Something that strikes me as particularly admirable about rice’s novels is that despite the fact that sexual violence is a pervasive undercurrent throughout, she seems to very deliberately avoid depicting women as victims. I think this is an angle for which we should read iwtv partially independently of the rest of the series, as the cases of claudia and louis are a bit more complicated.
Sexual violence exists both before and at the threshold of vampiric transformation, and while it changes form afterwards, it is present nevertheless there as well. However, the complexity of rice’s dialectic of gender and sexual violence means that the experience of sexual violence falls loosely along lines of gender.
first it’s worth isolating how rice represents gender through the temporality of vampiric transformation. For this, I think gabrielle and armand are the two most interesting and productive case studies. I’ve described gabrielle’s transformation before as someone who has never had experience other than traumatic gendering being violently brought into a world where gender is more or less irrelevant. I believe @pissbataille has spoken before about the traumatic gendering of gabrielle’s mortal life, in so many words. Her gender (obviously) determines her life trajectory, in that she’s married off and brought from italy to france, to a husband who is strongly implied to be abusive. Reproduction and reproductive labor is also represented as traumatic: she compares it to lestat as being as fundamentally an isolating and violent experience as his encounter with the wolves. That her other sons reproduce their father’s patriarchal vulgarity is made worse by the fact that they were produced from her body. That most of her children have died is made worse by the fact that they were produced from her body. Etc.
despite the fact that vampirism fundamentally constitutes a loss of bodily autonomy (more on this later); for gabrielle, she gains more than she loses- she puts on men’s clothes (and I want to be really careful in making clear that this does not at all reject or diminish a trans reading) not as an expression of an internal sense of self, but rather in celebration of the fact that vampirism allows her to move through the world as a man- i.e., no longer in fear of gendered sexual violence. Merrick in merrick and mona in blackwood farm have very similar experiences (this isn’t reflected as obviously in their gender presentation, but I think that mona’s choice of more provocative clothing than she wore as a mortal is comparable). This is why gabrielle is so upset that her hair has grown back- it indicates to her that her new ability to control over how her own body presents her to the world is not as absolute or unconditional as she would have liked.
Essentially, gabrielle experiences the degendering that comes of vampiric transformation as liberatory, and this is based in the fact that she was violently gendered as a woman before transformation. In contrast, armand experiences transformation as a way of reifying the complex gendering he experiences as an adolescent. As he tells us at the beginning of the vampire armand, children exist in a de- (or perhaps more accurately pre-)gendered state, one which he longs to escape but cannot. While he’s living at the palazzo, marius insists that he should reach adulthood before transformation, and he insists that he already has, contrary to how he’s viewed by others. We should read armand’s gender and sexual transformation through the practice of pederasty, in which the penetration of a boy is an initiatory practice that signals his readiness to become a man, and his penetration of others as the end point of his growth into manhood. For armand, this is mirrored in returning to the brothels as a client after having had sexual acts performed upon him as a child. Marius attempts to guide armand in becoming a man, but transforming him on his deathbed as an adolescent prevents him from ever reaching that point. (this also facilitates armand’s intense identification with claudia, since both are inscribed far more substantially by their physical youth than by the supposed gender they occupy/potential to grow up into thereof)
Thus, vampiric transformation exists as a force that sort of evens out gendered experiences diegetically within the world of the text. Returning to sexual violence, however, its manifestation before/during/after the process of transformation exists in a complex dialectic with gender as it is represented.
The case of lestat is perhaps the best example for how vampiric transformation functions as a stand-in for rape. In terms of the sequence of events, lestat is abducted from his home and brought to magnus’ lair, which recalls the castle of bluebeard (forgive me for being more familiar with the opera than the original myth). Lestat’s rejected doubles both suggest that magnus’ fixation on lestat has a strong erotic component, and recall bluebeard’s brides thereby lending to the sequence a particularly sexual component. The physical closeness, the erotic rapture of the blood swoon is clearly, then, a forced consummation, a marital rape. In terms of narrative perspective, lestat oscillates wildly within the extremes of psychosomatic experience throughout this sequence, incapable of maintaining anything close to the level of narrative objectivity of the rest of the novel. The claustrophobic closeness of his narrative voice makes it clear that his experience is one of sexual trauma and rape. Finally, there’s the fact that the bite stands in for sexual intercourse for vampires, and therefore nonconsensual biting stands in for nonconsensual sex. The maker is thus both father, as he penetrates the victim with the phallic object of his fangs, and mother, as the lifegiving substance of his body brings the fledgling into being. Lestat is then, essentially, simultaneously raped and a child borne of rape.
In the case of armand, vampiric transformation simultaneously stands in for a traumatic sexual encounter, reiterates to the point of rewriting previous traumatic sexual encounters, and replaces an instance of attempted rape. The stages of armand’s sexual initiation is of particular scholarly interest to me well beyond the scope of a tumblr post that is already hitting 1k words long, so I will touch on it cursorily. Armand experiences three sexual transformations as a mortal child: first, when he is stolen from the monastery which operates on a level of platonic mimesis wherein the world exists in imitation of the inscribed divine image and brought to the brothel, where he a) presumably loses his virginity and b) is localized in the same psychosomatic space as lestat goes into as his body is inscribed by the sexual acts performed upon him. this is reiterated/reversed in vampiric transformation as he is a) brought into the vampires’ concern for mimesis and b) returned to kyiv first in his vision and then in reality. Second, marius brings him home and claims him physically by pleasuring him in the bathtub, as well as nominally by referring to him as his ‘only child’ and renaming him amadeo. This second phase both rewrites kin relations (marius replaces ivan as father) and redefines kin relations (a father can have sexual relations with his son). Patriarchal hierarchy is later further perturbed (‘you gave me your blood and it made you my slave). The disruption of the incest taboo in this second stage is reiterated/reversed by armand’s birth into vampiric androgyny. Because vampires don’t procreate, the relation of the heterosexual incest taboo to procreation and inheritance no longer applies; and transformation prevents him from becoming fully male/a man regardless. The third stage of initiation happens when marius sends armand back to the brothels, during which time he meets harlech, whose attempted rape is replaced by vampiric transformation as fangs replace the sword as the phallic object and blood replaces poison replaces ejaculate as the transforming and productive substance.
Thus, vampiric transformation and existence in many cases functions as a site where sexual trauma is reproduced. To vastly oversimplify it, transformation is a site of interrogating past rape in the case of armand. Transformation is a simultaneous reproduction of rape in the case of lestat. Transformation functions as protection from future rape in the case of gabrielle and minor female vampire characters later in the series. I have not touched on claudia because I think she is a very particular case, and the dynamics of age/gender/CSA/transformation in iwtv specifically are a little bit different and I will probably make another post about her soon :) but it’s been remarked upon on my blog by myself and my followers how what is particularly striking about rice’s commentary on sexual trauma is how its nuance and complexity creates such an empathetic representation, and the complexity of the gender dialectic within that conversation is a big part of that.
