I've been rereading The Vampire Lestat, as I've surely mentioned before (I'm taking my reread of the series molasses-slow, for reasons) and I'm struck by so many things I want to talk about, so I figured why not make a post? I don't have anywhere else to ramble about the Anne Rice of it all.
I'm not even two hundred pages into the book and there is just so much sort of awesome stuff mixed in with so much totally fucked up nonsense. Mostly in this post I'm going to delve into Gabrielle, radiant badass that she is, and her creepy incestuous relationship with Lestat.
First of all, Gabrielle is even more amazing than I remembered her being. I have not read these books since I was twelve years old and I am now double that, so I'm finding a lot of my reactions to be drastically different (understandably). I don't remember having strong feelings about Gabrielle prior to now, though I suspect I was maybe a little bit unsettled by her. I didn't understand her then, I don't think, just like I didn't understand Claudia then. As a kid, I was mostly blind to everything except The Gay Of It All and my militant feminism had not yet crystallized into its hard exoskeleton. I just saw pretty dudes queering up on each other and got all confused about it. The Vampire Lestat was my favorite book of the series, I loved Lestat absolutely the most, and I wanted him to smooch any number of men, though particularly Louis.
It's funny. Now Lestat is farther down on my list, because though I still like him, I see all the flaws in his creation much too clearly. I'm really not far in the book, but the tonal shift from Interview with the Vampire is apparent immediately. I've talked about that a little bit before, I think. There's a ten year gap in the writing of both books, and it really shows. For all Louis' angst and the relatively boring first half, there are a lot of things I really adored about Interview. Mainly, no one was the hero of that book. There was no hero. Louis was too self-loathing to see himself as such, Claudia was doomed from the start, and Lestat's ugliest faults are all on display. As an adult, I vastly prefer Lestat's characterization in Interview. He was still charming, you know? But he was not – and I hesitate to use the phrase, but here we go – the Mary Sue than he would become. I was laughing my butt off for the first fifty pages of this book because Lestat is so intelligent, Lestat is so handsome, Lestat has so many special vampire abilities, Lestat rides a sexy motorcycle around New Orleans.
The novel is first person and so one could easily argue that Lestat is simply painting himself in a crazy favorable light because that's the kind of person he is: he's vain and self-absorbed and absolutely self-aggrandizing. Lestat absolutely would make himself out to be the prettiest princess in the realm. He is an actor, after all. But my issue that the line between unreliable narrator and author wank fantasy is impossible to define in cases like this, and I think anyone halfway familiar with Anne Rice knows just how very much she wanks over Lestat. She based him on her husband, for crying out loud.
It robs Lestat of some of his complexity IMO. Even Lestat's declining vampire health and decades-long descent into hiding is painted in a less pathetic light. I would enjoy him more if I could have some sense that Anne knew what she was doing, but Anne is terrible, so.
This is not to say I have turned on him. He is still a very charismatic and enjoyable character. There are a lot of things I do like, particularly human!Lestat and his weirdly-written-but-interesting depression in the wake of killing the wolves, etc. But I find as an adult he does not consume me like he did when I was a child and I'm drawn to all the other characters so much more than I was then.
(I kind of want to do a just Lestat post now. These things, they snowball, man.)
But I am here to talk about Gabrielle, for whom I have discovered a new love than I did not possess before. Gabrielle is Lestat's mother. They share a deep connection despite the fact that Gabrielle is relatively cold and distant, keeping herself removed from the rest of the family (I believe Lestat is the seventh son, because he's just so fucking special). They are aristocrats without any money, living in a French village, and all the men in the family besides Lestat are useless and backwards and don't even get names. Gabrielle is originally from Naples and is the only literate person in the family, who she escapes from by diving into her books. Lestat doesn't understand her at all but he loves her anyway because she's sort of odd and not very motherly in a way that appeals to me a lot now – I really love shitty mothers in fiction, women who have children but are entirely unsuited to it, even if they do love their kids. And Gabrielle does love Lestat; in fact he's the only child she seems to pay any amount of attention to. She stands up for Lestat where it counts, doing whatever she can to give him the kind of fulfilling and exciting life she cannot give herself. She is very much consumed with dissatisfaction while she's human.
Her first real impactful moment comes when Lestat has killed a pack of wolves for the villagers and afterwards sinks into a deep depression. They bond over their shared understanding of pain:
"I know how it is," she said to me. "You hate them. Because of what you've endured and what they don't know. They haven't the
imagination to know what happened to you out there on the mountain." [...] "It was the same the first time I bore a child. I was in
agony for twelve hours, and I felt trapped in the pain, knowing the only release was the birth or my own death. When it was over,
I had your brother Augustin in my arms, but I didn't want anyone else near me. And it wasn't because I blamed them. It was only
that I'd suffered like that, hour after hour, that I'd gone into the circle of hell and come back out. They hadn't been in the circle of
hell. And I felt quiet all over. In this common occurrence, this vulgar act of giving birth, I understood the meaning of utter loneliness."
