Anne Rice: A Mainstream Guide to Vampirism and BDSM
When looking at Rice’s considerable success as a writer of popular fiction and lesser-known erotic works, several questions arise: where does Rice stand in the literary canon? Has her work in the mainstream hindered the credibility and quality of her lesser-known works, or merely served to boost her status as a celebrity/star author? Anne Rice is a celebrity author who has made a name for herself by introducing literary works with unconventional, escapist themes to the mainstream marketplace. Along the road to literary stardom, Rice’s celebrity status has benefited greatly by having some of her most well-known works adapted into motion pictures.
Anne Rice is a celebrity author. She presents herself in the mainstream with a very low-key demeanor, accepting of her place in the field of literary production but reluctant to outwardly accept her place in pop culture. She typifies the kind of celebrity authors whose “[lives and work] are ransacked for human interest at the same time as they are lauded for their difference and aloofness.” Her works are mostly associated with fantasy and fiction which would serve to have them ready-made for the restricted field of literary production but find themselves produced for mass consumption to satisfy a large following. Some of her works have been deemed controversial and chosen as targets by the well-to-do yet misinformed, a strong characteristic of the literary celebrity. However, since controversy has not loomed over the majority of her works, Rice retains the title of celebrity author (Moran 59-60).
Anne Rice is not a high-brow, high-art author. Her works do not resonate with the classics of the great literary (read: dead Anglo-male dominated) canon. However, Rice does possess a considerable amount of symbolic capital and, due to her status as a celebrity; the name Anne Rice is heavily associated with contemporary Gothic fiction and vampire tales (Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production 22). The mainstream’s persistent pegging of Rice as a Gothic vampire fiction author serves to characterize and identify Rice as such. Placing Rice in the aforementioned genre and/or related genres is more than just a reflection on American’s society’s habit of categorization; it is a way to clearly define her as a celebrity with certain marketable and charismatic traits in an effort to make her “well-known for her well-knownness” (Moran 57).
Rice does not write books dealing with conventional topics and the same can be said for most best-selling fiction authors. Though she adds almost nothing new to the great literary canon because all the great, primordial ideas have been used and eventually reused for the sake of mass production, her works are an asset to the “dumbed down” culture industry (Adorno & Horkheimer 136-37). This is not to say that Rice and her works are void of meaning, intellect and originality. Rice and her works mainly serve to entertain and provide an escape for their audience.
Initially, Rice had always felt that her work had no bearing in the mainstream, that it was essentially an outlier and not on the same level as the works of mainstream, best selling authors like Danielle Steel, Stephen Kind and Dean Koontz (veinotte.com). Lo and behold, Rice eventually found her works branching beyond the grasp of her cult of die-hard fans and subsequently perched atop The New York Times best-seller list. This has helped Rice fortify her place in the mainstream literary canon.
Anne Rice does not write sappy, romance novels with plots and characters not too far removed from television soap operas. Her name would never adorn the cover of a courtroom drama novel. The shining stars in Rice’s literary collection can be generally categorized as mainstream horror. The horror literary genre was propelled by early Gothic works such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but finds its contemporary manifestation lead by writers such as Stephen King. Authors like Rice and King have been mainstays in the mainstream due to their stoking of the audience’s desire for thrills and chills. These horror producers thrive on the audience’s desire to be scared and taken to realms of terror which seem far removed from their everyday lives. Both provide entertainment by way of catharsis. However, the main thing that sets Rice apart from King and her mainstream canon peers is her Gothic style.
Despite her low-art, middlebrow-profile standing, Rice does a service to the mainstream literary canon by producing highly sexual and sensual, Gothic tales of vampires and witchcraft to satisfy a mainstream audience therefore legitimizing the work as a viable component of literature with a significant duty (Moran 58). Along with satisfying the imaginative appetites of her audience, Rice’s work strives to both penetrate and break down the norms and habitus of which society tends to subscribe (Pecora 221). While it is easy to assume that Rice’s work would not find favor in mainstream culture due to its stance in binary opposition of what is typically found in society (the normal versus the eccentric), her works illustrate that “the magic of writing abolishes all determinations constraints, and limits that constitute social existence” (Bourdieu, The Invention of the Artist’s Life 79).
