Vampire--The Defamiliarized Familiar Figure In Contemporary American Society

Vampires are popular figures, often appearing in Gothic fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Bram Stoker's Dracula and J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla. What these vampires have in common is that they are mostly portrayed as monsters. In horror novels, the vampire is nothing but a bloodthirsty killer. Opposing the monster there is always a hero or even a group of heroes who, at the end, will succeed in annihilating the fiend and saving humanity. An explicit separation exists between, vampires and humans: "they" are not like "us". The reader will identify with the human hero and feel completely detached from the monster that, along with its horrific characteristics, inhabited remote and ghastly locations.Contemporary vampires have been transformed from their late nineteenth-century signification as the monstrous Others into largely sympathetic character: and a metaphor for various aspects of contemporary life, such as sexuality, power, alienation, illness, secularized evil, and the persistence of the fantasy in the supposedly rationalist age.Anne Rice is a major figure in contemporary popular literature. She has revolutionized the image of the vampire. This writer of gothic fiction attracts not only great interest among the general readers but also much serious scholarly attention among those who recognize in her works evidence of sophisticated characterization and intricate plotting. Some even assert that Rice goes far to examine important contemporary social issues. Rice's adaptation of the vampire myth to modern times accounts in part for the popularity of vampire stories. In 1976, Anne Rice published Interview with the Vampire, and a new archetype of the outsider was born. In 1985 The Vampire Lestat appeared on shelves. Every book of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, The Tale of the body Thief, Memnoch the Devil) has been received with general acclaim, putting vampires in the spotlight. With these books, vampire had a new language to describe its alienation. The vampire became a universal Gothic symbol.Rice's vampires are much more humane than their predecessors. They partake ofinfinity of human feelings and emotions such as guilt, love, loneliness, and ambition. The most important feature that separates them from their literary ancestors is that her vampires are not inherently evil. Throughout the five books of the Vampire Chronicles, Rice follows the life and adventures of the main character, an attractive, charming, intelligent, wealthy, powerful, and over 300-year-old, but eternally young French vampire named Lestat. As the prototype of the modem vampire, Lestat is no longer a passive character. Instead he is the narrator and active participant of his own "autobiographic" books. Other characters that accompany Lestat in his journey are also undeniably human; they are vulnerable and passionate. The main characters Lestat and Louis are human-like, passionate hero-villains, and they are the defamiliarized familiar figures in contemporary American society.I first trace the tradition and modern development of Gothic novels to show that vampire, which is indeed one of the most enduring and successful of the Gothic novel's grotesque creatures, has changed from a bloodthirsty monster to an alienated sympathetic figure in contemporary American society. Modern writers begin to probe into the internal world of this tortured transgressive figure. Several facets of American cultural identity have contributed to the alterations in the past years.Then I employ a psychoanalytic approach to examine how and in what ways Anne Rice's particular popular vampire character may reveal symbolically aspects of our hidden nature, and why this is a defamilarized familiar figure. The analysis of the Gothic sublime and the Freudian uncanny can function as the theoretic basis.In the third chapter, I apply the cultural critical approach to analyze this defamiliarezed familiar figure in the background of contemporary American society from several respects: vampirism as homoeroticism and gender transgression, vampirism as disease and immortality, middle-class longings and the loss of faith in the postmodern society.In conclusion, Rice's vampire is mobile enough to touch a range of contemporary issues: AIDS, homoerotism, loss of faith, with which readers are generally familiar. Lestat and Louis are the defamiliarized familiar figure, which is both the rejection and projection of the American people's fears and desires. And nowadays, vampires evenbecome commodities, as production cedes to consumption, all bodies are changed from being simply the victims or the wage slaves of vampiric capitalism to its willing participants. Lestat's paradoxical situation mirrors the tensions and contradictions both in western culture and in human nature itself. But his extreme exaggerations of these tensions are a warning for us not to follow him too far down his road.