creative project

For my creative project I will be writing a piece of fan-fiction. One idea I currently enamored with is an alternate history set in the fictional world of Frankenstein, where Victor’s research on reanimating the living were not lost and there is a large population of the Creature’s ilk. But if it becomes obvious that I cannot produce anything worthwhile from said idea I might do a piece of fan-fiction on Interview with a Vampire, from the perspective of one of the vampires victims.
The passage that my idea about the Frankenstein fan-fiction came from is on page 98 of the novel and is written, “What I ask you is reasonable and moderate; I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself; the gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive, and it shall content me. It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless, and free from the misery I now feel.”
Out of all the available creative project options a few stood out to me. If I were a talented artist I would definitely have enjoyed to create a piece of visual art concerning one of the novels. I thought that the psychoanalysis was very interesting as well, but I have no background in psychiatry, and would most likely botch the psychobabble. I’d be interested to know how any multimedia projects were done in the past, it seems to me like a difficult project to pull off.
As to the written component of the creative project I believe I will be trying to accomplish a passing grade as well as a chilling what-if style alternate past where the creatures have become slaves and beggars living underneath the modern society. I’ll focus on architecture, religion, the supernatural, and the sense of the uncanny those who encounter the Creatures will experience in an effort to make the piece sound gothic.
I can already tell you what I best like about this project and that is the idea. Sadly, once pulled out of its theoretical and hypothetical realm, this idea will become marred, tainted, and stained by the grim realities of my writing capability and inability to make any deadlines.
Speaking of, question five of the written component asks “How did you get your project done? Did you wait until almost the last minute and then create it all at once? Did you do extensive revising, or did you find that your first draft was fairly clear and complete already?” The initial two sentences scream to me the word ‘trap’. Although you could be subconsciously impressed by the quality of a work started and finished hours before it is due, some semblance of coherency while barely making it to the desired length would be the impressing features, I can’t help but feel as though you are looking for a specific answer to this question.

Benefiel’s Blood Relations: The Gothic Perversion of The Nuclear Family in Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire

Benefiel’s Blood Relations: The Gothic Perversion of The Nuclear Family in Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire explains the vampire’s transformation from a hunted monster to drive the plot forward from shadowy castles to deeper characters capable of eliciting sympathy. The vampire has been a vehicle for social commentary for as long as it has existed, with the foreigner, and the homosexual in the past and now more contemporary topics like drug addiction, AIDS, and the selfishness and narcissism of the baby boomer generation.
On page three, Benefiel writes, “In the bulk of vampire fiction, a master vampire serves as father, mother, and husband, while other younger vampires serve as children/lovers”. The conventions of the nuclear family are queered by vampirism, with the typical relationships blurred. The older vampire acts as the father, mother, and husband, but also as a teacher to the younger vampires. The incestuous familial relationships between vampire families creates a feeling of the uncanny. In addition to the vampire acting as mother and father, the vampire is bisexual or pan gendered, feeding off of men and women whenever they see fit.
On page four of the paper Benefiel states that, “Within the family, after its creation, there is no sexual contact-normal or otherwise-between the members”. I thought that when Lestat took Claudia out hunting it was more or less a sexual act. The act of sex is described as a pale shadow to killing, so to share in the kill would be very intimate and passionate. Louis is the prude of the family, refusing Claudia’s requests to come kill with her, instead Louis kills in solitude, out of necessity and not pleasure. In addition to the homoerotic overtones when Louis is turned, Lestat seems drawn to Louis consistently after they part ways. To me, Lestat seemed to be following Claudia and Louis to England to get his revenge on Claudia but also to reclaim Louis. Lestat shouts his name in the theatre of the vampires and tells him he has something to tell him. At the end of the book Lestat is a tottering old senile, begging Louis to stay and help him, a request that Louis refuses. Without having sex, the two main male vampires seem to treat each other like jilted lovers from time to time. The time and proximity they share makes us wonder how close they really are.
On page 9 of the readings Benefiel describes Claudia as a rebellious teen. The closeness to the typical nuclear family and its roles and tropes causes Rice’s family to be a kind of parody. Claudia wishes for her own coffin to sleep in and she removes herself more from the family, evading Lestat for weeks despite them living together. The way the vampire family follows the conventional family ideas and aspects while mixing them to ultimately queer the traditional values ascribed to them is how the novel makes commentary on today’s social structure.

