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Lestat’s relationship with Nicki and how it impacts his relationship with Louis:
So I’ve been re-reading “The Vampire Lestat” recently, and one of the most amazing things, I think, is how well it ties in to “Interview with the Vampire” in terms of psychologically explaining why Lestat was the way he was with Louis, why Louis thought of Lestat as he did, but also, why Louis’ perception of Lestat was so wrong. There’s countless examples of this throughout the book, psychological excavation of Lestat which sheds so much light on his behavior in Louis’ story. But I wanted to focus here on one particular aspect of it, and that’s how Lestat’s general positivity as a character, and the ways in which it impacted those around him, how those around him reacted to it, especially Nicki and Armand, would later inform Lestat’s affected apathy and seeming detachment with Louis.
Lestat explains early on in TVL that, growing up, he was often treated as a burden by his family. That his refusal to accept his lot in life, his persistent dreaming and hope, his persistent attempts to improve and even escape the dreary dead-end of his provincial life caused a great deal of consternation, disapproval and even anger and cruelty from his father and two brothers, even at times resulting in physical and verbal abuse at their hands. So early on in life, Lestat was already taught by those closest to him that his enthusiasm and fighting spirit and positivity were bad things. That to truly be himself, to be the free spirit that he was and to fight for what he really wanted, were things he couldn’t do without being a “bad person”. He even has a conversation with Gabrielle specifically about this, about Lestat’s fears that to defy his father and brother’s is equal to him being bad, that he can’t be himself and do what he actually wants without giving up the ability to be good. And anyone who knows anything about Lestat’s character should know that the true driving force behind basically every one of his actions is the desire to do and be good.
So already at this early stage of his life, Lestat is made to believe that who he is, his natural personality, is a thorn in the sides of most people he knows. I know that in this fandom, it gets made fun of often, that Lestat is referred to as “a lot”, and people laugh about his overbearing personality. But it’s actually incredibly sad, that here we have a person who, because of his innate optimism and hope, was made by his own family to feel like a disappointment and a burden.
Moving on, and looking at how this aspect of Lestat’s personality, this positivity, his refusal to quit and his undying belief in the “impossible”, effects his relationship with Nicki in particular, I think is vitally important in understanding Lestat’s relationship with Louis later on, and why it plays out the way it initially does.
The entire story between Lestat and Nicki is particularly heartbreaking, because of the deep and genuine love which existed between them, and how it eventually eroded and ended in genuine resentment and even hatred toward Lestat from Nicki, and specifically, because of how this ends up effecting Lestat and his perception of himself and the way he ends up conducting himself with the other great love of his life in Louis.
Nicki goes mad, slowly descending into an ever deepening depression and general negativity after he and Lestat move to Paris, and it’s later revealed that Nicki had hoped, by moving to Paris, that he and Lestat would “go down”, to use Nicki’s own words. He wanted them to fail as a means of rebelling and disappointing his own father, as a way of making his father angry and upset. The very basis of his reasoning for going to Paris was the opposite of Lestat’s. Lestat wanted to go to Paris to do something good and positive with his life, to give meaning to his life. Nicki went to Paris to destroy his life as a final “screw you” to his family, a reason driven by negative emotion, as opposed to the positive emotion driving Lestat. He never told this to Lestat, of course. He simply went along with him and pretended to share in his hope and enthusiasm for the future. He tells Lestat later that he believed that once they’d gotten to Paris, Lestat would become disillusioned with the world and stop pursuing his dream of doing good with his life. He’d hoped, secretly, that Lestat would give up, the way Nicki himself had long before given up in believing in anything better. But one of Lestat’s defining traits as a person is his refusal to ever give up. He’s a fighter through and through. He’s an eternal optimist. No matter how bad things get for him, he never loses his hope or belief in the impossible.
When things really get bad between Lestat and Nicki is after Lestat reveals to him he’s been turned into a vampire, and Nicki uses Lestat’s own generosity and desire to help his loved ones against him, guilt-tripping him for sharing the “Dark Gift” with his mother, but not with Nicki himself, accusing Lestat of giving preferential treatment to his direct family because of their royal blood. He essentially tells Lestat that giving money and gifts to him, to the actors they worked with and the theater they worked at, was an insult, a dismissal of the less important people in his life. This is all wrong, of course. It couldn’t be farther from the truth. Lestat showers Nicki and everyone else with gifts and material wealth as a means of expressing his genuine love for all of them, given the abject poverty he himself grew up in. He wants to take care of them, and provide for them, as he’d always done with his family. But Nicki, suffering from his worsening mental illness, uses this against Lestat, badgering him with it until Lestat’s sense of guilt and driving wish to do good makes him act against his better judgement, and he gives Nicki what he wants, turning him into a vampire too.
Lestat has a final, climactic confrontation with Nicki in the theater they worked at as mortals, in which Nicki reveals to him how Lestat’s positivity truly effected him. In which he reveals to Lestat that “his light”, as Nicki refers to it, was a source of anguish and torment for him. He tells Lestat that his refusal to give up, that his general positivity and ability to push through even the most dire and seemingly hopeless circumstances, that his ability to make the impossible happen and make a success of himself despite all odds being against him, was like a “piercing” to Nicki. He explains that for every moment of exuberance and enthusiasm and passion in Lestat, it created a proportionate amount of darkness and despair in Nicki, a proportionate unhappiness and hopelessness. He basically blames Lestat here for causing his own, deranged mental state simply through the power of his own, overwhelming positivity. He reinforces in this moment what Lestat had already been taught over and over again by his own family. That his very existence, his natural state of being, was causing harm to those he loved. You see where I’m going with this? Lestat is made to feel here, by Nicki, that just being himself is what caused Nicki to lose his mind completely.