And also their shared desire to murder the rest of the family (no, really):
"I mean I dream sometimes that I might kill all of them," I said. "I kill my brothers and my father in the dream. I go from room to
room slaughtering them as I did the wolves. I feel in myself the desire to murder..."
"So do I, my son," she said. "So do I." And her face was lighted with the strangest smile as she looked at me.
But then Gabrielle gets so fucking awesome I could cry:
"You know what I imagine," she said, looking towards me again. "Not so much the murdering of them as an abandon which disregards
them completely. I imagine drinking wine until I'm so drunk I strip off my clothes and bathe in the mountain streams naked." [...]
"And then I imagine going into the village and up into the inn and taking into my bed any men that come there – crude men, big
men, old men, boys. Just lying there and taking them one after another, and feeling some magnificent triumph in it, some absolute
release without a thought of what happens to your father or your brothers, whether they are alive or dead. In that moment I am purely
myself. I belong to no one."
I LOVE HER SO. Lestat is kind of freaked out by his mom saying sex words (which is funny, considering their relationship later), but he also kind of digs and respects it. He realizes for the first time that his mother is a person and it's actually pretty great. Gabrielle chooses this moment to reveal that she's dying of an unspecific lung-related illness (consumption I guess??), which stuns Lestat totally, but she's just like: dude I know, it's really gross and it sucks, but whatever, what can I do.
Gabrielle's desire for autonomy and independence is what defines her character. And it feeds into what I love so much about female vampires: their vampirism frees them, allows them to take control of their lives and to be as selfish as any man without recrimination or judgement. The scenes following Gabrielle's transformation are what really inspired me to make a post, because her freedom is so beautiful and so just. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Gabrielle arranges for Lestat and his boyfriend to run away to Paris together, and sort of lives vicariously through Lestat. Then he becomes a vampire, a rich one at that, and tries to provide her with medical care, but her condition is worsening much too rapidly. She comes to Paris to see him before she dies, but Lestat is overcome at her deathbed and decides to turn her into a vampire. It's actually a very beautifully written passage, one of my favorites in the series. Here is when Lestat sees her again for the first time in a while, before he turns her:
For one eerie moment she looked to me as she had when I was a little boy. So pretty. The symmetry of her face was unchanged
by time or illness, and so was her hair. And a heartbreaking happiness came over me, a warm delusion that I was mortal again,
and innocent again, and with her, and everything was all right, really truly all right.
There was no death and no terror, just she and I in her bedroom, and she would take me in her arms.
I don't know, I just really like it. I like how Lestat is constantly trying to reconcile Gabrielle as his mother and Gabrielle as a person in her own right, because that feels like a very real thing to me. Once they are both vampires, their familial connection begins to break down and they become very incestuous, but Lestat always has this sort of backburner cognitive dissonance about her identity and how it relates to him, and I love that. Have another quote, this time from the turning itself – I think it really sums up what I'm trying to say:
All the memories of my life with her surrounded us; they wove their shroud around us and closed us off from the world, the soft
poems and songs of childhood, and the sense of her before words when there had only been the flicker of the light on the ceiling
above her pillows and the smell of her all around me and her voice silencing my crying, and then the hatred of her and the need
of her, and the losing of her behind a thousand closed doors, and the cruel answers, and the terror of her and her complexity and
her indifference and her indefinable strength.
And jetting up into the current came the thirst, not obliterating but heating every concept of her, until she was flesh and blood and
mother and lover and all things beneath the cruel pressure of my fingers and my lips, everything I had ever desired. I drove my teeth
into her, feeling her stiffen and gasp, and I felt my mouth grow wide to catch the hot flood when it came.
Try to ignore the Anne Rice of it all, because there's some good stuff in there and also some hella creepy stuff. This is very obviously the turning point in their relationship. The first paragraph is, I think, so great at expression that conflicting mother/human-person-with-thoughts-and-feelings thing. But then that relationship, the mother-son one, is essentially destroyed, though vestiges of it echo. Rice vampires don't have sex because the blood drinking replaces it, as you can tell from the not at all subtle language there, so basically Lestat and Gabrielle vampire-fuck and are no longer mother and son, but equals, and lovers (ew).
Anne likes her vampires incestuous, it seems. This takes it one step further because they're actually biologically related, but Louis was referred to interchangeably as Claudia's father and lover. Though was that worse because pedophilia? Why is Anne such a creep? I'm so honestly confused, like can someone talk me through why this is such a thing?
