Interview with a Vampire - Week 2 Vampires

    Vampier, what is a vampier exactly? To truly understand the depth of “Interview with a Vampier” by Anne Rice we first have to answer that question. Well, to many vampires are simply supernatural blood drinking monsters but it’s a bit more complicated then just that. You have most likely meet a vampier in your real everyday life or even heard others meeting one. You maybe wondering ‘how is that possible?’. Let me explain a vampier in its simplest form is an over powering older being that drains the life from a young and in turn innocent person. Thomas Foster explains this in his novel “Read like a Professor” by stating that a vampier is simply: “an older figure representing corrupt, outworn values; a young, preferably virginal female; a stripping away of her youth, energy, virtue; a continuance of the life force of the old male; the death or destruction of the young woman.”(Foster 2003) Now if that is true then novels like “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov (1955) are also vampier novels. They may be completely different novels but they share more similarity then you may think. 

“Lolita” was written in 1955 (many years before “Interview with a Vampier” at 1976) the novel circles around Humbert a hebephile who falls for his land ladies twelve-year-old daughter Dolores. The middled aged man Humbert being the narrator of the story spins a tale of his ‘romance’ with Lolita(his nickname for Dolores). However it is clear to many that his sexual abuse is far from romance. Humbert has a clear bias when it comes to his own action in this story meaning if Dolores told us the same story I would imagine it would be very different. Louis holds the same bias as he tells his own tale of romance with an even younger girl Claudia. Though his bias is unclear at first it is apparent when he describes five-year-old Claudia as “sensual” and how the feeling of bitting from her and other young children was “A fraction of what human sex is like”.  Louis , Lestat and pretty much all male vampier are written to be pedophilic in some way or another. Lestat’s favorite meal in the novel is described as “young boys that are at the perfect age of androgyny” and he “moans wildly” when he drinks from one. Louis describes the perfectly beautiful women as a young one with a body “not yet developed”. Armand even has a young boy as his partner. If the fact that they were all pedophiles were a snake it would bite you if you didn’t notice it! 

If Anne Rice wrote this to give gay man good representation then she failed (or best guess she thinks all gay men are pedophiles a common thought at the time). What this novels shows best is what vampier do best; Manipulate and deceive. Louis manipulates the reader to sympathies with him and deceives them into looking past his crimes. He gains your empathy though he is far from deserving, draining you of your morality. He hides his monsters deeds under a soft handsome smile and charming words. Just as characters Humbert from “Lolita” and Alex from “A Clockwork Orange”. They all use their intellect and subsection to trick the reader into pitting them but just like Louis they are all un-deserving. “In all the darkest pages in the malign supernatural, there is no more terrible tradition than that of a vampire - a pariah even among demons.” (Summers). 

Resources used:

 Summers, Montague. “A Quote by Writer Montague Summers.” Quote by Writer Montague Summers: "In All the Darkest Pages in the Malign Supernat...", Goodreads, 26 Sept. 2016, www.goodreads.com/quotes/744068-in-all-the-darkest-pages-in-the-malign-supernatural-there.

Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Literature like a Professor: a Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading between the Lines. Harper, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2017.