging on the settee in a tiny nightgown of lace and stitched

pearls; she became an eerie and powerful seductress, her voice as clear

and sweet as ever, though it had a resonance which was womanish. (Rice,

Interview 102)

The use of "dreadful" and "eerie" to describe Claudia's sensuality suggests that there is a bit of hesitation on Louis's part; while he knows that she is a woman in her tiny body, he may have some reservations about his feelings due to the fact that she still looks like the

10 small child he first fed on over half a century ago. However, the attraction is not one sided, and Claudia does not react to his attentions in the same manner Isabella does to

Manfred's advances. Louis refers to the two of them as "Father and daughter. Lover and lover" (Rice, Interview 101), Claudia calls Louis "Lover," and the two share a romantic, sensual moment, which Louis recalls: "I remember holding her and burying my head into her small chest, crushing her bird-like shoulders, her small hands working into my hair, soothing me, holding me" (Rice, Interview 117).

In other works of Gothic fiction that depict paternal incest, the daughter-figure is typically a helpless victim who is terrified and horrified by her father-figure's advances.

According to Twitchell, "paternal incest... is portrayed in romantic art culture not as unfeeling, or ignorant, or even self-aggrandizing, but rather as categorically evil. It is not the result of tragic flaw or accident, but of pure malice" (Forbidden Partners 114). This is certainly true in The Cenci, in which Count Cenci, a man who claims that he never knew true delight before he "killed a foe, / And heard his groans, and heard his children's groans" (Shelley 1.1.106-107), rapes his daughter Beatrice; also, in The Castle of

Wolfenbach, Matilda flees her home when she overhears plans for her uncle to "get into her room at night when she's asleep" (Parsons 14) which horrifies her, especially after he began "for ever seeking opportunities to caress [her], his language was expressive of the utmost fondness, he praised [her] person in such glowing colours as sometimes filled

[her] with confusion" (Parsons 13-14). While these women are victims, this is not the case in the relationship between Claudia and Louis, as Claudia is certainly not a victim of any horrific, lecherous advances from Louis. As stated above, Claudia and Louis begin their life together as father and daughter, and as she mentally matures over the years

11 Louis describes her as "sensual" in passages that are disturbing because it is also clear that he is describing the body of a child. However, he does not become predatory; he does not make sexual advances towards her, as vampires in Rice's fiction do not have sex or gain pleasure in the same manner as mortals do. As Benefiel points out, "sex, death, and sustenance are linked for these creatures" (264), something that Louis confirms when

Claudia asks him what it is like to make love: "It was something hurried ... And ... it was seldom savored... something acute that was quickly lost. I think that it was the pale shadow of killing" (Rice, Interview 209; first ellipsis mine). The love between Claudia and Louis grows mutually and is based upon companionship. As Jowett argues, "Louis and Claudia's love is not a sexual love, however erotic it may seem. It may be for Louis almost intellectual, a love of the mind" (63). There is never any form of penetration between the two, aside from when Louis fed on Claudia when she was human, before she was his vampire daughter, and he penetrated her neck with his teeth. As Louis states,

"For vampires, physical love culminates and is satisfied in one thing, the kill" (Rice,

Interview 254).

Thus, Claudia is not a victim of a lecherous older male figure; the main victim of

Louis and Claudia's love is Lestat, her other vampiric father. Gelder notes the differences between Louis and Lestat, as he states that Louis is "delicate and sensitive (i.e. feminized)" and Lestat is "aggressive and impetuous (i.e. masculinised)" (112); Jowett states that, when acting as parents, "Lestat plays the strict, sometimes distant father;

Louis the caring, constant mother" (62). In a section of the novel that alludes to Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex, Claudia, in love with her feminized father Louis, attempts to kill her more masculine father Lestat According to Freud, a boy's

12 early awakened masculinity makes him seek to assume, in relation to [his

mother], the place belonging to his father, who has hitherto been an envied

model on account of the physical strength which he displays and of the

authority in which he is clothed. His father now becomes a rival who

stands in his way and whom he would like to push aside. {Psychoanalysis

57)

Claudia, technically female but masculinized by her possession of phallic vampire teeth, takes the position of the son in this triad. In fact, the teeth define gender here: like her father-figure Lestat, Claudia kills human beings with her phallic teeth while her mother- figure, Louis, remains behind, morally unable to use his phallic teeth on human beings.

This in a sense renders Louis castrated and thus he is feminized.

Lestat, the eldest vampire and creator of both Louis and Claudia, is much stronger than Claudia, not only due to his vampiric age but also due to Claudia's small stature.

Claudia is a fluidly gendered figured and, thus, is not simply gendered masculine; her small size operates like the lack that precipitates the castration complex of the female

Oedipal child in Freud's theory. According to Freud, the female child envies boys because she does not have a penis. In Claudia's case, she envies her male guardians because she does not have their size; like the phallus, the adult body signifies power, power that Claudia can never obtain. Freud's Oedipal female, "under the influence of her envy for the penis, cannot forgive her mother for having sent her into the world so insufficiently equipped" (Freud, Psychoanalysis 62); similarly, Claudia cannot forgive

Lestat, who had the motherly role of nursing her with his blood (Rice, Interview 92) and thus caused her to be born into vampirism, unable to grow up and gain the powerful adult

13 body that her fathers have. In her anger, she demands to know which one of them is responsible for her condition: "Which of you did it? Which of you made me what I am?"

(Rice, Interview 108; Rice's italics). As the head of the family, Lestat is the authority figure, a power that Claudia resents and can never have due to her size. He is a rival to her, as Lestat, a parental figure, is Louis's partner, and thus Lestat is a rival for Louis's affections; she wants to walk by Louis's side as his lover, not as their daughter. Freud states that for male children, "the threat of castration brings the Oedipus complex to an end; in females, on the contrary, we find that it is the effect of their lack of a penis that drives them into their Oedipus complex" (Psychoanalysis 63), and this is true for

Claudia; her lack of physical power because of Lestat motivates her plan to replace him as Louis's partner. When she plots with Louis to leave Lestat, and thus his controlling influence, Louis states that Lestat will never let them leave, to which Claudia replies, "Oh

... really?" (Rice, Interview 119; Rice's italics), indicating that she has no intention of letting him control them; unlike Freud's Oedipal child, who learns his place after being threatened with castration (Freud, Psychoanalysis 58), Claudia, who is already castrated, follows through with her plan to murder her father and marry her "mother." I am not suggesting that Rice's revision of the incest theme represents a feminist revision of

Freudian theory; rather, Rice's use of fluid gender roles in the portrayal of Claudia displays a postmodern perspective on issues of gender.

In other works of Gothic fiction, incest is made possible due to the father-figure's patriarchal control; his daughter is his possession, and even if she tries to escape his advances, as Matilda does in The Castle ofWolfenbach, he has every right to seek her out until she is found. Matilda has to find refuge from kindly strangers while on the run from

14 her uncle, who has every legal right to take her back home. While Claudia is not a victim of Louis's incestuous advances, she is a victim of this patriarchal control. While Louis never attempts to control Claudia outright, she is still controlled by him due to her stature; a perpetual child, she requires constant protection and accompaniment: "She was a child no bigger than that. Who would have sheltered her?" (Rice, Interview 117). The main vehicle of patriarchal control is Lestat, and he controls both Claudia and Louis; however, his control over Louis is more tenuous, as Louis would be able to survive on his own, should he choose to leave Lestat. He had just this intention when Lestat transformed

Claudia into their child: he created her to keep Louis with him, an act which Benefiel rightly links to a couple who have a child in order to save their failing marriage (267):

'"Now, Louis was going to leave us,' said Lestat, his eyes moving from my face to hers.

'He was going to go away. But now he's not. Because he wants to stay and take care of you and make you happy.... You're not going, are you, Louis?'" (Rice, Interview 94).

Like most women in the nineteenth century, Claudia is under the control of a paternal figure, and she is infantalized, literally, as she is in the body of a child forever. As Jowett states, "she is dependent on Louis and Lestat for protection, the appearance of adult guardians; she can never do without them for long, just as a woman under patriarchy is reliant on her father/husband.... she embodies the role of the woman-child, the woman treated as a child by the world around her" (60,61). Even after being with Louis and

Lestat for sixty-five years, Claudia is still treated as a child, but she is a woman. For

Claudia, Auerbach argues, "who will always look like a doll, vampirism is no release from patriarchy, but a perpetuation of it until the end of time. Her only alternative is her futile attempt to kill Lestat; immolation for this treachery is her only respite from

15 undeath" {Our Vampires 154). Unable to grow up and mature physically, her mind ages and she becomes hostile to the infantilizing treatment she receives from her fathers.

Auerbach states that Claudia "is, in her enforced perennial childhood, bristling with feminist significance, but... she scarcely articulates her complaint:... she is a visual icon of arrested development" {Our Vampires 154). No longer a child, Claudia uses her incestuous desire as a way to assert her sexuality and reclaim some of the power lost to her, and it appears to work for a time, as Louis sees her more and more as a woman and less of a child.

Claudia tries to escape patriarchal control by first attempting to kill Lestat, and then by leaving Louis when she knows that she will lose him to Armand, a fellow vampire who becomes a rival for Louis's affections. Once more, Claudia is involved in an Oedipal triad. She works through the Oedipal complex in two stages: first, she challenges the father's power like a son, and then she refuses to participate in the Electra complex as the daughter who competes with the mother (Armand) for the father (Louis).

As a result, Claudia becomes the vampire-mother to Madeline with Louis as father, which puts her slightly into an adult position. As Sonser states, "Claudia wishes to escape from the doll-like prison created for her by Lestat and Louis, a purgatory mat represents the passive and truncated characterization of woman as little girl" (94). Knowing that she cannot survive on her own, Claudia forces Louis to transform Madeleine into a vampire.

Madeleine is a doll-maker who, in her grief over losing her daughter, wants a daughter who cannot die. It is ironic that, in her attempt to free herself from the men who keep her in a doll-like state, Claudia chooses to be with a woman who not only makes dolls but, like Louis and Lestat, also views her as a living doll. Claudia intends to live with

16 Madeleine to form what Auerbach refers to as "a community of women." Such a community "is a rebuke to the conventional ideal of a solitary woman living for and through men, attaining citizenship in the community of adulthood through masculine approval alone.... As a literary idea, a community of women feeds dreams of a world beyond the normal" (Auerbach, Communities 5). Auerbach refers to Classical examples of communities of women, such as the Graie, the three sisters who share one eye, and the

Amazons, warriors who remove one of their breasts, and she argues that these women are immediately viewed as being mutilated because they exist without men {Communities 4):

"even to the most sympathetic observers female communities still tend to evoke the maimed, outcast image of the Graie—a collective amputee by definition.... Women by themselves appear to be incomplete, as if a limb were missing" (Communities 7).

Madeleine and Claudia can be described in this way: not only are they outcasts due to their vampire nature, but Madeleine, who was unstable when she was human, also displays many signs of madness as a vampire, and Claudia's stature will not enable her to survive on her own. With Madeleine, Claudia is given the power she lacks; she associates the adult female body with power, and regardless of Madeleine's mental deficiency, she is physically strong and will be able to protect Claudia. Wisker points out that Claudia and Madeleine

act out the mother/daughter relationship. Claudia seeks a replacement for

her mother who died of the plague, while Madeleine seeks a replacement

for her dead daughter. This signals a return to the Mother's body, a

reunion that patriarchal law forces apart in everyday moral life. The

17 patriarchal violence of the vampire family of Armand victimises this

closeness. (173)

Claudia cannot escape the patriarchy that she tries to destroy, and she is punished for trying. Before she and Madeleine can form their community of women, Armand and the

Parisian vampires destroy them. Claudia is thus punished for her transgressions, and patriarchy reasserts itself.

Although she is punished for her attempted murder of Lestat, Claudia is not reprimanded for her incestuous relationship. The relationship is not condemned in the novel by other vampires or by themselves; there is little discomfort in their feelings for one another when they first emerge, other than Louis's hesitation due to the dreadful and eerie quality of Claudia's sensuality. According to Jowett, Claudia "embodies the unlawful/unnatural: an attribute of the monstrous feminine. Her relationship with Louis is incest, a transgression of natural law; her attempt to kill Lestat is a transgression of vampire law" (61). The incest is not punished because, as Jowett states, it is a transgression of natural law, and the vampires are certainly not natural; thus such mortal laws and morals do not apply. The only rules which apply to these creatures are the vampire laws; however, even those laws appear to be subjective, as, Jowett points out,

"we are also told that it is forbidden to make a vampire as young as Claudia precisely because she can never be independent. Thus Lestat succeeds in transgressing the vampire code and goes unpunished (and so does Louis, when he kills the Paris vampires), while

Claudia fails and dies" (66). Even amongst Vampires, creatures that exist outside of the realm of mortal society, men are given a different set of rules than women. Lestat openly defies the law and creates a child vampire and goes unpunished, while Claudia, who did

18 not even succeed in her attempt to murder Lestat, and Madeleine, who was wholly innocent in the entire affair, are left in the sun to burn to death. "Thus," Jowett argues,

"Claudia enacts the typical end of the transgressing woman. The male world of the patriarchy, [sic] erases her from the male narrative and destroys her. It is clear that

Claudia very powerfully demonstrates the limitations of fixed gender roles and representations" (66). Contrary to Gothic novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Rice uses the incest trope to give Claudia the power that she lacks in her life as a child and a woman. Unfortunately, patriarchal authority prevails, and any power

Claudia obtains through her relationship with Louis is taken away. The male narrative is a Freudian one in which girls are quintessentially powerless and mothers are monstrous; thus, whatever Claudia does to try to break out of these fixed roles, she cannot help but fall within one of those categories. While Claudia is not a victim of incest, she is the victim of patriarchy.

2.2 "She Was Flesh and Blood and Mother and Lover"

In The Vampire Lestat, her 1985 sequel to Interview with the Vampire, Rice once more presents an incestuous relationship between vampires, this time between Lestat and his mortal mother Gabrielle. Like Claudia, Gabrielle is also in a patriarchal prison, but only while she is mortal. Under the control of her husband and sons, Gabrielle is set free from their oppression when her youngest son Lestat transforms her into a vampire.

