Selina Jiang, Period 1, 3/12/24

Selina Jiang 

Period 1

3/12/24

Modern Mythology 2024

Blog #3

Literacy & Learning

As we entered the Vampire Unit in our Modern Mythology class with Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice, my knowledge of vampires was extremely limited prior to entering the vampire unit. I have never been intrigued by the whole idea of vampires and never indulged in it while most people would think about Twilight or Vampire Diaries when hearing the word vampire. I had the most basic understanding that vampires couldn’t be in the sun, sucked blood out of humans, slept in coffins, scared of garlic, and can’t be seen in mirrors. 

The book was nice to read after reading Beowulf as I could actually understand what Louis was trying to express while for Beowulf, I would read over each line multiple times trying to understand it only to find out I didn’t understand the reading properly from the class discussions.When we started reading the book, I was shocked by how the book was written as it was similar to how the fanfiction genre is written especially with the vampire-romance trope. My favorite parts of the book are where Louis is struggling between whether he wants to keep his morals or succumb to his vampire side. Anne Rice did a good job portraying Louis’ vampirism in an untraditional way by having Louis constantly switch between being a servant of God and being a child of Satan. I loved how Louis still kept his human emotions and didn’t become like Lestat who only cared about himself. For example, Louis struggled to understand how every vampire he met reveled in killing humans as he was mainly doing it to survive.

And of course with good comes bad, even though I loved the internal struggle with Louis there were parts of the book that I was just repulsed by. The way and reason Claudia became a vampire, the way the relationship between Claudia and Louis changed from a father-daughter relationship to Claudia wanting to be his lover were all really concerning to me. The lesson where we talked about the characterization of Claudia was definitely not my favorite as the whole class listed descriptions Louis made of Claudia, many of which included the combination of descriptions of a child’s body and a grown woman. We learned the word “dichotomy” which means two opposing forces of the same idea. The dichotomy between Claudia’s physical appearance and mental state is causing a rift in the relationship between Claudia and Louis as her child body is saying that they should only be strictly a father-daughter relationship while Claudia’s mature desires are asking to be lovers.

Ultimately, I think Anne Rice is a splendid writer for writing Interview with the Vampire. As mentioned before, there are some parts of the book that were notable while others were unpleasant. I love how the book can stand by itself as there is no additional information needed at the beginning and end of the book.