Here’s an paper that I wrote for one of my undergraduate Critical Theory courses. I’ve always been intrigued by the Feminist theory as well as other body theory—especially as a response or way around the dilemma of Deconstructionism. This paper is actually light on theory in my opinion, using it only as an explorative tool to plunder a narrative. Keep in mind that this written to complete an assignment in which I had to demonstrate my knowledge of a particular school of critical thought by examing a text through my chosen school’s critical methodology.
What is feminism? This is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down since feminist discourse borrows a lot of ideas from other theoretical schools.(1) In feminist thought, you’ll find the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, the Structuralist concept of the sign, and the fluidity and subjectiveness of Deconstruction just to single out a few. There is also a great deal of variation within the feminist school. Some feminists focus on rediscovering the work of women whose work has been lost in our androcentric culture while others prefer to take a new look at older established male authors from a female schema. Some feminists (like Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous) wish to focus on the body while others tended to focus more on the literary text.(2) Contemporary Feminism has concerned itself with all manner of critical issues from women’s role in the postcolonial to femininity as a masquerade.(3)
How, then, can we pin down such a diverse critical method? I believe the solution lies in applying the method to a literary work. The best way to explore the feminist method is to apply some of its aspects to a central literary text. For this application of the feminist method, I can think of no better work than Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. Interview with the Vampire is an excellent text for exploring the feminist critical method because of its recurring theme of vampirism as the feminine. In this essay, I will take up three of these feminist themes. First, I will explore Interview with the Vampire’s connection with Elaine Showalter’s three stages of women’s writing as an allegorical journey from one phase to the next. Next, I will focus on the body as I explore the multiplicity of vampiric desire and pleasure and some of the ramifications of that multiplicity. Finally, I will turn to vampirism as motherhood and the concept of matriarchy latent in Ricean vampirology.
Interview with the Vampire as a Feminine Journey
In her essay “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” Elaine Showalter categorizes the whole of women’s literature in three stages: Feminine, Feminist, and Female. In the Feminine phase (from about 1840 to about 1880), women tried to imitate their male counterparts. The era was characterized by the absorption of male ideas - even those concerning female natures. The next phase, the Feminist stage dominated women’s literature from about 1880-1920. In this stage, the accommodating nature of the feminine gave way to the more aggressive posture of the feminist. Masculine ideas and conventions were rejected in favor of Amazonian utopias. In the final stage, the Female, which has continued from 1920 to the present day, women no longer concerned themselves with imitation and rejection, the two forms of dependence that characterized the first two stages. Instead, women draw on their unique female experiences to create a unique women’s literature - a Female Aesthetic.(4) It is easy to see a parallel to Showalter’s feminine journey in Interview with the Vampire. Louis, too, progresses from the submissive acquiescence of the Feminine to the autonomy of the Female.
When Louis is first born into darkness, his senses awaken. Louis sees the world in a completely different way. At first, Louis’ new senses are confusing. Sounds, for example, all run together in a very fluid manner. This is reminiscent of Patricia Waugh’s essay “Stalemates?: Feminists, Postmodernists and Unfinished Issues in Modern Aesthetics.” In Waugh’s essay, female subjectivity is defined by a fluid notion of self and one’s environment. In Waugh’s concept of female existence, well-defined boundaries of the self are abandoned in favor of an intersubjectivity in which barriers have little meaning. This intersubjectivity often seems chaotic to male modernists and postmodernists.(5) In much the same way, Louis finds the new fluidity of his senses, at first, to be “confusing, each sound running into the next sound…”(6)
These new senses seem to allow even male vampires stunning insight into the female mind. Louis, for example, forges a new relationship with his sister. He tells us, “It was only now as a vampire that I did come to now my sister”. This new relationship is based on communication and openness. Louis learns of his sister’s “secret thoughts and dreams, those little fantasies she dared tell no one.”(7) Rice’s vampires are also very good listeners - a trait that we see best in Louis’ conversation with Armand:
I was at a loss suddenly; but conscious all the while of how Armand listened; that he listened and listened in the way that we dream of others listening, his face seeming to reflect on everything said. He did not start forward to seize on my slightest pause, to assert an understanding of something before the thought was finished, or to argue with a swift, irresistible impulse - the things which make dialogue impossible.(8)
This skill with passive communication further allies vampires with femininity. Ricean vampires - at least those other than Lestat in Interview with the Vampire - don’t constantly interrupt their listeners with their ideas. Instead they focus completely on what is being said. This may be because of the telepathy which vampires other than Louis and possibly also Claudia possess.(9) With this telepathy, vampires wouldn’t have to constantly interrupt for clarification. They would grasp the meaning beyond the mere words someone was speaking.
