The Theme of the Vampire Family in Literature - Essay Example

Task: Interview with the vampire by Anne Rice is about Louis who narrates his story, in his words, about his life in the mortal and immortal forms (Rice 11). Louis recalls the unwilling transformation of his human form to that of a vampire by creepy Lestat. The story is contextualized in New Orleans where Louis discovers a lost Claudia, a child, who he wanted to save and comfort with his remaining humanity within him. He finally transforms her into a vampire grasping her womanly attributes and intelligence in her child’s body, after which they engage in a tight relationship. Both Louis and Claudia become desperate to know where they belong and meet with others who would understand their entire situation. Finally, they travel to Europe destining in Paris where they find the theatre of vampires. Here, the author of the novel through establishing the book as a short story brings out the disastrous and successful life experiences of a spirit, as well as the endeavors of characters thus capturing the socio-political changes of different continents. By the novel introducing Lestat, the most lasting character who is a thrilling combination of attraction and revolt with many lush illustrations, it focuses on immortality, loss, sexuality, change, and power as its main themes. The request by characters Daniel and Madelein for Louis to give them the power he had or make them vampires clearly indicates they were living in an era and region that had a lot of restrain in terms of sex, non-tolerance to criminal activities and may be stern code of social conduct. That is why they were eager to experience new taste of life. The author through building such a scenario where characters with non-human attributes could go to new places and the people they meet becoming excited about their attributes and wanting to be like them, captures the theme of change. This theme has a close relationship with the Victorian orals emphasized through religion, elitism, and improvements as regarding industrialism. The main characters’ description of vampires does not, in any way, portray a picture of ugly look of vampires, and, in fact, he states that all vampires move about with preternatural grace and beauty. Again, the author acknowledges the similarity of her themes with that of Mary Shelley’s alternative title for her book Frankenstein of the modern Prometheus, a title founded on the romantic’s point of view that Prometheus personified the demon. This is undoubtedly true especially when taking into consideration that Rice, in her novel, objectifies the life situations that were beginning to take on a new leaf. She uses vampires to signify the advent of modern science, industrialization, globalization and their consequences. This, when viewed from the social perspective, has brought about severe, traumatizing and permanent transformations, which are more often swiped under the carpet. Thus, the novel portrays the hidden implications and nature of modern changes. In the scene of Louis and Daniel, the latter is pleading for more and acknowledging that what he had experienced was an adventure he will never again experience in life, which can be taken to show the passion and longing that the experience of transforming to a vampire had created in him. In addition, considering the context of the novel, this is either introduction to drugs or homosexuality, two phenomena, which transform someone to a new state of being and makes them anxious to have it again. This is a highly, important dimension of changes that were occurring during the writing of the novel otherwise termed as transformation to vampirism. Moreover, Rice’s novel “The interview with the vampire” addresses the theme of hopelessness that has crippled humanity because of modernization, which brought about exploitative capitalism, emergence of HIV/AIDs, drug abuse and many other socially unbecoming behaviors. This is well illustrated when the novel is interpreted from the point of view of Henry Nouwen in his book, the wounded healer, where he referred human shift to the nuclear age as one of a new man whose hope for the future of human had moved into meaningless emphasizing that it is a generation which no longer clinches to motivators of existence. This is quite true considering the current state of things where the youth no longer rely on parents or adults for life lessons but rather on their fellow youth. This is brought out in the second conversation between Armand and Louis where the former asks the latter if he is still the spirit. Louis responds that he was not the spirit of any age and that he was in conflict with everything as he has always belonged nowhere at no time. Armand in desperation and frustration tells Louis that she was the product of his spirit age and that she was a broken heart thus the hopelessness brought about by Louis otherwise symbolizes change and new spirit. At the end of the novel, the author captures the theme of modernist quest to attach meaning to postmodernist doubts. This is deduced as Louis sums up the interview by stating that he would like to be in a place where there was nothing known to him and where nothing mattered. Further, the situation is captured in the questions posed by Louis to Lestat and Armand. In Tolstoy’s Family of the Vourdalak, vourdalaks are corpses who ascend from their graves to feed on blood of the living humans. The story paints a picture that these vourdalaks exhibited behavior similar to those of other vampires but posses one different trait of preferring blood from close relatives and cherished friends. It is also highlighted that the vourdalaks could be killed with an