Driven by a life-long infatuation with vampires, Rice began her writing career paying homage to them. The first entry in Rice’s well-known Vampire Chronicles, and undoubtedly her best-known work, is Interview with the Vampire, originally published in 1976. The novel is a throwback, of sorts, to the late-Victorian/Gothic period written in a similar, legend-invoking vein as Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Much like its predecessor, Interview with the Vampire “is not an isolated phenomenon, but it is part of a literary/cultural discourse comprised not only of other tales about vampires, but of other fantastic novels and stories that also focus on sexual dynamics, whether covertly or overtly” (Spencer 198).
Interview with the Vampire is a marker of sorts when it comes to defining Anne Rice, the author. The implied star of the novel is Lestat, a prominent figure in the complete Vampire Chronicles and the vampire responsible for the metamorphosis of the story’s main focalizer, Louis. The novel lives up to its title; the story reads like an interview with Louis, replete with long passages filled with minute details. The novel’s prose strives to keep the audience engaged and entertained. While high-art, high-brow critics consider Rice’s writing style to be melodramatic, verbose, boring and basic, its flow and air of drama appeal to fans, i.e. “I gazed at nothing, not even a mirror…especially not a mirror…with a free eye” (Rice 47). One might even say there are times where it seems Rice is trying too hard to write high art: “His narrow chest heaved so subtly with his sigh that seemed to be rising slowly from the floor then settling in again with that same somnambulistic grace” (341). Rice has been known to use her vampires to illustrate or mimic the faults and triumphs of the human spirit. The character who most illustrates this is Louis; being turned into a vampire inadvertently forces him to initially curse himself and Lestat, then constantly soul search and long for humanity (17).
Rice also explores different facets of sensuality and sexuality which are a focal point throughout the Vampire Chronicles. Despite Rice’s efforts to paint locations, people and events with a certain degree of eroticism, Louis’s first feed as a vampire is a strong example of Rice’s use of the erotic (18-20). Rice’s description of Lestat through Louis’s eyes presents underlying homosexual/sensual tension between the two: “his movement so graceful and so personal that at once it made me think of a lover” (17).
Aside from crafting tales of vampires and witches, Rice intensified her focus on sexuality and sensuality by producing several erotic works, which, like most of her other works, garnered lackluster reviews from critics and major acclaim from followers. In an attempt to “create her own pornography” as well as heighten the arousal of like-minded readers, Rice created The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy (annerice.com).Although Rice penned the series under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelare, essentially meaning Anne under a cloak in French, the covers of later printings read “Anne Rice writing as A. N. Roquelare,” thereby divulging the true name and identity of the author and subsequently associating the author with pornography (Butts). The trilogy’s theme (featuring excessive and overt sexuality) and status (little to no audience) make it a perfect fit for the field of restricted production. Not only does the trilogy feature a strong sexual current, but the type of sexual fantasy and sex play make the sexual current a focalizer. The trilogy is replete with the master/slave role play and mentions of physical and scenario apparatuses that are prevalent in the sexual realm of bondage, domination and sadomasochism, otherwise known as BDSM.
The highly controversial series found itself removed from many libraries across the country due to its overtly graphic, sexual nature (veinotte.com). This is considered to be Rice’s first real stroke of controversy. One of the main reasons for the controversy stems from the ever present subject of sex, which is much more accessible to social agents (the mainstream audience) and much more realistic than the realm of vampires. Essentially, the topic of sex threatens the hegemonic limits in place in society (Pecora 223).
Released in 1983, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty is the lead novel in The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy. Early on in the novel, Rice presents the basic Sleeping Beauty plot, then instates a highly sexual, BDSM twist (Rice, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty 1-5). From that point, the original myth loses its bearing and allows Rice to create her own explicitly sexual myth. Aside from the novel’s many scenes of bondage, domination and submission, and full-on sex, Rice brings homosexuality into play and peppers it throughout the novel (79-81). Within the books of The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy, Rice leaves no stone unturned in the realm of sex. She does this not only for her own pleasure, but to stimulate and appeal to others who share a similar vision. In order to fully accept the hardcore erotic nature of this novel without being overly repulsed or dismissive is through “accepting the aesthetic quality of that project” (Loesberg 1037). However producing this and other erotic works did not impede Rice’s current standing in popular culture and the literary field.
