The Vampire’s Contemporaneity in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat (1985)
The Vampire’s Contemporaneity in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat (1985)

Summary/Abstract: Contemporaneity, defined as the quality of relating to the present moment, reveals the relationship between fiction and the culture in which its writers are situated, and has long been recognised as a distinguishing feature of vampire fiction. The culturally constructed and ever-evolving figure of the vampire has served as a cultural symbol and metaphor since the early nineteenth century, when it was first employed in British literature to represent various anxieties within specific historical and cultural contexts. Anne Rice radically rewrites and reinterprets the transgressive figures of vampires, giving them centre stage and granting them a narrative voice, thereby appropriating the vampire motif as a means of providing contemporary social critique and questioning the fixity of social and sexual roles and behaviours. This paper examines how The Vampire Lestat (1985) reflects the cultural climate of its 1980s production, particularly in its sympathetic portrayal of the protagonist. Firstly, it looks at the emphasis on Lestat’s rebelliousness as a strategy employed by Rice to present socially unorthodox behaviour sympathetically, in line with the cultural climate of the 1980s. Secondly, I examine the privileging of the pre-Oedipal in the novel, which reveals the author’s influence of specific psychoanalytic feminist theories. Finally, I concur with George E. Haggerty’s assertion that Lestat’s contentious depiction as simultaneously attractive/repulsive and affectionate/horrifying offers a direct critique of modern American society’s homoerotic fixation and homophobic aversion towards the representation of gay males. Furthermore, I perceive the homoerotic elements in The Vampire Lestat as intrinsically connected to the novel’s historical backdrop, serving as a poignant reflection of the vampire’s relevance to contemporary issues.

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