Louis the Plantation Owner: The Haunting of Vampiric Slavery in Interview with the Vampire

초록

Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is now considered a groundbreaking work of fiction that humanizes the typically demonized and otherized image of vampires and assigns a sociocultural role of embodying moral and sexual ambiguities in contemporary America. Yet most consider Rice’s vampire characters as glamorous and stylistic modern flâneurs. Rejecting that general consideration, this essay aims to read the novel anew in light of its historical and geographical setting of late-eighteenth-century American South. The essay focuses on the consistently disregarded fact that the main character and first-person narrator Louis is originally a plantation owner in Louisiana, and examines his endeavor to achieve the absolute authority of that identity through his encounters with other vampires and humans. By exposing the futility of such endeavor, this essay ultimately sheds light on Rice’s intention of proposing a vampiric relationship as a productive and even necessary model of life in multicultural and multiracial America.

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