“And when we decided to go to Paris, I thought we would starve in Paris, that we would go down and down and down. It was what I wanted, rather than what they wanted, that I, the favored son, should rise for them. I thought we would go down! We were supposed to go down… But you didn’t go down Lestat… The hunger, the cold- none of it stopped you. You were a triumph!… You didn’t drink yourself to death in the gutter. You turned everything upside down! And for every aspect of our proposed damnation you found exuberance, and there was no end to your enthusiasms and the passion coming out of you- and the light, always the light. And in exact proportion to the light coming out of you, there was the darkness in me! Every exuberance piercing me and creating its exact proportion of darkness and despair! And then, the magic, when you got the magic, irony of ironies, you protected me from it! And what did you do with it but use your Satanic powers to simulate the actions of a good man!”
He tells Lestat that it’s some sort of irony that Lestat, who wishes to do good, should be given a power which can do only evil, while keeping it from Nicki himself, (Nicki, who wishes to do evil and will use the Dark Gift “properly”, unlike Lestat himself), in an effort to protect him. Lestat later imagines that what Nicki really meant, without saying it to him, was that Lestat wouldn’t allow Nicki to have what he could believe in. The exact words that he imagines Nicki saying to him are “Let me have what I can believe in. You would never do that.” Lestat is blaming himself here for crushing Nicki’s own dreams through the sheer force of his personality. He feels like Nicki’s downfall is his doing because he failed to understand just how depressed Nicki was, that he couldn’t understand how depressed he was because Lestat himself is such an innately positive person, and instead of supporting Nicki in his wish to self-destruct, he encouraged him and tried to inspire him and make him believe in himself as a force of good, as Lestat believed in himself. Nicki reveals to Lestat that he wanted to fail, and Lestat had refused to let him do it, and that’s what Lestat ends up believing. That in his efforts to help Nicki, he only ended up hurting him.
We can see then how this experience with Nicki, this sense of guilt and responsibility that Lestat takes on to himself for Nicki’s downfall, later impacts how he behaves with and treats Louis. Louis is very much like Nicki. He tends towards depression and melancholy. He has a tendency to get trapped in his own head and self-obsess and think of himself as “evil”. These are all traits which are eerily similar to Nicki, and to Nicki’s state of mind before he went truly mad. Recognizing this, and remembering what Nicki said to Lestat about how his “light” made Nicki descend deeper into darkness, we then see how Lestat doubtless feared that history would repeat itself with Louis. That the force of Lestat’s overwhelming positivity and enthusiasm would do to Louis what it had supposedly done to Nicki, that is, send him further into despair and self-destruction.
Louis recounts how, later on in their relationship, when he and Lestat would go out to a play or some sort of show, Lestat would afterward go dancing through the streets, reciting the play’s lines out loud with overexcited enthusiasm and passion, even frightening the people passing by with his energy and bursting joy. This was Lestat’s true personality coming through. This was who Lestat really was. Seeing theater productions would remind Lestat of the happiest days of his life, when he was still mortal, living in squalor with Nicki in Paris, working as an actor in the theater, living out his dream and doing something he genuinely believed was good, and it caused, in the present with Louis, his true personality to come to the surface, rather than the biting, dismissive, apathetic personality he’d affected since then. Louis recalls then how he would express to Lestat, in these moments, that he was actually enjoying his company, and upon doing so, Lestat would again retreat into himself, he would withdraw and once more become that detached, apathetic and dismissive person Louis believed him to be, dispassionate and caring about seemingly nothing. It would be weeks and even months, then, before Lestat would again ask Louis to go out with him. Why is that? Well, in the context of Lestat’s relationship with Nicki, and what Nicki accused him of, of destroying him through the force of his overbearing positivity and enthusiasm, it makes perfect sense why Lestat acted like he did with Louis, why he, upon hearing Louis’ positive reaction to Lestat’s genuine nature coming out, would retreat back into himself and put on the act of someone who doesn’t care. Because the last time Lestat was in a romantic relationship with someone, and he was himself, that person went insane, blamed Lestat for it, and ended up killing themselves later on. Really think about that, and then think about how that must have effected Lestat’s relationship with Louis, seeing so many of the same traits in Louis that existed in Nicki, and remembering how Nicki blamed Lestat for his depression. Louis himself had expressed numerous times his own wish to die. In Lestat’s mind, mistaken though he was, he no doubt feared that being who he really was, showing his true personality, his true passion and love for life and for people, his true eternal optimism and hope, would drive Louis to self-destruct the way he believed it had driven Nicki.
This fear in Lestat could only have been exacerbated too by his relationship with Armand, and how Armand, like Nicki, blamed Lestat’s positivity, his self-belief and powerful will on his own downfall, with the destruction of his coven and his way of life. Just like Nicki, Armand accuses Lestat of coming in and wreaking havoc and destruction through the sheer force of his personality, his refusal to give up or give in. He blames Lestat for causing the other vampires in his coven to lose belief in worshiping Satan simply because Lestat himself refused to submit to their will, and fought back when they tried to burn him and his mother and Nicki in a pyre for doing so.
From childhood on, Lestat is essentially taught and shown by everyone around him that his personality causes destruction. That his self-belief and can-do attitude is a burden at best, and a force of chaos and evil at worst. He’s taught to believe that being himself is somehow the worst thing he can be, because it drives everyone around him to despair and misfortune. With that in mind, it becomes painfully clear just why Lestat adopted with Louis a personality that was, in reality, wholly opposite of who he truly was, and why Louis, in turn, formed such a tragically false conception and misunderstanding of who Lestat was.
