Interview With The Vampire Abuse

Abuse and Death in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire

A young child cries while an abusive alcoholic father screams at a scared mother. Another family griefs the loss of their child and fails to come to terms with the inevitability of death. Both of these circumstances are all too common in modern day life. One novel, Interview with the Vampire, addresses these situations in a way that helped author Anne Rice come to terms with her own alcoholic nature and get past the death of her first born child. In the novel Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice condemns abusive relationships and exposes the gruesomeness of an inevitable death.

In author Anne Rice’s own life, abuse having to do with alcohol was a very common theme. From an early age her own mother was an alcoholic and would often get drunk in her room and start destroying things such as lighting the bed on fire (Gale). Lestat can be seen as a reflection of Rice’s mother as just as he demands that Claudia and Louis act a certain way, “Rice’s mother demanded perfection from her children, and her children often

Louis consistently shows that he tries to ignore the abuse and deny that anything is wrong out of fear. At one point he attempts to get Claudia to not go after Lestat because he is afraid of his abuser and believes that confrontation will just make everything worse:

“‘Then listen to me Claudia, I beg you,’ I whispered, holding her, pricked suddenly by a nearby collection of whispers, the slow, rising articulation of human speech over mingled sounds of the night, ‘He’ll destroy you if you try to kill him. There is no way you can do such a thing for sure. You don’t know how. And pitting yourself against him you’ll lose everything. Claudia, I can’t bear this.’” (Rice 125)

Louis is reluctant to leave Lestat for the first half of the novel and as a victim of abuse this goes right along with a victim's reluctance to leave abusers (Burke