“Coven of the Articulate”: Orality and
Community in Anne Rice’s Vampire Fiction
SARA WASSON
B
ETWEEN 1976 AND 2003 ANNE RICE WROTE TWELVE SPRAWLING,
interconnected vampire “autobiographies” which continue to
be hugely influential for vampire fiction and other artifacts of
popular culture. Rice’s vampires come together to set up house, pro-
duce offspring, tour the world, and form passionate attachments. Two
tropes structure and enable the vampire communities throughout the
twelve texts. Both are gifts: the “Dark Gift” of blood to be swal-
lowed, and the gift of autobiography to be shared. Originally a field
of anthropological inquiry, gift theory emerged as scholars sought to
articulate how gift exchange creates and maintains communities, and
gift scholarship is a fruitful tool for analyzing the way exchange func-
tions in Rice’s texts. Rice’s vampires create communities by exchang-
ing gifts of blood and gifts of words, joining mouths that swallow
and mouths that speak.
Gift Theory and the “Dark Gift”
From the nineteenth century through to the 1970s, a majority of
popular fictions assumed that vampiric transformation was effected
by a vampire biting a human. This approach shifted in the late
1970s and early 1980s when Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire
(1976) became a bestseller. In Rice’s influential mythology, one
The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 45, No. 1, 2012
© 2012, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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