Beautifully said, and beautifully articulated. Lestat’s tragedy is ironically not the kind of traits we see depicted in classically tragic characters. Rather, it is a trait we typically associate with good and positive characters and it’s just so damn tragic that his force of sunshine positivity and his capacity for enduring that leads him to so much misery and pain to himself and the people around him who just cannot understand him. This is why I keep keep keep enforcing that people MUST read The Vampire Lestat to understand him before passing random uneducated judgements.
@ medievalfantasyqueen Totally, and thank you for reading!
You put it perfectly, when you say that Lestat’s tragedy is actually born out of the sorts of traits we typically associate with positivity or triumph. The persevering hero who’s strength and self-belief inspires those around him to rise to his level and find their own strength. But in Lestat’s case, it very often has the opposite effect. It overwhelms others and causes them to bend and sometimes break, often responding in exactly the opposite way Lestat had hoped for. Lestat has such a powerful will and self-belief and such an incredible capacity for hope and optimism. He’s such a big person and personality, but he’s so immense and so bright that it has the unintentional effect, often, of overpowering others, resulting in devastation for both Lestat and the people he loves. His light is so bright, those around him feel like they’re being cast in shadow. Like you said, his optimism and positivity is often misunderstood, interpreted incorrectly as insensitivity or apathy, or blindness, what have you. Lestat of course isn’t any of those things. He’s actually so deeply feeling and intelligent, and deeply introspective. He sinks into horrible depressions several times because of this. But his innate hope and positivity always lifts him back up. The saddest thing about all of this is what I was saying in my original post, which is that Lestat is more or less made to believe through all of his experiences, and the lessons taught to him by others, that it’s his own self, what he is naturally, that causes so much misery to others. I really can’t think of anything sadder than that. Especially when Lestat is possessed of those qualities which normally would be cherished and admired by others.
And definitely, I don’t think anyone can understand Lestat if they don’t read “The Vampire Lestat”. It’s vital in understanding who he is and why he does the things he does.
People who claim Lestat is the villain of “Interview with the Vampire” don’t realize, for example, that Lestat was never the villain of that book, that he was never a villain at all. Louis’ negative perception of Lestat is almost all based is misunderstanding and misconception, and that misunderstanding is born out of Lestat’s own trauma, particularly tied to what we’re talking about here, which is this feeling of his very self being somehow a force for evil, despite his deep desire to do good. It’s enough to make you cry, truly.
omg that analysis was everything!! thank you sm! really was a palette cleanser. would love the continuation with the parts you didn't get to - his relationship with jonah and the dynamic within the rue royal household. the housewife insult from claudia really did a number on the fandom's reading of louis. (still not over people seriously considering him the embodiment of "edwardian housewife" archetype while lestat is a classic patriarch. dunno if i wanna laugh or cry).
(x)
Thank you! And yeah, I think I've mentioned it before, but it's interesting to me that so many people take both Claudia's housewife insult and Grace's white daddy insult as effectively one-to-one attributes instead of as weapons of emasculation to not only try and hurt Louis, but to goad him into action.
The dynamic of the Rue Royale household is probably it's own entire answer, and one that might be best answered after I've finished my re-watch, but yes! Let's talk about Jonah. Or, well, about sex, haha.
Virtue and the gothic heroine
One of the key attributes of a gothic heroine is her virtue, because Gothicism as a genre is rooted intrinsically in the loss of that virtue. What that means or looks like exactly changes – in the earliest stories within the genre, that loss of virtue was a result of perversion or corruption and usually spelled doom for the heroine, and in later stories it marked a point of transformation or metamorphosis where the loss of that virtue often came to symbolise a transition from girlhood to adulthood.
Virtue was, and still is, often depicted in the genre through virginity as excellently stated in the paper Female Virtue in Gothic Literature 1780-1810 “female morality was irrevocably intertwined with a sexual code of conduct. Daughters…were reminded that their most important attribute was intact virginity and wives were constantly retold their worth relied upon their chastity and therefore their ability to bear legitimate children.”
This came to define gothic literature, and her loss of virginity became pretty vital as a character beat as it would mark this loss of agency which I talked about a bit in the last post. Significantly too though, the gothic heroine usually has men after her virtue. Which, well, - -
As put in this paper Haunted Heroines: An Examination of the Complication of the Gothic Heroine: “She is the object of the perverted sexual desire of older men, above all representing the innocence and purity that the men are themselves negations of.”
Typically, when she did lose her virginity, she’d end up with three options: she could marry the man who took her virginity, she could “give up the idea of marriage and take holy orders” (aka become a nun), or she could die. Regardless of the decision she makes, the actual choice is a really marked moment for the gothic heroine, as it’s often the only actual moment of agency she gets in a story which is invested in her disempowerment. She has to give herself away – to a husband, to God, or to death – because the gothic, particularly the female gothic, understands that once her body has been taken by a man, it can never be her own again for better and for worse.
Claudia loses her virginity way back in season 1, but she’s robbed even of that momentary agency, because her body itself stays virginal. She does not get to make a choice. The monstrosity of Claudia’s making is that she will never not be an innocent, the virtuousness that men seek to take from her can never be taken, and thus she is never allowed transformation, she is never allowed her moment of agency, and she can never belong to another. It re-emphasises her arrested development, but it also keeps her trapped as the gothic heroine in Louis and Lestat’s house forever. There is no getting out for Claudia, she dies without transformation, she dies so that she can be mourned by the monsters in the house.