In this confusion and awe of being a fledgling vampire, Louis first attempts to emulate Lestat, his creator - a task at which he fails miserably. He and Lestat are simply two completely different beings. Louis continues to have a lingering respect for human life that Lestat doesn’t seem to possess. Louis instead falls to feeding on rats. In his failed attempt to emulate Lestat, Louis is in Showalter’s Feminine stage.
The birth of Claudia brings a decidedly feminist turn to the novel. We learn very little about Claudia throughout the novel. Nina Auerbach has gone so far as to suggest that Claudia may even be an allegorical figure.(10) Claudia is the catalyst which will bring Louis into the new era of feminism.(11) It is she who incites Louis to revolt against Lestat; and, in doing so, she is part of a larger Western tradition of the disruptive woman - a tradition that is almost demonic - which seems to be at the root of feminism. Claudia is out to break down the patriarchy in which she is imprisoned by striking out against Lestat(12) and also by becoming Louis’ lover - a point which Auerbach doesn’t take up. The apparent death of Lestat in New Orleans and Louis and Claudia’s voyage to the Old World mark the end of the feminine stage and the journey into the feminist stage.
Louis enters the final Female stage when he accepts his individual nature with Armand. In order to enter the Female stage, however, Louis must leave his Feminist stage behind since it is still another form of dependence. That means that Claudia must be left behind if Louis is ever to reach the final stage of his journey. It becomes apparent that Louis is bound to Claudia so completely as a paramour(13) that only death can separate them. It is, then, necessary for Claudia to die so that Louis can progress. To enter into this stage which is characterized by acceptance, Louis must also accept Armand’s offer to travel with and learn from him. When Louis finally accepts Armand’s offer after Claudia’s death with a request to visit the Louvre, the patient Armand “thought it a very simple request” and wonders “why [Louis] had waited so long.”(14)
It seems important to note that Louis doesn’t fully achieve fullfillment of the Female stage until his eventual separation from Armand. At this point, Louis is finally autonomous. Louis finally confirms this independence near the end of the novel when he denies Lestat’s request to learn from him. Louis no longer needs the oppressive masculinity of Lestat, the combative nature of Claudia, or even the quiet comradeship of Armand. Louis has achieved the fluid intersubjectivity with the environment around him that Waugh was writing about. He has become his own coven.
It is interesting that Louis progresses to each stage through either a death or a perceived death. Louis passes from humanity to the femininity of vampirism through his own death and rebirth into darkness. Louis next escapes the Feminine stage by Lestat’s apparent death at Claudia’s hand. Finally, Louis enters into the Female stage with the death of Claudia and progresses deeper with the loss of Armand.
The Multiplicity of Desire and Pleasure
Anne Rice’s vampires possess a sensuality that many other vampires in the vampire tradition (Stephen King’s vampires from Salem’s Lot come to mind) lack. This sensuality brings with it a focus on the body. This focus on the body and sensuality also seems to point to a certain feminism in Anne Rice’s vampirology.