Afterwards, the two forget their previous blood ties as mother and son, and they become lovers for many years. As with Louis and Claudia's relationship, the love between Lestat and Gabrielle is not viewed with horror or disgust, as mother-son incest is in other Gothic

19 works. Once Gabrielle is a vampire, she is no longer the same woman she was before.

Gabrielle's relationship with Lestat enables her to assert her independence and eventually live the life she always wanted, without any male guardianship or attachments.

The relationship between Lestat and Gabrielle is truly incestuous, as they have both mortal and immortal ties of consanguinity, unlike Louis and Claudia, who require vampiric ties and guardianship to establish the familial bonds between them. As Thorslev points out, "[p]arent-child incest... is always the object of horror" (47), and Twitchell argues that "[w]e reserve our linguistic wrath for the most abhorrent act: mother-son incest. The most obscene and ferocious curse in the English language, and in almost all other languages for that matter, is 'mother-fucker,' which with gnomic concision expresses both social and familial outrage at a fever pitch" {Forbidden Partners 54). The abhorrence associated with mother-son incest goes back to the story of Oedipus that

Freud takes for his model of childhood development The horror and outrage that mother- son incest evokes is depicted in Walpole's Gothic drama The Mysterious Mother, where the intercourse between the Countess and her son Edmund is "consistently presented in terms of a crime, a transgression, and a sin" (Townshend 202) and, once she confesses to her indiscretion with her son, the Countess stabs herself to give her son the revenge he seeks yet cannot bring himself to claim (Walpole, Mysterious Mother IV.81).

Before he is transformed into a vampire, Lestat and his mother already have a special relationship. As Gelder points out in his discussion of a key passage (Rice, Lestat

62),

Lestat has a tyrannical father; he identifies instead with his mother, and

she helps him to realise his masculinity by turning him into a wolf-hunter.

20 Or rather, she helps him to realise her masculinity: "She spoke in an eerie

way of my being a secret part of her anatomy, of my being an organ for

her which women do not really have. 'You are the man in me,' she said."

(117)

Unable to step outside of her role as wife and mother, Gabrielle takes "pleasure" in watching Lestat upset the family when he questions the same authority that binds her:

"she felt... pleasure when I angered everyone and thundered my questions at my father and brothers as to why we had to live the way we lived" (Rice, Lestat 62). Gabrielle is cold toward her family, and, although she always favoured Lestat, her youngest son,

"only extreme pain in [him] could ever wring from her the slightest warmth or interest"

(Rice, Lestat 37). This differs from the standard mother-figure in Gothic incest tales, which, according to Clery, "tend to emphasise the maternal devotion of the mother to her son before the incestuous act takes place" (36). However, Gabrielle's coldness recalls that of the Countess in The Mysterious Mother, as "Edmund remark[s] on at least two occasions that the Countess always lacked maternal feeling" (Clery 36). However cold she may appear, Gabrielle is always devoted to Lestat, and she always does what she can to ensure his happiness, such as demanding that he be educated at a nearby monastery and selling her jewels to provide him with the proper books and clothing (Rice, Lestat 30-

31); and supplying him with the money needed for him to escape his father's house and move to Paris (Rice, Lestat 61). Their relationship is Oedipal long before they become vampiric lovers. Lestat dislikes his oppressive father, yet he and his mother shared "a love for each other [that was] unnoticed and probably unequaled in the lives of those around [them]" (Rice, Lestat 36). Lestat always loved looking at his mother, whose

21 beauty "was always very important to [him]" (Rice, Lestat 36). It is because of bis great love for her that he offers her the chance to join him as a vampire, rather than let her die of consumption. She readily accepts his offer, and, as Sonser points out, "Lestat's merging with Gabrielle in the vampiric act is described in the most erotic of terms" (142):

I leant forward and kissed the blood on her open lips.... My arms slipped

around her tight little form and I lifted her up and up, until I was standing

with her against the window.... [S]he was flesh and blood and mother

and lover and all things beneath the cruel pressure of my fingers and my

lips, everything I had ever desired. I drove my teeth into her, feeling her

stiffen and gasp.... I was holding her, holding her off her feet, my arms

crossed behind her narrow back, my hand cradling her limp head, and I

was groaning so loud against her with the pumping of the blood that it was

a song in time with her heart. (Rice, Lestat 157-58)

Once Gabrielle's transformation is complete, the two leave and Gabrielle never sees her mortal family again. Like Freud's Oedipal child, Lestat desires to penetrate his mother and replace his father at her side, and he succeeds when he penetrates Gabrielle with his fangs and she becomes bis lover. Their new relationship, which neither of them questions or deems unnatural, is now doubly incestuous: as Lestat changes his mother into a vampire, he becomes the vampiric father of his mortal mother, who then becomes his lover and companion.

While vampirism imprisons Claudia in eternal patriarchy, it accomplishes the opposite for Gabrielle. When she was mortal, the coldness she displayed toward her family was a result of her dissatisfaction with married life. She was a prisoner of

22 patriarchal power, that of her husband and sons, but also society itself which enforced these rules. Having been highly educated in her homeland of Italy, "[s]he had always been silently unhappy" (Rice, Lestat 41) with her married life in France and takes solace in her books to escape "the years and years of suffering and loneliness, the waste in those dark, hollow chambers to which she'd been condemned" (Rice, Lestat 158). When she becomes sick, she encourages Lestat to leave home and live the life he has always wanted, to ensure that he will not be trapped in their home all his life as she was:

"I want you to go to Paris, Lestat... (ajnd I swear I will go mad if I don't

know you're in Paris and you're free when [death] finally comes.... And

I don't care what you do when you reach Paris, whether you sing while

Nicholas plays the violin, or turn somersaults on the stage at the St-

Germain Fair. But go, and do what you will do as best you can." (Rice,

Lestat 61)

When Lestat offers her vampirism instead of her inevitable death, she jumps at the chance: having lived her life under the authority of men, she sees vampirism as a way to be free. Just as Dracula "kisses {Lucy and Mina] out of their passivity" (Craft 119),

Lestat does the same for his mother. Once Gabrielle "dies" and is no longer mortal, she does not have to live her life by the laws and traditions upheld by that society. According to Clery, in The Mysterious Mother there are "hints that female desire has its own, autonomous and selfish volition, land] that it might be impervious to the social desiderata of reproduction and the patriarchal family; that it might even be at war with them" (36).

This is certainly true in Gabrielle's case, as she imagines abandoning her family and

23 "drinking wine until I'm so drunk I strip my clothes off and bathe in the

mountain streams naked And then I imagine going into the village ...

and up into the inn and taking into my bed any men that come there—

crude men, big men, old men, boys. Just lying there and taking them one

after another, and feeling some magnificent triumph in it, some absolute

release without a thought of what happens to your father or your brothers,

whether they are alive or dead. In that moment I am purely myself. /

belong to no one." (Rice, Lestat 39; my italics)

Gabrielle's desires oppose the morals of her society. She wants to be a sexual being who answers to no one but herself, but that is not possible in her mortal life. As a mortal woman, Gabrielle is a sexual commodity whose circulation is controlled by the patriarchal society in which she lives. She fantasizes that she "belong[s] to no one" by, ironically, belonging to everyone; instead of being a carefully controlled commodity, she wishes to be a freely circulating one, available to all. What is important is not the sexual aspect of her desires, but the wish to be in control of her own life. For Gabrielle to engage in these sexual acts would allow her to assert her independence and reject society's strict moral codes; it is as if she simply wishes to spite male authority. While the Countess's incestuous act with Edmund in The Mysterious Mother led to horror, shame, and her eventual suicide, it is only through Gabrielle's Oedipal relationship with her son that her desire to be free is fulfilled. Lestat's own desire and love for her causes him to save her life by offering her his vampirism. As a vampire, Gabrielle has no need for the sex she imagines as a mortal woman; she transcends sexuality and is no longer bound by domesticity. Her phallic teeth enable her to become a patriarchal consumer—of blood—

24 rather than a feminine sexual commodity. Lestat not only saves her life, but he gives her the one she always wanted.

While Gabrielle is able to escape society's patriarchal control, she does not fully gain her independence at first. She remains with Lestat for many years, and they are lovers, in the vampiric sense. Once more, there is no penetration, aside from the initial penetration of Lestat's fangs into Gabrielle's neck; however, they do express their love physically, much more than Louis and Claudia did, as they exchange deep, passionate kisses: "I let my teeth cut into the tip of my tongue until I felt the pain and tasted the hot blood there.... she lifted her head to meet my kiss. My tongue passed into her. Her lips were cold. My lips were cold. But the blood was hot and it flowed between us" (Rice,

Lestat 174-75). When she becomes a vampire, Gabrielle is no longer Lestat's mother; she is a different being, one whom Lestat can no longer to refer to as his mother but instead simply as Gabrielle (Rice, Lestat 160). As Sonser points out,

Gabrielle, itself a gender-neutral name, metamorphoses into more than just

a vampire. As a mortal woman trapped by the exigencies of a repressive

historical period, she finds escape in the books and fantasies of murder of

her husband and sons.. ?, a desire she shares with Lestat. She "hated to

be called mother"... and, once a vampire, quickly leaves the role behind

entirely, the oppressive husband, the children who devoured and

abandoned her, to become instead "no mother anymore." (143)

Part of her escape from her old identity and patriarchal prison involves her escape from gender: she wants to appear as a man, or simply genderless. "She leaves behind her constricting skirts and long hair," Sonser states, "and dons loose trousers and a dusty hat

25 to become a world wanderer. Her masquerade is complete when Lestat glimpses the

'figure of an unearthly young boy, an exquisite young boy, pacing the floor of the

chamber. Of course it was only Gabrielle'" (143). As women lack power in mortal

society, Gabrielle feels that she can pass throughout the world unnoticed as a man; as

Claudia could not exist without a male guardian, neither can a female Gabrielle: "she

looked impossible, a woman torn out of time and place,... no chains on her, free to

soar" (Rice, Lestat 164).

While she remains with Lestat for almost a decade after she becomes a vampire,

Gabrielle does eventually leave him. Through her vampirism, Gabrielle is able to fend for

herself and live without relying upon a male figure; however, she does not do so right

away. When she is mortal she relies upon her husband and sons, and when she is a

vampire she relies upon her mortal son / vampiric father / lover Lestat. She passes from

father to son, which, Clery argues, is common in tales of incest:

In incest tragedy, woman exists as a sign or commodity that fails to

circulate in a legitimate manner. Her transfer from father to son

precipitates a crisis of hierarchy, a breakdown of society as signifying

system. The woman's being is wholly accounted for at the level of

political and patriarchal signification; transgression leads to death as

inevitability as night follows day. (32)

Mortal and vampire, Gabrielle is reliant upon a male figure. Her transfer to her son shows that she no longer feels the need to submit to her husband's authority, and, technically, this transgression does lead to her death: the old, mortal Gabrielle dies and is reborn as the vampire Gabrielle. But she is not punished for her incestuous actions, and no one

26 questions the new relationship between mother and son; instead, she is rewarded with her new life and acceptance for who she is as an individual. But while her relationship with

Lestat allows her to gain independence from her husband, she still remains within proper female roles as mother, daughter, and lover. Cross-dressing is her attempt to leave these roles behind her, but, after spending her life as part a patriarchal system, Gabrielle appears hesitant to abandon these roles completely, which is understandable as life within this system is the only life she has ever known. As she begins to assert her independence, she leaves Lestat for long periods of time, but she always comes back:

Before we were even out of France, Gabrielle was breaking the journey to

disappear for several nights at a time. In Vienna, she often stayed away for

over a fortnight, and by the time I settled in the palazzo in Venice she was

going away for months on end. During my first visit to Rome, she

vanished for half a year. After she left me in Naples, -I returned to Venice

without her, angrily leaving her to find her way back to Veneto on her

own, which she did. (Rice, Lestat 331)

She eventually decides that she wants to explore Africa, and she asks Lestat to join her, but she does so because she feels the obligation to ask him. Lestat realizes that "what she really wanted was to be free" (Rice, Lestat 349), and that she would go to Africa with or without him. Unlike Claudia, who is unable to break free and is destroyed for trying,

Gabrielle has finally lost the chains that used to bind her.

27 2.3 "The Mother and the Son"

Lestat has another incestuous relationship with a different mother-figure, Akasha, the mother of all of the vampires. While they are not related through mortal blood-ties, they are related through vampiric consanguinity, as Akasha's blood flows through every vampire's veins, including Lestat's. Akasha and Lestat love each other deeply, and

Akasha uses Lestat's love for her to manipulate him into helping her enact her plan to murder all mortal men in the world, and thus destroy patriarchy and establish a peaceful matriarchy on earth. However, like Claudia, the other vampires intervene and Akasha is destroyed for her transgressions, and the patriarchy remains intact.

According to Wisker, "Rice's exploration of relationships and the role of the mother peaks with the story of Akasha the archaic mother and Enkil her husband" (174), although I would argue that Enkil does not have a significant role, as he is overshadowed by the presence of Akasha. Akasha and Enkil are first introduced in The Vampire Lestat, but Akasha plays a central role in the third book of The Vampire Chronicles, The Queen of the Damned (1988). Akasha and Enkil are Those Who Must Be Kept, the very first vampires who must be protected because, if any harm comes to them, the rest of the vampires will be destroyed because they share the same blood: "Our blood comes from them!... It is their blood. The line is direct, and what befalls them befalls us. If they are burnt, we are burnt That is why they have been kept for a thousand years.... What happens to them happens to us" (Rice, Lestat 434). For thousands of years, Akasha and

Enkil have been like statues, yet they are alive, as they move "now and then to whisper to each other, to knock [other vampires] down who would come to them for their healing blood" (Rice, Lestat 433-34). Lestat is instantly drawn to Akasha's beauty while she is

28 still a silent statue, and she is drawn to him as well. She moves to offer him her blood, and to prevent Enkil from destroying him out of jealousy. In the 1980s, Lestat is able to awaken Akasha entirely from her petrified state with his vampire-themed rock music, and she leaves her sanctuary in search of him. Lestat is able to reach something within

Akasha that others are not, and the two become lovers.