Lestat forces himself to call her Gabrielle post-transformation, though he still slips up occasionally. Her change is total and immediate and also beautiful. Gabrielle goes from sickly and powerless to immensely strong and powerful and the way she gets to revel in it is so enjoyable to me. She has been waiting for this kind of freedom her entire life and never expected to receive it and I am just SO HAPPY to see her have it, even if she is now a murderous creature of the night. "She was afraid of nothing," Lestat says. Finally, finally, Gabrielle is able to live a life free of fear. The glorious abandonment of her dreadful life that she fantasized about is her reality now and she doesn't have to face any consequences. Gabrielle the mother is dead and now Gabrielle the woman can thrive.
She and Lestat run around having vampire fun, reveling in her new powers. He realizes quickly that she is much better at being a vampire than he is (I'm not sure if the parallel is intentional, but Claudia was also much better at being a vampire than Louis was. It's kind of presented as a student-surpassing-the-master kind of thing, but I also find it fascinating that the men are flopping about overcome with emotion and the women are much more skilled at being coldblooded killers.) Lestat, upon his turning, had dealt with all kinds of moral issues when it came to killing and eventually came to the decision that he would kill only ~evildoers~ because Lestat is so up his own ass that he thinks HE is the person who can make that kind of moral distinction. But Gabrielle doesn't give a shit who her victims are and doesn't even blink twice over her first kill. She also laughs at the human way Lestat conducts himself by using his wealth to purchase the things he needs when as vampires they can simply steal them. The first thing she steals is a new gown to wear – this is at the beginning of the Night of Vampire Fun. It's important later.
She didn't even look disheveled so much as she looked impossible, a woman torn out of time and place, clad only in slippers
and dress, no chains on her, free to soar.
Gabrielle also remarks on the fact that the most dangerous parts of the city are no longer dangerous to them, and it kind of goes over Lestat's head, but it really resonated with me, as a woman. For the first time in her life, Gabrielle does not have to feel fear walking down a dark street. I mean, we all kind of pine for that, don't we? It's a nice touch that I didn't remember at all, because I was a kid and not conscious of those kinds of things.
Killing together brings Lestat and Gabrielle to a new level of intimacy, aka another round of vampire-fucking that changes their relationship again. It's after the joint killing that they become physically very different – as a human Gabrielle had disliked being touched, but as a vampire she is constantly holding Lestat, ~feeling up on him, and they kiss a bunch and it's WEIRD but not as weird as it's gonna get.
Towards the end of their night, they come upon a young man who Gabrielle takes down with immense skill, startling Lestat because they have already fed and he doesn't see the reason to take another victim when it's not necessary for survival. But Gabrielle has killed the young man specifically to steal his outfit, because she is awesome and she is not going to turn down a cute look that is clearly in her exact size over a little quibble like murder.
It came clear in an instant why she'd done it. She tore off the pink velvet girdle and skirts right there and put on the boy's clothes.
She'd chosen him for the fit of the clothes.
And to describe it more truly, as she put on his garments, she became the boy.
[...] Something in me rebelled against the charm of it, her standing so boldly in these new garments with all her hair still full over her
shoulders looking more the lion's mane now than the lovely mass of woman's tresses it had been moments before. Then I wanted to
ravage her. I closed my eyes.
It's fine, Lestat, your dick does not even work.
He has a freakout about her change and also his sexual attraction to her. I feel like it's important to point out that the young male victim reminded Lestat of his boyfriend? I don't know how, but I feel like that factors in here. Lestat is allegedly bisexual though Anne doesn't telegraph that very well; he seems to be primarily interested in men, and his most important relationship with a woman is his mother, who becomes sexual to him as soon as she stops dressing like a woman and, in fact, "becomes" a boy. He tries to play it off like 'you guys don't get it, in those days getting to see a woman's legs was very shocking!!!!!' but I think we all know Lestat digs dudes and I personally think that is responsible for the jump in intensity in his sexual feelings for Gabrielle.
Gender and Gabrielle is another interesting thing. Her feelings about that seem genuinely confused. She refers to Lestat as the male extension of herself. She is resentful of all the "trappings" of being a woman, and once she is free from convention, she chooses to present as male. Lestat is the one who dressed her up in a pink velvet gown, but when Gabrielle makes the choice for herself, she rips off that ladylike pink right in the street and does herself up as a man. She says there's "no real reason" for her to dress as a woman anymore. There is a certain fleeting idea in the text that they are genderless if only because they're now monsters, but I don't know. I don't think it's just that for Gabrielle. She also cuts off all her hair. And, when choosing a sarcophagus in which to retire from the day (there are a few just lying around Lestat's bachelor pad), the narrative makes a point of saying that she does not choose the one with a figure of a woman on it, but the one with a figure of a knight with a sword. And then this:
She appeared to be dreaming as she ran her hands over the stone.
"By this hour," she said, "she might have already been laid out, your mother. And the room would be full of evil smells and
the smoke of hundreds of candles. Think how humiliating it is, death. Strangers would have taken off her clothes, bathed her,
dressed her – strangers seen her emaciated and defenseless in the final sleep."
