The Vampire and Desire Lestat, again like all vampire figures, is also symbolic of unlimited desire and he breaks all taboos and blurs boundaries in pursuit of his desires. Because he never dies, his desire never dies, his very nature is desire. But all his sexual and physical desires are merged and satisfied in the one act of drinking blood. Lestat relates, "The taste of blood and the feel of blood, and what it meant for all passion, all greed, to be sharpened in that one desire, and that one desire to be satisfied over and over with the feeding and the death" (156). Yet when he is gazing on his young friend and fantasizing about what it would be like to drink his blood, Lestat describes the desire in sexual terms, he lusts after him because drinking blood conveys glorious sexual feelings. The making of another vampire also involves the mutual exchange of body fluids but in this case blood. Therefore, vampires represent unlimited sexual freedom, there is no fear of disease or pregnancy since they are dead. They can have safe sex anytime without guilt or repercussions and this is appealing in itself, even more so considering sex can be quite dangerous in a post-AIDS era. Since vampires do not have genital sex, they also blur gender boundaries and Rice emphasizes the androgyny of her characters as well as having them love members of both sexes. Androgyny is explicit; though vampires penetrate their victims, they do so with an orifice, the mouth, and since the medium of sexual exchange is blood, both genitals and gender becomes irrelevant. Lestat has mostly male "lovers" both before and after he becomes a vampire. He confesses after transforming his former male lover into a vampire that "I knew that the last barrier between my appetite and the world had been dissolved" (143). Lestat's mother Gabriellew celebrates her freedom from rigid gender classification after being transformed by adopting the freer male mode of dress (187). In a 1983 Vogue article Rice emphasized the gender transcendence that characterizes her vampires: "if we can preserve that earlier complexity, that mingling of masculine and feminine...we can have the endless possibilities of it all" (Roberts, 51). Lestat takes his ability to have vampiric "sex" with anyone he wants to its limit by breaking another taboo when he transforms his mother Gabrielle into a vampire. They symbolically have sex when they exchange blood. The language describing the exchange is highly erotic as Lestat "drives his teeth into her neck" and "crushes her" to him (157). She had no name but was "simply she ...the one I had needed all of my life with all of my being. The only woman I had ever loved" (168). Lestat repeats the oedipal drama when he exchanges blood with Akasha, the mother of all vampires (486). In all these ways, the figure of Lestat expresses the repressed desires that the reader cannot in his/her everyday life and blurs the traditional binary boundaries we use to artificially order our lives. And "it is this tension between the need to express transgressive desires and the need to repress them that maintains the persistent confluence of desire and fear" which continues to make the vampire myth so compelling (Howes, 117-8). Lestat's will to power expresses itself through the flaunting of all social and sexual rules including the vampiric rules that mandate vampires should never reveal themselves to humans; at the novel's beginning he announces that his biography is designed to do just that. He is thus an ultimate rule breaker. But the most obvious manifestation of Lestat's desire nature is his fierce passion for life which is ironically expressed in his passion to drink up other's lives. Lestat declares his "love" for mortals, "From the first nights when I held them close to me, I loved them. Drinking up their life, their death, I love them" (231). It is a desire that ultimately consumes the love object. Perhaps the sucking of blood as a form of sustenance is not as repugnant to the modern reader as it was to earlier ones because it seems our increasingly exploitive culture is trying to suck the life out of us! Therefore, Lestat may also represent the collective and insatiable desire that drives a capitalist system. We are taught to be consumers and this role has long superceded our roles as citizens. Lestat's driving desire mirrors our culture's relentless seeking after sensation as antidotes to despair. Whereas past representations of the vampire highlighted the conflict between individual desire and social duty, Lestat triumphantly marches through the novel's pages and is more powerful at the novel's end than ever. Though the nature of desire is that it is never extinguished, the ultimate source of Lestat's vampire desires springs from death and brings death. Lestat's individualized triumph spells disaster for the idea of community and represents the breakdown of the cultural checks that help forge community. There is no restoration of bourgeois values and order in The Vampire Lestat as at the conclusion of Dracula (although I would not argue for that either). Rice's portrayal of Lestat resonates in our cultural imagination because at a deep level we recognize that we are part of a vampiric system in which individuals are encouraged to ruthlessly "feed" on each other and the most successful predators are deemed cultural successes. And we sense that in the end such a system degrades life rather than enhances it. Lestat, a predator with a "disembodied' awareness, thus has a point when he declares, "It is a new age. It requires a new evil. And I am that new evil. I am the vampire for these times" (229). The underlying reasons for the success of The Vampire Lestat, and indeed all of Rice's vampire novels seems clear. As we increasingly become a 'recycled' culture whose visions of the future are all nightmarish, the Gothic is more than ever a vital site of cultural imagination in which to express cultural fears and desires. The novel explores the modern reader's sense of alienation, his fears of death and decay, and his repressed desires that yet remain constantly inflamed by consumer culture. Lestat's paradoxical situation mirrors the tensions and contradictions inherent both in bourgeois capitalist culture and in human nature itself. But his extreme exaggerations of these tensions are a warning for us to not follow him too far down that 'Devil's Road.'
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