As the first vampire, Akasha is the mother of all vampires; thus, in addition to being his lover, she is also Lestat's Mother. Akasha claims that she is Lestat's true

Mother, and that his relationship with Gabrielle was a foreshadowing of theirs: "in those first years, when you went into your mother's bedchamber and brought her into the world of the undead with you, it was but a prefigurement of your waking me. I am your true

Mother, the Mother who will never abandon you" (Rice, The Queen of the Damned 262-

63). In a sense, she is right, and she is Lestat's true Mother: while Gabrielle was his mortal mother, she lost that role once they became vampires; because Lestat is no longer mortal, for him mortal ties of consanguinity are not as strong as vampiric blood ties. The blood flowing through Lestat's veins is not Gabrielle's but that of Akasha. Akasha is now

Lestat's Mother, as Eve is the Mother of mankind. Lestat falls in love with his vampiric

Mother while she is still in her petrified state, and he penetrates her in one of her rare moments of movement: "her arms enclosed me, and she drew me closer, and I felt the hand... cupping my head gently, very gently, and I felt my teeth against her neck.... I felt my fangs break through the skin... and the blood came streaming into my mouth"

(Rice, Lestat 485-86). There is a tension between the pre-Oedipal and Oedipal Mother in this scene, as Lestat wants to return to the Archaic Mother and the nurturing wholeness of the Pre-Oedipal stage of psychosexual development Yet Freud's Oedipal Father

29 intervenes, as Lestat's penetration of his Mother is quickly interrupted by his vampiric

Father Enkil, who attempts to kill Lestat for his transgressions: "some horrid noise intruded It was Enkil. And his powerful hands were clamped on the sides of my head.... My skull was going to crack.... The vise of stone clamped to my head suddenly let go. I felt myself hit the floor... and I felt the cold pressure of his foot on my chest. He would crush my heart in a second" (Rice, Lestat 486-87). As Townshend states,

"incest in The Mysterious Mother occurs immediately in the wake of the father's absence

... [and] it points to the presence of incestuous desire between mother and son well before the father's death—an incestuous bond, that is, that the father was functional in regulating, prohibiting, and keeping in check" (200). This is true in Akasha and Lestat's relationship, as Enkil angrily keeps their desires "in check." However, Akasha later disposes of Enkil by draining him of his blood and destroying him (Rice, Queen 29), revising the Oedipal motif by having the mother, rather than the son, kill the father. Thus,

Enkil is no longer in their way and they are free to indulge in their incestuous desires.

Lestat previously stated that Gabrielle was the only woman he has ever loved

(Rice, Lestat 168); however, this was before his relationship with Akasha. Lestat also truly loves Akasha, even though throughout much of their relationship he fears her, as

"she is a mythic and terrifying force" (Wisker 174) capable of destroying other beings at a whim. Both of Lestat's greatest loves are women who, in one way or another, are his mothers. This not only suggests that Lestat is prone to Oedipal desires, but also that he is narcissistic. According to Freud, children first receive sexual pleasure from the feeling of satisfaction, and "the persons who are concerned with a child's feeding, care, and protection become his earliest sexual objects; mat is to say, in the first instance his

30 mother or a substitute for her" ("On Narcissism" 553). Yet Freud discovered that some people model their choice of love-objects on themselves rather than their mothers: "They are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object, and exhibiting a type of object choice which must be termed 'narcissistic'" ("On Narcissism" 554). However, Freud states, this does not mean that each person can only fall into one of these two groups, and "both kinds of object choice are open to each individual, though he may show a preference for one or the other" ("On Narcissism" 554). Lestat falls into both categories, as he has a deep love for his biological mother Gabrielle, and he also displays narcissism as he sees himself in her. Lestat states that he resembles her when he describes her beauty: "She was still beautiful.... Her hair was full and blond, and that I had inherited from her. In fact I resemble her at least superficially" (Rice, Lestat 36). Lestat's ability to recognize himself in Gabrielle may be where the attraction lies. It is possible that Lestat favours the mother as a love-object, as his other serious female relationship is with his vampiric Mother

Akasha; however, their relationship could also suggest his self-love. While Lestat does not resemble Akasha, she feeds his narcissism by not only rising from her tomb for the first time in over two thousand years to be with him, but she wants to make Lestat a god- figure, and herself his goddess. Although he is horrified by the idea of being a vengeful god-figure, as someone who has always sought the attention that comes with stage performance, as both an actor in Paris in the eighteenth century and a rock star in the twentieth, the chance of being revered as a god must be very enticing to his ego. Instead of performing for groups of mortals at concerts, Akasha will enable him to be worshipped by the world: "Yes, I took your audience from you.... I burnt away the arena in which

31 you sought to shine.... But don't you see? I offer you finer things than you have ever reached for. I offer you the world, my prince" (Rice, Queen 258).

While Claudia was a prisoner of patriarchy, and Gabrielle managed to escape from that prison, Akasha intends to destroy the prison entirely, or at least rid the prison of its wardens. As Wisker states, "Akasha's simplistic response to patriarchy's obvious evils is to kill all men" (174): she wants to destroy patriarchy on earth and create a matriarchy, a community of women who would be like the Amazons, "a less vulnerable community of mythic women" (Auerbach, Communities 3). These women will be strong and independent, and will know nothing of men and the violence they create:

a new order was to begin, a new world in which the abused and injured

would know peace and justice finally.... All males save one in a hundred

should be killed, and all male babies save one in a hundred should also be

slaughtered immediately. Peace on earth would follow once this had been

done far and wide; there would be no more war; there would be food and

plenty. (Rice, Queen 303)

This world-wide community of women differs from Auerbach's community, as her community of women in literature tend to be viewed as less than whole or disfigured because they are without men; Akasha's community of women will be whole because the idea of living without men will be commonplace and empowering. Akasha believes that through the slaughter of men, peace will be created on earth, as women have the ability to realize peace while men can only dream of it (Rice, Queen 366). She claims that a "new era is coming when those males who glorify death and killing shall reap their reward"

(Rice, Queen 297); ironically, as Gelder points out, this makes "Akasha herself

32 patriarchal, since she, too, wishes to destroy in order to (re)create a new matrilineal order" (116). Lestat has a place in her plan: he is "[a]ggressive, full of hate and recklessness, and [has] endlessly eloquent excuses for violence," which renders him the essence of masculinity; this essence is what is wrong with the world, but with Lestat it can be controlled by Akasha (Rice, Queen 369). He will serve as a reminder to future generations of what was wrong with the patriarchal past. Horrified by her actions and plan, Lestat is hesitant; however, Akasha uses their relationship, and his ego, to manipulate Lestat into joining her. She does not need him to carry out her slaughter, and she makes it clear that it is "absurd" if he thinks he can change her mind (Rice, Queen

364); however, she needs his companionship because she truly loves him (Rice, Queen

397). She uses flattery and his love for her to convince him to stay with her and be a part of her plan to destroy patriarchy.

Akasha's violent vision of peace is met with resistance from the other vampires, those Akasha spared from destruction because of their close relationship to Lestat. The vampires are given the option of joining Akasha as angels to enforce the peaceful Utopia she envisions, but they refuse (Rice, Queen 438), Interestingly, Gabrielle, once a prisoner of patriarchy, is also opposed to its destruction, and she argues that "(Tjf men and women were born without arms and legs, this might be a peaceful world as well" (Rice, Queen

439). Akasha will not be reasoned with, and she fully intends to carry out her plan, with or without their help. However, she is not given the chance to spread her vengeance throughout the world, as Mekare, an ancient vampire, destroys Akasha and eats her brain and heart, an act that enables Mekare to absorb Akasha's powers and prevent the destruction of the rest of the vampires. Like Claudia, Akasha is punished for her

33 transgressions by other vampires, only this time there are several women amongst the group, many of whom are the most powerful. While Mekare is a woman and, as Gelder calls her, "an earth-Mother figure" (116), she has no intention of establishing a matriarchy or presenting herself as a goddess to the world. The vampires live in a meritocracy, but they preserve the patriarchy of the mortal world; by destroying Akasha and preventing her feminist Utopia from taking shape, patriarchy is once again secure.

In the early novels of The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice explores the limits of patriarchy and female power through incest. Claudia, Gabrielle, and Akasha are three strong-willed women who rebel against patriarchal control, and, while they are still reliant upon men to some extent during their rebellions, they gain the strength needed to exist on their own. Claudia's incestuous relationship with her vampiric father Louis gives her the strength to assert her sexuality and attempt to escape the male power that controls her, regardless of the fact that her attempt to evade patriarchy was unsuccessful in the end; Gabrielle's relationship with her mortal son Lestat allows her to successfully break out of the confinement placed upon her by society due to her sex, and she is able to transcend sexuality altogether; and Akasha uses Lestat's love for her against him in her fruitless attempt to destroy the patriarchy of the world and all of the men upholding it.

These women use incest as a means of trying to escape patriarchal control, while in other works of Gothic fiction incest is used to enforce this control. Also contrary to typical

Gothic novels, the incestuous relationships in Rice's works are not condemned or questioned, and the women are not victims; instead, the incestuous relationships are sources of empowerment for the women, even if that empowerment is limited and does

34 not ultimately overthrow patriarchy. Rice thus highlights through these three women's narratives both the problems of patriarchy and the difficulties of imagining a way out of it.

35 CHAPTER THREE:

"This is My Body, This is My Blood":

Cannibalism in the Early Vampire Chronicles

Cannibalism plays a significant role in the early novels of Anne Rice's Vampire

Chronicles—Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Vampire Lestat (1985), and The

Queen of the Damned (1988)—as Rice extensively refers to the tribe of twins Maharet

and Mekare who ate the flesh of their dead millennia ago, and the vampires feed upon the

blood of humans.2 Cannibalism, "both as event and metaphor," is common in works of

Gothic fiction,a s it

evokes an even deeper response than Western sexual taboos, with which it

has much resonance. It is such an obviously available trigger for

sensational emotion that virtually all gothic literature employs some

anthropophagic element, indicating the depth of the fear/disgust response

it evokes—from Frankenstein's pulling apart of bodies to the soul- and

blood-devouring demonism of Dracula ... It evokes torture and murder,

rape and incest—often in folklore involving the victimiaation of the most

innocent, of children, boys, and young women. (45)

Literal cannibalism, in which one human being devours another, appears in works such as

Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street

(1846-47), and blood-drinking cannibalism appears in the aforementioned Dracula

(1897) and other nineteenth-century vampire tales. In contrast to the standard portrayal of cannibalism in the Gothic, Rice does not depict the act as one of horror; rather, Rice's

36 cannibals are depicted sympathetically, largely because they eat their dead out of respect and to reinforce a sense of community. In complicating the traditional depiction of cannibalism, Rice draws on elements of anthropology and religion to investigate the development of cannibalism as taboo and cannibalism's metaphorical resonance with communion (the focuses of my two sections below), recalling Kilgour's point that

"vampirism is the gothic definition of symbiosis and communion" (173).

3.1 "This is My Body ..."

Along with the blood-drinking of her vampires, Rice's novels depict the standard flesh-eating cannibalism, and the two practices are intricately linked. As Walton points out, "Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles foregrounds the interconnectedness of vampirism and cannibalism. In the Queen of the Damned, the third book in the series, a history of vampirism is offered, a history that overtly interweaves the two practices" (81). Indeed, in Rice's fiction, the creation of the first vampire arises from a chain of violent events that begins with cannibalism. The red-haired twins Maharet and Mekare are severely punished for ignoring the laws that forbid cannibalism enacted by Enkil and Akasha, the

King and Queen of Egypt. Akasha and Enkil have the twins raped for their transgressions

(Rice, Queen 344), and a spirit named Amel, who "liked to draw blood" and thought mat

"it tasted good" (Rice, Queen 341), torments Khayman, the one forced to rape the twins, and Akasha and Enkil to avenge the rape of the twins (Rice, Queen 346). After priests, who blame the King and Queen for bringing the vengeance of Amel to their people, attack Akasha and Enkil, Amel enters Akasha's body through her wounds and she survives her injuries (Rice, Queen 385-86). When he enters Akasha's body, Amel

37 becomes one with Akasha, and his bloodlust becomes her own: "as she stared down at the

King, a great ghastly change came over her, and she lunged at the King, as if she were a hungry beast, and with her long tongue, she lapped at the blood that covered his throat and his chest" (Rice, Queen 387). Akasha must now feed upon others in order to satiate her need for blood, and she begins with her husband. She inadvertently transforms him into a vampire as she realizes that her blood can heal his wounds, and he "lapped at

Akasha's spilt blood as it ran down his face" (Rice, Queen 387). If it were not for their attempt to rid the land of cannibalism, Akasha and Enkil would not have become vampires and thus responsible for the birth of new form of cannibalism. Thus, in The

Queen of the Damned, Rice highlights the traditional association between cannibalism and vampirism by creating a myth in which they are substantively as well as metaphorically linked.