[...]
She looked wan, cold all over. Sleepily, she drew something out of her pocket.
It was the golden scissor she'd taken from the lady's table in the faubourg St. Germain. Sparkling in the light of the torch like a bauble.
"No, Mother," I said. My own voice startled me. [...] The hurt in my heart stunned me.
Evil sound, the snipping, the shearing. Her hair fell down in great long locks on the floor.
Gabrielle-the-vampire distances herself in every way possible from Gabrielle-the-human. She doesn't say "I would have been dead already" when referring to the human death she would have had if Lestat hadn't intervened. She says, "your mother." Lestat though he was saving his mother, but his mother is effectively dead either way; he saved the person Gabrielle was in deep in her soul, her private self, and every time she reveals that person, it startles him. He calls her mother here for the first time since her death and I think in a lot of ways, this moment is his final realization that his mother is gone.
With her short hair, Lestat notices multiple times how much she looks like a boy. So, of course, he takes that as his cue to have a bloody makeout sesh before they retire for the day.
The next night, Lestat begins to respect her new gender identity in small ways – he chooses masculine jewelry for her to wear, which is kind of sweet. But despite the intimacies of their Night of Vampire Fun, Gabrielle is once again distant from him. She had been sitting still her entire life, trapped in a castle reading, and she wants to explore. She wants to dive into forests. She wants to experience everything previously denied her. And she is so cut off from who she once was that she's constantly puzzled by Lestat's ties to his human life – especially the insistence with which he cares for the people he once loved, like his boyfriend Nicki. Her indifference and lack of understanding terrifies Lestat. And I think once again how strange it is that Anne Rice writes such incredible women, because I sometimes get the feeling she doesn't like women very much. Does anyone else ever get that feeling? Perhaps it's only that Anne is so very worshipful of men that it throws me off. Either way, her female characters are fantastic.
"I cannot overcome this notion that I've died," she said. "That I am utterly cut off from all living creatures. I can taste, I can see,
I can feel. I can drink blood. But I am like something that cannot be seen, cannot affect things."
The women are so much better at being coldblooded killers!!!!!!!!!!! There's this entire scene where Lestat tries to explain why he has feelings about things and Gabrielle is so bemused, like she just does not get it at all. It's great. She cannot comprehend his weird human emotions when she has so much vampiring to do.
But then, in a scene that was echoed in the film version of Interview to express something entirely different, Gabrielle realizes that overnight her long hair has grown back and she SCREAMS. This is the most violent outpouring of emotion from her, I think, ever. Her hair growing back freaks her the fuck out in a way that, say, murder does not. She can scale buildings now and read thoughts and do everything short of fly, but her hair royally fucks with her. Now, this happens to Claudia in the movie and she loses it because she realizes so concretely that her body will never, ever change and she will always be a child physically. I think Claudia and Gabrielle are very similar in a lot of ways, and for Gabrielle it is a reminder that she can never be totally free from the woman she was, the Marquise. She tried to shed all of that baggage and then it sprang back on her overnight.
"Does nothing about it all...ever...frighten you?" she asked. Her voice was guttural and unfamiliar. "Does nothing...ever...stop you?" [...]
"I don't know," I whispered helplessly. "I don't see the point," I said. But I felt confused now. Again I told her to cut [her hair] each night
and to burn it. Simple.
"Yes, burn it," she sighed. "Otherwise it should fill all the rooms of the tower in time, shouldn't it? It would be like Rapunzel's hair in
the fairy tale. It would be like the gold that the miller's daughter had to spin from straw in the fairy tale of the mean dwarf, Rumplestiltskin."
"We write our own fairy tales, my love," I said. "The lesson in this is that nothing can destroy what you are now. Every wound will heal.
You are a goddess."
"And the goddess thirsts," she said.
I LOVE GABRIELLE SO MUCH.
My one holdup with this series is that I can never tell what is intentional on Anne Rice's part, what is accidental, and what is me seeing what I want to see. It seems too well put together in places to be an accident, but I also know as a writer that sometimes shit like that truly is subconsciously worked out without you realizing it. I have said before that I think Anne Rice is a pretty terrible person. She is definitely racist and has zero idea that she is. I would say she is often guilty of fetishizing queer men. I cannot fully extrapolate why I think she dislikes women, as I said it's just a vibe I get despite her admittedly incredible female characters. And she is a straight up pedo. Has anyone read her porn books? Are THOSE a psychological minefield or what. She sexualizes children and young teens and infantilizes adults in sexual situations, particularly women. She is very cavalier about rape in a way that is tragically commonplace with writers of the 70s and 80s. These are all things that I would love to discuss if anyone even cares. But I'm bringing it all up again because I find it so hard to reconcile all that nonsense with the stuff that is good in these books, and I really cannot tell when she is doing things on purpose. I just can't.