Luce Irigaray has a great deal to say about the body in her discussion of jouissance, or sexual pleasure. Irigaray says that women’s jouissance is more diverse than men’s. Whereas men only have the outlet of phallic pleasure, women find jouissance “just about everywhere” on their bodies. This multiplicity of pleasure leads women to write in a more multiple language than men exhibit.(15)
Using Irigaray’s concepts as a basis, we find yet another masculine/feminine dichotomy in the Lestat/Louis relationship. Lestat seems to have one unitary pleasure in Interview with the Vampire - the kill. Feeding, in Ricean vampirology, is an almost sexual experience. Like sex, the kill is also an expression of love: “For vampires, physical love culminates and is satisfied in only one thing, the kill.”(16) When Louis feeds on Claudia, his heart rate increases “with no hope of cease.”(17) Lestat finds great pleasure in the kill. He tells Louis, “I like to do it…I enjoy it.”(18)
Louis, however, has multiple sources of pleasure which Lestat either doesn’t possess or doesn’t perceive. Louis’ vampire sight causes him to become “so enamored with [the moon] that I must have spent an hour there [looking at it].” With this new vampire sight, Louis had found that “all things had changed.”(19) Louis also indirectly alludes to the tactile pleasures of vampirism in his conversation with the boy about the superstitions of the vampire tradition. The boy inquires whether Louis is capable of transforming into steam and passing through a keyhole. Louis tells him that he can’t but “I wish I could…How positively delightful. I should like to pass through all manner of different keyholes and feel the tickle of their peculiar shape.”(20) Sound is yet another source of pleasure for Louis. Louis refers with a smile to first hearing Lestat’s laughter with vampire senses as “peals of laughter…peals of bells”.(21) This is not to say that Louis derives no pleasure from the kill. On the contrary, Louis “never knew what life was until it ran out in a red gush over my lips, my hands.”(22) Louis, however, never loses his respect for human life. This difference between Louis and Lestat is best evidenced in the passage where Louis is describing the death of the overseer that he had to witness before he became a vampire:
Lestat was laughing, telling me callously that I would feel so different once I was a vampire that I would laugh, too. He was wrong about that. I never laugh at death, no matter how often and regularly I am the cause of it.(23)
This multiplicity of language that comes out of the multiplicity of pleasure often simply isn’t translatable into logocentric Western languages. Rice shows the impossibility of rendering the chaos of multiplicity in our inherently logocentric language in Louis’ inability to speak of vampirism using words. Louis first encounters this dilemma when he tries to explain his peculiar state of undeath to the boy. He finally resorts to telling the boy “I can’t really make this clear to you for the obvious reason that you are now as I was before my body died. You cannot understand.”(24) Vampires cannot fully commune with humans because they don’t have the vampire experience.(25) Any attempt at communion between vampires and mortals is doomed to fail because vampirism is simply too intense for human comprehension.(26) Since humans cannot experience what it means to be a vampire, the burden falls to our logocentric language, which is doomed to failure. Vampires, like their female counterparts, must be defined as “other” in Western society.
Vampiric Motherhood
In psychoanalytic theory, one achieves maturity when he regards the mother as simply an object by which he obtains existence.(27) With this theory in mind, let’s take a look at Louis first few moments as a vampire. The first thing Louis sees after he is born into darkness is Lestat, his creator. It is through that first look that Louis explores his new “vampire eyes.” Louis learns about his new existence by looking at Lestat:
I saw as a vampire…Lestat was standing again at the foot of the stairs, and I saw him as I could not have seen him before…now I saw him filled with his own life and own blood: he was radiant, not luminous. And then I saw that not only had Lestat changed, but all things had changed.(28)
Lestat in the above passage is in a mother role. He is the first person Louis sees after being reborn as a vampire. He is also the way in which Louis will define himself throughout his early years. Lestat is what Louis will try to be in his early attempts to “be a vampire.” However, Lestat will also be the one who Louis must separate himself from to reach maturity. Lestat’s role as mother rather than father brings us to an important point about Ricean vampirism.
In Anne Rice’s vampirology, vampirism is a matriarchy. In later novels in the Vampire Chronicles, we discover that the progenitor of all vampires is a woman, the “queen” vampire Akasha. Her consort, Enkil - while powerful in his own right - is not the parent of all vampires. Whereas Akasha is linked to all of her progeny, Enkil has no connection to other vampires (other than the typical telepathic connection of Ricean vampires) and is therefore expendable. Akasha, however, is indispensable since whatever harm is done to her extends to all vampires.(29)
Another point of support for the vampiric matriarchy is the method by which vampires procreate. Vampiric life, like human life, is created through the exchange of fluids. First, the “mother” vampire takes in fluids, mirroring the female role in sexual intercourse. Next, the mother vampire nurses the newborn vampire with vampire blood. In this way, the Dark Gift is a return to the oral stage, where pleasure is centered on the mouth through nursing with the mother. In Louis’ words:
I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment…(30)
Finally, Louis exhibits his final maturity in his independence from “Mother” Lestat. When Louis returns to New Orleans and trails the fledgling vampire back to Lestat, Lestat begs him to return to him to teach him about the new times and help Lestat become the dashing vampire he once was. Though Louis obviously still cared a great deal for Lestat, he rejected his offer. Louis had to avoid linking his existence with his “mother” because if he did he would lose his maturity and his identity. In this manner, Louis’ refusal of Lestat is the greatest test of Louis’ newfound independence. Louis remains an autonomous being.
