Vampire Aesthetics in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire

Despite critical attention to the many vampiric texts Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire invokes, Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner has received barely any notice, although it is the one vampire text Rice specifically cites. This essay argues that the Rime provides a major structural and thematic template for the novel in pointing toward what Louis accomplishes in telling his life story to the interviewer: creating a vampire aesthetic that enables him to survive the ennui of immortality and work through his conflicted sense of himself. The pleasure he takes in telling the story of his life provides an alternate version of what he terms the ultimate experience of the vampiric kill: the reenactment of one's human death and vampiric rebirth. Through autobiography he actualizes what Rice brilliantly postulates as the component of vampiric existence that enables the most successful vampires to thrive: he locates an art form that suits and enhances his idiosyncratic nature. Whereas Coleridge's mariner remains locked in a cycle of traumatic repetition, Rice recasts the mariner's dilemma as a potential solution for Louis's moral and existential crisis in offering an aesthetic that empowers him to perform his identity as a vampire on his own terms.