The Byronic Hero and the Past
On the flip side of that, the Byronic Hero is, inherently, a romantic, both physically and poetically, or as Jean Ann Bates put in her excellent 1949 essay “The Byronic hero is distinguished by the clearly defined existence of sensuousness and its antithesis, sensitiveness.” After all, as an archetype, he’s based on Lord Byron who fucked his way through Venice while producing some of the most romantic poetry ever, in history.
Bates continues:
“The Byronic hero is almost always a man with a mysterious past. This past is usually surmised to be of wickedness and sin, and our hero is periodically haunted by feelings of remorse concerning it…the mood of the Byronic hero is one of intense melancholy and pessimism; yet we feel underlying this apparently static exterior, the beat of throbbing life energy. Like the Corsair, the Byronic hero is ‘warp’d by the world of disappointment. He seems to loathe himself and all mankind, and is always one apart from his fellow creatures…The Byronic hero’s character is amoral rather than immoral…The Byronic hero is all that is characteristic of the somewhat jaded cosmopolitan man of the world.”
The whole essay’s a great read, and I think again, really encapsulates Louis’ character, but I wanted to talk a little bit about this sense of a mysterious past and one surmised to be of wickedness and sin, because I think it’s an overlooked part of Louis’ arc.
Because he tells us in such soaring, and romantic detail, this large portion of his life, it can be easy to think we know all of it, when really, there’s a lot we don’t know about Louis as a young man. We meet him when he’s 33-years-old, we know that his father is dead, that the sugar plantation his father owned went broke, that he and his brother had a chapter of their shared life where they shuffled for pennies, but we lack a lot of context beyond these glimmers of what Louis tells us.
In particular, we don’t really know that much about his sexual history before Lestat, which is actually pretty typical of the Byronic Hero. Think the reveal of Rochester’s wife in Jane Eyre or Heathcliff’s three year absence where he mysteriously returns wealthy in Wuthering Heights and soon marries Isabella, the Byronic Hero has chapters that remain unrevealed to us, and part of that is often soaked in sexual or romantic undertones.
In the first episode, Louis talks about the fact that he didn’t consider himself a homosexual, which I think can become a focus, but I’m more interested in the earlier exchange with Daniel where Louis articulates using Lily as cover for his sexuality.
If you take this scene at face value, and look at it on its own, Louis’ saying yes, he had urges towards men, but his faith was keeping him in check, only if you look at it with the scene before it, we see him refuse to enter the church confessional after joking with Paul that Paul is wasting people's time as he has nothing to confess. An implication, perhaps, that Louis knows that he does.
My reading of that has always been that Louis was sleeping with men in New Orleans long before Lestat came into the picture, and probably a fair few, but the show plays with Louis’ unreliable narration and the mystery of his sexual history to shroud that really until Jonah’s introduction. Jonah, after all, not only confirms that Louis had been with other men prior to Lestat, (as does Louis’ familiarity with the bayou as a gay hook up site), and that he wasn’t keeping much of anything at bay through the threat of absolution, but that he was sleeping with boys.
Louis’ 33 when he’s turned in 1910, and we know from the notice in this episode that we’re now in 1917, so Louis should be 40. We don’t know how old Jonah is, but given they look like contemporaries now, I think you could pretty safely gauge that if Louis was hooking up with him when Jonah was 16, he was probably in his mid-twenties. The context of the era is, of course, important, and there are a million reasons why Louis might have taken the opportunity with a teenager (although I think given Louis’ relationship with power, particularly in the NOLA era, we can assume that plays a role) but the narrative choice of the show to make Jonah a teenager when they hooked up – just like the choice to have Madeleine sleep with a Nazi teenager – is a deliberate ethical muddying of the waters to show that these elements of the monstrousness and the predator existed in him prior to his turning.
Louis is not, and has never been virtuous. He is not chaste when Lestat first has sex with him, and he is not an innocent when Lestat turns him. He can’t be corrupted, because, like a true Byronic hero, he is corrupt.
I could talk more here about the Paris park hook-ups, or the 128 boys in San Francisco (literally the most Byron thing imaginable to fuck your way through the city and then try and write a book about your ex lmao), but I think it’s worth leaving it at the New Orleans era, because I think what Jonah represents is not just Louis’ tendency to paint himself in the best light, but the mystery of his past and his inherent sexual agency which is vital to a Byronic hero. Louis is deeply feeling, and he’s capable of being in love with Lestat and having his heart dance with another man, he’s allowed sexual agency and sexual freedom even if it does lead to a bitter fight with Lestat because he's not under the thumb of the patriarch, he is one of the patriarchs. Lestat might follow after all, he might watch, but he doesn’t interrupt, he doesn’t exert control, in fact he fills the house with other men to offer Louis the deepening of depravity even through his own jealousy and, notably, empties the house when Louis tells him to.
Again, this goes back to what I was saying in the last post, but Louis doesn’t lack agency. The townhouse is not a prison to him, Lestat’s patriarchal, yes, but so’s Louis, he’s just more emotionally manipulative about how he keeps Claudia close to him. Louis' sexuality is a huge part of him, but it also doesn't define him in the way Claudia's virginity does. After all, for Claudia her sexuality is symbolic of her eternal chastity and girlhood, a gothic heroine locked in a prison of her own innocence, whereas for Louis, it gets to be so much more, because as a Byronic Hero, he gets to be so much more.
