#at rue royale

[vividxp]

If I could figure out how to create a poll I’d create one asking folks what they thought about Louis’s money situation on the show. 

I personally think he’s pretty well off on that front. But in one of my previous posts, someone in the replies raised the notion that part of the reason why Louis didn’t leave Lestat post ep 5 could be for financial reasons. So I was curious as to what other people think.

[lizardkingeliot]

It’s my brother’s funeral.

[prettysweetprettysweet]

staring long and hard at these photos like they might eventually tell me what sort of emotional catharsis im in for

[brotherconstant]

So, you're bouncing around ideas, and then it all clicks into place. It's a two person play in Season 1 that becomes a three-person play. 

[sofipitch]

Louis really finished the book interview with "And I sure hope nothing bad happens to Lestat who lives on 1132 Rue Royale the house with the overgrown garden, rusting balconies, and rotting roof. Smells like dead animals you can't miss it"

[kafkasapartment]

Rue Royale, 1953. Frank Welch. Gelatin silver.

[pynkhues]

I would LOVE to read your analysis of louis as byronic hero as apposed to his reading as gothic heroine. lots of the latter and zero of the former in the fandom.

Sure! Mmm, okay, so –

What are we talking about when we talk about Gothic Heroes?  

When we talk about gothic heroes, we’re really talking about three pretty different character archetypes. All three are vital to the genre, but some are more popular in certain subgenres i.e. your Prometheus Hero may be more common in gothic horror, whereas your Byronic Hero might be more likely to be found in gothic romance. That’s not to say they’re exclusive to those subgenres at all, and there is an argument that these archetypes themselves are gendered (in many ways, I think people confuse Anne being an author of the female gothic with Louis being a gothic heroine, but I’ll get into that later), but this is also not necessarily something that’s exclusive.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself, haha, so the three gothic hero archetypes are:

Milton’s Satan who is the classic gothic hero-villain. You can probably guess from the name, but he was originated in John Milton’s 1667 poem, Paradise Lost. He is God’s favourite angel, but God is forced to cast him out of heaven when he rebels against him. As an archetype, he’s a man pretty much defined by his pride, vanity and self-love, usually fucks his way through whatever book or poem he’s in, has a perverted, incestuous family, and a desire to corrupt other people. He’s also defined as being “too weak to choose what is moral and right, and instead chooses what is pleasurable only to him” and his greatest character flaw, in spite of all The Horrors, is that he’s usually easily misguided or led astray. (I would argue that Lestat fits into this archetype pretty neatly, but that’s a whole other post.)

Prometheus who was established as a gothic archetype by Mary Shelley with Frankenstein in 1818. Your Prometheus Hero is basically represented by the quest for knowledge and the overreach of that quest to bring on unintended consequences. He’s tied, of course, to the Prometheus of Greek myth, so you can get elements of that in this character design too in that he can be devious or a trickster, but the most important part of him is that he is split between his extreme intelligence and his sense of rebellion, and that his sense of rebellion and boundary pushing overtakes his intelligence and basically leads to All The Gothic Horrors.

And the Byronic Hero, who as the name implies, was both created by and inspired by the romantic poet, Lord Byron in his semi-autobiographical poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage which was published between 1812-1818. The archetype is kind of an idealized version of himself, and as historian and critic Lord Macaulay wrote, the character is “a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection.” Adding to that, he’s often called ‘the gloomy egoist’ as a protagonist type, hates society, is often self-destructive and lives either exiled or in a self-exile, and is a stalwart of gothic literature, but especially gothic romance. Interestingly too, in his most iconic depictions he’s often a) darkly featured and/or not white (Heathcliff being the most obvious example of this given Emily Bronte clearly writes him as either Black or South Asian), and b) is often used to explore queer identity, with Byron himself having been bisexual.

Okay, but what about the Gothic Heroine?

Gothic heroines are less delineated and have had more of an evolution over time, which makes sense, given women have consistently been the main audience of gothic literature and have frequently been the most influential writers of the genre too. The gothic genre sort of ‘officially’ started with Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto and Isabella is largely regarded as the first gothic heroine and the foundation of the archetype, and the book opens even with one of the key defining traits – an innocent, chaste woman without the protection of a family being pursued and persecuted by a man on the rampage.