aspen stake pierced through their hearts (Craft 47). The teaching associated with the vourdalaks is the warning to grandchildren that they should not ask for their grandfather as they await him because if he were a vourdalak, he would rise. Generally, this story is centered on Gorcha who is the patriarch of the family having gone to the mountains supposedly to hunt Turks but returns having changed. He later attacks his own grandson and sucks blood leading to the grandson’s death. It becomes the onset of a sequence of reactions. The dead grandson comes back to life, attacks the mother, and sucks her blood and ultimately the whole family becomes vourdalaks. It is a story based on the myths of Slavs and Greeks, which postulated that a risen dead attacked his family because of jealousy that he should be among those living. This is a very thrilling story that is based on the theme of sexual aggression. The theme is vividly brought out when the narrator portrays that he looks like a lothario and exclaiming that he had to talk about love affairs. Feeling challenged by one prospective conquest, he embarks on a diplomatic venture and due to icy weather, they shelter with the family while awaiting the arrival of the father, Gorcha who is a vampire and tries to attack his family. On the other hand, the narrator intends to predate on the family’s daughter sexually (Rice 34). He is stopped by the fear of family’s reaction, incase they became aware. Returning home later within six months, he is fore warned that the village was already plagued with vampires. He, however, decides to come back to see Sdenko the little daughter who became insane and finds out that she is a sexual predator and a vourdalak. Like in the novel interview with the vampire, Tolstoy’s family of the vourdalaks, the socially unbecoming behaviors that have crippled society due to changes that have occurred is highlighted. Nevertheless, unlike in the interview with the vampires, this story does not convey the other dynamics of change and the social situations during the time conception. Similarly, Ligotti’s the lost of art of twilight, it has its basis in the philosophy that it is not horror per se that existed in reality but that there is an alternate version of reality in life that was much worse compared to the manifest reality. It talks of a higher reality that has been covered with a mask, whose face is terribly horrific, and its characters uncovered of the mask and forced to face the horror. The story is premised on a main character, a protagonist born to a woman who while she was expectant with him, interacted with vampires and probably drunk blood. The narrator, therefore, feeds on blood while in the womb, and because the mother used to do vampire things, he is born without identity. He is not fully human and not a vampire. He, thus, exists in a twilight world, where there is two versions of him, not human and not vampire, twilight not day nor night, he loves painting twilight and time to him, has no beginning and has no end either, in short he does not exist or rather hangs in timeless time. Andre thus lives in twilight, actually in the middle way (Doane 17). He talks of trouble feeding in the wind and hiding at the window and mentions two opposing words, impetus, and impotence. This story creates a picture of an alternate reality, which is hard to conceptualize and understand. Like in the novel, interview with the vampires, it not only tries to espouse the horrific reality that faces people sometimes, but also it influences people to adapt to the changes that were beginning to show. The themes generally addressed through vampire stories though a little bit exaggerated are more often concerning societal issues that cannot be expressed directly. The horrific and terrifying accounts, in the literature, show how those things that people face in society but always not brought to the lime light has terrific effects. In the 19th century, however, literature writers to demystify the long held myths that affected society and to challenge authorities on how to handle social matters majorly used them (Benefiel 45). It worked well during the Victorian era when society was expected to act in a particular way yet the situation on the ground was different. Particularly, people were expected to be morally upright which they seemed to be from the outside, but their actions were quite different. Those who were courageous enough imagined, fantasized and did as they desired in their thoughts, which in the vampire novels is portrayed as a horrific situation. It was a matter of time before what the vampire novels centered on happened, with the rise of atheistic beliefs, homosexuality, and tele-pornography, things that had occupied the minds of people for long. Currently, themes addressed by vampire novels still surround issues that cannot otherwise be done in the open. Works Cited Benefiel, Candace. “Blood Relations: the Gothic Perversion of the Nuclear Family in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. “The Journal of Popular Culture” 38 (2004): 261-73. Google Scholar. EBSCO. Gramley, Winston-Salem. 25 Nov. 2007. Print. Craft, Christopher. Kiss Me with Those Red Lips: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Representations 8 (1984): 107-133. JSTOR. EBSCO. Gramley, Winston-Salem. 27 Nov. 2007. Doane, Janice & Devon, Hodges. “Undoing Feminism: From the Preoedipal to Postfeminism to Anner Rices Vampire Chronicles.” American Literary History 2 (1990): 422-42. JSTOR. EBSCO. New York, NY: Gramley, Winston-Salem. 2007. Print. Rice, Anne. Interview with the vampire: Book 1 of Vampire Chronicles, New York, NY: Random Publishing Group, 1997. Print. Read More