That aside, let us all bask in how amazing Gabrielle is and think about how good she probs looks in her old timey male drag and picture a young Catherine Deneuve as her, because.
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I'm not even two hundred pages into the book and there is just so much sort of awesome stuff mixed in with so much totally fucked up nonsense. Mostly in this post I'm going to delve into Gabrielle, radiant badass that she is, and her creepy incestuous relationship with Lestat.
First of all, Gabrielle is even more amazing than I remembered her being. I have not read these books since I was twelve years old and I am now double that, so I'm finding a lot of my reactions to be drastically different (understandably). I don't remember having strong feelings about Gabrielle prior to now, though I suspect I was maybe a little bit unsettled by her. I didn't understand her then, I don't think, just like I didn't understand Claudia then. As a kid, I was mostly blind to everything except The Gay Of It All and my militant feminism had not yet crystallized into its hard exoskeleton. I just saw pretty dudes queering up on each other and got all confused about it. The Vampire Lestat was my favorite book of the series, I loved Lestat absolutely the most, and I wanted him to smooch any number of men, though particularly Louis.
It's funny. Now Lestat is farther down on my list, because though I still like him, I see all the flaws in his creation much too clearly. I'm really not far in the book, but the tonal shift from Interview with the Vampire is apparent immediately. I've talked about that a little bit before, I think. There's a ten year gap in the writing of both books, and it really shows. For all Louis' angst and the relatively boring first half, there are a lot of things I really adored about Interview. Mainly, no one was the hero of that book. There was no hero. Louis was too self-loathing to see himself as such, Claudia was doomed from the start, and Lestat's ugliest faults are all on display. As an adult, I vastly prefer Lestat's characterization in Interview. He was still charming, you know? But he was not – and I hesitate to use the phrase, but here we go – the Mary Sue than he would become. I was laughing my butt off for the first fifty pages of this book because Lestat is so intelligent, Lestat is so handsome, Lestat has so many special vampire abilities, Lestat rides a sexy motorcycle around New Orleans.
The novel is first person and so one could easily argue that Lestat is simply painting himself in a crazy favorable light because that's the kind of person he is: he's vain and self-absorbed and absolutely self-aggrandizing. Lestat absolutely would make himself out to be the prettiest princess in the realm. He is an actor, after all. But my issue that the line between unreliable narrator and author wank fantasy is impossible to define in cases like this, and I think anyone halfway familiar with Anne Rice knows just how very much she wanks over Lestat. She based him on her husband, for crying out loud.
It robs Lestat of some of his complexity IMO. Even Lestat's declining vampire health and decades-long descent into hiding is painted in a less pathetic light. I would enjoy him more if I could have some sense that Anne knew what she was doing, but Anne is terrible, so.
This is not to say I have turned on him. He is still a very charismatic and enjoyable character. There are a lot of things I do like, particularly human!Lestat and his weirdly-written-but-interesting depression in the wake of killing the wolves, etc. But I find as an adult he does not consume me like he did when I was a child and I'm drawn to all the other characters so much more than I was then.
(I kind of want to do a just Lestat post now. These things, they snowball, man.)
But I am here to talk about Gabrielle, for whom I have discovered a new love than I did not possess before. Gabrielle is Lestat's mother. They share a deep connection despite the fact that Gabrielle is relatively cold and distant, keeping herself removed from the rest of the family (I believe Lestat is the seventh son, because he's just so fucking special). They are aristocrats without any money, living in a French village, and all the men in the family besides Lestat are useless and backwards and don't even get names. Gabrielle is originally from Naples and is the only literate person in the family, who she escapes from by diving into her books. Lestat doesn't understand her at all but he loves her anyway because she's sort of odd and not very motherly in a way that appeals to me a lot now – I really love shitty mothers in fiction, women who have children but are entirely unsuited to it, even if they do love their kids. And Gabrielle does love Lestat; in fact he's the only child she seems to pay any amount of attention to. She stands up for Lestat where it counts, doing whatever she can to give him the kind of fulfilling and exciting life she cannot give herself. She is very much consumed with dissatisfaction while she's human.
Her first real impactful moment comes when Lestat has killed a pack of wolves for the villagers and afterwards sinks into a deep depression. They bond over their shared understanding of pain:
"I know how it is," she said to me. "You hate them. Because of what you've endured and what they don't know. They haven't the
imagination to know what happened to you out there on the mountain." [...] "It was the same the first time I bore a child. I was in
agony for twelve hours, and I felt trapped in the pain, knowing the only release was the birth or my own death. When it was over,
I had your brother Augustin in my arms, but I didn't want anyone else near me. And it wasn't because I blamed them. It was only
that I'd suffered like that, hour after hour, that I'd gone into the circle of hell and come back out. They hadn't been in the circle of
hell. And I felt quiet all over. In this common occurrence, this vulgar act of giving birth, I understood the meaning of utter loneliness."