The gothic heroine was, for years, defined by her lack of agency. She was innocent, chaste, beautiful, curious, plagued by tragedy and often, ultimately, tragic. Isabella survives in The Castle of Otranto, but she’s one of the lucky ones – Cathy dies in Wuthering Heights, Sybil dies in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Justine and Elizabeth both die in Frankenstein, Mina survives in Dracula, but Lucy doesn’t. There’s an argument frequently posited that the gothic genre was, and is, about dead women and the men who mourn them, and Interview with the Vampire certainly lends itself to that pretty neatly.

Of course, the genre has evolved, and in particular by the late 1800s, there was a notable shift in how the Gothic Heroine was depicted. The house became a place of imprisonment where they were further constrained and disempowered, she was infantilized and pathologized and diagnosed as hysterical, and as Avril Horner puts it in her excellent paper, Women, Power and Conflict: the Gothic heroine and ‘Chocolate-box Gothic’, gothic literature of this era “explores “the constraints enforced [by] a patriarchal society that is becoming increasingly nervous about the demands of the ‘New Woman’.”

This was an era where marriage was increasingly understood in feminist circles to be a civil death where women were further subjugated and became the property of their husbands. This was explored through gothic literature as the domestic space evolved into a symbol of patriarchal control in the Female Gothic.

Female Gothic vs Male Gothic

Because here’s the thing – the female gothic and the male gothic are generally understood to be two different subgenres of gothic literature.

While there are plenty of arguments as to what this entails, the basics is that the male gothic is written by men, and usually features graphic horror, rape and the masculine domination of women and often utilises the invasion of women’s spaces as a symbol of further penetrating their bodies, while the female gothic is written by women, and usually features graphic terror, as opposed to horror, while delving more specifically into gender politics. More than that though, its heroines are usually victimized, virginial and powerless while being pursued by villainous men.

The Female Gothic as a genre is also specifically interested in the passage from girlhood to female maturity, and does view the house as a place of entrapment, but she is usually suddenly “threatened with imprisonment in a castle or a great house under the control of a powerful male figure who gave her no chance to escape.”

That’s not Louis’ arc, that’s Claudia’s arc twice over, first with the house at Rue Royale, then with the Paris Coven, and Lestat and Armand aren’t the only powerful male figures who imprison her.

Claudia as the Gothic Heroine

Claudia in many ways is the absolute embodiment of the classic gothic heroine. Even the moment of their meeting is a product of Louis’ Byronic heroism – his act of implacable revenge against the Alderman Fenwick which prompts the rioting that almost kills her. She’s a victim of Louis’ monstrousness before they’ve even met, and while he saves her, he arguably does something worse in trapping her in the house with both himself and Lestat, holding her in an ever-virginal, ever-chaste eternal girlhood, playing into Lestat’s Milton-Satan by enhancing the perversion of family and ultimately infantilizing her out of his own desire for familial closeness.

Claudia has no family protection before Louis and Lestat – a staple of the gothic heroine – she is completely dependent on them in her actual girlhood, and again in adulthood, never developing the strength to be able to turn a companion, to say nothing about the sly lines here and there that further diminish and pathologise her (Lestat calling her histrionic, Louis making her out to be a burden, etc.). This is all further compounded again with the Coven, and when the tragedy of her life ultimately leads to the tragedy of her death.  

Louis as the Byronic Hero

Not to start with a quote, but here’s one from The Literary Icon of the Byronic Hero and its Reincarnation in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights:

“Generally speaking, the Byronic hero exhibits several particular characteristics. He does not possess heroic virtues in the usual, traditional sense. He is a well-educated, intelligent and sophisticated young man, sometimes a nobleman by birth, who at the same time manifests signs of rebellion against all fundamental values and moral codes of the society. Despite his obvious charm and attractiveness, the Byronic hero often shows a great deal of disrespect for any figure of authority. He was considered "the supreme embodiment [...] standing not only against a dehumanized system of labor but also against traditionally repressive religious, social, and familial institutions" (Moglen, 1976: 28).

