Anne Rice’s Savage Garden

intersemiotic translation of Rembrandt in the Tale of the body thief through a “creative design”

Abstract

Throughout her novels, Anne Rice comes and goes from simple impressions to complex considerations concerning paintings, poems, short stories, songs, and other artistic mediums. In some cases, such works may be ressignified throughout her prose. In this scenario, such a process may be read as intersemiotic translation. In her novel The Tale of the Body Thief, Rice approaches a painting by Rembrandt, The Syndics of the Clothmakers Guild, as an object which mirrors Lestat’s ultimate anguish: the problem of evil. Having the interarts studies as my theoretical background, I reckon that there is a creative and critic notion that guides Rice’s artistic rereading’s in “The Vampire Chronicles”, a notion that Lestat calls The Savage Garden, which I conceived as an “imaginative design”. By this means, I analyze The Tale of the Body Thief related to Rembrandt’s painting. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.