Steamed Rice

Interview with the Vampire takes the romanticism of the vampire we found in Dracula and turns it around, changing the perspective from that of those hunting the vampire to the vampire itself, even while using the first-person to tell the story. Along with the parallels to Dracula's narrative style, Interview with the Vampire takes the veiled eroticism in Dracula and exploits it, heightening it to a fever pitch that cannot be ignored. Perhaps this is borne of necessity, as its told as the vampire sees it rather than how a Victorian man or woman should see it, but I think that most of it is Anne Rice making sure the reader knows how sexual the vampire is.

The sexuality of the vampire is first immediately apparent when Anne Rice writes, "and he lay down beside me on the steps, he movement so graceful and so personal that at once it made me think of a lover." Of course, they're both men, which is something the late-Victorian Stoker could never reconcile in his novel: the feeding of a male vampire on a male victim. It is, of course, an extremely sexual maneuver to penetrate one with the extended canine so prominent in vampires of literature, and it is a bit of a risk for a man to feed on a man in such a manner. Anne Rice continues the play of sexual content with "I remember that the movement of his lips raised the hair all over my body, sent a shock of sensation through my body that was not unlike the pleasure of passion." Again, we see two male lovers, locked in a sort of blood-bonding ritual that removes the metaphor of sex in previous vampire novels and exposes it, bringing it to the fore; Anne Rice does not even make an attempt at hiding it. She extends the sexuality, this time in more double-entendre form than anything, in "his teeth withdraw with such a keenness that the two puncture wounds seemed enormous, lined with pain."

Directly after Lestat drains Louis, Lestat needs to give blood back to Louis in order for Louis to fully become the vampire. So Lestat feeds Louis, "I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source." The reader is left with nowhere left for the imagination to go, the sexuality of the deed has come to completion in vulgar clarity with Lestat replacing Louis's mother. Freud would undoubtedly have something to say about how the man wishes to swap fluids with his mother or some such, and I think it's come to its full realization here. Of course, if the reader is dim-witted enough to be left with any cluelessness about whether or not the vampire's birth is a blatantly sexual act, Anne Rice makes sure to put the two in a coffin together. I can just imagine her clapping her hands together and saying, 'there! That should do it!'

I'm finding the overtly sexual tones distasteful and overwrought. Dracula included very little of this; there it was intellectual, with implied sexuality. Here we find it being overtly sexual without remorse, but I guess that's what sells the book in the first place.