The Byronic hero is usually a social outcast, a wanderer, or is in exile of some kind, one imposed upon him by some external forces or self-imposed. He also shows an obvious tendency to be arrogant, cunning, cynical, and unrepentant for his faults. He often indulges himself in self destructive activities that bring him to the point of nihilism resulting in his rebellion against life itself. He is hypersensitive, melancholic, introspective, emotionally conflicted, but at the same time mysterious, charismatic, seductive and sexually attractive.”

Louis as he exists in the show to me is pretty much all of those things, and I think to argue that he’s a gothic heroine not only diminishes Claudia’s arc, but robs Louis of his agency within his own story. Louis chooses Lestat, over and over again, he’s not imprisoned by the monster in the domestic sphere, he is one of the monsters who’s controlling the household, including making decisions of when they bring a child into it and when Lestat gets to live in it – he wanted to be turned, he wanted to live with Lestat in Rue Royale, and while there are certainly arguments to be made about their power dynamic within the household in the NOLA era, importantly Louis actually gained social power through his marriage to Lestat, particularly through The Azaelia, he didn’t lose it in the way that’s vital to the story of the gothic heroine.

Daniel Hart even said it in a recent twitter thread about Long Face, but there is an element of Lestat and Louis’ relationship that is transactional, and to me, for that to exist, they both have to have a degree of control over their circumstances and choices in order to negotiate those transactions. Claudia is the one who can’t, she’s the one who’s treated effectively as property, and she’s the one who lacks control over her circumstances.

While you could perhaps argue the constraints of the apartment in Dubai lend more to the gothic heroine archetype, I’d argue it as furthering the Byronic trope again by being representative both of Louis’ self-destruction and self-imposed exile. As Jacob has said a few times, Louis does seem to have known to a degree that Armand was involved in Claudia’s death on some level, and it’s that guilt and misery that has him allowing Armand his degree of control. The fact that Louis was able to leave Armand as easily and as definitively as he was I think demonstrates that distinction too – after all, to compare that ending to Claudia’s multiple attempts to leave the confines of the patriarchal house, both in Rue Royale and Paris, which were punished at every turn – first by her rape, then by Lestat dragging her back off the train, and then by the Coven orchestrating her murder.

Louis gets to leave because Louis can leave, he has both the social and narrative power to, and the fact that he does is, to me, completely at odds with the gothic heroine. Louis can, and does advocate for himself, Louis is proud, moody, cynical. Defiance is a key part of his character, just as his exile from NOLA society due to his race, and his chosen rejection of vampire society in Paris, is. He’s intelligent and sophisticated, travels the world, and has misery in his heart, guilt that eats him up, and self-destructive tendencies. That’s a Byronic Hero, baby!  

[armandsfangs]

Devil's Minion is such a good ship name why isn't there a cooler name for loustat like Lion du Lac or the Rue Royals

[divorceblogger]

Interview with the Vampire / Nona the Ninth

[bandydear]

I think the sad thing about the Rue Royale family is that they really are operating the best that they can considering everyone’s circumstances.

Take Claudia for example: She’s a 14 year-old orphan who has never ever been loved. She was abused from the moment she could crawl by her aunt, exposed to creepy uncles at the boarding house, and has had 0 friends. A goose egg. Louis and Lestat were the first people. Ever. To love her. The only people who would care if she died. And they loved her. They poured all the devotion that bounced off each other’s defence mechanisms onto The Child.

So she’s a spoiled teenage apex predator who has had zero socialization her own age trapped in eternal homeschooling with BPD The Clown and the vampire embodiment of self-loathing. She was never going to be Normal. The fact that she grows up to be so socially capable is really a testament to her willpower.

And they’re fucking trying to raise her right too! Lestat’s parents did not give a shit about him. If he wasn’t being abused he was being neglected. Beatings, withholding food, withholding love*, he never learned how to read! So he feeds Claudia, he teaches her to drive, to play chess, to play piano—all the things he is proud of. All that nourishes his soul he gives to Claudia. He gives her a priceless amulet all while thinking she’s impermanent. That she won’t last.