Cannibalism is almost always the subject of horror, whether it occurs in fiction or in the real world. Even if the act is a last resort it is viewed with condemnation; for example, the survivors of the 1972 Andes air crash were criticized because they chose to eat the flesh of those who died during their long wait for rescue rather than die themselves (Taylor 73). Malchow argues that this horror and revulsion "offers a double sensation—both fear of being eaten and disgust at eating, at sharing in that unmentionable feast" (45). In Dracula, Mina encapsulates this fear and disgust when she is fed on by Dracula and feeds on him herself, and she screams that she is "unclean" and must not touch or kiss Jonathan ever again (Stoker 248). Contrary to this abhorrence of the practice, Rice represents cannibalism as a positive act performed to revere the dead in

The Queen of the Damned In the novel, Maharet and Mekare belong to a society

38 millennia ago that performed cannibalism as a sacred funeral feast Their tribe practices endophagy, which is the consumption of friends, relatives, or fellow tribe members

(Askenasy 117), and they eat their dead as a sign of respect. They "took into [themselves] the bodies of those who'd given [them] life, the bodies from which [their] bodies had come. And so a cycle was completed" (Rice, Queen 313). They believe that it was not only disrespectful but horrific to let their dead rot within the earth, be eaten by wild animals, or burned "as if they were fuel or refuse" (Rice, Queen 313): According to

Taylor, this belief is held by the Yanomamo of the Amazon basin, for whom "the idea of burying dead children in damp rainforest earth and abandoning them to rot, cold and lonely, is as horrifying a thought as it is for us to imagine doing what they do, cooking and eating their dead children and drinking down their calcined bones in plantain soup, keeping them warm and comforted inside them" (Taylor 83). Not only does cannibalism prevent the slow decay of a loved one in the earth, but the twins' people believed that residual energy still remains in one's flesh after death, and this energy would be absorbed by those who eat it: "We believed that the spirit left the body at death; but we also believed that the residue of all living things contains some tiny amount of power after life itself is gone.... And of course when we consumed the flesh of our dead this residue, so to speak, would be consumed as well" (Rice, Queen 312-13). Freud wrote about this belief in Totem and Taboo: "By incorporating parts of a person's body through the act of eating, one at the same time acquires the qualities possessed by him. This leads in certain circumstances to precautions and restrictions in regard to diet" (82). The twins' people took such precautions, as they only ate those who were members of their village, and

39 never enemies (Rice, Queen 313). The eating of their dead is much like Catholic communion, which is

a ritual to restore a primal unity, in which man and God are returned to an

original identity.... Both God and man play 'host' Man is a host in

that he literally takes God, in the form of the Host, into himself.... The

act is one of reciprocal incorporation, as both are identified by the single

word and substance, the Host, so that the absolute boundary between

inside and outside, eater and eaten, itself appears to disappear. (Kilgour

15)

As Catholics symbolically ingest the flesh and blood of Christ in order to become one with Him, the twins' people are similarly reunited with and receive energy from their kinsmen by literally eating their flesh. (Rice's depiction of Catholicism in the early

Vampire Chronicles will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.)

While the twins' tribe practice cannibalism, and view not eating their dead as horrific, they are, however, appalled by other forms of cannibalism. As Taylor states, there are many different motivations for cannibalism:

In humans it has been claimed to relate to nutritional necessity (survival

cannibalism), psychological imbalance (psychotic cannibalism),

aggression (hunting enemies and eating them), spirituality (eating the dead

as a funeral practice; partaking of human sacrifices), sensual pleasure

(gustatory or culinary cannibalism), health concerns (medicinal

cannibalism), and combinations of these. (64)

40 Rice's depiction of the twins' tribe places them within the "spirituality" category, as they only eat flesh as part of a funeral feast, and they do not approve of those who eat human flesh for other reasons. Maharet speaks of "the savage people" of the Nile Valley who not only perform a funeral feast but also go to war to "bring back captives for their spits and pots" (Rice, Queen 313). The twins' endophagous tribe view exophagy, the practice of eating those outside of one's own tribe (Askenasy 117), with scorn. The people of the

Nile Valley "gloried" in eating the flesh of their enemies, and they believed mat they would gain the strength of the people they killed. Aside from this spiritual aspect of cannibalism, the Nile Valley tribes simply "liked the taste of the flesh" (Rice, Queen

313), and thus human flesh was part of their diet. Maharet is quick to distinguish herself and her tribe from these cannibals, and she stresses that her tribe was peaceful and those who hunted for flesh were not: "But perhaps the crucial difference between us and the warlike dwellers of the Nile Valley was not that they ate their enemies, but that they were warlike and we were peaceful. We did not have any enemies" (Rice, Queen 313). In this instance, Rice is consistent with modern anthropology, which has noted that there are taboos and laws concerning cannibalism even within cannibalistic tribes. As Askenasy points out, this is common in cannibalistic societies:

Many kinds of cannibalism were hedged with ceremonial and religious

regulations and customs. The literature indicates that certain tribes went to

war to provide human flesh, and only the killers were permitted to eat it;

in others only the nearest relatives could do so; in yet others related or

befriended clans might be included in the feast. (117)

41 While Maharet is quick to draw a line between her tribe's practices and those of the Nile

Valley tribe, those opposed to the practice do not see such degrees of acceptability. When

Akasha becomes Enkil's queen, she brings ideas and customs with her from her homeland of Uruk in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley (Rice, Queen 314). She is sickened by the cannibals in her kingdom and makes the practice illegal, on punishment of death, regardless of whether it is a sacred act or simply part of a tribe's diet.

Throughout the text, the only opposition to the twins' cannibalism comes from

Akasha, though it is supported by her consort Enkil. The people of the Nile Valley were cannibals under the rule of his royal family (Rice, Queen 314); it did not offend anyone until Enkil married Akasha, and she brought her foreign beliefs to his kingdom. It is

Akasha who disapproves of the act, and Enkil simply enforces "Akasha's edict" (Rice,

Queen 315) to please his new queen. In the novel's present, the 1980s, several characters receive visions of the twins' interrupted funeral feast, and they are not horrified by the practice either. Daniel, the vampire Armand's human paramour, is one such recipient, and, while he is horrified by the sight of the burned body, he understands the importance of the ritual to the people in his vision: "[T]he funeral feast was ready... and the body lay steaming hot on the stone slab.... It horrified Daniel.... This feast was the right and duty of the twins. This was their mother, the blackened body on the stone slab. And what was human must remain with the human" (Rice, Queen 78; Rice's italics). Daniel is not disgusted by the fact that the twins intend to eat their mother, and he becomes agitated when he realizes that soldiers, sent by Enkil to punish those who break the new law against cannibalism, are coming to interrupt the feast:

42 But the ghastly cry comes, just as Daniel knew it would. Stop the soldiers.

But he can't.... The soldiers storm the clearing, the villagers scatter, the

twins set down the plates and fling themselves over the smoking feast. But

this is madness.

The soldiers tear them loose so effortlessly, and as the slab is

lifted, the body falls, breaking into pieces, and the heart and the brain are

thrown down into the dust. The twins scream and scream.

But the villagers are screaming too, the soldiers are cutting them

down as they run.... No one will roast these bodies, no one will consume

this flesh. It will pass out of the human race, with all its power and its

mystery. (Rice, Queen 78-79; Rice's italics)

Daniel understands the importance of the funeral feast, and it is the dishonour shown to the mother of the twins and the traditions of their people that cause him grief. Even

Khayman, Enkil's chief steward and one of the soldiers who interrupts the feast, understands the importance of the act and is ashamed of his role in destroying the sacred practice; as a former participant of ritual cannibalism, he is horrified that he is responsible for the remains of the twins' mother being thrown the to earth, uneaten, where they will rot and putrefy: "He was of an old family; he had eaten the flesh of his ancestors; and he found himself now punishing such traditions among those whom he had known and loved" (Rice, Queen 334). His understanding of the importance of consuming the flesh is emphasized when he picks up Maharet's eyes after soldiers pluck them out and he enables her to swallow them, "lest they be desecrated or lost" (Rice, Queen 411).

43 Therefore, Rice's novel associates cannibalism positively with respect for the dead, and so critiques opposition to it, especially violent opposition such as Akasha's.

Although the majority of the characters in the novel do not condemn cannibalism,

Akasha's condemnation of the act is that which is most often shared by Western society and cultures that do not participate in the practice. As Wright states, cannibalism is "a powerful taboo that taints any social practice, or people, that it metaphorically touches"

(85). Cannibalism is such a taboo that even Sweeney Todd, the "demon barber" who has murdered countless men to be made into pies, will not accept a meal at Mrs. Lovett's pie- shop; after making "a horrible face," he quickly makes an excuse to avoid eating a pie:

"No, thank you; it's very foolish, when I knew I was going to make a call here, but I have just had a pork chop" (Mack 263). Todd knows that he must give a valid reason as to why he will not enjoy one of Mrs. Lovett's renowned meat pies; the pies are so delicious that

"they are positively fit for the gods" (Mack 99), and to refuse without cause may arouse curiosity or suspicion. The level of disgust associated with cannibalism is emphasized by the author's suggestion that even a serial murderer cannot bring himself to commit the act. After the true contents of the pies are revealed, the unknowing participants in Mrs.

Lovett's cannibalistic feasts never get over the horror of what they ate. After many years pass and "[tjhe youths who visited Lovett's pie-shop, and there luxuriated upon those delicacies, are youths no longer," the only surviving patron "is very, very old, but even now, as he thinks of how he enjoyed the flavour of the 'veal', he shudders, and has to take a drop of brandy" (Mack 281).

It is ironic that, after they outlawed the practice and severely punished the twins for transgressing the new law, Akasha and Enkil, cannibalism's biggest opponents,

44 become vampires who feed on their enemies to satisfy their thirst for blood: "when they execute their enemies in secret, they drink their blood!... Like jungle cats, they feed upon these victims; and the room after is as a lion's den" (Rice, Queen 389). In order to satisfy their maddening thirst, they must create more vampires, and thus dilute the thirst and spread it amongst other vampires to "share the burden" (Rice, Queen 406). Thus, they are responsible for the spread of this new form of cannibalism throughout Egypt, where they had forbidden the practice, and, subsequently, the world. Maharet and Mekare are transformed into vampires also, which is another irony, as Akasha punished them greatly for their own cannibalism, which did not require murdering or hunting others for the feast; Akasha is responsible for the perpetual cannibalism the twins must perform daily in order to endure the thirst for blood. Thus, Akasha's repression leads to an intensification of what is repressed.

The original conflict—the twins's interrupted funeral feast—is eventually resolved through the killing of Akasha, the one who created the conflict by repressing the practice. Khayman transforms Maharet, Mekare, and "any who wanted the power" into vampires in an effort to create a small army of blood-drinkers who will rise up against the

King and Queen (Rice, Queen 414-15). Mekare previously swore that she would destroy

Akasha for her treatment of her and Maharet: "You are the Queen of the Damned, that's what you are! Your only destiny is evil, as well you know! But I shall stop you, if I must come back from the dead to do it. At the hour of your greatest menace it is I who will defeat you! It is I who will bring you down. Look well upon my face, for you will see me again!" (Rice, Queen 411). When she swears this oath, Mekare and her sister are facing certain death, and, as threatening as her oath is, it is highly unlikely that she would be

45 able to keep her promise; however, when Khayman transforms the twins into vampires,

they become immortal, which not only enables them to evade death but also allows

Mekare to enact her revenge upon Akasha. Millennia later, in 1984, Akasha intends to

destroy all of the men on earth, and thus rid the world of the evils of patriarchy. While

other vampires oppose Akasha's bloody plan and challenge her actions, they are at a loss

as to how to stop her, as her death would bring about their own (Rice, Lestat 434).

However, Mekare still intends to kill her, and is successful:

I saw [Mekare's] fingers, caked with mud, streaking towards Akasha; I

saw Akasha's face as she was caught by her long black hair. I heard her

scream. Then I saw her profile, as her head struck the western window and

shattered it.... Akasha's headless body was sliding down the fractured

glass wall... [a]nd [Mekare] held Akasha's severed head by the hair.

(Rice, Queen 454)

With the death of Akasha, the lives of the other vampires are in danger, as any harm that comes to her, the mother and life source of all vampires, comes to them. However,

Mekare is able to save them all by consuming Akasha's brain and heart. With this act,

Mekare absorbs Akasha's vampiric powers, and she becomes the new Mother of the

Vampires. The act gives credence to the twins' sacred cannibalism, as Mekare absorbs the residue of her vampiric mother. In the act, Mekare performs both endophagy and exophagy, as she not only eats her (vampiric) mother, but also her enemy. The tabooed act of cannibalism not only enables the vampires to survive day to day, as they must feed on human blood, but it also saves the vampire race from extinction. While this is not necessarily positive, as the vampires will continue to feed on and thus kill humans, the

46 death of Akasha prevents mass murder and world-wide destruction. Once again, the practices of cannibalism and vampirism are interconnected and, just as the twins' cannibalism led to the birth of Akasha's vampirism, now Mekare's murder and cannibalism of Akasha makes possible vampirism's survival.

3.2 "... This is My Blood"

In The Vampire Chronicles, blood is essential to a vampire's existence. While younger vampires need it to survive, blood, mortal and vampiric, is also a powerful restorative. For instance, transfusions of the vampire Marius's blood make Lestat so powerful that, along with feeding on animals, he is able to recover from Claudia's attempt on his life. In Rice's novels, the vampiric exchange of blood is linked to Catholic communion, as the blood of vampires empowers recipients with "[l]ife everlasting"

(Rice, Lestat 90), just as the symbolically cannibalistic ingestion of Christ's body and blood of communion empowers recipients with eternal life through unity with Christ.

For Rice's vampires, blood is vital to survival, particularly for a new vampire, but this requirement of blood is tied to the vampires' residual humanity, which determines both their preference for human blood and their horror of it. It is possible for a vampire to feed upon the blood of animals (Rice, Interview 28), but it does not provide the pleasure and peace associated with feeding on the blood of humans (Rice, Interview 87). While they will not physically die without blood, younger vampires will starve, without the relief that death can bring: "A starving child is a frightful sight... a starving vampire is even worse. They'd hear her screams in Paris" (Rice, Interview 297-98; ellipsis Rice's).

A starving vampire might even lose his mental faculties, and Claudia speculates whether

47 she would have shared the same fate as the mindless vampires she and Louis encountered in Eastern Europe if she had been denied blood:

What if, after Lestat's infusion of blood, she'd been put in a grave, closed

up in it until the preternatural drive for blood caused her to break the stone

door of the vault that held her, what then would her mind have been,

starved, as it were, to the breaking point? Her body might have saved itself

when no mind remained. (Rice, Interview 196-97)

Malchow states that a vampire is a "half-breed cannibal who can 'pass,' caught between two worlds" (48), and this is a problem that Rice explores through their need for blood.