“Of course Louis released Rose and then he bowed just as if he were at a ball in old New Orleans after the opera. I came up beside him and took his hand. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Dancing with you,” I said. I turned him easily this way and that to the music. I could see he found this immediately awkward, to be dancing with me as a woman might dance with a man, and then something playful and vibrant came into his eyes. He gave himself up to it. I turned us around fast twice and then three times, and we broke the pattern and then my arm slipped around his waist and I danced beside him, in step with him, like the Greek men do it. “Do you like this better?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said. He appeared brimming with happiness. But I was the one truly brimming with happiness. The music seemed to move us as if we were powerless, borne along exquisitely, and then we faced each other again and we were simply dancing in a loose, comfortable embrace, intimate, making one body and then two bodies, and one body again. All around us were dancers, dancers pressing in so that at last we were dancing without really moving our feet. But what did it matter? One can dance that way. One can dance a thousand ways.”
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Idk if uve discussed this before, im new haha but I really enjoy your readings of the show and I’m curious, would u call louis a femme? Idk i think it’s a widely accepted canon in the fandom and i constantly see it spread all over twitter with no argument whatsoever and im over here like i.. i dont see it?? Idk!
Hey! Welcome, anon! And thank you for your kind words! You’re very sweet!
I think I’ve probably discussed it in fragments before, but not outright said it, but no, I wouldn’t call Louis a femme. It’s certainly a largely accepted fanon in a vocal part of the fandom, particularly on Twitter and ao3, and yeah - - I mean. I’m really glad people are having fun with it! I do also sometimes feel they’re watching a different show to me though, because it’s honestly not something I see at all. I don’t know if their arguments are necessarily organized in the one place (although I could be very wrong in terms of that!) but I might use this as an opportunity to collate my thoughts and the previous posts I’ve made addressing the arguments around this particular topic. SO! Okay! Let’s break it down and dive in:
Louis is femme because he’s a Gothic Heroine
I just don’t agree with this argument, I’m sorry. I’m not going to get into the weeds of this one, just because I feel like I’ve done so already, but I don’t personally read Louis as a gothic heroine at all. In fact, I see him as a very archetypical Byronic Hero, which I talked about in this post, and in others in my Byronic Hero tag.
Louis is femme because he is a Battered Housewife / relying on a Sugar Daddy
This point often gets tied up into the gothic heroine one, and it’s one that always kind of surprises me a little bit. Even putting aside the fact that it’s an ugly, misogynistic trope in general, Louis’ relationship to being a quote-unquote ‘housewife’ is one that – to me – is symbolic of his feelings of emasculation in the Rue Royale household not as a result of Lestat alone, but as a result of the white power structures in New Orleans that would disempower and disenfranchise him. He doesn’t like it, it doesn’t make him ‘femme’, in fact, my interpretation is the opposite – it emasculates him as a Black Man, and he feels that in every part of his life to the point that both his daughter and sister weaponize it against him, and I personally think it’s a factor in his periodic impotence in his marriage. Respectively, Claudia calls him the housewife, and Grace calls Lestat his white daddy – these aren’t compliments, these are callous insults from both of them designed to bruise his pride and force him into action. The fact that neither of them work to move him the way they want doesn’t mean Louis identifies with them, rather it means he’s – at the time – committed to Lestat for better and worse, but their words compound in a way that fuels his resentment of Lestat as both an adulterous husband and a symbol of everything wrong with his life.
Further to that – and I say it in the Byronic Hero/Gothic Heroine post that I link to above – but a vital part of power dynamic tropes in gothic literature is that women lose power through marriage, they don’t gain it, and Louis does, in fact, gain it. Lestat’s a ticket to social advancement for Louis because as much as Louis (rightfully! It’s extremely racist!) hates being forced into a servitude role publicly at the theatre or in lease agreements, it’s Lestat’s whiteness that allows Louis into more conversations politically, and eventually allows him to buy the Fair Play Saloon and turn it into The Azaelia. It’s a limited power, of course, as a result of his race and the era, but the show actually explicitly lays out certain things for us like the fact that Louis pays Lestat back in full, and pointedly, that Louis never felt that he had to pay Lestat back at all:
The last line of which is Louis greeting Lestat not as a sugar baby or a housewife walking out to his sugar daddy or husband, but as a business man to his husband.
In fact, the interesting exchange of power in that sequence actually leans to the reverse as Lestat ends up playing host to a new client while Louis lords over an empire.
(You can't see it exactly in these subtitles, but it's Louis who says 'you about five years late', and Lestat honeytrapping with taking the man away).
It's a dynamic that repeats with the musician who tries to leave that Lestat coerces into staying - Louis' king of the castle, and Lestat, the show implies, I feel, plays the placating partner smooting over the edges.
But isn’t Lestat a symbol of patriarchal power in the Rue Royale Household?
I’ve had a couple of asks about this and have a long reply in my drafts that I’ll try and post this weekend, but yes and no? I think in Rue Royale, Lestat’s definitely a symbol of patriarchal power to Claudia, and I think Louis sometimes feels him that way too, but I don’t think it’s actually true for Louis in the way that it is for Claudia. Gender isn’t what divides Louis and Lestat, it’s race, and every time Louis has the chance to exert patriarchal power against anyone outside that house or inside it, he uses it – from coercing Lestat into Claudia's rebirth to physically assaulting Claudia over Lestat’s murder, to even trying to influence her diet and guilting her into staying, to throwing Lestat out of his own house and then fucking him in his lover’s bed (which, obviously, are after Lestat's singular act of violence), to being literally a pimp, strongarming his sister and his mother, to giving less than 0 fucks about Lily’s murder and the attempted anal-rape of Bricktop - - just.
