Gotiskais

The Gothic conventions of setting, plot, and character have both retained a remarkable cultural resiliency while also evolving over time. The old house or haunted castle, central to early Gothic as a representation of the unconscious mind, and the landscape of the storming Nature of the pathetic fallacy that it stands in, can be represented in a variety of ways in modern Gothic as long as the setting is a closed world that possesses the same qualities of isolation, mystery, and claustrophobia. Likewise the beleaguered heroines and brooding, tormented villains of early Gothic have evolved from stereotypical figures into a wide range of characters that nevertheless must confront and battle with either external or internalized representations of evil, the unknown, or the grotesque. In general, the themes of evil and chaos have moved from being represented as external and objective in the early Gothic of the 18th century to increasingly subjective and psychological representations throughout the 19th and into the 20th centuries. However, the fact that representations of evil and the grotesque still take the supernatural forms of ghosts, phantoms, or monsters says much about the value these figures still have in the popular imagination.

Rice's novel continues in this tradition in that she sets her scenes in medieval castles and towers, in crypts and graveyards, as well as in public spaces and modern cities. The closed world of The Vampire Lestat centers around Lestat and his relationships with other vampires. And of course, once Lestat becomes a vampire, one of the prototypical Gothic monsters, the novel's remaining action takes place only at night, the sense of prevailing darkness serving to evoke an atmosphere centered around that which is mysterious and hidden. Besides being a monster Lestat is also the epitome of MacAndrew's idea of a classic Gothic villain: He has a "twisted nature...full of unnatural lusts and passions [but] suffers the torments of the damned while committing his nefarious deeds" (82). In addition, many Gothic classics are often mediated: The narrator of The Castle of Otranto claims to have found the manuscript of the tale he's relating, the character of Robert Walton mediates the story of Frankenstein, and Jonathan Harker mediates between the reader's world and the Gothic universe of Dracula. Although The Vampire Lestat utilizes this device in that there is a frame story situated in the present by which Lestat recounts his biography beginning in the 18th century to the present, Lestat simply mediates his own story for the reader, even though it is to repudiate Louis' prior mediated tale in Interview with the Vampire. But the ambiguity of Lestat's story is present from the outset since the reader must decide what kind of credence to give a 'realistic' account of Lestat's life related by a narrator whom the reader knows to be a creature of imagination. This is only one of the ways in which The Vampire Lestat both draws on traditional Gothic conventions while attempting to dissolve the barriers between the reader and fictional world and between the hero and the monster.

"Lestat is a monster who survives by murdering humans, yet gains the reader's sympathies because he deplores what he is and agonizes over how to become a "good" vampire; he is a killer with a conscience. As already mentioned, Lestat's dilemma also evokes the theme of dualism or the double: He is both the hero and the monster, the demonic is generated from within. Finally, as many of the classic Gothic tales of the 1890's like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,Island of Dr. Moreau, and of course, Dracula also demonstrate, The Vampire Lestat is concerned in one way or another with the problem of degeneration, and thus of the essence of the human. Death and decay and how one retains one's humanity in spite of them are dealt with throughout the novel, both in the sense that Lestat is himself no longer human but is still conscious, functional and capable of learning from his experiences, and in the sense that he is the instrument of death for his human victims. Yet despite a vampire's ability to survive for centuries, the reader learns that vampires can also be killed or the oldest ones will often commit suicide, chiefly out of the sheer weariness and despair of living too long.

The vampire as literal alien serves as a vehicle for exploration-and the containment-of metaphorical alienness. In other words, the vampire as alien allows an author a non-threatening way of looking at the human animal and its behavior.

Sociālais

By the way, I want to say to the person who called in last night, you mentioned that you didn't care for my wealthy characters. I understand your point of view, but really my gift is to write about what fascinates me, and I am not a good chronicler of the working class or the middle class. We have American writers who are absolutely brilliant at that, and they're very much expressions of the 20th Century and its preoccupation with those classes. My job really is to write about other things and really my characters in the 20th Century are no wealthier than Hamlet or, I don't know, Oedipus Rex, or different people throughout the ages. They're no more wealthy than Macbeth, they're no more wealthy than Tonio Teschi in my own book, CRY TO HEAVEN. The vampires Louis, Lestat and Armand all had continuous flow of gold. The point of this is not that one has to be rich to be morally interesting, but that it's easier for me to write about someone who is concentrating on problems that are generated from the soul, that do not have to do not have to do with economics. Again, it's not that I think that this is superior. There are other people who are very, very good at doing things that have to do with economic binds, class, class struggle, deprivation and so forth. I don't. Maybe I just have experienced too much of it in my life.