While drinking blood is a necessity, some vampires view the act with horror and despair, recalling Maturin's depiction of cannibalism in Melmoth the Wanderer, where two lovers imprisoned under the monastery are left to starve, and one attempts to feed on the other: "It was on the fourth night that I heard the shriek of the wretched female,—her lover, in the agony of hunger, had fastened his teeth in her shoulder;—that bosom on which he had so often luxuriated, became a meal to him now" (Maturin 212-13). This is a form of survival cannibalism, which, Wright states, is "a cannibalism based on the natural urge to survive, on the inevitable choice of cannibalism over self-annihilation" (90).

Though driven by hunger, the male prisoner stops himself and is not able to follow through with his attempt at survival cannibalism; instead, he turns his efforts onto himself: "On the sixth day, all was still... [and] they were no more There was a slight scar on [the female's] shoulder,—the rabid despair of famine had produced no further outrage. [The male] lay extended at his length,—his hand was between his lips; it seems as if he had not strength to execute the purpose for which he had brought it there"

48 (Maturin 213). While the cannibalism is viewed with horror, the man himself is not condemned; it is the man responsible for their imprisonment, and who delights in and

"feeds" on their suffering, who is viewed as monstrous (Maturin 213). The male prisoner is understandably driven to the act out of a desperate need to survive; similarly, Rice's vampires are forced to kill, as blood is necessary for their survival, rather than merely pleasure as it is for Maturin's villain.

When Lestat transforms Louis into a vampire, Louis is not repulsed by Lestat's blood, and instead he enjoys drinking it and recognizes it as essential to his being:

I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time

since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body

focused with the mind upon one vital source.... [A]nd then Lestat pulled

his wrist free suddenly, and I opened my eyes and checked myself in a

moment of reaching for his wrist, grabbing it, forcing it back to my mouth

at all costs. (Rice, Interview 20)

However, once Louis must begin to kill humans for survival, his conscience forces him to hesitate. Like Maturin's male prisoner, Louis is unable to feed upon a human. "I think I was about as horrorstruck as you would be" (Rice, Interview 28), Louis tells his interviewer, "I was ... terribly agitated, convinced I couldn't bring myself to attack and feeling no urge to do so" (Rice, Interview 29). When he is finally forced to kill out of hunger, as death will not release him from his starvation, his kill is truly cannibalistic, as he must tear open the man's neck with his human teeth because bis fangs are not yet fully formed (Rice, Interview 30). He later learns that he can live on the blood of animals, and he chooses this option over that of killing humans: "I would not then kill people. I moved

49 along the rooftop in search of rats" (Rice, Interview 71). His decision to feed on rats is a moral one (Rice, Interview 72), and he cannot condone the destruction of a human life for his own pleasure (Rice, Interview 73). Louis cannot morally live off the blood of humans because he sees himself as still being human; aside from his natural repulsion at the idea of killing, endophagously feeding off other humans is a horror he cannot contemplate.

While Louis is able to feed from Lestat when he is still human, he recognizes that Lestat is not human, as "he was no ordinary man at all. His gray eyes burned with an incandescence, and the long white hands that hung by his sides were not those of a human being" (Rice, Interview 14). Louis does not see feeding on such a "creature"

(Rice, Interview 14) as cannibalistic because it is not an endophagous act; because Lestat is different from Louis, and not human, to feed upon him would be exophagous, and thus it does not go against his morals. After Louis's transformation into a vampire, Lestat tries to convince Louis that he must feed on human blood to live a happy life; he tells Louis that he is no longer human and, no matter what he does, he cannot change his form: "You do not know your vampire nature. You are like an adult who, looking back on his childhood, realizes that he never appreciated it. You cannot, as a man, go back to the nursery and play with your toys So it is with you and mortal nature... And what truly lies before you is vampire nature, which is killing" (Rice, Interview 82). Regardless of his advocacy for killing, Lestat also retains a bit of his humanity, as he is unable to kill innocent humans and, unbeknownst to Louis, Lestat "hunted exclusively among the gamblers, the thieves, and the killers... the evil doerfs]" (Rice, Lestat 499). Thus,

Lestat, too, is exophagous, as he sees himself as a moral being and is unable to kill other moral beings, and instead hunts only immoral beings. Before he can come to terms with

50 killing humans himself, Louis has to stop viewing himself as one of them; that is, he must relinquish his humanity, and view himself as different and separate from mankind in order to feed upon them.

Along with alleviating a vampire's hunger, blood can act as a restorative for vampires who have been injured. As Twitchell states, blood is believed to contain power and life-giving energy, thus it helps restore the vampires' lost strength and heal their wounds:

Blood-drinking as a way to partake of another's energy was the logical

extension of what seemed a casual nexus between blood and vigor, for as

this fluid left the body, death seemed to enter. And if blood was life, then

drinking blood would be absorbing that life. (The Living Dead 13)

The effects are greater when a "safe" endophagous exchange is made; that is, when one vampire feeds upon another, without the threat of death. This takes place when a younger vampire is invited to drink from an older, more powerful vampire, and the act leads to communion and restoration. After he goes underground in what is referred to as a vampire's "first death" (Rice, Lestat 377), Lestat becomes weak due to blood-starvation, and his "hands were claws, and [his] flesh was shrunk to the bones, and [bis] eyes bulged from the sockets" (Rice, Lestat 358). Marius, a two-thousand-year-old vampire, finds

Lestat and gives him an infusion of his blood (Rice, Lestat 362-63). Lestat regains his strength from Marius's blood, and, instead of the pains of starvation, he feels "an extraordinary sense of peace" (Rice, Lestat 367). He gains even more strength and power when he drinks the blood of Akasha, the mother of all vampires, from whom vampires have attempted to drink in the past to be healed by her powerful blood (Rice, Lestat 434).

51 Because he drank "the blood of the old ones," including his centuries-old maker Magnus,

Lestat is able to survive the wounds inflicted by Claudia's attempt on his life and the burns inflicted days later when Louis hurls a lamp at him upon his return to their flat

(Rice, Lestat 502). After Claudia and Louis leave his drained body in a swap, Lestat is able to begin the healing process by feeding on "the warm-blooded things that could put

[his] feet on the long road back" (Rice, Lestat 502). However, the blood provided by these swamp creatures is insufficient, so Lestat is "left at the mercy of time to heal [his] wounds" (Rice, Lestat 502). If he were able to once more feed upon an older vampire,

Lestat would have healed instantaneously. Repeated infusions of Akasha's blood a century later in 1984 give Lestat powers that took Marius centuries to acquire (Rice,

Queen All) and render Lestat as powerful as "the old ones" (Rice, Queen 474; Rice's italics). Lestat is now in the position to allow others to feed from him as he once fed from

Marius and Akasha, and he is able to continue the act of vampiric communion with a younger generation of vampires.

The life-sustaining power of blood is emphasized by the Catholic Church.

"Blood," Badley states, "has always been invested with power. There is power in blood as life and family bloodlines, in the Christian tradition, in Christ's blood. In Roman

Catholic doctrine, Christ sacrificed his blood and body, which the process of transubstantiation sacramentally restores in sanctified wine and the Eucharist" (119).

According to Twitchell, blood was "central to early Christianity. In both the Old and New

Testaments 'the blood is life' motif is repeated again and again, both as objective statement and psychological truth. In fact, the sacrament of communion is based on the transfer of energy through blood. Christ himself exhorts us to drink his blood as a way of

52 sharing his power" (Living Dead 13). However, Twitchell points out, the Bible also contains several warnings against drinking blood, to prevent us from "becoming] obsessed with it" (The Living Dead 14); for example, Deuteronomy 12:16 states, "You will not, however, eat the blood, but will pour that like water on the ground." The power of blood is underscored in Catholic communion, and, although the consumption of

Christ's blood is symbolic, and participants do not literally drink blood during communion, in the past some took the act literally, and, according to Kilgour, Protestants portrayed Catholics as cannibals and Catholic mass as "a bloodthirsty rite, in which the priests ate God over and over again" (83). However, prior to Protestant representations of

Catholics as cannibals, early Church Fathers feared that their parishioners would also take the act literally, as they "realized that in symbolically emphasizing the regenerating powers of blood, the Christian Eucharist risked encouraging a regression to pagan rituals"

(Cavallaro 179). However, Cavallaro states, "[i]n spite of persistent attempts by the

Church to dispel these superstitions, a powerful connection survived between

Christianity, the consumption of flesh and blood and, by implication, vampirism" (179).

As stated above, Kilgour argues that "[v]ampirism is the gothic definition of symbiosis and communion" (173), and the connection between vampirism and communion appears in Stoker's Dracula, "as Dracula takes on the role of Christ, offering his own breast and blood to Mina" (Kilgour 173) in a travesty of communion:

With his left hand [Dracula] held both Mrs Harker's hands, keeping them

away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back

of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was

smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man's bare breast

53 which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a

terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk

to compel it to drink. (Stoker 247)

Kilgour's use of the word "offer" to describe the exchange of blood between Dracula and

Mina is slightly misplaced, as Mina clearly has no choice in the matter. However, she rightly points out that Dracula paradoxically "consumes others by offering himself to them: the reciprocity of exchange is thus shown to be an illusion, for he is an alien who possesses those who have let him into their bodies" (173). While the blood exchange unites Mina with Dracula, in reality their unity is simply his invasion of her body, and thus he begins to take control of her. As Twitchell states, Christ encourages his followers to drink his blood to share his power (Living Dead 13):

if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have

no life in you. Anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood has

eternal life, and I shall raise that person up on the last day. For my flesh is

real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks

my blood lives in me and I live in that person. As the living Father sent me

and I draw life from the Father, so whoever eats me will also draw life

from me. (John 6:53-57)

In contrast, Mina's infusion of Dracula's blood has empowered him, not her (Stoker 248); although his blood has given her eternal life, she is not in control, and vampirism begins to take over her body and soul, which is evident when the Eucharist burns her forehead

(Stoker 258-59). Similarly, Rice's vampires, argues Badley, perform communion "in reverse, taking the blood of others and transforming it into their own 'preternatural'

54 energy" (119). However, this mostly refers to the act of feeding; when a vampire creates a new vampire, the act is very similar to Christian communion, as the blood "comes from the Great Mother Akasha much as Christ's comes from God and the Holy Ghost.... As their victim-beneficiaries drink their blood, vampires are imitations of the martyred and transubstantiated Christ. The Christian communion becomes the equally sacred cannibalism of the vampire's feast" (Badley 119). The similarity is underscored when

Magnus transforms Lestat into a vampire, as the elder vampire echoes the New

Testament when he says, "I shall give you the water of all waters ... The wine of all wines This is my Body, this is my Blood" (Rice, Lestat 89). Magnus promises Lestat

"[l]ife everlasting" (Rice, Lestat 90), much like Christ promises his followers eternal life if they ingest his body and blood. As Magnus gives Lestat bis blood, he gives Lestat his vampirism, and they are united in this exchange of power.

Cannibalism plays a significant role in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles.

Contrary to the usual portrayal of the act as abhorrent in canonical Gothic works, Rice does not condemn cannibalism, whether flesh-eating or blood-drinking, in her novels.

Rice explores different forms of cannibalism to examine various ethical questions about the nature of communion and community. The flesh-eating of Maharet and Mekare's tribe millennia ago is presented as a positive practice intended to show reverence and respect for the dead; the idea of not consiuning the flesh of one's dead relative and allowing the body to rot within the earth is horrifying and shocking to the twins' people.

Similarly, the blood-drinking of the vampires is a necessary evil that one must partake in to ensure one's survival as a vampire, and not to feed upon the blood of others would lead

55 to starvation and, ultimately, horrific madness. Contrary to characters such as Sweeney

Todd or Dracula, Rice's cannibals, mortal and immortal, evoke sympathy and understanding, rather than abhorrence and disgust. With the death and subsequent consumption of Akasha, mankind is saved from her wrath, and, while vampires will continue to feed upon humans, because of Mekare's act of sacred cannibalism the world is spared from the matriarchal holocaust envisioned by the Queen of the Damned.

56 CHAPTER FOUR:

"Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned":

Catholicism in Anne Rice's Early Vampire Chronicles

Catholicism is often central to Gothic fiction, as innocent young women or men

become prey to villainous monks or nuns, or Catholic holy relics are used to protect

characters from vampire threats. Catholicism permeates Anne Rice's novels Interview with the Vampire (1976) and The Vampire Lestat (1985); however, Rice's portrayal of

both the religion and its clergy and Catholic holy objects differs greatly from that of her

predecessors. As Ingebretsen points out, "[i]n her gothic texts,... Rice consciously

rejects the anti-Catholicism conventionally associated with the genre.... Nor are her

unabashedly New World vampires ecclesiaphobic in the accustomed mode of vampires"

(94). Rice's novels portray the Catholic Church as a positive institution that "affords

comfort to those in need. Louis was Catholic in his mortal life, and even as his faith in

God wavers he goes to a church for comfort as he tries to come to terms with his vampiric existence; and when Lestat was a young boy he went to monastery school, where he was loved and accepted, something he lacked in his home life. Neither Lestat nor Louis is "ecclesiaphobic" upon his transformation into a vampire, as, Worley points out, "[i]n Rice's mythos ..., the contemporary vampire has lost all the fear and repulsion that Dracula and his kin have for the items of holiness in the ancient Catholic tradition"

(80). Not only do Louis and Lestat not fear holy items, but they are also able to enter churches, handle the Eucharist, and, Louis in particular, enjoy looking at crucifixes.

Rice's novels are not anti-Catholic; instead, Rice shows the Church's potential as a place

57 in which one can find solace in one's time of need, regardless of whether or not one

believes in the Divine. This chapter will discuss Rice's use of Catholicism in the early

Vampire Chronicles, focusing both on the positive portrayal of Catholic clergy and

rituals, and her revision of the post-Stokerian use of holy relics associated with

Catholicism against vampires.