And then there’s Louis. Louis who always had the expectations of “carrying the family line”. Louis who was told to marry a woman named Hazel by Paul the moment before he died. Louis, whose familial and social rejection for what he is (in layers) sent him spinning out in self-destruction and what he find on the brink of annihilation was Claudia. His beautiful daughter. She’s the embodiment of all his hopes and dreams. Only child to all the expectations of an eldest child. He brings her to the lake his dad took him and Paul to when he was a child and they catch fireflies. He does her hair and he dresses her like the little rich girl he’s always wanted to parade around at church.

But Claudia is a person, not a doll.

And Louis is still caught up in the living drama of his family. Louis spends Claudia’s entire life mourning the mortal man he never was. He wants to make his mother proud. He wants her forgiveness for Paul. He wants to be there for his sister and her family, and he wants to be a married man with a child of his own. His war with his own nature extends to his family. He cannot accept being a vampire the same way his mother never accepted his queerness. And, just like his mother, he withdraws love as punishment when his family does not follow his rules. He cannot accept a daughter with sadistic house cat tendencies, and he can’t accept the horny Shakespearean menace he married. He punishes Lestat when Claudia goes off to college (typical empty nester behaviour) and he punishes Claudia when she starts having a life outside of him in Paris.

And yet! They were happy! For years! Happy until what was always going to happen happened. Lestat has always had a wandering dick and Claudia was always going to want independence and companionship outside of her parents and Louis was always going to be jenga tower of emotional stability. On a tight rope of personality disorders and abusive upbringings they actually lasted longer than a lot of vampire covens.

[lionofchaeronea]

Rue Royale, Paris, Rain, Frank Armington, 1925

[mothpdf]

yes Lestat's #patriarch but listen. listen. Louis is literally rich husband writing checks for his wife's monthly allowance. he's "I let her decorate the house don't ask me about the drapes" . Lestat will take Claudia out to kill people and stop outside the door of the Rue Royale house to go "remember, this spree is our little secret, if your dad asks we only got one dress (murder but also dress)". Lestat sees Claudia grow up and sees himself in her. Claudia grows up and realises that to Louis she is still daddy's little girl.

[fate-defiant]

Rue and Mytho post-canon, making out on the the royal couch, both wondering why is Duck on their mind rn.

[thefairylights]

Loustat fic: The French Quarter Phantoms, rated t/5967 words.

Summary:

Lestat flies Louis to New Orleans for a romantic date night that he definitely has planned and isn't at all a spur of the moment thing once they arrive. Definitely not. Only, while on this date, ghosts of their previous life begin to haunt them. The question is, how accurate are these ghost stories? And who knows them better than the two vampires who have lived to tell the tales?

Notes:

Here's a funny little story to go along with this fic.

I went on an incredible vacation to New Orleans with my friends, @dreamofme9 and @amc-iwtv and we decided to go on a vampire and ghost tour because why not? New Orleans is known for its ghosts and vampires! Of course we should go on a tour and see if we get spooked! Well, the tour was lots of fun and our tour guide had such a great sense of humor, and surprise! While we walked and talked once it was over, my friends and I began to write this very fic. It was the most fun I have ever had plotting out a fic because I have never been able to do this in person! With other fic writers! We fed off each other and lo and behold, our collaborated fic was written in a few days and now, here it is, for your reading pleasure.

We were quite literally on a high as we planned this and the inspiration was so powerful that none of us could resist it.

I must say that walking the streets of New Orleans, seeing the Gallier House and Royal Street and even the streetlamp where Lestat eats a man in the pilot has made me love and appreciate Interview with the Vampire more than I ever have! Going to Jackson Square, sitting outside St. Louis Cathedral, and just taking in the atmosphere of the city has left me so in love, more in love than I thought possible. I could literally see Louis and Lestat before my eyes, living and breathing, and as we three wrote this, it was made so much easier because we lived it, and were able to fully immerse ourselves in this moment.

Speaking of moments, I would like to share photo collages of my trip! You may find them here at my tumblr

[thedailydescent]

pretty fitting then that claudia escaped her father and her daughter role during the 40s when traditional family structures were decreasing in america due to the war, and died just before the 50s, a time when marriage and nuclear family ideals started being heavily emphasized again.

[claudiatherelentless]

RIP Claudia de Pointe du Lac de Lioncourt. You would've loved Sweary Coloring Books