Asexual Vampires?

 

I recently read Ell Huang's excellent essay Interview with the Vampire and Asexual Loneliness In it, Ell does an asexual reading of all versions of Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice - the book, film and recent TV series - talking about how the loneliness of Rice's vampires speaks to the asexual experience. 

I don't intend to reiterate all the points Ell makes (you can read the essay yourself). But there were many aspects that resonated with me, even though Ell is aromantic, single and childfree, and I am heteroromantic, married and a mother. Some of the points that grabbed me most stongly were:

• Queer Time. The idea that queer folk typically discover themselves and come of age later in life than non-queers. Or maybe we feel ourselves in a perpetual coming-of-age, a perpetual adolescence.
• Feeling like a child ("girl" always seems more fitting a word for myself than "woman" although I an currently 51) but not wanting to be infantalised.
• The vampires don't have a human sex-drive, but have other ways of experiencing love, family, ecstasy etc.
• Searcihng for others like yourself, but never really finding anyone the same.

After reading the essay, I decided to reread the book to see if it spoke to me in a new way. Here's what I discovered.

Warning: the next part of the blog will contain spoilers for Interview with the Vampire and Asexual Fairy Tales.

It also contains some references to sexual intercourse, aphobia, foetuses and gore.

The Glass Coffin by Anna Hopkinson

Sleeping Beauty

The first time the protagonist Louis has to sleep in a coffin as a vampire, he takes refuge in a comforting place. "I opened the door of my brother's oratory, shoving back the roses and thorns which had almost sealed it, and set the coffin on the stone floor before the priedieu." [1] This immediately took me to the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, and the prince cutting his way through the thorns and roses to enter the castle and wake the sleepers.

It then occured to me (how could I have missed it?) that there is correlation with the ageless vampire sleeping a coffin, and the sleeping beauties in glass coffins I have written about in my Asexual Fairy Tales books. For example, "The Glass Coffin" (Brothers Grimm), "Zellandine and Troylus" (medieval French romance) And in particular...

The Man Without Desire by Anna Hopkinson

The Man Without Desire

If you have not read it, "The Man Without Desire" is based on a silent film of 1923 starring Ivor Novello, written by director Adrian Brunel from an idea by Irish playwright Monckton Hoffe. It tells of a man - Venetian Count Vittorio Dandolo - from the 18th century, who seeks sanctuary by submitting to an experiment. He will go into suspended animation in a glass coffin, sleeping without ageing. But he is warned, "Your body will live but your soul will pay the price. Life may seem empty, bland, colourless. It is even possible that you may find yourself without desire of any kind." [2] When Vittorio awakes in the 20th century, this is indeed the case, and it drives him to despair.

This is mirrored in Interview with The Vampire. Louis's story begins in the 18th century, when he is made a vampire by Lestat, and follows him through the 19th century into the 20th. A cold detatchment from life is the eventual result. Armand - the oldest living vampire - tells Louis, "One evening a vampire rises and realises what he has feared perhaps for decades, that he simply wants no more of life at any cost. That whatever style or fashion or shape of existence made immortality attractive to him has been swept off the face of the earth." [3] And we see this happen with Lestat towards the end of the book. He can no longer bear to even go outside in the 20th century. Meanwhile, Louis has lost all his former vitality - love, longing, questioning - and feels nothing.

When I retold "The Man Without Desire" it was because I percieved asexual themes in it. While the story is problematic in suggesting that a lack of all desire (including sexual) is bad; if we imagine that Vittorio was asexual all along, there is much for a romantic ace to relate to: in the beauty and romance (in the broader sense) of the 18th century world; in Vittorio's preservation of his inviolate self in the glass coffin;  and in the discomfort of being thrust into a world where sex is being pushed to the forefront while romance is fast retreating. 

Asexual Vampires?

In her essay on Interview with the Vampire, Ell Huang says, "Interestingly, this book has simultaneously some of the gayest and most asexual lines I have ever read." We are probably more familiar with the vampire as a gay, lesbian or bisexual trope. Sacha Coward covers this well in his book Queer as Folklore (2024) in which he discusses the sexuality of Lord Byron and Bram Stoker, and examines Saphhic vampiric figures such as Lilith and Carmilla. 

But as Ell Huang points out - despite the queer sexual imagery that is all over Interview with the Vampire - the vampires in the book are essentially asexual. They don't feel sexual desire. For them, ecstasy is found in the kill, in drinking someone's blood and feeling the beat of their heart. And the characters are subject to taunts similar to the "compulsary sexuality" aces are often faced with. "The woman on the settee with him was already teasing about his kisses, his coldness, his lack of desire for her."[4]

I have written about non-sexual ecstasy and desire in a previous blog, in which I compare my retelling of "Zellandine and Troylus" with the ecstacy of Saint Teresa of Avila, and discuss the ace desire to have children with a partner without having to consciously have sex.

And I realised that I have revisited this theme in More Asexual Fairy Tales using the vampiric figure of the manananggal or penanggalan from the folklore of Southeast Asia and Latin America. In folklore, this type of creature typically drinks menstrual blood or draws foetuses from pregnant women. Again, the vampiric creatures don't have sex. (They don't even have a body; they're just a head and some organs). We could say they get children another way.

In my take on "The Wife with the Flying Head", every time the husband and wife try to make love, the wife's head detatches and she flies around as a mananggal:

"You did it again," said the husband the next morning... "Are you sure you love me?"

"Yes... I just can't seem to feel any... Well, couldn't you just get it on while I'm flying about? That would be a good solution."

The husband leapt out of bed. "I'm not doing it with a headless corpse! What do you take me for?"

"Sorry," said the wife. "That sounded better in my head. No pun intended." [5]

In this story (and this was in the Salvadorian original) the wife gets children, not by sucking feotuses out of other women, but by becoming a tree whose fruits become hundreds of tiny children.

In Interview with the Vampire, Louis gets a child by making a child-vampire, Claudia. This becomes extremely problematic, as Ell Huang discusses in her essay, and it is she whose loneliness is the most painful.

Conclusion

This has been a fascinating journey for me. I'm not someone who revels in horror, yet I see my own writing reflected back at me in many of the themes from Interview with the Vampire. (More than I have covered in this blog). 

If you're reading this and have read both Interview with the Vampire and Asexual Fairy Tales, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

[1] Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire, 1976. (London: Hachette, 2008 edition, p.39)

[2] Elizabeth Hopkinson, Asexual Fairy Tales. (Bristol: SilverWood Books, 2019, p.108)

[3] Interview with the Vampire p.306

[4] Interview with the Vampire p.86

[5] Elizabeth Hopkinson, More Asexual Fairy Tales. (Bristol: SilverWood Books, 2022, p.84