And also their shared desire to murder the rest of the family (no, really):
"I mean I dream sometimes that I might kill all of them," I said. "I kill my brothers and my father in the dream. I go from room to
room slaughtering them as I did the wolves. I feel in myself the desire to murder..."
"So do I, my son," she said. "So do I." And her face was lighted with the strangest smile as she looked at me.
But then Gabrielle gets so fucking awesome I could cry:
"You know what I imagine," she said, looking towards me again. "Not so much the murdering of them as an abandon which disregards
them completely. I imagine drinking wine until I'm so drunk I strip off my clothes and bathe in the mountain streams naked." [...]
"And then I imagine going into the village and up into the inn and taking into my bed any men that come there – crude men, big
men, old men, boys. Just lying there and taking them one after another, and feeling some magnificent triumph in it, some absolute
release without a thought of what happens to your father or your brothers, whether they are alive or dead. In that moment I am purely
myself. I belong to no one."
I LOVE HER SO. Lestat is kind of freaked out by his mom saying sex words (which is funny, considering their relationship later), but he also kind of digs and respects it. He realizes for the first time that his mother is a person and it's actually pretty great. Gabrielle chooses this moment to reveal that she's dying of an unspecific lung-related illness (consumption I guess??), which stuns Lestat totally, but she's just like: dude I know, it's really gross and it sucks, but whatever, what can I do.
Gabrielle's desire for autonomy and independence is what defines her character. And it feeds into what I love so much about female vampires: their vampirism frees them, allows them to take control of their lives and to be as selfish as any man without recrimination or judgement. The scenes following Gabrielle's transformation are what really inspired me to make a post, because her freedom is so beautiful and so just. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Gabrielle arranges for Lestat and his boyfriend to run away to Paris together, and sort of lives vicariously through Lestat. Then he becomes a vampire, a rich one at that, and tries to provide her with medical care, but her condition is worsening much too rapidly. She comes to Paris to see him before she dies, but Lestat is overcome at her deathbed and decides to turn her into a vampire. It's actually a very beautifully written passage, one of my favorites in the series. Here is when Lestat sees her again for the first time in a while, before he turns her:
For one eerie moment she looked to me as she had when I was a little boy. So pretty. The symmetry of her face was unchanged
by time or illness, and so was her hair. And a heartbreaking happiness came over me, a warm delusion that I was mortal again,
and innocent again, and with her, and everything was all right, really truly all right.
There was no death and no terror, just she and I in her bedroom, and she would take me in her arms.
I don't know, I just really like it. I like how Lestat is constantly trying to reconcile Gabrielle as his mother and Gabrielle as a person in her own right, because that feels like a very real thing to me. Once they are both vampires, their familial connection begins to break down and they become very incestuous, but Lestat always has this sort of backburner cognitive dissonance about her identity and how it relates to him, and I love that. Have another quote, this time from the turning itself – I think it really sums up what I'm trying to say:
All the memories of my life with her surrounded us; they wove their shroud around us and closed us off from the world, the soft
poems and songs of childhood, and the sense of her before words when there had only been the flicker of the light on the ceiling
above her pillows and the smell of her all around me and her voice silencing my crying, and then the hatred of her and the need
of her, and the losing of her behind a thousand closed doors, and the cruel answers, and the terror of her and her complexity and
her indifference and her indefinable strength.
And jetting up into the current came the thirst, not obliterating but heating every concept of her, until she was flesh and blood and
mother and lover and all things beneath the cruel pressure of my fingers and my lips, everything I had ever desired. I drove my teeth
into her, feeling her stiffen and gasp, and I felt my mouth grow wide to catch the hot flood when it came.
Try to ignore the Anne Rice of it all, because there's some good stuff in there and also some hella creepy stuff. This is very obviously the turning point in their relationship. The first paragraph is, I think, so great at expression that conflicting mother/human-person-with-thoughts-and-feelings thing. But then that relationship, the mother-son one, is essentially destroyed, though vestiges of it echo. Rice vampires don't have sex because the blood drinking replaces it, as you can tell from the not at all subtle language there, so basically Lestat and Gabrielle vampire-fuck and are no longer mother and son, but equals, and lovers (ew).
Anne likes her vampires incestuous, it seems. This takes it one step further because they're actually biologically related, but Louis was referred to interchangeably as Claudia's father and lover. Though was that worse because pedophilia? Why is Anne such a creep? I'm so honestly confused, like can someone talk me through why this is such a thing?
Lestat forces himself to call her Gabrielle post-transformation, though he still slips up occasionally. Her change is total and immediate and also beautiful. Gabrielle goes from sickly and powerless to immensely strong and powerful and the way she gets to revel in it is so enjoyable to me. She has been waiting for this kind of freedom her entire life and never expected to receive it and I am just SO HAPPY to see her have it, even if she is now a murderous creature of the night. "She was afraid of nothing," Lestat says. Finally, finally, Gabrielle is able to live a life free of fear. The glorious abandonment of her dreadful life that she fantasized about is her reality now and she doesn't have to face any consequences. Gabrielle the mother is dead and now Gabrielle the woman can thrive.