In this day and age, it is common to see literary works adapted to “The Big Screen.” Motion pictures are seen as “escapist entertainment” and are known vehicles used to amuse and distract (Maltby 13). Some would argue that motion pictures are technological advancements in art that are doing the art world a disservice by mass producing art and severely decreasing its value and regard; motion pictures “leave no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from precise detail without losing the thread of the story” (Adorno & Horkheimer 126-27). So it can be said that books turned into motion pictures may do a disservice to the literary base because the artist’s original vision may become distorted, or seeing the work brought to life may leave nothing more to the audience’s imagination. On the other hand, motion pictures can do a service to the books that they are based on by presenting the work to an audience that may have otherwise overlooked it, therefore gaining the work’s originator acclaim and mass appeal.
Although Anne Rice was already a best-selling author, her status as a celebrity author intensified with the 1994 motion picture releases of Exit to Eden and Interview with the Vampire. Exit to Eden, which opened in the American cinema in October 1994, starred Rosie O’Donnell and Dana Delany. Although the film maintained the main plot element of Rice’s original erotic vision-a couple involved in a BDSM relationship visit an island where all of their fantasies are manifest-the film treated the topic and characters in a very comical, R-rated way. The film grossed a scant $6.8 million at the American box office. One of the major reasons that this film received lackluster reviews and earned the title of box office bomb is the Rice had little to no involvement with the making of the movie and the screenplay was not written by her, therefore allowing the screenplay writer to derealize Rice’s vision (imdb.com). Another reason that the movie turned out to be a flop, and its box office gross provides evidence, is that early 1990s mainstream America and its consumers were not willing to support and accept the themes of Exit to Eden as a part of its cumulative and symbolic life.
On the contrary, Interview with the Vampire, released in November 1994, was a box office blockbuster grossing $221.3 million worldwide including over $105 million from the United States alone (Interview with the Vampire, imdb.com). Aside from making Anne Rice a household name, Interview with the Vampire solidified the star power of actors Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst and Antonio Banderas. The film’s box office success led to an undeniably high level of exposure for Rice and her literary works. Through the medium of motion picture, not to mention the star power of the movie’s actors, Rice’s work was allowed to be more prominently thrust in the face of consumers the world over. A printing of the novel after the release of the film boasted sales of over 5 million, therefore reflecting the substantial impact made by the motion picture and correlating with the motion picture’s worldwide box office gross (Butts).
Box office grosses do not equate with critical acclaim nor awards of high achievement, but they do speak volumes about popularity and symbolic capital. In America’s highly money-driven, capitalist-based society and economy, box office grosses can determine how well received a movie is in comparison with its competition. In Anne Rice’s case, box office grosses reflect American society’s interest in her work. Ironically, Rice said in a 1992 interview with Maclean’s, “My efforts with Hollywood are like things written in water” (veinotte.com). Little did she know she would find herself laughing all the way to the bank and riding high on the success of the motion picture based on her first novel, eighteen years after its first publication.
Anne Rice epitomizes the idea of the celebrity author; she tries to defy the stereotypes of mainstream authors by utilizing subjects and themes that try to unnerve the audience by shaking up the belief systems that they have come to know. Rice inadvertently asserts her star power by keeping the audience wanting more of what she has to offer. The majority of Rice’s appeal comes from her deliberate use of vampires, sex and other contemporary Gothic elements to further assert her place in the mainstream literary canon by virtue of her work’s literary value. Although her preferred subjects are far left of the beliefs of the moral majority, her literary “forbidden fruit” provides escapist entertainment for the mainstream. Her fame and notoriety in the literary field and in popular culture, thanks to the medium of motion picture, have aided in her achievements as well.