Yeah. There are two patriarchs in the Rue Royale household, and both their names begin with L.
Eldest daughter syndrome
Sometimes men are also eldest siblings who feel the burden of responsibility?
Even beyond that though, I think Louis’ response to Grace is particularly paternalistic, a pattern he’d repeat with Claudia, which I talk about here. I do think Louis has a lot of responsibility and weight on his shoulders as an eldest child, absolutely, and I actually think there’s a lot to talk about in terms of his complex position as brother-father to Paul and Grace in s1 (and I empathise with him intensely in this regard as someone who’s been a sibling’s guardian), but like. That’s not a feminine trait, nor is it one that makes him an eldest daughter. I’m not one, and he’s not one either. Sibling dynamics aren’t cut and paste.
But Louis buys and reads Madame Bovary and obviously relates to Emma
I mean, he doesn’t buy it – the show literally, explicitly makes the point of telling us that it’s Lestat’s copy of the book that he’s reading, which honestly makes sense to me. I talked about it here (where I include the caps of it being Lestat's book too), but Emma as a character cheats because she finds monogamy boring, provincial life even more so and dislikes her daughter, while married to a successful man in a regional town. Louis’ not the Emma in that equation, Lestat is, given he's fucking Antoinette – allegedly because he wants variety – escaped the Auvergne in Paris, and can’t cope with parenthood and/or Claudia.
Interestingly too, Louis’ focus in that scene is on the 'denseness' of the prose and 'the absence of metaphor' not the content, as he ignores Lestat having a meltdown directly opposite him. My interpretation of that scene is that the writing is pointing out exactly how disconnected they are from each other, and that Louis can read a story that parallels a lot of Lestat’s experience, and fail to relate it to, or empathise with Lestat at all, even as Lestat indulges Louis’ depression and hoarding, which ! I love Louis, but Lestat does in that sequence (not that that justifies anything that Lestat does, of course).
Isn’t Louis compared to Juliet and Mélisande?
Mmm, yes and no? Armand does put him in the Juliet role, which Louis riffs with Dreamstat about, but I tend to interpret that more to be about the involvement of the balcony than I do about their roles as Romeo and Juliet – because, y’know. Not everything’s actually about gender, particularly with same sex couples of that era who had limited reference points generally, and certainly limited mainstream ones.
And Melisande - - not at all, actually? I do have to say that I’m a little bit baffled by this particular argument given we have the lyrics to Come to Me and Lestat puts himself in the feminine role of Mélisande (and I actually do think you can mount the argument that he's done that because he’s intending for Antoinette to sing it, which I thought for a long time before hearing Long Face tbh, and now I actually do think it’s deliberately playing into Louis’ sense of masculinity), and he does cast Louis in the masculine role of Pelléas. The chorus literally goes:
Ruin each other
Like star-crossed lovers
Your Pelléas, my Mélisande
Oh, come to me
Come to me
So, yeah. Again, that argument just doesn't quite land for me.
Wasn’t he jealous of Grace’s pregnancy though?
Was he? That wasn’t my interpretation, but I’d actually genuinely be interested to hear a case for it, because I feel that’s kind of tasty on a narrative level, haha. My interpretation of that entire sequence though kind of feeds back into that eldest sibling thing again where he a) resented Grace building something of her own before he could, and b) was terrified of the idea that her having her own family would mean that she’d pull way from him which she, of course, did.
I tend to see Louis’ desire to have Claudia as a fairly impulsive one, and I actually see (in the show’verse) his desire to have Lestat be the one to turn her as a part of him further interlocking him and Lestat together, particularly after he's effectively just broken up with Lestat. It's messy! But yeah, I mean, I think 2.07 laid out pretty cleanly that Louis' choice to turn Claudia was inherently a selfish one, and I personally don't see it as one borne out of jealousy so much as needing an anchor.
Anne bases Louis on herself
She also bases Lestat on herself and/or everything she wants to be, and also washes her hands of Louis as a character for books at a time, and like - - I’m sorry, this is not the tone I usually take, but like - - lowkey, who cares? Everyone in this fandom loves death of the author until Anne says one thing they can use to justify their headcanons, and I just don’t really get it. Why are you trying to interpret a vampire novel as a memoir? Obviously it’s not factual? Anne’s not a man, she’s not drinking blood, she’s not romantically entangled with her dead daughter, like I do understand that it can feel noodly sometimes with authors and characters, but as someone who works with a lot of writers, I can promise you they’re dipping in and out of characters like crazy, haha.
It doesn’t mean a character’s them, and it certainly doesn’t mean you’re interacting with Anne when you're interacting with Louis, which I suspect a lot of people don’t want anyway? I don't know, personally I view this one as a bit of a non-starter.
Louis’ pretty though
Yeah, he is! He’s your Helen of Troy! He’s beautiful! He’d look amazing in tights and heels! That doesn’t mean he’s canonically femme though.
I really hate that Louis as a Byronic hero post 😭 it's such a white take. Louis isn't a victim or a gothic heroine but he's also not that. Jacob based a lot of his acting choices off of strong black women and Bowie and the Byronic Hero is such a masculine traditionallly white archetype I can't get behind it at all.