She and Lestat run around having vampire fun, reveling in her new powers. He realizes quickly that she is much better at being a vampire than he is (I'm not sure if the parallel is intentional, but Claudia was also much better at being a vampire than Louis was. It's kind of presented as a student-surpassing-the-master kind of thing, but I also find it fascinating that the men are flopping about overcome with emotion and the women are much more skilled at being coldblooded killers.) Lestat, upon his turning, had dealt with all kinds of moral issues when it came to killing and eventually came to the decision that he would kill only ~evildoers~ because Lestat is so up his own ass that he thinks HE is the person who can make that kind of moral distinction. But Gabrielle doesn't give a shit who her victims are and doesn't even blink twice over her first kill. She also laughs at the human way Lestat conducts himself by using his wealth to purchase the things he needs when as vampires they can simply steal them. The first thing she steals is a new gown to wear – this is at the beginning of the Night of Vampire Fun. It's important later.
She didn't even look disheveled so much as she looked impossible, a woman torn out of time and place, clad only in slippers
and dress, no chains on her, free to soar.
Gabrielle also remarks on the fact that the most dangerous parts of the city are no longer dangerous to them, and it kind of goes over Lestat's head, but it really resonated with me, as a woman. For the first time in her life, Gabrielle does not have to feel fear walking down a dark street. I mean, we all kind of pine for that, don't we? It's a nice touch that I didn't remember at all, because I was a kid and not conscious of those kinds of things.
Killing together brings Lestat and Gabrielle to a new level of intimacy, aka another round of vampire-fucking that changes their relationship again. It's after the joint killing that they become physically very different – as a human Gabrielle had disliked being touched, but as a vampire she is constantly holding Lestat, ~feeling up on him, and they kiss a bunch and it's WEIRD but not as weird as it's gonna get.
Towards the end of their night, they come upon a young man who Gabrielle takes down with immense skill, startling Lestat because they have already fed and he doesn't see the reason to take another victim when it's not necessary for survival. But Gabrielle has killed the young man specifically to steal his outfit, because she is awesome and she is not going to turn down a cute look that is clearly in her exact size over a little quibble like murder.
It came clear in an instant why she'd done it. She tore off the pink velvet girdle and skirts right there and put on the boy's clothes.
She'd chosen him for the fit of the clothes.
And to describe it more truly, as she put on his garments, she became the boy.
[...] Something in me rebelled against the charm of it, her standing so boldly in these new garments with all her hair still full over her
shoulders looking more the lion's mane now than the lovely mass of woman's tresses it had been moments before. Then I wanted to
ravage her. I closed my eyes.
It's fine, Lestat, your dick does not even work.
He has a freakout about her change and also his sexual attraction to her. I feel like it's important to point out that the young male victim reminded Lestat of his boyfriend? I don't know how, but I feel like that factors in here. Lestat is allegedly bisexual though Anne doesn't telegraph that very well; he seems to be primarily interested in men, and his most important relationship with a woman is his mother, who becomes sexual to him as soon as she stops dressing like a woman and, in fact, "becomes" a boy. He tries to play it off like 'you guys don't get it, in those days getting to see a woman's legs was very shocking!!!!!' but I think we all know Lestat digs dudes and I personally think that is responsible for the jump in intensity in his sexual feelings for Gabrielle.
Gender and Gabrielle is another interesting thing. Her feelings about that seem genuinely confused. She refers to Lestat as the male extension of herself. She is resentful of all the "trappings" of being a woman, and once she is free from convention, she chooses to present as male. Lestat is the one who dressed her up in a pink velvet gown, but when Gabrielle makes the choice for herself, she rips off that ladylike pink right in the street and does herself up as a man. She says there's "no real reason" for her to dress as a woman anymore. There is a certain fleeting idea in the text that they are genderless if only because they're now monsters, but I don't know. I don't think it's just that for Gabrielle. She also cuts off all her hair. And, when choosing a sarcophagus in which to retire from the day (there are a few just lying around Lestat's bachelor pad), the narrative makes a point of saying that she does not choose the one with a figure of a woman on it, but the one with a figure of a knight with a sword. And then this:
She appeared to be dreaming as she ran her hands over the stone.
"By this hour," she said, "she might have already been laid out, your mother. And the room would be full of evil smells and
the smoke of hundreds of candles. Think how humiliating it is, death. Strangers would have taken off her clothes, bathed her,
dressed her – strangers seen her emaciated and defenseless in the final sleep."
[...]
She looked wan, cold all over. Sleepily, she drew something out of her pocket.