After Louis and Claudia escape Lestat in their burning home they board a ship for Europe. On the way they muse as to how Lestat had survived Claudia’s poisoning and stabbing. “But how could he have survived? I asked her. You saw him, you know what became of him.” (162) Recounting how Lestat might have survived the night he was dumped into the swamp, Claudia attributes Lestat’s vivacity with his tenacity or a will to live. Louis rejects this conclusion, instead offering, “…perhaps he was incapable of dying…perhaps he is, and we are…truly immortal?” To Louis, the immortality vampirism offers is a very religious thing, and the life that he has gained is a curse.
When confronted with the thought of Lestat being burned to death, Louis thinks that the will to live had nothing to do with Lestat’s survival. He instead feels that to Lestat there was no recourse. There is no choice for a vampire when it comes to death. The sun and earth reject them as agents of Satan. Louis feels that a vampire burned still lives, that the body has been more or less destroyed but that perhaps the vampire remains conscious forever.
When Louis first drinks the blood of another human he does not describe the physical beauty of the runaway slave, nor does he comment on his pressing hunger for blood. When Louis drinks blood for the first time, all else vanishes “and there came the beating of the drum again, which was the drumbeat of his heart-only this time it beat in perfect rhythm with the drumbeat of my own heart, the two resounding in every fiber of my being” (30). The way Louis describes the heart of his victim I think that the life of a vampire is more closely tied to the heart of its victim then its blood.
For many of the vampires in the book interview with a vampire, life itself means much more then the beating of another’s heart. When Louis first feels and then kills a rat or mouse he senses the creature and it’s life force. Blood itself does not fuel vampires, because blood from the dead is deadly and unpleasant and blood taken out of the body and put in a wine glass soon becomes cold and unpleasant. The life force itself seems to be what vampires feed off of, and blood then is vessel for it.
Lestat kills young rich women and young men at the prime of their life. I couldn’t decide if this destructive tendency of killing people at their pinnacle was another way Lestat choose to get revenge on the world or if all vampires choose to kill the young and beautiful for the pleasure of snuffing out life. The animals that Louis kills are smaller then humans but no vampire makes any attempt to kill horses or cows instead of their regular human kills. I think that this is because the amount of blood has little to do with the amount sustenance drawn from a victim. That is why an animal would never be as pleasing to the palette of a vampire opposed to a human. The life of an animal is a pale comparison to the life of a human.

Interview with a vampire

In Interview with a Vampire I was somewhat perplexed by the character of Lestat. He enters into the story a mystery, and he seems to remain one. Louis is the stories narrator, and so we get to see every single occurrence in his life. Claudia is found as a child, and while her reasoning and perceptions are complex and unreadable at times, we are allowed to see her life from it’s beginning to end, without any gaps. Lestat on the other hand is a character throughout the novel and we hardly ever gain insight to his motives or thinking.
Louise constantly derides Lestat as a terrible teacher, one who failed to fully explain the senses of a vampire and focused only on the love of killing others. Throughout the novel we are told again and again that Lestat knows nothing of vampires origins or powers. But by threatening Claudia and Louise with the possibility of some critical knowledge he is able to keep them under his power for decades.
Most puzzling is Lestat’s past. His blind father asks forgiveness for burning several of his son’s books so that he could not go to school, but how Lestat is transformed into a vampire is never explained. Later when Claudia and Louise find Armand and his group of vampires, it is reviled that Lestat had been one of several vampires under one master. But whether Lestat killed his Master or not remains mere heresy.
Lestat remains a mystery throughout the book. In the first half of the book he acts violent and vengeful in nature interspaced with bouts of civility and what could be love. On page 55 Lestat refuses to forgive his father saying, “For what! Taking me out of school!” he threw up his hand in desperation “Damn him! Kill him!” After Claudia poisons and stabs Lestat he manages to survive, though the ordeal is never told. After that Lestat is left in New Orleans for years, only recurring to help kill Claudia, after which he seems desperate to tell Louise something that the readers never find out. Finally at the end of the book Lestat eats only cats and babies, frightened of sirens. He tells Louis “Louis, I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it, Help me, Louis, stay with me.” Lestat acquires another young vampire for a slave, and ages and degenerates so much, but the stories behind these things we never learn.

When I read the literary criticism “The Occidental Tourist” I found myself agreeing with the majority of Arata’s points. On page 463 Arata notes on how Stoker links vampires to military conquest and the rise and fall of empires. Van Hellsing provides this insight to the behaviors of vampires, “He have follow the wake of the berserker Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, and the Magyar.” This makes perfect sense to me. The supernatural creature that is the vampire has nothing to fear when it comes to men’s rifles or swords. The battlefield would be the perfect environment for the vampire. There would be scores of bloodied and dying bodies; with so many deaths a few paler corpses with pricks in their necks would go completely unnoticed. Additionally the vampire could reap the spoils of war, such as gold, land, and titles for fighting for his country.

With Dracula’s history in such a war-torn area, it is no surprise he was able to amass such a fortune and fortify himself so steadfastly into the country. Before Dracula moved to England he imprisoned Johnathan Harker to learn the subtle mannerisms of a British man, and Dracula also purchased and studied any written material on his intended land of conquest. On page 26 of the novel Dracula explains that ‘I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he sees me, or pause in his speaking if he hear my words, to say, “Ha, ha! A stranger!’ Dracula lost the defenses of his castle that included the forest full of wolf minions and the heavily defended castle for the anonymity of the “teeming masses”.
Dracula is portrayed as not only a bloodthirsty vampire but also as a Szekely warrior. The reasoning behind Dracula’s move from his homeland to a new place with potential danger was made much clearer after Arata stresses the conqueror spirit in Dracula. Dracula had been living in his castle for centuries and the allure of Britain was too much for him. Dracula is a conqueror of the lands, men, and women. He is defined through the immense power he wields wherever he goes. The newness of Dracula’s three wives had worn off, children were easy prey, so it is understandable that Dracula wanted a challenge.
Victorians view that Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster were capable of rearing hordes of demonic offspring seem to point to a xenophobic undercurrent in the thoughts. In Frankenstein the monster wanted a wife created the same as him to be his companion, but Dracula takes these thoughts a step farther through Dracula’s conquest and defilement of English women. Throughout the novel women seem to serve as the main battlefield for Dracula and the Victorian men. Each male character gives his own blood trying to save the life of Lucy as she is being fed upon and later Mina is in constant danger of being taken by the Count. I agreed with Aratathat the role of women in the novel was that of life givers, the means to which the race was continued.