Homoeroticism and Oedipus Complex Explained (The Vampire Lestat - Anne Rice)

Member Name: happybunny75

Product:	The Vampire Lestat - Anne Rice
Date:	23/10/01 (135 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: True Anne Rice Style, Drama and suspense

Disadvantages: None

I tell no fibs, honestly. Would I use a cheap trick like that?


Following on from Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice wrote The Vampire Lestat as the second part of The Vampire Chronicles.

As a quick recap (but if you haven’t read Interview with the Vampire or seen the film, this will mean nothing to you!), Lestat was Louis’ creator in Interview with the Vampire and well, wasn’t considered to be a popular ‘vamp’ by Louis in his narration. Lestat was regarded by Louis, as a bit secretive fellow who wouldn’t tell of the vampire secrets that Louis new that he knew (if you see what I mean). Louis and Claudia (another child of the devil-spawn, Lestat who was this time a real child) got a bit upset by this, felt Lestat was a nasty bit of work, and too possessive by far and tried to kill him – did they succeed? Well, would Rice have written a follow up from the perspective of Lestat if they had?

Lestat’s narrative starts with his recent ‘rising’ from living in disgrace in an old ramshackled house in New Orleans and describes his realisation of what is now happening in the modern world of 1980’s America. It is the same format that Rice adopted in Interview with the Vampire – what Lestat is doing in the present and then starts with his death and rebirth as a vampire and charters his life autobiographically up to the present day.

Fortunately, this isn’t just another Interview with the Vampire, in that Rice does do extraordinarily well in distinguishing the personality traits and characters of both Louis and Lestat – a difficult thing to achieve when you have written about both of them in one novel from the one perspective and then focused on the other character solely for the next novel.

So, Lestat is a rock star.” A what”, you say? Yep, the vampire of immortal secrets is a rock star. This interesting piece of information is rev
ealed at the beginning of Lestat’s narrative (or his published autobiography, if you prefer) and I was thinking “What! Has Rice gone mad?”. I couldn’t see it, and was concerned that the novel was going to be a modern day comedy of scaremongering and strangeness, but fortunately all is well. The novel does follow the usual historical path that we come (and let’s face it, want to expect) from the gothic genre.

The is something very erotic in vampire stories, but more often than not it involves Count Dracula or suchlike, opening his mouth and sinking his teeth into succulent young maidens. Rice avoided this cliché in Interview with the Vampire and expands it further in The Vampire Lestat.

Lestat’s mortal life is signified by three major things. Firstly, he tracks down and kills a pack of wolves in his homeland of France; he has a very distanced and fraught relationship with his father and brothers, but is dedicated to his mother, despite her unease at affection; and he is ‘close friends’ with Nicholas who he runs off to Paris with. Can you see where I was going with the title of this opinion?

Lestat’s relationship with Nicholas, although not explicitly saying that they had a sexual relationship together, more than indicates that the two were lovers. Previously, in Interview with the Vampire, Rice had used a high degree of homoeroticism between Lestat and Louis, but within their immortal lives rather than in Louis’ mortal life. Here Rice goes one stage further. And I don’t think I give any of the plot away by saying that Lestat makes his mother into a vampire as well. The result being that he re-discovers his mother’s beauty and cannot bring himself to call her ‘mother’ but Gabrielle. And so Rice adds a bit of Freudian/Greek eroticism to the narrative, but without the degradation of the ‘unspeakable sins’ of her protagonists.

The truly inte
resting aspect of the novel is that Lestat does in fact know the secret to the beginnings of the immortal life – the secret of where vampires came from. In Marius, a vampire who has existed for 1,800 years, he finds a teacher who tells him the history and secrets of the vampire world. And in addition to Rice’s interpretation of where vampires could have originated, she allows Marius to voice the futility of being immortal and existence “What can I say finally that will not confirm your worst fears? I have lived over eighteen hundred years, and I tell you life does not need us. I have never had a true purpose. We have no place.” Life no matter how long or short could be expressed by many of us in these terms exactly.

Reading The Vampire Lestat certainly made me think. Like who would I want to drink from first and whom would I like to turn into vampires to join me. But, yes, Anne Rice novels always make me think. It isn’t just a horror story which is both entertaining and fascinating, but a way to delve into the rudimentaries of our own existences and how we would feel if the burden of immortality was laid upon us. As with most fiction of this type, how long will it be that some of the concepts within it become more of a reality than the writer intended?

Summary: