~

"And here it is," she said under her breath. "And I hate you both!"

~

"Snatching me from mortal hands like two grim monsters in a nightmare fairly tale, you idle, blind parents! Fathers!" She spat the word. "Let tears gather in your eyes. You haven't tears enough for what you've done to me."

Interview with the Vampire ~ Anne Rice

One Happy Family
~ Dany & Dany ©2000

The five year old child made into a vampire in 1794. (In the first draft of IV, Rice described Claudia as three or four years old.) Louis first comes across the blonde, blue-eyed child as he roams New Orleans asking himself whether he is damned. Since he wants to die, he has denied himself the sustenance of blood: when he sees the child crying beside the corpse of her plague-infested mother, Louis feels so trapped in his self-condemnation that he drinks from this child, who is his very first human victim in four years. When Lestat sees what Louis has done, he ridicules him.

The next night, Lestat locates Claudia at a children's hospital, brings her to the hotel and urges Louis to drink. Louis drains her nearly to the point of death, but Lestat rescues her and makes her a vampire child so that he can keep Louis with him. That she is made into a vampire on a bed involves significant sexual imagery: she is losing her innocence through an act that involves penetration, domination and blood.

Lestat declares that Claudia is now their daughter and Louis is so taken with their creation that he remains with her for another sixty-five years. He protects her from Lestat's veiled threats and eventually becomes dependent on her as his companion.

Claudia seeks blood with the demanding hunger of a child and while she learns refinement from Louis, her killing style more closely resembles Lestat's. She learns to play with her victims and she develops a taste for families, taking them one at a time. She particularly likes to feed on mothers and daughters.

Lestat and Louis treat Claudia like a doll, despite the fact that her mind matures into that of an intelligent, assertive and seductive woman. She reads Boethius, Aristotle and sophisticated poetry and can play Mozart by ear, yet still they dress her, comb her hair and buy her pretty things. Claudia is resentful that her developing maturity is not acknowledged.

"I saw Claudia as a woman in a child's body," says Rice. "There are women who are eternally called girls - cute, sweet, adorable, pinchable and soft - when in fact they have a strong mind that's very threatening. And there are beautiful men who feel that way, too."

Eventually Claudia discovers that she was once a mortal child and comes to hate her two "fathers" for making her while she was in such a helpless form. Finding out that Lestat was responsible, she poisons him, then dumps him in the swamps outside New Orleans. When he returns, Claudia and Louis flee, boarding a ship bound for Eastern Europe.

When it becomes clear that Eastern Europe holds no answers to their vampire existence, Claudia plots a course for Paris. There she senses Louis's emotional infidelity as he grows attached to Armand, one of the vampires they encounter there. Claudia demands that Louis makd Madeleine the doll maker into a vampire to be a mother-protector for her. Madeleine, Claudia and Louis live together for a brief time until the vampires in Paris grab them and take them to the Theatre of the Vampires for trial. Lestat has arrived and his accusations against Claudia result in Claudia and Madeleine being locked into an airshaft and burned to death when the sun rises.

Rice based Claudia's appearance on her own daughter Michele, who died at the age of five from leukemia. Claudia even shares Michele's birthday, September 21. However, despite the intense tone of suffering and guilt evident in Louis's telling of the story, Rice insists that she had not been aware that she had included her feelings about Michele's tragic death. "I never consciously throught about it when I was writing the book," she says. "I wasn't conscious of the connection. I knew that I was using the physical beauty of Michele as the model, but Claudia was a fictional character in her own right. The character, the voice and the things Claudia say have nothing to do with my daughter - but there's no question that this is the symbolic working out of a terrible grief. What else can it possibly be?"

In the first version of IV, Claudia eventually goes off with three vampire brothers whom she meets in Paris. She does not die. As such it was as if Rice had attempted to give her daughter a form of immortality. Rice, however, experienced psychological problems that cleared up only after she had rewritten the ending - by killing off Claudia and taking Louis through an experience of intense grieving. This version was much more cathartic for Rice.

In BT, Lestat is haunted by an image of Claudia after he loses Akasha. More cynical, he is prone to despair over what he is and she appears to him as his conscience. Would he do it again, she asks; would he make her, a child, a vampire? She is present throughout BT as Lestat ponders the pressing question of his own evil nature. He is confronted with his self-deceptions and finally says good-bye to Claudia as a moral force when he accepts what he is and knows that he would do it all again.

The Vampire Companion ~ Katherine Ramsland