The Undead Republic: Vampire Memory and the Myth of American Innocence in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire

Among the most persistent myths of American national identity is the myth of innocence—the belief that the nation was born pure, that its founding ideals were untainted by the contradictions that surrounded them, and that whatever darkness exists in American history is aberration rather than origin. Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, across its remarkable transmedia life from 1976 novel to 2022 AMC series, constitutes one of American culture's most sustained and searching dismantlings of that myth—replacing it with another, much older one. This paper argues that Rice deploys the vampire, one of Western culture's most ancient and enduring mythological figures, immortal, memory-bound, and constitutionally unable to escape its own history, as a mythographic counter to the twisted memory of a country that never was. New Orleans, the narrative's ur-site, is no accident. It is a city where the promises of American freedom have always decomposed beneath their own splendor, where enslavement, coloniality, queerness, and death are not aberrations but foundations. Drawing on Roland Barthes's theorization of myth as naturalized ideology and Maurice Halbwachs's framework of collective memory, this paper reads Louis's impossible desire to forget New Orleans as a desire to forget America itself, and the AMC series's foregrounding of race and queerness as a deepening of Rice's original mythographic project into our contemporary moment. Tracking the vampire myth across its artistic iterations, this paper asks what it means that one of America's most beloved popular mythologies is also its most unflinching counter-memory: the ancient undead rising to expose the fresh lies of a republic that has always fed on its own.