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COPYRIGHT 2004 Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
IN THE VAST, DARK LANDSCAPE OF GOTHIC FICTION IN LATE TWENTIETH-century America, the seminal figure of the vampire wanders in ever-increasing numbers. Much as the Gothic has seen a flowering in the past twenty-five years, the vampire has risen from the uneasy sleep of the earlier part of the century and experienced his own dark renaissance. Prior to 1976, in film and fiction, the vampire was portrayed in the mold into which he had been cast by Bram Stoker in the greatest of the nineteenth-century vampire novels, Dracula--an essentially solitary predator whose presence was the stimulus for an intrepid group of vampire hunters to form and bay in his pursuit, and whose time on center stage was limited to brief, menacing appearances and capped with a spectacular death scene. The vampire was, to borrow a term from film, a McGuffin--a device to drive the plot and give the vampire hunters something to pursue.
In 1976, this changed. Several years earlier, the mainstream Gothic had been brought to renewed attention by the success of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist in both its print and film versions. A young novelist named Stephen King was finding a broader audience, and in 1975 had published a "traditional" vampire novel, 'Salem's Lot. Then, in 1976, Anne Rice published her first novel, Interview with the Vampire, and turned the vampire paradigm on its head. This breakthrough novel focused not on vampire hunters, but on the vampires themselves--and what a different breed they were.
Louis, Lestat, and Claudia slept in coffins and drank blood, but throughout Interview with the Vampire, they preyed with impunity, they gave themselves over to introspection, and they sought and found an entire subculture based on their own peculiar existence. They existed in a different world, and the old models no longer applied. Although, given their great debt to the brooding Byronic heroes of British Romanticism, they may not have been the first sympathetic vampires, they were the first successful ones in their initial publication, and they have been followed by a host of others.
After Rice, and even in her subsequent novels in the "Vampire Chronicles" series, the vampire was used to provide a vehicle for social commentary, and vampirism itself became a convincing metaphor for such varied topics as drug addiction, homosexuality, AIDS, and the general selfishness and narcissism of the baby boomer generation. Vampire literature in itself has become a vast and varied body, and one whose many facets cannot be contained in one model (Benefiel 35). The figure of the vampire, so varying and adaptable in the hands of many authors, became a liminal, transgressive figure, a stage upon whom the fears and secret desires of society could be acted.
What is less widely recognized by readers and critics is that Rice's novel served to redefine the vampire paradigm in more ways than one. Because in most texts (although there are exceptions to this) vampires reproduce either by biting their lovers and victims and draining their blood, or by having a mortal drink their blood through force or seduction, the parent of a vampire is the vampire who made it. Deirdre Byrne points out that in Interview with the Vampire, when Lestat exchanges blood with Louis, turning him into a vampire, the "ritual ... is carried out with strongly erotic overtones" (178). The male sexual penetration of the victim (with the phallic-substitute fangs) is followed by the more archetypal female nurturing of the victim, feeding him or her blood from the vampire's body. Vampire sexuality has been the focus of many studies, and it is not intended that this article cover that well-trodden ground. For example, Christopher Craft's essay, "'Kiss Me with Those Red Lips': Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula," sees the vampire novel as exemplifying fear of the homosexual "other," and feels that the Gothic offers the expulsion of the other and the removal of the threat of the monster to provide "comforting closure" to the text (107-08). On the other hand, John Allen Stevenson explains the vampire "... not as a monstrous father but as a foreigner, as someone who threatens and terrifies precisely because he is an outsider" (139). In "Anne Rice and the Queering of Culture," George E. Haggerty insists on a homosexual interpretation of Rice's work. In short, as James B. Twitchell wrote in 1985, "Clearly the vampire ... has more going for him than just being the resident demon in Christian folklore. For the last few generations he has also served to explain the dynamics of human social and sexual behavior. And it is here, especially as a paradigm of suppressed interfamilial struggles, that the vampire has become a central figure...
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