Anne Riceʼs Vampire Myth and Its Gothic Tradition

Abstract

Before the familiar image of Count Dracula was immortalized in literary world during the nineteenth-century, the origin of vampires would be traced back to the far-distant, unknowable past. The vampiric being used to be omnipresent in the human world both in terms of time and place; Bram Stoker created a new type of vampire who was disarmed by dropping old vampiric images such as horror and fear. Genealogically, Anne Rice's vampires, Louis and Lestat, succeeds Count Dracula; they are imbued with Romantic idealism and Decadent spirit, rather than the Medieval images. All Gothic elements such as the fantastic, imaginative, immoral, irrational and negative are associated with the Romantic pioneer, Lord Byron. With his work “The Giaour,” he created the first figure in English literature, representing the paradoxical qualities as a Gothic villain-hero. That is, Lestat echoes Dracula, and Dracula echoes Giaour as ‘Byronic Heroes.’Understanding the social, moral and literary context covers how Rice's vampires embrace generic and aesthetic Romantic conventions. Gothic spirit celebrates the sublime, which is associated with excessive emotions first, and then, with the supernatural, sensational and superstitious fancies. Excessive emotions erase the proper limits of order, and obscure the boundaries of life: Gothic transgressions bring both an overflow of strong creative force and a fear of moral collapse. Endless inquiries about God and Devil, sexual debauchery, the incestuous relationship, and the game-like killing touch the bottom of corruptible fin de siecle notions. As asserted by Horace Walpole, the Gothic spirit is more related with ‘spreading a pleasure’ than ‘producing a lesson.’ A number of the Victorian writers, however, happily adopted the realism techniques based upon probability in life. The majority of Victorian writers wanted to portray their world as it were: exotic settings were displaced with more familiar realms such as the bourgeois domestic world or the new urban landscape. This is also adopted by Anne Rice to portray her vampiric atmosphere in terms of a compromise between the simple, detailed description and the imaginative expansion in writing. Anne Rice, as a Romantic successor to Stoker, sincerely follows Gothic conventions; she also brings her innovative adaptations of these conventions by moving her figures both temporally and spatially. She makes her vampires humanized to bring them into human society. Today, her vampires are not marginal any more. They are just a bit different from human being, as composites of half-human/half-inhuman entities. They do not convey Victorian issues such as darkness, danger and mystery any more.