The Postmodern Sympathetic Vampire: Subjectivity, Romance, And Gender in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire

Authors:

Pages: 419-437
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/PAYH8190

Abstract:

This article aims to explore the literary vampire’s transformation into a postmodern romanticized subject, telling his own story in Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976). The first-person account dispels the vampire’s otherness, encourages audience sympathy and identification, and renders him not only sympathetic but also attractive. The article is divided into four sections that focus on several new developments in the figure. Firstly, I discuss the significance of the vampiric narrative voice and subjectivity as a postmodern advancement of the character. Then, the text examines how the vampire’s agonizing ontology resonates with the contemporary individuals’ struggles to shape their identity and find meaning in their existence. The third section discusses how the plot “plays on the traditional position of the Romantic outcast to gloss the vampire subject with all the characteristics of selfhood” (Botting). Finally, I examine the critique of heteronormativity with which Rice reworks Gothic conventions in the novel.

Keywords:

sympathetic vampire, subjectivity, postexistentialism, gender, power, homoeroticism

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