I don't think the rarity of Black Byronic heroes in the gothic romance genre (which is in itself, eurocentric as it was european-generated in the first place and predominantly non-black, despite many authors of color contributing notable works to the genre) preclude Jacob Anderson's Louis de Pointe du Lac from being one 😭 The lack of examples of Byronic heroes of color in popular media doesn't mean no Byronic hero of color could exist, since whiteness isn't a requisite of its existence 😭
And though I get your resistance in calling him one, I don't think it takes away from Jacob's excellent portrayal of Rolin's version of Louis to admit that Louis ticks off so many boxes in what constitutes a Byronic Hero. Because while Jacob had a particular aesthetic vision in his portrayal of Louis (reptilian, fluid; which added so much charisma and character to the role), show Louis' characterization as well as his major themes and the arc he underwent stayed true to the books, where Louis is white and in my opinion, still could be characterized as a Byronic Hero. That's unaltered. Like, here's a 2012 bachelor's dissertation calling LDPDL a Byronic hero:
And in broad strokes, these things as described still apply to show Louis no? It's fine if you don't agree with the interpretation though! I don't think saying he is one is meant to be a catch-all explanation of everything Louis is, just a character trope with which he could be analyzed as.
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I would LOVE to read your analysis of louis as byronic hero as apposed to his reading as gothic heroine. lots of the latter and zero of the former in the fandom.
Sure! Mmm, okay, so –
What are we talking about when we talk about Gothic Heroes?
When we talk about gothic heroes, we’re really talking about three pretty different character archetypes. All three are vital to the genre, but some are more popular in certain subgenres i.e. your Prometheus Hero may be more common in gothic horror, whereas your Byronic Hero might be more likely to be found in gothic romance. That’s not to say they’re exclusive to those subgenres at all, and there is an argument that these archetypes themselves are gendered (in many ways, I think people confuse Anne being an author of the female gothic with Louis being a gothic heroine, but I’ll get into that later), but this is also not necessarily something that’s exclusive.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself, haha, so the three gothic hero archetypes are:
Milton’s Satan who is the classic gothic hero-villain. You can probably guess from the name, but he was originated in John Milton’s 1667 poem, Paradise Lost. He is God’s favourite angel, but God is forced to cast him out of heaven when he rebels against him. As an archetype, he’s a man pretty much defined by his pride, vanity and self-love, usually fucks his way through whatever book or poem he’s in, has a perverted, incestuous family, and a desire to corrupt other people. He’s also defined as being “too weak to choose what is moral and right, and instead chooses what is pleasurable only to him” and his greatest character flaw, in spite of all The Horrors, is that he’s usually easily misguided or led astray. (I would argue that Lestat fits into this archetype pretty neatly, but that’s a whole other post.)
Prometheus who was established as a gothic archetype by Mary Shelley with Frankenstein in 1818. Your Prometheus Hero is basically represented by the quest for knowledge and the overreach of that quest to bring on unintended consequences. He’s tied, of course, to the Prometheus of Greek myth, so you can get elements of that in this character design too in that he can be devious or a trickster, but the most important part of him is that he is split between his extreme intelligence and his sense of rebellion, and that his sense of rebellion and boundary pushing overtakes his intelligence and basically leads to All The Gothic Horrors.
And the Byronic Hero, who as the name implies, was both created by and inspired by the romantic poet, Lord Byron in his semi-autobiographical poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage which was published between 1812-1818. The archetype is kind of an idealized version of himself, and as historian and critic Lord Macaulay wrote, the character is “a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection.” Adding to that, he’s often called ‘the gloomy egoist’ as a protagonist type, hates society, is often self-destructive and lives either exiled or in a self-exile, and is a stalwart of gothic literature, but especially gothic romance. Interestingly too, in his most iconic depictions he’s often a) darkly featured and/or not white (Heathcliff being the most obvious example of this given Emily Bronte clearly writes him as either Black or South Asian), and b) is often used to explore queer identity, with Byron himself having been bisexual.
Okay, but what about the Gothic Heroine?
Gothic heroines are less delineated and have had more of an evolution over time, which makes sense, given women have consistently been the main audience of gothic literature and have frequently been the most influential writers of the genre too. The gothic genre sort of ‘officially’ started with Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto and Isabella is largely regarded as the first gothic heroine and the foundation of the archetype, and the book opens even with one of the key defining traits – an innocent, chaste woman without the protection of a family being pursued and persecuted by a man on the rampage.
The gothic heroine was, for years, defined by her lack of agency. She was innocent, chaste, beautiful, curious, plagued by tragedy and often, ultimately, tragic. Isabella survives in The Castle of Otranto, but she’s one of the lucky ones – Cathy dies in Wuthering Heights, Sybil dies in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Justine and Elizabeth both die in Frankenstein, Mina survives in Dracula, but Lucy doesn’t. There’s an argument frequently posited that the gothic genre was, and is, about dead women and the men who mourn them, and Interview with the Vampire certainly lends itself to that pretty neatly.
Of course, the genre has evolved, and in particular by the late 1800s, there was a notable shift in how the Gothic Heroine was depicted. The house became a place of imprisonment where they were further constrained and disempowered, she was infantilized and pathologized and diagnosed as hysterical, and as Avril Horner puts it in her excellent paper, Women, Power and Conflict: the Gothic heroine and ‘Chocolate-box Gothic’, gothic literature of this era “explores “the constraints enforced [by] a patriarchal society that is becoming increasingly nervous about the demands of the ‘New Woman’.”
This was an era where marriage was increasingly understood in feminist circles to be a civil death where women were further subjugated and became the property of their husbands. This was explored through gothic literature as the domestic space evolved into a symbol of patriarchal control in the Female Gothic.
Female Gothic vs Male Gothic
Because here’s the thing – the female gothic and the male gothic are generally understood to be two different subgenres of gothic literature.
