Claudia (The Vampire Chronicles)
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Claudia is a fictional character in Anne Rice's novels Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, The Tale of the Body Thief, and Merrick.
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[edit] Background
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In plague-torn New Orleans, the newly-made vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac has a crisis of conscience. He goes for a guilt-driven, rain soaked walk through the plague-sealed houses near the wharf, where the epidemic had hit the strongest. In a shack, Louis finds Claudia trying to wake her mother, long since dead from plague, and without her father.
Louis takes pity on the girl and intends to take her to an orphanage. However, being starved by a self-inflicted need to drink the blood of rats rather than humans, he starts to feed on her. Before he could finish, his companion Lestat de Lioncourt finds him and mocks him for giving in to his vampiric urges. Claudia is taken to a hospital, but Lestat kidnaps her and tells Louis to finish her. Claudia is nearly drained, but Lestat pushes him away and offers his wrist to her, making her into a vampire.
The three of them form a "family" of sorts, with Claudia adopting Louis' love for books and morality, but also Lestat's fondness for playing with victims before their death. This peace lasts approximately 65 years, during which Claudia's mind matures even as she physically remains a child. During the course of 65 years, Claudia eventually realizes the flipside of the implications of her immortality: while she can never grow old, she can never grow up either. This described by Louis when she sees Lestat murder a young Creole woman; she asks him if she will ever look like the young lady that Lestat took.
Claudia eventually attempts to kill Lestat, first by allowing him to feast on two boys whose blood was poisoned with laudanum, then by slicing his throat open. The attempt upon Lestat's life is prefaced by a scene in which she flies into a fit of rage, demanding to know "who did this" to her. By this period in time, her relationship with Lestat has already disintegrated, for all intents and purposes, as she offers the two boys to Lestat as a "peace offering", knowing his fondness for young men. Because their blood is kept warm with Laudanum, Lestat is unable to discern the fact that they are conveniently dead, until the effects of the dead blood have begun to take effect. Her attack upon Lestat was ironically based upon one of his first lessons to her: that vampires could not drink dead blood - the infusion of it would be deadly to vampires. It is later revealed that this "fact" isn't actually true. Afterwards, she demands that Louis help her destroy most of the dolls that had been created in her likeness, one presented to her each year on the date of her "birth into darkness". She and Louis dumped his body in a swamp, only for him to return three nights later, scarred and hideous. After accidentally setting their flat on fire, Louis and Claudia flee to Europe, in search of other vampires who can teach them of their true nature.
They arrive in Paris and discover a "coven" of vampires, who pretend to be actors pretending to be vampires. Armand, the head of this coven, falls in love with Louis, but sees Claudia's existence as an abomination. Armand allows his coven to kill her, along with Madeleine, a woman she had chosen to be her 'mother', by exposing them to direct sunlight in a sealed room, similar to the bottom of a well. Armand explains he did this out of love for Louis, and with selfish reasons.
Further, it is revealed within The Vampire Armand that Claudia had requested to be made a woman, and willing to be exposed to anything to allow this, no matter how torturous. In direct contrast to Interview with a Vampire, the reader is told that Claudia is decapitated willingly, as is the body of a young vampire woman, and that Armand attempts to connect her head to an older vampire's body through the use of vampiric blood. He fails, however, so he exposes her to sunlight to hide what he had done. However, in the movie Interview with the Vampire, both Claudia and Madeline are exposed to the sunlight, because Claudia's very existence is an abomination.
Claudia also appears in Queen of the Damned in which Jessica Reeves, a young member of the Talamasca, finds her diary. In the diary, she writes about her gifts she got from her two fathers, Louis and Lestat, for what she believes to be her birthday. It is also revealed in Queen of the Damned, that Claudia harbored a deep and conflicted love towards her dark father, Lestat. Louis gave her the diary and Lestat gave her a doll. The doll provokes Claudia to lash out at Lestat and demand him to tell her why he treats her like a doll. Lestat, in a moment of weakness, kisses her and recites this verse from the Jaccobean revenege "The Duchess of Malfi":
Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young.
Claudia makes another appearance in Tale of the Body Thief in which she seems to haunt Lestat mercilessly in an attempt to make him feel the pain she claims he inflicted on her.
Claudia then made another appearance as a ghost in Merrick, this time to take out her anger on Louis. Having once claimed that she didn't blame him for her being turned into a vampire, it seems that her time in Sheol had changed her mind. When she is brought back as a ghost, she attempts to kill him by driving a stake through his heart. Louis survives, however, and Claudia's ghost disappears.
[edit] In other media
In the 1994 film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, Claudia is portrayed by Kirsten Dunst. Because a six-year-old was highly unlikely to understand and play a character with the necessary emotional depth, an older actress (Dunst) was used instead.
Claudia was given two solos in the musical production of Lestat: The Musical: "I Want More", her "plea" to Lestat and Louis that she is sick of being a sweet little girl, unmasking her dormant desire to hunt; and "I'll Never Have That Chance", a somber lament sung when she realizes she will never get to grow up and experience a normal life. She was portrayed by Allison Fischer.
[edit] Inspirations
Rice has claimed that Claudia was inspired by her daughter, who died at the age of six.[1]
[edit] References
- Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice, published in 1976 by Alfred A. Knopf
- The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice, published in 1985 by Alfred A. Knopf
- The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice, published in 1988 by Alfred A. Knopf
- Tale of the Body Thief by Anne Rice, published in 1988 by Alfred A. Knopf
- http://www.answers.com/topic/anne-rice
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