#hodges

Vampires are effortlessly rich and Rice's hero Lestat is a blonde, blue-eyed Aryan who participates with other vampires in selective breeding and in eliminating undesirables. These vampires are completely at home in late twentieth-century America as she constructs it...When Lestat wakes into the America of the eighties, he finds himself in a utopia

The reader, like the vampire, has godlike powers to surrender safely. No virus contaminates the exchanges of blood in these vampire stories, nor the exchanges of pleasure between text and the reader.

Within a story that emphasizes oral pleasures, her novels are set up to be talked. Speech is privileged over writing. The Vampire Lestat, for example, is set both before and after his autobiography is actually written...Not for Rice an avant-garde modernism that would play on the undecidability of representation. Rice would like to eliminate representation itself.

As Lestat searches the world, traveling widely to discover his origins, he meets new vampires whose tales of initiation only and inevitably bring us back, via tales within tales within tales, to a dyadic union with the mother--a symbiotic union and reunion that never satisfies, that is predictably broken into by a father figure, and that is always experienced as lost because the relationship with mother can never be retrieved. So we get an obsessive repetitive tale that never progresses, despite its hermeneutic, narrative promise of a "mystery" at the center...Lestat's feeding upon [Akasha} and...her feeding upon him...intensifies the description of previous "initiation" scenes to the point of near hysteria

Freud depicts oedipal development in the girl as leading to a rejection of the mother and embrace of the father; Rice sees the oedipal moment as beginning with the father's embrace of the girl child in a patriarchal order that so restricts her possibilities for development--Claudia is called "Doll," "My Bride," "Lover," "Infant Death," Daughter"--that she develops murderous rages against the father. Freud calls the oedipal stage a "haven, a refuge" for the girl; Rice shows it to be a coffin.

The oedipal story is a narrative that encourages fantasies of male monogenesis because fathers, aligned as they are with the symbolic, produce subjects, if not babies. Indeed, this vampire story could be subtitled: "Two Men and a Baby." When the male vampire couple, Lestat and Louis, "create" Claudia she is five years old and presumably just ready...to turn away from the mother toward the father...This perfect staging of the oedipal moment uncovers not the girl's desire for the father so much as the father's desire for the girl child.