While there are plenty of arguments as to what this entails, the basics is that the male gothic is written by men, and usually features graphic horror, rape and the masculine domination of women and often utilises the invasion of women’s spaces as a symbol of further penetrating their bodies, while the female gothic is written by women, and usually features graphic terror, as opposed to horror, while delving more specifically into gender politics. More than that though, its heroines are usually victimized, virginial and powerless while being pursued by villainous men.
The Female Gothic as a genre is also specifically interested in the passage from girlhood to female maturity, and does view the house as a place of entrapment, but she is usually suddenly “threatened with imprisonment in a castle or a great house under the control of a powerful male figure who gave her no chance to escape.”
That’s not Louis’ arc, that’s Claudia’s arc twice over, first with the house at Rue Royale, then with the Paris Coven, and Lestat and Armand aren’t the only powerful male figures who imprison her.
Claudia as the Gothic Heroine
Claudia in many ways is the absolute embodiment of the classic gothic heroine. Even the moment of their meeting is a product of Louis’ Byronic heroism – his act of implacable revenge against the Alderman Fenwick which prompts the rioting that almost kills her. She’s a victim of Louis’ monstrousness before they’ve even met, and while he saves her, he arguably does something worse in trapping her in the house with both himself and Lestat, holding her in an ever-virginal, ever-chaste eternal girlhood, playing into Lestat’s Milton-Satan by enhancing the perversion of family and ultimately infantilizing her out of his own desire for familial closeness.
Claudia has no family protection before Louis and Lestat – a staple of the gothic heroine – she is completely dependent on them in her actual girlhood, and again in adulthood, never developing the strength to be able to turn a companion, to say nothing about the sly lines here and there that further diminish and pathologise her (Lestat calling her histrionic, Louis making her out to be a burden, etc.). This is all further compounded again with the Coven, and when the tragedy of her life ultimately leads to the tragedy of her death.
Louis as the Byronic Hero
Not to start with a quote, but here’s one from The Literary Icon of the Byronic Hero and its Reincarnation in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights:
“Generally speaking, the Byronic hero exhibits several particular characteristics. He does not possess heroic virtues in the usual, traditional sense. He is a well-educated, intelligent and sophisticated young man, sometimes a nobleman by birth, who at the same time manifests signs of rebellion against all fundamental values and moral codes of the society. Despite his obvious charm and attractiveness, the Byronic hero often shows a great deal of disrespect for any figure of authority. He was considered "the supreme embodiment [...] standing not only against a dehumanized system of labor but also against traditionally repressive religious, social, and familial institutions" (Moglen, 1976: 28).
The Byronic hero is usually a social outcast, a wanderer, or is in exile of some kind, one imposed upon him by some external forces or self-imposed. He also shows an obvious tendency to be arrogant, cunning, cynical, and unrepentant for his faults. He often indulges himself in self destructive activities that bring him to the point of nihilism resulting in his rebellion against life itself. He is hypersensitive, melancholic, introspective, emotionally conflicted, but at the same time mysterious, charismatic, seductive and sexually attractive.”
Louis as he exists in the show to me is pretty much all of those things, and I think to argue that he’s a gothic heroine not only diminishes Claudia’s arc, but robs Louis of his agency within his own story. Louis chooses Lestat, over and over again, he’s not imprisoned by the monster in the domestic sphere, he is one of the monsters who’s controlling the household, including making decisions of when they bring a child into it and when Lestat gets to live in it – he wanted to be turned, he wanted to live with Lestat in Rue Royale, and while there are certainly arguments to be made about their power dynamic within the household in the NOLA era, importantly Louis actually gained social power through his marriage to Lestat, particularly through The Azaelia, he didn’t lose it in the way that’s vital to the story of the gothic heroine.
Daniel Hart even said it in a recent twitter thread about Long Face, but there is an element of Lestat and Louis’ relationship that is transactional, and to me, for that to exist, they both have to have a degree of control over their circumstances and choices in order to negotiate those transactions. Claudia is the one who can’t, she’s the one who’s treated effectively as property, and she’s the one who lacks control over her circumstances.
While you could perhaps argue the constraints of the apartment in Dubai lend more to the gothic heroine archetype, I’d argue it as furthering the Byronic trope again by being representative both of Louis’ self-destruction and self-imposed exile. As Jacob has said a few times, Louis does seem to have known to a degree that Armand was involved in Claudia’s death on some level, and it’s that guilt and misery that has him allowing Armand his degree of control. The fact that Louis was able to leave Armand as easily and as definitively as he was I think demonstrates that distinction too – after all, to compare that ending to Claudia’s multiple attempts to leave the confines of the patriarchal house, both in Rue Royale and Paris, which were punished at every turn – first by her rape, then by Lestat dragging her back off the train, and then by the Coven orchestrating her murder.
Louis gets to leave because Louis can leave, he has both the social and narrative power to, and the fact that he does is, to me, completely at odds with the gothic heroine. Louis can, and does advocate for himself, Louis is proud, moody, cynical. Defiance is a key part of his character, just as his exile from NOLA society due to his race, and his chosen rejection of vampire society in Paris, is. He’s intelligent and sophisticated, travels the world, and has misery in his heart, guilt that eats him up, and self-destructive tendencies. That’s a Byronic Hero, baby!
In the Rockstat era there are definitely video compilations of him looking off into the distance and his pupils suddenly dilating like crazy because he has just spotted his husband in the crowd. People know when Louis is there because Lestat looks like a cat about to pounce.
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