Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire - a Gothic Lolita

Part of the great acclaim for Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) is due to the way she renews the vampire story by reinforcing the traditional erotic dimension and, as a result of this, the way she examines the theme of homosexuality already present in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). However, this essay shows that Rice’s novel stands in much closer relation to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) than to Dracula and that pedophilia, not homosexuality, is the facet of sexuality which here first and foremost comes into focus. Through a comparison between Interview with the Vampire and Lolita emerges a surprising coherence on the levels of plot and characterization, which in itself is of importance for our understanding of Rice’s novel as well as Lolita, but it is also interesting to note to what degree these two novels share a world of concepts and ideas common to actual pedophiles. Combined with our knowledge of Anne Rice’s peculiar public statements, this analysis of Interview with the Vampire also suggests a more focused reading of a number of Rice’s other novels