The Vampire Lestat's place within the Gothic As one can obviously glean from the title, Lestat de Lioncourt is a vampire. This alone is significant within the Gothic tradition since with the publication and subsequent popularity of Bram Stoker's Dracula, "the vampire moved from being a peripheral element within the genre to a place near the center, and capable of generating its own now massive tradition" (Williams, 21). A survey of popular literature and films bears out Williams' point that the vampire is indeed one of the most, if not the most, enduring and successful of the genre's grotesque creatures. Obviously, the vampire figure is an adaptable one and can function as a breaker of moral, social, and sexual taboos, but in keeping with a marxist approach, Punter speculates that the growing currency of the vampire in 18th and 19th century Gothic fiction that culminated in the extreme popularity of Dracula may also have been a symbolic expression of middle-class fears regarding the aristocracy (256-8). I think there is much in The Vampire Lestat that supports this idea. First of all, the central feature of the vampire myth is blood. Blood is not only the means by which the vampire sustains itself, but the medium through which new vampires are created. Through the blood, Dracula represents a dynasty as he is the descendant and bearer of a long aristocratic tradition. Punter contends that "The long historical progression of the bourgeoisie's attempts to understand the significance of noble 'blood' reaches a point of apotheosis in Dracula, for Dracula is the final aristocrat; he has rarefied his needs, and the needs of his house and line, to the point where he has no longer any need of any exchange system or life-support except blood...the aristocrat has paid the tragic price of social supersession, yet his doom perforce involves others" (Punter, 257). The reader of The Vampire Lestat learns at the outset that Lestat was born the seventh son of an impoverished French Marquis "in the last decades before the French Revolution" and his family castle and lands date back at least to the 12th century and the Crusades (23-4). Like Dracula, Lestat is portrayed as the last of an aristocratic line emphasized by the fact that Lestat is born at the cusp of a new era as the French Revolution heralds the secular, democratic, and modern capitalist world. The tension between an 'aristocratic' view of life and a 'bourgeois' one is established early in the novel. Lestat complains that he had to learn to hunt to help feed his parents and brothers or else they might go hungry but the "richest of the bourgeois didn't have to hunt...he had money" (23). Lestat's best friend Nicholas expresses his bitterness about the fact that Lestat did not share his new vampiric status with him in class terms: "Your kind...has always had access to great secrets." "My kind!" [Lestat exclaims.] "That you are an aristocrat, Monsieur" (144). After Lestat has become a vampire, he meets other, older vampires in his quest for knowledge about his vampire origins, and the most powerful of these are also from privileged ranks. Marius, a nearly 2000 year old vampire, was born the son of a Roman senator (400), and the 3500 year old King and Queen of all vampires, "those from whom all [vampires] descend," were formerly monarchs of ancient Egypt (428). Thus, the vampire line, which stretches back into antiquity and is determined by the shared "blood" that transforms a human into a vampire, becomes a Gothic double for the former feudal aristocracy, and while less numerous this line is also more deadly. Other critics agree that the vampire legend in general may have originated in order to explain the connection between the aristocracy and immortality (Carter, 65). Gothic plots tend to revolve around wills, succession, and inheritance and though the lord in the castle may change through death and generational succession, the presence of a lord and his rights and title persisted through the centuries often at the expense of peasant blood. And, of course, the analogy between tyrannical exploitation and literal "blood-sucking" is clear enough. Lestat also "inherits" the accumulated wealth of the vampire who transforms him and his wealth only continues to grow, as does the material wealth of most of the novel's other vampire characters, due in part to their longevity and to the emerging capitalist system. As Lestat tells his mother, "You know where to reach me, the addresses of my banks in London and Rome. Those banks have lived as long as vampires already. They will always be there" (353). Thus, the novel explores the related idea of a secret elite that controls great wealth over generations, a fairly popular conspiracy theory today, or simply a matter of fact, depending on one's political viewpoint. Yet, the question arises as to why Rice's depiction of a vampire dynasty of whom Lestat is a recent and most interesting member should so enthrall readers. One clue may be that even in the late 18th century when the Gothic emerged, there was "a remarkably clear urge of the middle classes to read about aristocrats" (Punter, 53). Certainly, as stated earlier, our increasingly narrow and alienating culture would lead us to idealize a feudal past culture (as did those readers of Gothic literature in the past and in which we, the readers, identify with the noble lords) yet since the present cannot replace the past "it is a nightmare version of it" (Kilgour, 30); the novel presents a 'class' of rich powerful creatures who are literally 'in' or 'non' human. In the case of Lestat and his community of wealthy, powerful, and immortal vampires, the attractions of such a lifestyle (besides the blood-drinking part which I'll address later) are obvious. Lestat doesn't punch a time-clock, or have to make house payments. He is not troubled by an aging body or mind. He can travel anywhere in the world and stay as long as he likes; he is privy to all that great wealth can buy without the physical or time constraints it may impose. Thus, the novel plays on the wishes for wealth natural to a working and middle-class audience. Indeed Anne Rice, in a 1993 Playboy interview, equates the middle-class outlook with a Protestant ethic and rejects the critical notion that "to be profound a book has to be about the middle class and about some specific domestic problem of the middle class" (Roberts, 23). Obviously Rice sees the portrayal of the grand lives of supernatural characters as synonymous with a wealthy "old-world," aristocratic lifestyle. In so doing, she reconstructs the past in The Vampire Lestat as the authors of early Gothic fiction did, in such a way that both the aspirations and the fears of middle-class readers are explored while many of its dominant values are rejected.
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