Anne Rice’s 1976 Interview with a Vampire launched a new kind of vampire, an attractive but troubled figure rather than a disgusting villain. In 2014’s Prince Lestat, the thirteenth member of her Vampire Chronicles, Rice updated and modified her vision of the vampire world. This novel represents a new stage in the life of Rice’s main protagonist, the vampire Lestat, who develops from “Brat Prince” to leader of the “vampire tribe,” as the Children of Darkness acquire the more propitious name “People of the Savage Garden” (PL 425). This paper applies psychologist Melanie Klein’s concept of projective identification incorporating the preoedipal processes of persecutory anxiety and depressive anxiety. The analysis shows the savagery of Rice’s vampire world reflects what is arguably the greed and rapacity of contemporary life; her readers relate vicariously to the struggles of her lonely vampire rebels and outcasts. In the interval between the first and most recent novels, the greed and economic inequity in our society have become apparent to everyone. In Prince Lestat, Rice has reshaped the vampire tribe to reflect society’s ongoing dialectic with greed and violence. The appeal now is that her tales allow readers to relate also to the efforts of vampires, the “one proud race that seeks to prosper on this Earth” (PL 423) to limit their nature for the good of the community. However, Rice’s world nonetheless remains circumscribed by both old and new strictures on sexuality and reproduction: vampire sex is not as pleasurable as violence, and the amount of reproduction of vampires is limited by the underlying “Sacred Core” animating them. This means that loneliness and immaturity must persist in her world, despite the rising up of a new order to govern it.
About the presenterEva Maria Thury
Associate Professor of English and Philosophy at Drexel University. Co-author, with Margaret K. Devinney, of Introduction to Mythology: Contemporary Approaches to Classical and World Myths, 4th edition.