Dieting and Damnation: Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire

DIETING AND DAMNATION: ANNE RICE’S INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE S A N D R A T O M O University of British Columbia A t one point in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, the vampires Louis and Claudia journey to Eastern Europe on a quest to find others like themselves. Elegant, intelligent, and beautiful, Louis and Claudia are shocked to find that the fabled vampires of Romania are little more than zombies, rotten half-eaten corpses who suffer the fate of being animated. “I had met the European vampire, the creature of the Old World,” Louis pronounces as he kills the last of these; “He was dead” (192). Referring as they do to a comparison of monsters, Louis’s words might just as well describe a generic as a narrative twist. In 1976, the same year that Rice published Interview with the Vampire, Stephen King published his only vampire novel, Salem’s Lot, a novel that featured vampires who remarkably resemble the kind that repels Louis. King’s vampires were, of course, the norm. They partook of an ancestry that threaded its way from the works of Polidori, Le Fanu, and Stoker in the nineteenth century to those of Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Aickman, and Paul Morrissey in the twentieth, an ancestry whose members, even the most illustrious, were manifestly sub­ human. They were clever, they might be attractive, but their bodies were too hairy, their sense of smell too acute. When the chic and beautiful Louis meets the vampires of Eastern Europe, he is, as Rice is well aware, meeting one hundred and fifty years of monster stereotype. It was, of course, a pattern of Rice’s chic vampire rather than Stephen King’s bestial one that became the focus of such absorbed and wild popu­ larity in the 1980s and 1990s. From Rice’s own sequels, The Vampire Lestat (1984), Queen of the Damned (1988), and Tale of the Body Thief (1992), to such films as The Lost Boys, Innocent Blood, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, the vampire of enviable looks and inspiring ambitions — not sub­ human so much as ultra-human — reigned. But the vampire’s transformation had its corollary in a process of domestication, a process that seemed to be cemented with the casting of Tom Cruise, a squeaky-clean icon of norma­ tive masculinity, in the role of the amoral, sexually ambiguous Lestat for the 1994 film version of Interview with the Vampire. Vampirism, says Joan Copjec, “presents us with a bodily double that we can neither make sense E n g l is h St u d i e s in C a n a d a , 22, 4, D e ce m b e r 1996 of nor recognize as our own” (128). But with Cruise playing Lestat — a piece of casting that Rice herself bitterly opposed and then enthusiastically supported1— the vampire had ceased to be unrecognizable. Once a menace to the conclaves of average America, he was now an honorary resident. The journey of the vampire from monster to yuppie may not have been predicted in Interview with the Vampire, but it is, I would suggest, encoded there. In order to separate her own vampires from those indigenous to the genre, Rice borrowed heavily from 1970s discourses of gender mutability and bodily transformation, finding in the twin paradigms of androgyny and weight loss an articulation appropriate to her generically radical aims. But if the then-revolutionary potential of gender and corporeal metamorphosis liberated Rice’s vampires from the stocks of their heritage, it also, I would suggest, facilitated their bland domestication. This essay will examine the mechanisms of that domestication, with, I might add, as much an eye to using Rice’s text to read 1970s discourses of bodily alteration as the reverse. In the 1970s upheaval around bodies and weight, particularly women’s bodies, we can trace the means by which the very process of becoming ultra-human — of becoming a new person, a new monster, a new woman — could realize itself in confinement and limitation. When Rice set out to make the “animal” vampire a new person (Ramsland 149), she imagined the process as part of...