The Postmodern Sympathetic Vampire: Subjectivity, Romance, and Gender in Anne Rice’s “Interview With the Vampire” (1976)

Authors:

Pages: 211-224
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/RVNR8964

Abstract:

Anne Rice’s beautiful and alluring vampires have long been acknowledged to mark the advent of the sympathetic vampire in popular fiction. This article explores the literary vampire’s transformation into a postmodern romanticized subject, telling his own story in “Interview with the Vampire” (1976), focusing on several new developments in this literary figure. First, I discuss the significance of the vampire’s narrative voice and newfound subjectivity as a postmodern advancement of the character. Then, my text examines how the vampire’s ontology of suffering in Rice’s novel resonates with contemporary individuals’ struggles to shape their identity and find meaning in their existence. The third section discusses how the plot utilizes the traditional position of the Romantic outcast to provide the vampire subject with all the characteristics of selfhood. Finally, I examine the critique of heteronormativity with which Rice reworks Gothic conventions in the novel.

Keywords:

postmodern vampire, sympathetic vampire, subjectivity, postexistentialism, gender, homosexuality

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