It was the golden scissor she'd taken from the lady's table in the faubourg St. Germain. Sparkling in the light of the torch like a bauble.
"No, Mother," I said. My own voice startled me. [...] The hurt in my heart stunned me.
Evil sound, the snipping, the shearing. Her hair fell down in great long locks on the floor.
Gabrielle-the-vampire distances herself in every way possible from Gabrielle-the-human. She doesn't say "I would have been dead already" when referring to the human death she would have had if Lestat hadn't intervened. She says, "your mother." Lestat though he was saving his mother, but his mother is effectively dead either way; he saved the person Gabrielle was in deep in her soul, her private self, and every time she reveals that person, it startles him. He calls her mother here for the first time since her death and I think in a lot of ways, this moment is his final realization that his mother is gone.
With her short hair, Lestat notices multiple times how much she looks like a boy. So, of course, he takes that as his cue to have a bloody makeout sesh before they retire for the day.
The next night, Lestat begins to respect her new gender identity in small ways – he chooses masculine jewelry for her to wear, which is kind of sweet. But despite the intimacies of their Night of Vampire Fun, Gabrielle is once again distant from him. She had been sitting still her entire life, trapped in a castle reading, and she wants to explore. She wants to dive into forests. She wants to experience everything previously denied her. And she is so cut off from who she once was that she's constantly puzzled by Lestat's ties to his human life – especially the insistence with which he cares for the people he once loved, like his boyfriend Nicki. Her indifference and lack of understanding terrifies Lestat. And I think once again how strange it is that Anne Rice writes such incredible women, because I sometimes get the feeling she doesn't like women very much. Does anyone else ever get that feeling? Perhaps it's only that Anne is so very worshipful of men that it throws me off. Either way, her female characters are fantastic.
"I cannot overcome this notion that I've died," she said. "That I am utterly cut off from all living creatures. I can taste, I can see,
I can feel. I can drink blood. But I am like something that cannot be seen, cannot affect things."
The women are so much better at being coldblooded killers!!!!!!!!!!! There's this entire scene where Lestat tries to explain why he has feelings about things and Gabrielle is so bemused, like she just does not get it at all. It's great. She cannot comprehend his weird human emotions when she has so much vampiring to do.
But then, in a scene that was echoed in the film version of Interview to express something entirely different, Gabrielle realizes that overnight her long hair has grown back and she SCREAMS. This is the most violent outpouring of emotion from her, I think, ever. Her hair growing back freaks her the fuck out in a way that, say, murder does not. She can scale buildings now and read thoughts and do everything short of fly, but her hair royally fucks with her. Now, this happens to Claudia in the movie and she loses it because she realizes so concretely that her body will never, ever change and she will always be a child physically. I think Claudia and Gabrielle are very similar in a lot of ways, and for Gabrielle it is a reminder that she can never be totally free from the woman she was, the Marquise. She tried to shed all of that baggage and then it sprang back on her overnight.
"Does nothing about it all...ever...frighten you?" she asked. Her voice was guttural and unfamiliar. "Does nothing...ever...stop you?" [...]
"I don't know," I whispered helplessly. "I don't see the point," I said. But I felt confused now. Again I told her to cut [her hair] each night
and to burn it. Simple.
"Yes, burn it," she sighed. "Otherwise it should fill all the rooms of the tower in time, shouldn't it? It would be like Rapunzel's hair in
the fairy tale. It would be like the gold that the miller's daughter had to spin from straw in the fairy tale of the mean dwarf, Rumplestiltskin."
"We write our own fairy tales, my love," I said. "The lesson in this is that nothing can destroy what you are now. Every wound will heal.
You are a goddess."
"And the goddess thirsts," she said.
I LOVE GABRIELLE SO MUCH.
My one holdup with this series is that I can never tell what is intentional on Anne Rice's part, what is accidental, and what is me seeing what I want to see. It seems too well put together in places to be an accident, but I also know as a writer that sometimes shit like that truly is subconsciously worked out without you realizing it. I have said before that I think Anne Rice is a pretty terrible person. She is definitely racist and has zero idea that she is. I would say she is often guilty of fetishizing queer men. I cannot fully extrapolate why I think she dislikes women, as I said it's just a vibe I get despite her admittedly incredible female characters. And she is a straight up pedo. Has anyone read her porn books? Are THOSE a psychological minefield or what. She sexualizes children and young teens and infantilizes adults in sexual situations, particularly women. She is very cavalier about rape in a way that is tragically commonplace with writers of the 70s and 80s. These are all things that I would love to discuss if anyone even cares. But I'm bringing it all up again because I find it so hard to reconcile all that nonsense with the stuff that is good in these books, and I really cannot tell when she is doing things on purpose. I just can't.
That aside, let us all bask in how amazing Gabrielle is and think about how good she probs looks in her old timey male drag and picture a young Catherine Deneuve as her, because.