Typically, when Catholicism is represented in a Gothic novel, it is the subject and

frequent cause of horror and terror, but vampire fiction offers a clear exception to this trend. In non-vampire Gothic, evil priests, lecherous monks, and cruel nuns are commonly employed characters used to terrorize virtuous young men and women, and

such anti-Catholic sentiments appear in Gothic works such as Walpole's The Mysterious

Mother (1768), Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and, most famously, Lewis's The Monk (1796). Numerous critics have remarked that the

Gothic is an anti-Catholic genre before the twentieth century, and Townshend links the anti-Catholicism of English Gothic to "Protestant fear" and argues that the revival of such anti-Catholic sentiment is partially due to the rise in pro-Catholic forces in the late eighteenth century (215). Many of the 60,000 Catholics in England had class-based allegiances with the aristocracy and upper-middle classes, and many members of the

French Catholic aristocracy came to England during the 1790s, "thus adding to the

English Protestant fear of the native English Catholic the added impetus of anti-French xenophobia" (Townshend 215). "[Tjherefore," Townshend argues,

it is in relation to this context of increasing agitation for Catholic

emancipation in Britain... that the rise of the Gothic, the literature of

anxious Protestant xenophobia, it [sic] to be situated. The Gothic seeks to

58 access, and then exploit, the rich vein of anti-Catholic sentiment as a

means of re-deploying the threatened Protestant status quo of nationhood.

(215-16)

The result was novels that portrayed Catholicism and Catholic clergy as degenerate and

evil. In Lewis's The Monk, the titular character Ambrosio, deemed saintly by the people

of Madrid, commits horrifying acts including murder, rape, and incest; yet, according to

Haggerty, while the excessive violence was shocking to readers, many did not question

the possibility of such acts taking place within a Catholic setting:

When in The Monk (1796) Matthew G. Lewis uses the details of

conventual life to suggest lurid forms of sexual excess such as

necromancy, incest, matricide, and same-sex love, he does not need to

explain his choice of a Catholic setting, a Mediterranean country,... or

religious life. All these things, to the English imagination at least, made

such easy, rational sense that Lewis could assume a general understanding

of (and even assent to) his extravagant posturing.... Devil worship, self-

abuse, and other lurid sexual possibilities were common popular

perceptions of conventual life in Mediterranean countries. (64-65)

With his portrayal of monastic life in The Monk, Lewis was successful in perpetuating negative Catholic stereotypes. The novel helped reaffirm many long-standing prejudices against the Catholic community.

Interestingly, however, Gothic novels involving vampires use Catholicism in a different manner, as items associated with Catholicism, such as the Host and the crucifix, are used to protect protagonists against vampires. Catholic items were given alternative

59 significance in works of vampire Gothic after Stoker's Dracula (1897). Although Stoker

uses items associated with Catholicism, he does not draw on the religion itself, as there is

nothing in Catholic liturgy that states that holy relics will protect one from vampires.

Because the items used to repel Dracula are Catholic and the novel mostly takes place in

nineteenth-century England, the Protestant heroes of the novel are skeptical and confused

by the items. When Harker receives a rosary from a peasant woman, he refers to it as

"idolatrous" (Stoker 13), and Dr. Seward states that Van Helsing's use of the Eucharist

"appalled" the rest of the men present (Stoker 187). As O'Malley points out,

Van Helsing is explicitly Catholic. The tools necessary to defeat the

monster here are... Catholic ritualist symbols. Van Helsing takes his own

gold crucifix to place over the lips of the dead but vampiric Lucy.

Similarly, he brings the Eucharist, a symbol so foreign to the Protestant

Dr. Seward that his initial description is completely baffled.... The other

confederates in the trapping of the undead Lucy similarly confess

confusion at the doctor's reverent usage of the Catholic Communion.

(148-49)

O'Malley's claim that Van Helsing is "explicitly Catholic" is problematic as the novel does not indicate this and, instead, Dr. Seward writes to Arthur that Van Helsing has "an absolutely open mind" and that "his views are as wide as his all-embracing sympathy"

(Stoker 106); thus, Van Helsing's use of Catholic items does not mean that he himself is

Catholic, but rather that he is open to the possibility that the relics and rituals of

Catholicism will ward off beings such as vampires. The confusion of the Englishmen in

Dracula at Van Helsing's use of Catholic items was extended to contemporary readers of

60 the novel as well, as the Spectator's critique of Dracula points out the "anachronism of

this obsessive return from the environment of modern London to the Catholicism of

medieval Europe" (O'Malley 149):

Mr. Stoker has shown considerable ability in the use that he made of all

the available traditions of vampirology, but we think his story would have

been all the more effective if he had chosen an earlier period. The up-to-

dateness of the book — the phonograph diaries, typewriters,' and so on —

hardly fits in with the mediaeval methods which ultimately secure the

victory for Count Dracula's foes. (qtd. O'Malley 149)

While the Catholic items save the heroes of Dracula from the vampire, their use is

questioned due to the Protestant-dominated setting in which the action takes place.

Dracula helped to shape the vampire Gothic in the twentieth century, as Stoker was

highly influential on the vampire novels that followed. Myriad texts exhibit the vampire

Gothic's more complicated attitude towards Catholicism: on the one hand, Catholicism is

associated with objects that are powerful in the supernatural world; and, on the other, the

religion as a whole suggests a backwardness that its characters reject. Part of Rice's

treatment of Catholicism in her vampire novels is her use of Stoker's ideas about holy

relics. Her use of holy objects builds on the specifically vampiric Gothic line of literature,

but revises it: while traditional vampires fear the items, Rice's vampires relish them.

4.1 "I Was a Catholic; X Believed in Saints"

A resident of eighteenth-century New Orleans, prior to his transformation, Louis

"was a Catholic; [he] believed in saints. [He] lit tapers before their statues in churches;

61 [he] knew their pictures, their symbols, their names" (Rice, Interview 9). However, Louis

certainly is not devout in his beliefs, and Gelder argues that "Louis is a lapsed Catholic, a

disillusioned Catholic" (111); Louis himself admits that he simply paid "lip service to

God and the Virgin and a host of saints whose names filled [his] prayer books" (Rice,

Interview 14). However, contrary to Gelder's view, I would argue that Louis has not lost

his faith completely, but rather struggles with it. As Ingebretsen states, "Louis ... loves

the baroque trappings of church equipage and liturgy" (94), and his faith hinges upon the

ritual aspects of Catholicism. When his faith in God begins to wane, his love of the

"baroque trappings" remains intact, as, he tells his interviewer, he enjoys looking at

crucifixes (Rice, Interview 23). The enjoyment of Catholic paraphernalia is common in

Gothic fiction, as Tarr states,

Catholic dogma in practice can provide situations highly pleasurable to the

emotions, and the appurtenances of religious life have qualities extremely

satisfying to the lover of the picturesque. Catholicism in Gothic fiction,

therefore, presents ample materials for the exercise of both sense and

sensibility. Sense rejects the dogma; sensibility revels in the decorations.

(72)

Louis, who is mocked by Lestat for his sensibility (Rice, Interview 83), certainly revels in the decorations of the Church, but he does not reject the dogma altogether, as he states, "I had not been cynical for one moment about the existence of God. Only lost from it"

(Rice, Interview 149).

Louis's struggle with his faith in the Catholic Church is juxtaposed with his brother Paul's blind faith in the religion. As Gelder states, Paul, "by contrast, is a

62 religious zealot who has visions; that is, he believes wholeheartedly in the illusions of the

Catholic Church" (111). For Paul, "prayer and his leatherbound lives of the saints" were

all that mattered (Rice, Interview 6). However, Paul is a religious extremist, and his

dedication begins to create concern. Paul's passion is at first encouraged by Louis, and he

builds bis brother an oratory to provide a place for his devotions (Rice, Interview 6), and

he intends to allow Paul to enter the priesthood if he so desires (Rice, Interview!). Paul's

devotion is real, and he is not forced to dedicate himself to his religion, unlike Melmoth

the Wanderer's Alonzo, for whom "it is in vain to endeavour to diminish [his]

repugnance to the monastic life" he has been forced into by his family (Maturin 139);

rather, Paul's zeal comes from within himself. His fanaticism takes over his life,

however, and it appears that Paul may be a bit unstable, as

he began to see visions ... and he stopped taking his meals altogether. He

lived in the oratory.... And the oratory itself was neglected. He stopped

tending the candles or changing the altar cloths or even sweeping out the

leaves. One night [Louis]... watchfed] him for one solid hour, during

which he never moved from his knees and never once lowered his arms,

which he held outstretched in the form of a cross. The slaves all thought

he was mad. (Rice, Interview 8)

While Paul's devotion was once encouraged, the increasing intensity of his devotion, and the visions he claims to receive from God, cause him to be viewed with caution. During an argument with Louis, Paul accidentally falls down some stairs and is killed, leaving

Louis the subject of suspicion (Rice, Interview 10). Burdened by guilt, Louis tells a priest about the argument and his brother's alleged visions. Rather than believing Paul's claims

63 and being pleased with his devotion, the priest claims that Paul was possessed by the

Devil:

The devil made the visions, he went on to explain. The devil was rampant.

The entire country of France was under the influence of the devil, and the

Revolution had been his greatest triumph. Nothing would have saved my

brother but exorcism, prayer, and fasting, men to hold him down while the

devil raged in his body and tried to throw him about. "The devil threw him

down the steps; it's perfectly obvious," he declared. "You weren't talking

to your brother in that room, you were talking to the devil." (Rice,

Interview 12)

The priest's reaction to Paul's fanaticism relies on older forms—the Devil, possession, exorcism, mortification of the flesh—that were fading in the wake of a modernity the priest allies with the French Revolution. The priest's archaic diagnosis of possession enrages Louis (Rice, Interview 12), who, as a man in the late eighteenth century, is influenced by the increasingly secular and rational times, evidenced by his struggles with his faith. Ironically, the required exorcism described by the priest includes prayer and fasting, two practices in which Paul was already engaged. Louis points out, however, that possession is simply a metaphor for madness, which suggests that Paul's extreme religious convictions are the result of instability: "But you must understand, possession is really another way of saying someone is mad. I felt it was, for the priest. I'm sure he'd seen madness" (Rice, Interview 13). Such religious extremism is often depicted as praiseworthy in other Gothic novels, such as Lewis's The Monk (1796), as Ambrosio spent every hour of his thirty years "in study, total seclusion from the world, and

64 mortification of the flesh [H]e had never been on the outside of the abbey-walls .,. and he is reported to be so strict an observer of chastity, that he knows not in what consists the difference of man and woman. The common people therefore esteem him to be a saint" (Lewis 47). The people of Madrid praise Ambrosio's devotion, and, instead of thinking that it is unhealthy, they believe that it indicates that he is more than mortal.

While Louis believes in such saintly beings, he does not believe that his brother is one of them: "Not only did I not believe he saw visions, I couldn't entertain the notion for a moment.... Holy he might be, peculiar most definitely; but Francis of Assisi, no....

[He was] not a saint, but only a... fanatic" (Rice, Interview 9-10; last ellipsis Rice's).

Louis believes in the established aspects of the religion; he takes part in Catholic rituals and believes in saints that have existed within the Church for centuries. But, due to his disillusionment with the Church, he does not believe that miracles in the modern age are possible (Rice, Interview 13) and interprets his brother's fanaticism as madness.

After his transformation into a vampire, Louis does not forget his Catholic upbringing, and he understands the comfort the religion can bring to people. When Lestat is feeding on and cruelly taunting a dying prostitute, she asks for a priest because she

"can't die like this" (Rice, Interview 86), and Lestat mockingly says that Louis is a priest:

" 'But my friend is a priest,' said Lestat, smiling. As if he'd just thought of it as a joke.

'This is your funeral, dear. You see, you were at a dinner party and you died. But God has given you another chance to be absolved.... Tell him your sins'" (Rice, Interview

86). Horrified by Lestat's treatment of her and her subsequent terror, Louis performs the part of a priest to ease her mind and comfort her in her death:

65 The girl was screaming again, and I could not stand the sight of it any

longer. I bent down to her and took her hand. "I can't remember my sins,"

she said, just as I was looking at her wrist, resolved to kill her. "You

mustn't try. Tell God only that you are sorry," I said, "and then you'll die

and it will be over." She lay back, and her eyes shut. I sank my teeth into

her wrist and began to suck her dry. (Rice, Interview 86)

Because he was a Catholic in his mortal life, Louis understands the need for this comfort,

and he helps the prostitute to die in peace. He seeks religious comfort himself when he

revisits the cathedral where his brother's funeral was held. He enters a confessional and

attempts to alleviate his guilt, which includes admitting his true nature to the priest:

"Bless me, father, for I have sinned, sinned so often and so long I do not know how to

change, nor how to confess before God what I've done Murders, father, death after

death 1 have walked the streets of New Orleans like the Grim Reaper and fed on

human life for my own existence.... I am a vampire" (Rice, Interview 146). Louis does

not receive the forgiveness and comfort he seeks, as the priest thinks that Louis is mocking him and becomes enraged: "What is this, some sort of sport for you? Some joke?... Young man, do you fear God at all? Do you know the meaning of sacrilege?"

(Rice, Interview 147). Louis realizes that Catholicism can no longer provide comfort to him now that he is a vampire, and he struggles to make sense of his existence: "Then there is no mercy!... Why, if God exists, does He suffer me to exist!" (Rice, Interview

147). Louis attacks and kills the priest "on the very steps to the Communion rail" (Rice,

Interview 147). While traditional Gothic novels depict a priest or monk terrorizing

66 innocent victims, Rice's first vampire novel represents a priest who is himself an

innocent victim.

