Carina Alessandro, Period 1, 4/05/22

Literacy & Learning


Write about your thoughts regarding any of the fiction or non-fiction covered in class.
    Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire has many interesting, nuanced elements to explore. Its themes which range from sex and homosexuality to morality, elitism, entitlement, and those implications of immortality, create a story that is both hard to swallow and easy to devour. The apparent entitlement of vampires in this story, due to their prevalent comfort in playing God and seeking their immortal and mortal pleasures, in tandem with the factor of fear and survival, create an atmosphere where at some points I am searching for some way to sympathize, while at others I question why I do with little effort. Perhaps, I am so used to living in a vampiric society, full of invisible elitism and rich powers, of which I am expected to submit to, that I’m automatically ready to dole out forgiveness. (See The Smashing Pumpkin’s “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”, verse 1 & pre-chorus.) Frankly, it did seem distasteful to me that the main character, a queer-coded man, is seen to find, and to an extent, act on, sensual beauty of someone in the body of a five year old, as well as the many ambiguous “ages” of many boy-bodied people in the same boat. I do understand that it is somewhat the point to be uncomfortable, and there’s moral/psychological aspects to this due to Claudia’s eventual real age for example, but it seemed like a misfire, especially with (more-so at the time of writing’s) the not-so-uncommon conflation of homosexuality with predatory behavior— especially as Louie and Lestat, when she was still an actual five year old, literally raped her by stealing her innocence and change at mortality. Nevertheless, however unfortunate, all the those characteristics succeed at maintaining the confusion of a complex morality in the main characters, both for the readers and the characters themselves.

Reflect on any new information you have learned in English class by considering how that learning influences your critical perception. How is what you’re learning applied to any other classes/the world around you?
    One of the most recent information I learned in English class was about Louie in Interview With the Vampire being the Byronic Hero, a brooding, romantic, rebellious, arrogant, and non-social antihero, who happens to be hot. This seems pretty trivial, but I find it interesting how they always tend to be attractive. I think I’ve subconsciously noticed this too, but it’s funny how its almost universally recognized that mysterious equals alluring, or that apparently, say, playing (or being) hard-to-get, can make up for arrogance and unavailability. Furthermore, why is it that, unavailability to most comes with greater loyalty, and rebellion— perhaps such stringent, monogamous attitudes translates to some as passion and romance. I think that Louie’s accurate characterization as such (thinking about his goodness/evilness, not taking responsibility, passionate relationships, hot) plays into his unusual, but arguable perception as romantic, and in turn, likely even my aforementioned frequent questionable forgiveness for the character. On a darker note, the article we read about redlining and its connections with the marginalization of Grendel and his mother in Beowulf applies to both other classes of mine like Government and US History, and the world that we live in because it expresses how people have always been harmed from being perceived as “other.” The continuity of it being in texts like Beowulf from centuries ago that’s still of prestige highlights how marginalization is almost a standard in literature and history— thankfully, we’ve finally started to recognize it through lessons such as these.