But anyway, thank you very much for your thoughts. Please leave me a message. Good-bye. Thank you.

"In the case of Lestat and his community of wealthy, powerful, and immortal vampires, the attractions of such a lifestyle (besides the blood-drinking part which I'll address later) are obvious. Lestat doesn't punch a time-clock, or have to make house payments. He is not troubled by an aging body or mind. He can travel anywhere in the world and stay as long as he likes; he is privy to all that great wealth can buy without the physical or time constraints it may impose. Thus, the novel plays on the wishes for wealth natural to a working and middle-class audience. Indeed Anne Rice, in a 1993 Playboy interview, equates the middle-class outlook with a Protestant ethic and rejects the critical notion that "to be profound a book has to be about the middle class and about some specific domestic problem of the middle class" . Obviously Rice sees the portrayal of the grand lives of supernatural characters as synonymous with a wealthy "old-world," aristocratic lifestyle. In so doing, she reconstructs the past in The Vampire Lestat as the authors of early Gothic fiction did, in such a way that both the aspirations and the fears of middle-class readers are explored while many of its dominant values are rejected.

Seksualitāte, tabū laušana, feminisms

The very qualities that make the traditional vampire a threat in nineteenth-century stories such as Carmilla and Dracula -- particularly his or her erotic power and unconventional behavior -- make the vampire appealing to twentieth-century readers. Contemporary authors place increasing emphasis on the positive aspects of the vampire's eroticism and on his or her right to rebel against the stultifying constraints of society

"Dracula's predation is motivated by "an omnivorous appetite for difference, for novelty. The xenophobia of Stoker's novel centers upon the threat of the monstrous Other who not only steals "our" women but converts them into a threat in themselves. The sexuality of Lucy and Mina is released in the wrong way, by a foreigner . . . who has achieved what the men fear they may be unable to accomplish. His monstrous Other, moreover, blurs the concept of gender, stimulating a fear of vampire sexuality, a phenomenon in which 'our' gender roles interpenetrate in a complicated way". Men become "feminine" as victims penetrated by the vampire's phallic fangs; women devour infants rather than mothering them and take on the stereotypical "masculine" trait of aggressive sexuality. Bisexuality as well as alienness contributes to the terrifying threat Stoker and his nineteenth-century readers saw in vampirism.

"The sympathetic, attractive vampire is more often the creation of a female than a male author. It is a feminist vision to see power in the giver of nourishment as well as in the taker, freeing the female author to find positive qualities in beings ordinarily considered monstrous

"Lestat's will to power expresses itself through the flaunting of all social and sexual rules including the vampiric rules that mandate vampires should never reveal themselves to humans; at the novel's beginning he announces that his biography is designed to do just that. He is thus an ultimate rule breaker. But the most obvious manifestation of Lestat's desire nature is his fierce passion for life which is ironically expressed in his passion to drink up other's lives. Lestat declares his "love" for mortals, "From the first nights when I held them close to me, I loved them. Drinking up their life, their death, I love them" (231). It is a desire that ultimately consumes the love object. Perhaps the sucking of blood as a form of sustenance is not as repugnant to the modern reader as it was to earlier ones because it seems our increasingly exploitive culture is trying to suck the life out of us! Therefore, Lestat may also represent the collective and insatiable desire that drives a capitalist system. We are taught to be consumers and this role has long superceded our roles as citizens. Lestat's driving desire mirrors our culture's relentless seeking after sensation as antidotes to despair. Whereas past representations of the vampire highlighted the conflict between individual desire and social duty, Lestat triumphantly marches through the novel's pages and is more powerful at the novel's end than ever. Though the nature of desire is that it is never extinguished, the ultimate source of Lestat's vampire desires springs from death and brings death. Lestat's individualized triumph spells disaster for the idea of community and represents the breakdown of the cultural checks that help forge community. There is no restoration of bourgeois values and order in The Vampire Lestat as at the conclusion of Dracula (although I would not argue for that either). Rice's portrayal of Lestat resonates in our cultural imagination because at a deep level we recognize that we are part of a vampiric system in which individuals are encouraged to ruthlessly "feed" on each other and the most successful predators are deemed cultural successes. And we sense that in the end such a system degrades life rather than enhances it. Lestat, a predator with a "disembodied' awareness, thus has a point when he declares, "It is a new age. It requires a new evil. And I am that new evil. I am the vampire for these times"