While Louis had a Catholic upbringing, Lestat was raised in a family that was

atheist rather than Catholic, even though they lived in France and his mother is from

Italy, both of which are predominantly Catholic countries. Ironically, as he and his family

were not religious, Lestat went to monastery school when he was young, and he wanted

to declare his vocation and become a priest. His experience at monastery school was

pleasant, contrary to the usual Gothic representation of such experiences: Alonzo in

Melmoththe Wanderer is tortured for his lack of devotion to the order, and Agnes in The

Monk, while pregnant, attempts to escape from a convent to be with her lover, and is later

found imprisoned beneath the convent, emaciated and clinging to "a small bundle"

(Lewis 311)—her dead child. For Lestat, the monastery offered happiness that he had

never experienced before:

I loved the monastery school. I loved the chapel and the hymns, the library

with its thousands of old books, the bells that divided the day, the ever

repeated rituals.... When I was corrected, which wasn't often, I knew an

intense happiness because someone for the first time in my life was trying

to make me into a good person.... Within a month I declared my

vocation. I wanted to enter the order. (Rice, Lestat 31)

The school only leads to anguish for Lestat when he is removed from it because his

family could not afford to pay for him to ascend to the rank befitting their status: "[M]y brothers arrived to take me home with them. I cried and begged to stay, but there was nothing the Father Superior could do.... [W]hat came clear finally was that no member

67 of a great French family was going to be a poor teaching brother.... [They] have no money ... to make [me] a bishop or cardinal as befits our rank" (Rice, Lestat 31-32).

While they did not believe in God, Lestat's family saw the Catholic Church as a social institution, rather than a vehicle of faith; therefore, if Lestat were to join the ranks of the

Church, he must be able to ascend to a position that corresponds to their status in society.

For Lestat, however, the monastery was a place where he was accepted and loved for being himself, something to which he was unaccustomed. "[Tjhat was a most unusual thing," Lestat remembers, "I didn't make other people there unhappy or angry" (Rice,

Lestat 31), which is all he seemed to do at home with his family. While Lestat did not believe in God, he "believed in the monks around [him]" (Rice, Lestat 47), and they gave him the comfort and love he was missing in his home life. This differs drastically from the typical portrayal of Catholic religious figures in a standard Gothic novel, as monks and priests usually bring terror and pain.

While Lestat does not believe in God, he clings to Catholic ritual when he realizes that the vampire Magnus intends to kill him. He tries to reason with Magnus, but when he realizes that that will not work, he prays as a last resort in order to save his life: "In my mind I was praying fiercely, God help me, the Virgin Mary help me, help me, help me...

. I had to believe in God now. I had to. That was absolutely the only hope. I went to make the Sign of the Cross I called on all the saints I had ever for a little while loved"

(Rice, Lestat 87-88; Rice's italics). During the ritual in which he transforms Lestat into a vampire, Magnus echoes Catholic communion when he says, "This is my Body, this is my Blood" as he gives his vampiric blood to Lestat (Rice, Lestat 89). Magnus's use of communion imagery for this ritual is in response to Lestat's prayers for God's protection,

68 which Magnus considers blasphemous: "Yes, fight.... Don't go to hell without a battle.

Mock God" (Rice, Lestat 88). Magnus's echoing of Christ's words used in communion to describe a monstrous act is his own mocking of God in response to Lestat's prayers and refusal to mock Him: '"I don't mock!' I protested" (Rice, Lestat 88). After he is transformed into a vampire, Lestat continues to pray and beg "for forgiveness, though forgiveness for what [he] couldn't have said" (Rice, Lestat 97). Although he does not believe in God, Lestat cannot accept the horror of a meaningless existence in which such a thing as vampirism can occur. When he realizes that he cannot be saved, from Magnus or from his newly acquired vampirism, he uses his Catholic teachings as a source for comfort (Rice, Lestat 97), recalling Louis's attempt to unburden himself to the priest in confession.

While faith in the Catholic Church, and the divine in general, is questioned throughout Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat, the Roman Catholic

Church and its clergy are never portrayed negatively in the novels. It is when Louis and

Lestat lose faith in the Church, whether it is faith in God or faith in the "decorations" that bring comfort, that they feel pain and sorrow; just as the rituals and trappings of

Catholicism provide comfort and community, their absence provokes grief and isolation.

Louis feels alone when he realizes that God is not in the church, and that he is the only supernatural being there: "God did not live in this church; these statues gave an image to nothingness, /was the supernatural in this cathedral. I was the only supermortal thing that stood conscious under this roof! Loneliness. Loneliness to the point of madness" (Rice,

Interview 144; Rice's italics). Lestat, while still mortal, goes mad when he realizes that, without God, there is nothing after death:

69 There was no judgment day, no final explanation, no luminous moment in

which all terrible wrongs would be made right, all horrors redeemed.... I

began to make the single sound: "Oh!" I said it again "Oh!" and then I

said it louder and louder and louder.... I put my hands to my head and I

kept saying it.... P]t wasn't any better by the end of the week.... I ate,

drank, slept, but every waking moment was pure panic and pure pain. I

went to the village priest and demanded did he really believe the Body of

Christ was present on the altar at the Consecration. And after hearing his

stammered answers, and seeing the fear in his eyes, I went away more

desperate than before. (Rice, Lestat 56-57)

The Church gives comfort to Lestat and Louis in their sorrow, and without it they feel lost. However, Rice does not validate the Catholic belief system; rather, she validates the importance of the community and familiarity of Catholic practices. Because Louis and

Lestat grew up in predominantly Catholic areas, Catholic rites and ceremonies remind them of happier times in their mortal lives. For Louis, the Church and its rites recall a simpler time in which his beloved brother is still alive, and Lestat is reminded of the priests who gave him a safe and loving home at the monastery. Regardless of their beliefs, for Lestat and Louis, the Church stands for comfort.

4.2 "I Rather Like Looking On Crucifixes"

In post-Stoker vampire mythology, holy items associated with the Catholic

Church are used as defenses against a vampire. According to Summers in his discussion of the vampire, "[a]s all other demoniacal monstersfj the Vampire fears and shrinks from

70 holy things. Holy Water burns him as some biting acid; he flees from the sign of the

Cross, from the Crucifix, from Relics, and above all from the Host, the Body of God. All

these, and other hallowed objects render him powerless" (Vampires and Vampirism 208).

Because traditional vampires are demons, and are thus from the Devil, they fear objects

pertaining to God and His power. While novels such as Dracula, which relies upon the

vampire's fear and hatred of Catholic items, are largely set in Protestant countries at a

time in which Catholicism remains associated with primitive, anti-modern belief, it is the

Catholic Church's holy relics that provide the best defense from these preternatural

creatures. As Nelson points out in reference to modern films, the belief in Catholicism's

strength against evil still prevails when it comes to fighting demonic beings:

[Y]ou want that Roman Catholic priest with his collar, cross, holy water,

and Vulgate Bible.... A mild-mannered Episcopal reverend, a Southern

Baptist preacher in a Men's Wearhouse suit reciting the Lord's Prayer in

English over that tormented soul? I don't think so. Nothing less, or other,

than the sting of holy water, the hiss of the cross against burning flesh,

wiE make the demon wail in agony. (87)

Holy items such as the Host, holy water, and the crucifix are commonly used in vampire lore to render the vampire powerless. As Worley states, "Dracula is afraid of and repelled by the consecrated Host and the crucifix. All vampires in Stoker's novel share these fears, and readers were comforted that in the battle between good and evil that vampire stories represent, they had on their side divine powers that would protect them from an otherwise overwhelming evil" (79).

71 Although Van Helsing's use of these Catholic relics is viewed with confusion and

disbelief by the English Protestants in Stoker's novel, the items prove to be effective, and

even the Protestants cannot deny the power the items hold. In his discussion of Harker's journey to Transylvania in Dracula, O'Malley points out that while Harker

"condescendingly reportfs] the superstitions that give rise to the wearing of the crucifix,

[he] continues to keep the old woman's rosary around his neck" (160). Harker claims that

he took the rosary to be gracious, yet he admits that he is unnerved by local superstitions:

I did not know what to do, for, as an English Churchman, I have been

taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it

seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such a

state of mind.... [TJhe crucifix is still round my neck. Whether it is the

old lady's fear, or the many ghostly traditions of this place, or the crucifix

itself, I do not know, but I am not feeling nearly as easy in my mind as

usual. (Stoker 13)

While he is Anglican, Harker cannot ignore the power the crucifix holds, even if it simply has the power to make him uneasy. However, before he learns of Dracula's true nature,

Harker notices that the rosary has an effect upon Dracula when the vampire lunges for

Harker's throat after he cuts himself shaving: "When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat. I drew away, and his hand touched the string of beads which held the crucifix. It made an instant change in him, for the fury passed so quickly that I could hardly believe that it was ever there" (Stoker 31). The rosary, although worn by a non-Catholic, protects Harker from a potentially fatal attack from Dracula, and this emphasizes its holy power. A priest is not

72 needed to fend off the vampire, and neither is faith; the rosary is sufficiently powerful

itself.

Contrary to this aspect of the vampire tradition, Rice's vampires do not fear holy

relics and are not rendered powerless by any object. Louis is quick to clear this up when

his interviewer asks about Lestat's ability to hold a rosary:" 'Oh, the rumor about

crosses!' the vampire laughed. 'You refer to our being afraid of crosses? ... Nonsense, my friend, sheer nonsense. I can look on anything I like. And I rather like looking on

crucifixes in particular' " (Rice, Interview 23). Lestat and Gabrielle are even able to sleep in a sepulchre and exit during Mass, much to the horror of the worshipers (Rice, Lestat

190-93). Lestat is able to touch the box that contains the Eucharist wafers, which are considered to be the most powerful force against vampires as they are the Body of Christ.

He finds no power within the Hosts or the church:

[T|n desperation, I went up over the Communion rail and put my hands on

the tabernacle itself. I broke open its tiny little doors, and I reached in and

took out the jeweled ciborium with its consecrated Hosts. No, there was no

power here, nothing that I could feel or see or know with any of my

monstrous senses, nothing that responded to me. There were wafers and

gold and wax and light. (Rice, Lestat 113)

Lestat's ability to touch the box that contains the wafers differs drastically from Stoker's vampires, as Van Helsing is able to repel Dracula with a wafer that is within an envelope

(Stoker 247). As Worley points out,

[Tjhe traditional Catholic vampire, as an evil being, cannot abide to

remain in the presence of the consecrated Host.... Therefore, Dracula is

73 repelled by the Host which Van Helsing brandishes, even though the

Sacred Wafer is in an envelope and not directly exposed.... Dracula

flees, not because the Host is a mere symbol, but because there is

supernatural efficacy in the divine grace and Real Presence of the Host

itself. (81)

While Stoker invests the Host with divine power, Lestat realises that there is no power in

the holy items, and they are simply inanimate objects. Like Louis, Lestat sees nothing

supernatural in the church but himself. The lack of effect holy items have on Rice's

vampires is consistent with the fact that in the early Vampire Chronicles the vampires are

not derived from the Devil; in fact, as Marius explains to Lestat, Rice's vampires are

older than God and the Devil (Rice, Lestat 383). As discussed in the two previous

chapters, Rice's vampires were created when Amel, a spirit with a penchant for blood,

entered the body of Egyptian Queen Akasha millennia before the advent of Christianity.

Thus the holy objects, while sacred to Louis and respected by Lestat, do not harm or

invoke fear in the vampires, as they would have been meaningless to the spirit Amel.

Instead of being portrayed as ancient and primitive, Catholicism is younger than Rice's vampires; thus, Rice again revises the typical Gothic depictions of the religion, as it loses

its associations with backwardness, superstition, and ignorance that it has in novels such as The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer, and Dracula, as well as the latter's emphasis on

Catholic objects as defenses against vampires.

Rice deals directly with Stoker's use of Catholic holy objects through the

Children of Darkness. Lestat's ability to enter churches and touch holy relics angers the

Children of Darkness, the group of vampires who live in Paris as a coven dedicated to

74 worship of the Devil. The Children of Darkness follow the traditional Eastern European vampire folklore that Stoker drew upon for his portrayal of vampires in Dracula, as they fear holy objects and even sleep in the ground instead of in clean homes, as Lestat does.

They call Lestat "blasphemer" and "profaner" and curse Lestat and Gabrielle because they "dared to enter the House of God" (Rice, Lestat 186). However, their anger does not stem from the fact that Lestat and Gabrielle affronted God, but rather they are confused as to how Lestat and Gabrielle were able to do it: "They damned us for entering the churches!... And they don't know how we managed to do it. They themselves would not dare" (Rice, Lestat 188). The Children of Darkness "would not dare" to enter churches because they are afraid of what would happen to them if they tried, not because they did not wish to anger God. The Children of Darkness follow the Rules of Darkness, guidelines based upon folk beliefs passed down throughout the centuries that demanded that they

live among the dead, for [they] are dead things, returning.always to one's

own grave or one very nearly like it. To shun the places of light, luring

victims away from the company of others to suffer death in unholy and

haunted places. And to honor forever the power of God, the crucifix about

the neck, the Sacraments. And never never to enter the House of God, lest

he strike [them] powerless, casting [them] into hell, ending [their] reign on

earth in blazing torment. (Rice, Lestat 225)

The same rules and fear of holy items is prevalent in other vampire covens throughout the world, as Lestat encounters vampires in Italy who "fled screaming from any sign of heavenly power, and... threw themselves with savage abandon into their horrifying and

75 beautiful Sabbats" (Rice, Lestat 325). It is interesting that Lestat, without his maker

Magnus to guide him, does not fear holy items as others have. As Shafer points out,

The Vampire Lestat retains enough of the vampire mythology to establish

a link to the earlier vampires; however, much of the lore is

demythologized, as Lestat looks into mirrors, sleeps under a church altar,

has no fear of crosses. Lestat's deconstruction of these rituals serves as

metonomy [sic] for Lestat's iconoclasm throughout the novel. (151)

Because Lestat constantly questions convention throughout Rice's works, it is

unsurprising that he begins with the most sacred of all: the Catholic Church and its holy

objects. His disregard for the rules and traditions of the Church foreshadows his many

intended transgressions of mortal and vampire law, including his incestuous relationship

with his mother Gabrielle; the creation of the child vampire Claudia, as it is forbidden to

make one so young; and his role as lead singer in a rock band whose songs reveal the

secret history of the vampires.

