SOURCE: “Dieting and Damnation: Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire,” in Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, pp. 95-113.

In the following essay, Tomc explores the cultural significance of female body image, androgyny, and self-abnegation in Interview with the Vampire. According to Tomc, “Rice modeled the vampire's transformation on one of the most powerful narratives of gender metamorphosis available to 1970s culture: the story of successful dieting.”

At one point in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, the vampires Louis and Claudia journey to Eastern Europe on a quest to find others like themselves. Elegant, intelligent, and beautiful, Louis and Claudia are shocked to find that the fabled vampires of Romania are little more than zombies, rotten half-eaten corpses who suffer the fate of being animated. “I had met the European vampire, the creature...