Cannibal and Transcendence Narratives in Les Misérables, Sweeney Todd, and Interview with the Vampire

Abstract

This essay studies the interlocking cannibal and transcendence plotlines supplied by three Victorian texts to three neo-Victorian works, two of them musicals, and one of them a key twentieth-century reworking of perhaps the original nineteenth-century cannibal narrative, the vampire legend. Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s Les Misérables (1985) and Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd (1979) theatricalise this interlocking of narratives in surprisingly similar ways: Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) stages the cannibal and the transcendent impulses in a series of climaxes in and around the Théâtre des Vampires in Paris. Both the musicals and the novel break their deliberately theatrical frames in challenges to their audiences, raising in their similar ways the nineteenth-century question whether one can be Victorian without being a Romantic, and the twentieth-century question how one can be ‘neo’ as well as ‘Victorian’.