Ironically, Lestat and Gabrielle hide from the Children of Darkness in a church, as

"[i]t's perfectly obvious that the safest place [to hide from them] is within the village

church" (Rice, Lestat 188). In an amusing move, Lestat and Gabrielle cany rosaries to protect themselves from the other vampires (Rice, Lestat 188). Similarly, echoing

Harker's own acquisition of a crucifix, Louis is given a cross by a peasant woman to protect himself against the village vampire while he and Claudia are in Eastern Europe: "I had turned to go, but suddenly behind me she cried out for me to wait I turned to see she'd ripped the crucifix from the beam over her head, and she had it thrust out towards me now 'Take it, please, in the name of God'" (Rice, Interview 183). It is ironic that,

76 as she attempts to protect herself from the village vampire, the peasant woman invites two vampires into her home and gives them the very items that are intended to protect her from them. Along with a crucifix, the woman has garlic on her door, as, Summers claims, garlic is particularly hateful to vampires (Vampires and Vampirism 209); Harker also notes the use of garlic, as the lady who gave him the crucifix had garlic as well (Stoker

32). Garlic and the crucifix do nothing to prevent Louis and Claudia from entering the peasant woman's home (Rice, Interview 171), although other vampires may have been kept out if they still followed the Rules of Darkness. Louis and Claudia are surprised to find that the old vampire superstitions are still prevalent in Eastern Europe, and this is also shocking to Morgan, the Englishman that Louis meets in the woman's house.

In a passage that illustrates Rice's engagement with folk and literary depictions of vampires, Morgan tells Louis with horror how, when he and his new wife entered the village, he witnessed the exhumation, staking, and decapitation of a young girl believed to be a vampire:

They took a stake, a wooden stake, mind you; and this one in the grave, he

took the stake with a hammer and he put it right to her breast. I didn't

believe it! And then with one great blow he drove it right into her.... And

then that fellow, that beastly fellow, he reached up for his shovel and with

both his arms he drove it sharp, right into the dead woman's throat. The

head was off like that. (Rice, Interview 179)

Soon after, Morgan's wife is found dead with puncture wounds on her neck, and, to add to his horror, Morgan discovers that the villagers intend to perform the same ritual with her body (Rice, Interview 179). According to Summers, this practice was common in

77 Eastern Europe, although he states that garlic was stuffed in the vampire's mouth: "[T]he

general method [of destroying a vampire] is that which is common throughout the whole

of Eastern Europe, at one blow to drive a stake through the navel or the heart.... Garlic

may also be stuffed in the mouth" {Lore and Legend 309; see also Vampires and

Vampirism 209). Garlic in the mouth is a detail omitted by Rice, although her peasants do use it to ward off vampires, as evidenced by the placement of bulbs on the woman's door.

The destruction of Lucy in Dracula is more in tune with traditional Eastern European

lore, as Arthur stakes Lucy's body and Van Helsing and Seward "cut off the head and filled the mouth with garlic" (Stoker 193). When Van Helsing first describes the necessary steps involved in destroying the vampire Lucy, he is met with horrified resistance from Arthur, who refuses to "consent to any mutilation of [Lucy's] dead body"

(Stoker 184). Similarly, Morgan refuses to allow his wife's body to be decapitated, and he views the ritual and its adherents as barbaric: "The same blood flows in our veins, you and 1.1 mean, French, English, we're civilized men, Louis. They're savages!" (Rice,

Interview 180). While staking and decapitation destroys the vampire Lucy in Dracula, performing such an act upon Morgan's wife is truly folk belief, as she would not become a vampire unless there was an exchange of blood between her and the vampire. However, the methods used by the peasants are not completely fallible. While Louis tells his interviewer that the "story about stakes through the heart" is "Jb]ull-shit" (Rice, Interview

24), decapitation will kill a vampire, as evidenced in the destruction of Akasha when the glass from a shattered window slices off her head (Rice, Queen 454).

The holy relics' lack of power is consistent with Rice's depiction of her vampires in a world defined by its modernity—by science and reason rather than magic and

78 tradition. Prior to his transformation in 1780, Lestat is not surprised to hear from Nicki

"that educated people didn't believe in God, that they were infinitely more interested in science, that the aristocracy was much in ill favor, and so was the Church. These were times of reason, not superstition" (Rice, Lestat 46). As Worley points out, "for the best part of two centuries, the literary vampires of Polidori, Le Fanu, Stoker, and others have been Roman Catholics in exotic Roman Catholic countries where religion and superstition supposedly easily mix" (80). While France and New Orleans are predominantly Catholic, Rice represents the late eighteenth century as a time of

Enlightenment and Reason; products of the late eighteenth century, Louis and Lestat are thus skeptical. The Children of Darkness, on the other hand, are centuries old, and would have been transformed into vampires when religion was still a powerful force in society.

They respect and fear the items due to the times in which they lived, and they continue this tradition into the eighteenth century. However, the Children of Darkness are not immune to the increasingly secular world around them, and Lestat is able to show them that their fears are unfounded. Religious items cease to hold the same imagined power and authority that they once did over the Children of Darkness, and they disband their coven and live their lives without fear of God's wrath. "Although these seem to be the times of reason," Shafer points out, "superstition lingers" (153), which is obvious when

Lestat prays when he is faced with Magnus. For Louis, the "superstition" has never waned, as he was brought up Catholic; thus, because he loved holy relics in his mortal life, has nothing to fear from them as a vampire.

79 In The Vampire Chronicles, Rice challenges the traditional portrayal of

Catholicism in works of Gothic fiction, which often depicts the religion as archaic, primitive, and idolatrous, and members of the clergy as cruel villains who delight in torturing innocent young men and women. In Interview with the Vampire and The

Vampire Lestat, Rice explores different ideas of "primitive" that connect to the Church: the beliefs of the rural peasants in Eastern Europe, and their plan to decapitate Morgan's dead wife, are considered primitive and uncivilized by Morgan and Louis, who are members of "civilized" countries; and the Children of Darkness and the priest who wants to perform an exorcism on Louis's brother Paul hold onto outdated and archaic beliefs, which are waning in the Enlightened late eighteenth century. Such antiquated beliefs are held by the clergy in standard Gothic novels as well, and it is these beliefs that lead the cruel monks and nuns to inflict pain and torture on others; however, Rice not only represents Catholic clergy positively but also presents Catholicism as something other than primitive. Rice depicts Catholicism as a young religion; because her vampires are older than God and the Devil, they are the ones who are archaic. Because of their elder status, vampires are not repelled by the Church's holy objects, as vampires existed long before these objects came into existence, part of Rice's revision of traditional vampire

Gothic as well. Through Louis and Lestat, the Catholic Church is shown as a warm and positive institution that can change with the times yet retain its core values. The Church offers Louis and Lestat aesthetic beauty and a means of comfort, rather than terror and fear. Rice thus critiques the anti-Catholicism of traditional Gothic by separating the post-

Enlightenment Catholic faith from the Gothic bugbear of superstition, irrationality, and

80 tyranny—a modern worldview in which holy objects hold no power though they can

comfort with their familiarity.

81 CHAPTER FIVE:

CONCLUSION

In the early novels of The Vampire Chronicles—Interview with the Vampire, The

Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned—Anne Rice challenges the Gothic meta- narrative as she engages in, yet revises, the Gothic literary conventions of incest, cannibalism, and anti-Catholicism. Rather than portraying it as negative and harmful,

Rice depicts incest as an act that not only involves real love between those involved but also empowers the women in the relationship; instead of showing readers the horrors of cannibalism and blood-drinking, she shows how the acts can be performed out of respect and necessity for survival; and rather than depicting Catholic clergy as cruel and holy relics as harmful to vampires, she shows the potential Catholicism and its rites have as a source of comfort and community for those in need. While she revises the use of these conventions in her own works, her changes to views of incest, cannibalism, and

Catholicism did not influence many other writers. Instead, Rice's most successful revision is her revision of the figure of the vampire itself. With the publication of

Interview with the Vampire in 1976, Rice changed the image of the vampire as demonic monster, as her vampires "represent the human (rather than the inhuman) condition"

(Hoppenstand and Browne 3). Like humans, as Wisker points out, Rice's vampires "are not easily categorisable [sic] as good/bad or demonic/angelic. Their insecurities align them with the complexities of the postmodern world" (171). According to Badley, Rice was not the first to create a sympathetic vampire, as

82 [t]he modern sympathetic vampire emerged in the late 1960s with Dark

Shadows' Barnabas Collins, soap opera hero and reluctant bloodsucker...

. Then, around 1972, came the 'discovery' of the historical Dracula by

Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, documented in their In Search of

Dracula. McNally and Florescu traced the monster back to the fifteenth-

century (1431-1476) Wallachian prince Vlad Dracul, known as Vlad

Tepes ('the impaler'), named for his method of maintaining national order.

These biographers offered Vlad up to 'higher' criticism, presenting an

enigma: was he a bloodthirsty monster or a great Machiavellian politician,

the savior of his country?... Dracula was now approachable as a man—if

a man of 'immense capability, power, and violence.' (105-06)

While Rice is not responsible for the creation of the first humanized vampire, Badley points out that "Louis was the first fully realized specimen of this new breed [of sympathetic vampires]" (106). Vital to this achievement is how readers are given Louis's point of view in Interview. As Wood states, "[in Rice's] books, the narrative method helps forge the identification readers make with the vampires, reinforcing the sense that real evil is in the human self.... [TJhey are themselves the protagonists with whom the readers sympathize" (67). According to Ramsland, Rice was fascinated by Richard

Matheson's "Dress of White Silk," a story told from a vampire's perspective: '"I never forgot that story,' she says. 'I wanted to get into the vampire. I wanted to know what it was like to be the interesting one—the point of view of the person right in the center of it all'" (14). Inspired by this story, Rice wrote Interview and changed modern perceptions of vampires forever: "I gave them conscience and intelligence and wisdom They are

83 tragic heroes and heroines who suffer. They are not pure evil. They have hearts and souls.

They have a conscience; they suffer loneliness. They know what they're doing but

they're trapped by their nature" (Rice qtd. in Ramsland 20).

Before Rice's influence, and after Stoker's, stories involving vampires tended to

be stereotypical and repetitive, and the genre began to grow stale. As Wood argues,

Rice has resurrected the vampire from its moldering texts, infusing an

obsolete myth with new blood. Stripped of its silliness and illogical

superstitions, the vampire myth emerging from her earlier books is

vigorous, modern, and coherent She has challenged the traditional

portraits of vampires in several fundamental ways, producing a series of

books that cannot properly be understood if read according to the old

codes. (Wood 60)

Rice's revision of the vampire meta-narrative helped "revitalize a genre that had

seemingly run its course and become popularized into satire and triviality" (Roberts 146-

47), and "[h]er adaptations of vampirism expand the possibilities of a genre increasingly narrowed by stereotypical conventions and popular trivialization over the years" (Roberts

133). Thus, along with her revision of various aspects and conventions of the Gothic,

Rice revised the image of the vampire. Her novels influenced numerous authors since the publication of Interview, and, according to Badley,

[b]y 1985, when she published The Vampire Lestat,... Anne Rice herself

had the near-mythic status of the cult author. She had given birth to the

'new' vampire and a flourishing sub-genre. Mainstream and literary

writers such as George R. Martin, Tanith Lee, Angela Carter, Whitley

84 Strieber, and Joyce Carol Oates discovered vampirism as a metaphor.

Anthologies of vampire stories multiplied, acquired class, and were soon

being circulated by the major book clubs. (Ill)

Rice's influence is still prevalent today, as sympathetic and humanized vampires appear

in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter (1993- ) novels; Charlaine

Harris's Southern Vampire Mysteries (2001- ), recently adapted for television as the

series True Blood (2008- ); Stephanie Meyer's Twilight (2005-2008) series, which is

currently being adapted into a series of films; the television character Angel, a vampire with a soul who dates the titular Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003); and even Francis

Ford Coppola's film adaptation ofDracula (1992) incorporates elements of the

sympathetic vampire, as Dracula renounces God due to grief over his wife's suicide, and later has a love affair with Mina, who resembles his deceased wife.

So prevalent is Rice's influence that, as she revitalized a stale genre, many authors and filmmakers are challenging the modern perception of vampires as sympathetic humans rather than monsters, as they believe the genre is once again stagnant. For instance, the film 30 Days of Night (2007), based upon the comic by Steve

Niles, promises to "give vampires back their bite" (Ladouceur 50) and director David

Slade refers to the film as '"the anti-Anne Rice' movie" (Ladouceur 50), as Niles's vampires are "feral, frightening, soulless killing machines" (Ladouceur 50). Niles states that when he wrote his comic he deliberately "stripped away all [of the] humanity"

(Dwyer 9) given to vampires due to the influence of Rice: "we've tamed vampires so much that people want to be them. They were never supposed to be the sympathetic monsters — that's King Kong and The Creature from the Black Lagoon — now it's

85 gotten so bad [that] we have teenage girls dating vampires on TV" (qtd. Ladouceur 52).

Recent novels such as Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Strain (2009) and

David Wellington's series of vampire novels—13 Bullets (2006), 99 Coffins (2007),

Vampire Zero (2008), and 23 Hours (2009)—also aim at making vampires frightening

again. For Wellington, the romantic vampire trend directly influenced his writing:

I'd been reading a lot of 'paranormal romance,' which basically meant

books about sexy vampires.... They liked to date human women and not

drink their blood. That made very little sense to me — vampires were evil

bloodsuckers, weren't they? ... They saw us as walking food banks. So I

started imagining what a vampire would be like who was a true predator.

Something bigger, stronger, and even smarter than us, which wanted

nothing but to devour us. (Kuebler 22; last ellipsis Kuebler's)

While there are many authors, filmmakers, and critics who are tired of the sympathetic and humanized vampire, and have rebelled against these creatures in their works, their reactions are due to Rice's novels; because of Rice's revision of the vampire, writers are inspired to go back to vampirism's violent and inhuman roots. The current resurgence of the soulless vampire is a direct result of Rice's influence, and thus, whether they would like to admit it or not, writers such as Niles and Wellington have been influenced by Rice as well.

86 ENDNOTES

'For an interesting discussion of the relationship between Manfred and Isabella, see Townshend (184-85).

2On the connection between cannibalism, vampirism, and the Gothic, see

Malchow(45).

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