Conclusions
What then have we learned in our exploration of Ricean vampirism through the lens of feminist theory? From the section on Louis’ allegorical feminine journey, we see that feminism is still a formalist system. Showalter’s attempt to break the whole of women’s literature into three stages is formalism writ large. From the section of the multiplicity of desire and pleasure, we learn about feminism’s emphasis on how the body relates to the text. Finally, in the section on vampiric motherhood we find psychoanalysis hiding in the background of feminism and we also see feminism’s attempt to break out of the dominant patriarchy to create a unique female system. Most importantly, I think, we have seen that feminism is not a critical method that can be reduced to a single idea. Feminism, like the female subjectivity, is a system of multiplicity and fluidity. Feminism is made up of many parts without clear boundaries separating them.
Works Cited
Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.
Beidler, Peter. “What is Feminism?” The Wife of Bath. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996. 255-262.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993.
Rice, Anne. Interview with the Vampire. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976.
Showalter, Elaine. “Toward a Feminist Poetics.” Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Addams. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. 1224-1233.
Waugh, Patricia. “Stalemates?: Feminists, Postmodernists and Unfinished Issues in Modern Aesthetics.” Modern Literary Theory. 3rd ed. New York: Arnold, 1992.
Footnotes
- Peter Beidler, “What is Feminist Criticism?”, The Wife of Bath (Boston, Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 255-256.
- Ibid, p. 257-258.
- Ibid, p. 255.
- Elaine Showalter, “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” Critical Theory Since Plato (Orlando, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. 1231.
- Patricia Waugh, “Stalemates?: Feminists, Postmodernists and Unfinished Issues in Modern Aesthetics,” Modern Literary Theory, 3rd ed. (New York, Arnold, 1992), p. 337.
- Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire (New York, Ballantine, 1976), p. 21.
- Ibid, p. 38.
- Ibid, p. 281-282.
- The concept of vampiric telepathy is actually an elusive topic in Interview with the Vampire. It is only hinted at and never fully developed. Claudia, for example, asks Louis on page 249, “Do you know what it was that [Armand] told me over and over without speaking a word?” Yet when Louis asks Armand if he is capable of reading thoughts, Armand replies, “Not the way you mean.” It isn’t really until The Vampire Lestat that we are certain of the existence of vampiric telepathy.
- Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 154.
- Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon (Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1982), p. 1.
- Ibid, p. 154.
- Rice p. 281.
- Ibid, p. 317.
- Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1993), p. 101-102.
- Rice p. 254.
- Ibid, p. 74.
- Ibid, p. 84.
- Ibid, p. 21.
- Ibid, p. 23.
- Ibid, p. 21.
- Ibid, p. 82.
- Ibid, p. 16.
- Ibid, p. 25.
- Auerbach, Vampires, p. 215.
- Ibid, p. 153. This failure is demonstrated, for Auerbach, in the failed Lestat/David communion in Tale of the Body Thief. Auerbach misses the other perhaps more lucid failed vampire/human communion in the same novel of Lestat and Gretchen. While in human form, Lestat and Gretchen find a powerful connection - a connection which is broken with Lestat’s return to vampirism. In fact, we see that as a consequence of having seen Lestat’s true nature Gretchen is driven into madness.
- Waugh p. 336.
- Rice p. 21.
- We actually first encounter Akasha and Enkil (”Those Who Must Be Kept”) in The Vampire Lestat. However, it isn’t until Marius finds Enkil sucked dry in The Queen of the Damned that we discover that Enkil is actually only ornamental. His only real value is in his role as Akasha’s consort - a role that Akasha believes Lestat can handle more effectively.
- Rice p. 20.
