than nurturing. The hero who opposes him reconciles the opposing forces of good and evil, light and dark, life and death. The story of Dracula is told as a story of shifting perspectives, and this includes different views of the character of Dracula. The story of the vampire Dracula naturally includes a number of opposing forces or opposing conceptions, and as noted, it also involves an inversion of a number of mythic ideas and principles. Blood is both a symbol of life and a symbol of death, and the use of blood in this novel shows a duality--blood is drained from victims and leaves them dead, but they are resurrected shortly and continue to live in a half-world. Blood is a giver of life to the vampire, and its loss brings death to the victim. Blood is equated with life, and in the novel it is also associated with the non-life of the vampire.
Leo Braudy writes of Anne Rice's version of the vampire legend,
Anne Rice exploits all the sexual elements in these myths with a firm self-consciousness of their meaning, even to the extent of having a more than usually obtuse and bug-eyed interlocutor [in Interview with the Vampire]. . . Homosexuality--defined here as the refusal of adult sexuality (read heterosexuality)--is the hardy hidden mainspring of Rice's narrative, and her message seems to be: if you're homosexual, it's better to be
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