Hello! This was a really tough ask, and very intellectually stimulating, and opening it further, I ended up considering the larger topic of What is an author’s obligation to their readers? What is an artist’s obligation to their viewers/audience? I don’t know.
In that line of consideration, I don’t recall AR ever bringing up these specific issues in (or out) of canon, or whether she’s been asked about it. I don’t think she’s ever said anything about avoiding depicting wlw relationships… these seem like questions you could ask her directly on FB, but my prediction is that she would be unwilling to address them. My impression of her is that she enjoys praise but does not feel obligated to write anything for anyone but herself, for better or worse.
To use the word “avoiding” implies she’s aware of it as a failure on her part, and I don’t think she is aware of it.
[^Fanart by @garama, mommy!Louis w/ his parenting guide,
this looks, like a good mom, he’s forcing the other two into some kind of parent-child bonding exercise!]
Re: Coding characters as male or female, that discussion is kind of confusing to me. I’ve seen fandom discourse refer to Louis as the “mommy” in the Lestat, Louis, and Claudia family in IWTV (a little more on that under the cut). Louis is only one example of a male character who may have been intentionally written as being more of the stereotypically female role than a male; he is more protective and nurturing to Claudia like a mother would be, and Lestat seems to “wear the pants” in that household. IDK if that is sufficient as “coding a male character as female.”
- why her female characters are more peripheral to the story than her male characters,
- why she seems to avoid depicting wlw relationships.
- I don’t want to jump to labeling her as misogynistic, but it seems like her female characters are coded as female, while the males are just characters, if that makes sense.
- It seems like the men are bi and the women straight.
^This is a lot to consider, any one of which could be a whole essay of response. Anyone who has opinions on this is welcome to reblog/comment, as this is not an area of expertise for me. And, IMO, it’s not an area of expertise for Anne Rice, either.
TL;DR: I don’t think AR intended to “avoid” the topics you bring up, I believe she was more focused on her own topics (I list some under the cut). AR had posted “On My Method of Writing:” as part of a message on her page, 8/20/2003, which I found informative. A few excerpts are under the cut.
[^May 10, 2016- X] AR has said many times that she writes the books she wants to see in the world, no other intentions.
What is an author’s obligation to their readers? What is an artist’s obligation to their viewers/audience? I don’t know. We are all entitled to our own answers to that question.
Hit the jump for more, cut for length and QOTD spoiler.
To my knowledge, there isn’t any Universal Fiction Supreme Court (<– Tumblrland Hyperbole, just trying to add a little levity!) which require authors to satisfy certain demands in their writing. Just as I was recently called out both for sharing negative opinions/critical analysis
and for not sharing
negative opinions/critical analysis, it is hard, if not impossible, to please everyone, even if that’s a blogger/author’s goal. I try to compromise when I can, but that’s my own prerogative. AR seems to provide a little fanservice now and then and will write more of X, Y, Z when the POTP ask her to write more of X, Y, Z, but that’s her own prerogative.
Perhaps the misogyny some people perceive in her books is real, perhaps it’s internalized for her. She might deserve that label. I don’t know how I feel about that.
From all that I’ve absorbed over the years, she wrote about what intrigued her. This is just the first few things that come to mind of things I’ve seen in canon, in different variations, things she may have discussed outside the novels, things she has always seemed to want to explore:
- Her own retail and geographical interests/fetishes (classical painting, jewelry (cameos!!), high fashion (VELVET!), low fashion, literature, Shakespeare, music and culture of the 80′s (BLADE RUNNER & BON JOVI), SCIENCE and technology (iPHONES!), interior decorating, New Orleans, Miami, Ancient Rome, Paris, etc.);
- Sexuality & power;
- Religion and its role in terms of meting out punishment to those who deserve it and misapplied to innocent people, punishments as fitting a crime and punishments for no crime, varying forms of punishment;
- Revenge and whether it is justified;
- World peace and how to achieve it;
- Whether there is a God who will embrace us when we die, whether we will meet our loved ones who died before/after us, whether there is an eternal heaven and hell, etc. Whether we will get the answers to all of life’s questions;
- Religion and its setup as a social group and whether it requires genuine belief in order to be part of that group;
- Very hot guys and what they do w/ their dicks;
- Childlike, adorable women;
- Precocious young adults/teens who are interested in sex before coming of legal age;
- Consent, dubious consent, and lack of consent across many different categories;
- etc.
^I feel like all of her writing can be summed up as speculation on these topics (and others), exploring them to find out “what would happen if…” and presenting results which she does NOT promote, results which she DOES promote, and results she offers up to the reader’s interpretations. Misogyny can be easily woven into many of those topics w/ or w/o intention on the author’s part.
As an example of a speculative situation, involving a possible misandrist character: in QOTD, radical feminist Akasha believed she could guarantee world peace by killing off 90% of the men. She starts doing it but is thwarted before making much progress. If she could have continued, would it have been a successful plan? I believe AR is suggesting that it would not, that as enticing as the idea was, radical feminism is too extreme and would have failed. And further, that the misandrist proponent of radical feminism may have been missing a few marbles even as a mortal, in addition to being out of touch with reality as a nearly omnipotent immortal.
So my answer is that I don’t think AR intended to “avoid” the topics you bring up, I believe she was more focused on her own topics.
Re: Coding characters as male or female, that discussion is kind of confusing to me. I’ve seen fandom discourse refer to Louis as the “mommy” in the Lestat, Louis, and Claudia family in IWTV. AR has said Louis was basically written as herself (she famously said, and I can’t find the source rn but I remember it distinctly: “I’m the only woman ever played by Brad Pitt in film!”), evidence that she did see that character as female? Possibly.
“On My Method of Writing:” 8/20/2003, excerpts (my emphasis added):
“I have been writing most of my adult life, of course, but very steadily since about 1970.”
^Idk if coding gender into characters was a thing then.
“My method of writing is to develop the novel sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph and page by page with heavy rewriting and reshaping and editing as I go along,… until I had the perfected page in order to proceed to the next page.”
^I seem to recall her saying that some of her novels are planned out w/ plot points first, others just flow in the order she writes them, w/o pre-planning.
“After the publication of the The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore comments. I resolved to hand in the manuscripts when they were finished. And asked that she accept them as they were. She was very reluctant, feeling that her input had value, but she agreed to my wishes. I asked this due to my highly critical relationship with my work and my intense evolutionary work on every sentence in the work, my feeling for the rhythm of the phrase and the unfolding of the plot and the character development. I felt that I could not bring to perfection what I saw unless I did it alone. In othe words, what I had to offer had to be offered in isolation. So all novels published after The Queen of the Damned were written by me in this pure fashion, my editor thereafter functioning as my mentor and guardian.”
^Her editor was demoted to copyeditor
mentor and guardian
.
“…
the writing you are reading is quite deliberate, that it is informed and it is conscious, as well as being the result of intuition. It is the result of all that I am – my education, my mystic sensibilities, and the student in me. It is poured out fearlessly, and then edited, and re-edited, and subjected to merciless scrutiny. It represents, and always has, my finest efforts.”
^Her writing is all intentional and her focus is intentional.
I-want-my-IWTV 