Anne Rice used to house her extensive collection of dolls
at St. Elizabeths Orphanage.

"Lestat played with her as if she were a magnificent doll, and I played with her as if she were a magnificent doll;"

Interview with the Vampire ~ Anne Rice

"Of course, he gave me a doll as usual, the replica of me, which as always wears a duplicate of my newest dress. To France he sends for these dolls, he wants me to know. And what should I do with it? Play with it as if I were really a child?

'Is there a message here, my beloved father?' I asked him this evening. 'That I shall be a doll forever myself?' "

The Queen of the Damned ~ Anne Rice

One of the dolls at St. Elizabeths
~ Emma Barnard ©2000

The image of youth and perfection that Rice sets against the imperfections of humanity, or the former mortal life of the vampires.

"I think dolls are beautiful," says Rice. "They combine innocence and beauty with a sinister quality." Her emphasis on dolls in several of the Chronicles underlines a theme of how art - in this instance, the craft of doll making - is sometimes treated as if it is superior to life.

Louis and Lestat both think of Claudia, with her tiny body and beautiful features, as a doll. They dress her in pretty dresses and comb out her curls. She has been cut loose from her human mother - a metaphor of the loss of her own humanity - yet is preserved in her childhood, being a vampire who has a white, porcelainlike, and, overall, doll-like appearance. In line with Rice's own appraisal of dolls, Claudia combines the sinister quality of her vampire nature with childish innocent features.

Louis and Lestat give her dolls to play with, even when it is clear that her mind has matured to the point of being a woman. They want her to remain as childlike as she looks, so they can take care of her and, by doing so, give meaning to their own lives. By the time she is nearing forty, she counts over thirty such dolls from Lestat, and his treatment of her angers her. Claudia wants recognition for the woman she is, but Lestat and Louis continue to treat her as a child. She burns or crushes her dolls, believing this to be the appropriate gesture toward lifeless things that so strongly resemble her. "The doll expects it," she claims, and her destructive act foreshadows what eventually happens to her.

In Paris, Claudia brings a doll to the hotel room and tells Louis about a doll maker named Madeleine who has lost a child and who consequently makes the same doll over and over in an effort to replace her missing daughter and quell her grief. Claudia gets Madeleine to make for her a lady doll, the form to which she aspires. But then Claudia crushes the doll, expressing her frustration over her sense of helpless entrapment.

A Lestat doll at St. Elizabeths
~ Emma Barnard ©2000

Louis, Lestat and Claudia wax dolls at St. Elizabeth's
~ Emma Barnard ©2000

The Paul Crees Collection

Later Claudia asks Louis to make Madeleine into a vampire, so that Madeleine can become a "lady" doll of sorts. In this way they would be preserved together in vampirsm as a never-dying mother and daughter pair. It is clear that Claudia has become a substitute for Madeleine's dolls, which initially were a substitute for Madeleine's lost child. When Madeleine becomes a vampire, she burns her doll shop; she is letting go of her dolls now that she has Claudia.

Developing the idea of a doll as a representation of art, Rice opens the second section of BT with a poem by W. B. Yeats entitled "The Dolls." Through this poem, Yeats expressed the notion that when perfectly crafted dolls are juxtaposed against filthy, crying babies, the dolls seem the superior product. Lestat lives out this theme as he continues to think of Claudia as a perfect little doll, captured immutably in her childhood glory when he makes her a vampire. In his visions of her, she resists being viewed as a doll, and her dialogues with him represent his ambivalence between being a vampire and wanting to be a mortal. His uncertainty over which of the two is superior ends when he realises how much he dislikes being human; this experience also resolves his indecision about David Talbot. He wants Claudia to ba an eternal doll and he would make her into one again, despite her protests; similarly, he would make David a vampire, and not let him remain a fragile mortal.

The Vampire Companion
~ Katherine Ramsland