The Claudia post
Even moreso than the Nicki post, this is partly a 'Portrait of the Fangirl as a Young Woman' post about the early fan-life of me. But it's also a post about one of the vampires from Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, because I'm still totally not over the Broadway musical (it's still hours away from being a week since I predicted that the interest would only last another week! I'm not wrong yet!).
So today, we're going to talk about Claudia. Which actually means we're going to talk about how Mary got started writing fanfiction; the dorkitude of Darren Hayes; vampire as metaphor; the weird relationship between Buffy and the Vampire Chronicles; John Winchester as everyone's role model; and why the myriad versions of Jason Todd give Mary no problem as a fan. And some other stuff. Um. Possibly even a kitchen sink*!
*Full of blood.
Years before I knew about fanfiction, I started writing stories in my head about Claudia. She was the first character I ever did that about. Over the years, I've tried to put at least a little of that epic tale-in-my-head -- what I can remember of it, anyway -- down into a document, but the two tries I've had at it (once at sixteen, once at seventeen) didn't even start to grasp all the stuff I used to daydream about. Small pieces of this unwritten story still turn up in my writing even now.
Now, re-reading Interview at 25, it surprises me how much I still have the same perception of Claudia that I did as a fourteen-year-old. I stand by the plots I dreamed up about her, because the motivations I remember giving her ring true for the character I'm now meeting on the page in the novel. It's a little aback-taking to realise I was canny at this stuff from word go.
Anyway. My point is that Claudia is a character who taught me a lot about characters. About anti-heroines and villains, adults and children, personalities and one-note gimmicks. About how it's possible to love a character even if you don't like them.
Even if you haven't read Interview with the Vampire or any of the sequels, you're probably at least a little aware of Claudia as a character. Turned into a vampire at age five (or twelve, or three, or ten, depending on your source material), she's stuck that way forever.
To think that that's all there is to her, however, is a mistake. That's just the core of the Claudia legend, the same way 'Nicki was Lestat's mortal lover' is the core of the Nicki legend. It's the part that stays constant even when the rest evolves and changes to fit new versions of the tale.
Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire following the death of her daughter, Michelle, from cancer. The date given for Claudia's transformation into a vampire -- 21st September -- was Michelle's birthday.
The theme of Claudia as a surrogate for a lost child has moved closer and closer to the fore with every new version of the story: in the novel, the dollmaker Madeline loves Claudia because Madeline's own daughter has died. In the 1994 film, Louis is given a new backstory including a child who died at birth. This backstory is used in the musical as well, but with the baby dying later in infancy.
For me, though, the really compelling concept that Claudia can stand as an avatar of is the woman who isn't reacted to as a woman. A friend of mine who's in her fifties has often remarked to me that once a woman gets past a certain age, she becomes completely invisible in public. She simply ceases to be in the eyes of the other people around her, in a very real way.
After my friend first mentioned it with regard to age, a few years ago, I started noticing other instances where it can happen. I've noticed it in relation to myself, as someone overweight; in relation to friends with genetic conditions which make their body shapes other than the magazine standard; in relation to non-white friends in predominantly Caucasian environments; in relation to the visibly poor amongst the wealthy. There are a thousand ways in which a woman's sexuality can be seen as null and void; a huge number of those ways are based on simply not seeing that woman as a woman.
Claudia's particular predicament has the unheimlich edge, the nightmare twist that makes the situation a viscerally repulsive idea, but the core of universal meaning remains. If you spend your life striving to be seen for who you are, to battle the automatic assumptions of those around you, then that forces you to become a fighter. That's part of why I ended up falling so hard for the character, I think. I'll get to the other possible reasons later.
This is the short version of Claudia's mortal life, common to all the different incarnations: she was a poverty-stricken young orphan in New Orleans, sick with the plague when turned into a vampire. Lestat decided to make her a vampire as a way to keep Louis from leaving him, because their relationship is somewhat rather really a lot rocky.
(Lestat and Louis have a wonderful duet in the San Francisco version of the musical, called 'Embrace It', which is basically the emo vampire version of 'I'll Never Tell' and includes Lestat's marvelously snippy I don't think that I can take another night / Of your craving for the light / This wilting flower act / That questions wrong from right.)
So Lestat gives Louis a child. Though there's a gag in the musical --
Claudia: I've never had a father before.
Lestat: Now you have two!
(cue audience giggles)
-- about the family arrangement, Louis essentially plays the role of Claudia's mother during her childhood.
(At one point in the evolution from novel to screen, it was suggested to Anne Rice that there was no way the story would get away with the epic love story of Lestat and Louis, so Rice wrote a draft in which Louis was a young woman who cross-dressed and lived as a man in order to maintain ownership of the family plantation.
I've mused to myself whether Louis' genderqueer potential is why the movie and stage versions give him a dead wife. It's almost like the stories are saying that sure, he's got this thing with Lestat, but he had this great straight love affair in his mortal life and experienced fatherhood, so the relationships he had with Lestat and Claudia are echoes of that.
To which I say, whatever.)
In the original draft of the novel, Claudia's three years old. In the published version she's closer to five or six. The 1994 film used a twelve-year-old actress so as to get a greater depth of performance (and so as not to scar a small child for life with the experience of playing Claudia) but kept the essentials of the book character. The musical's Claudia describes herself as having been ten years old when she died, and her senses of self as an ex-human and as a vampire are markedly different to the other Claudias.
But we'll get there soon! For now, let's meet the happy family:
Lestat says:
All during the nineteenth century, vampires were "discovered " by the literary writers of Europe. Lord Ruthven, the creation of Dr. Polidori, gave way to Sir Francis Varney in the penny dreadfuls, and later came Sheridan Le Fanu's magnificent and sensuous Countess Carmilla Karnstein, and finally the big ape of the vampires, the hirsute Slav Count Dracula, who though he can turn himself into a bat or dematerialize at will, nevertheless crawls down the wall of his castle in the manner of a lizard apparently for fun-all of these creations and many like them feeding the insatiable appetite for "gothic and fantastical tales. "
We were the essence of that nineteenth-century conception, aristocratically aloof, unfailingly elegant, and invariably merciless, and cleaving to each other in a land ripe for, but untroubled by, others of our kind. Maybe we had found the perfect moment in history, the perfect balance between the monstrous and the human, the time when that "vampiric romance " born in my imagination amid the colorful brocades of the ancient regime should find its greatest enhancement in the flowing black cape, the black top hat, and the little girl's luminous curls spilling down from their violet ribbon to the puffed sleeves of her diaphanous silk dress.
Louis says:
One night, long gone by, was as material to me as if I were in it still, but I didn't tell her. She was desperate in that night, running away from Lestat, who had urged her to kill a woman in the street from whom she'd backed off, clearly alarmed. I was sure the woman had resembled her mother.
Finally she'd escaped us entirely, but I'd found her in the armoire, beneath the jackets and coats, clinging to her doll. And, carrying her to her crib, I sat beside her and sang to her, and she stared at me as she clung to that doll, as if trying blindly and mysteriously to calm a pain she herself did not begin to understand. Can you picture it, this splendid domesticity, dim lamps, the vampire father singing to the vampire daughter? Only the doll had a human face, only the doll.
Claudia says:
September 21, 1836:
This is my birthday present from Louis. Use as I like, he tells me. But perhaps I should like to copy into it those occasional poems which strike my fancy, and read these to him now and then?
I do not understand entirely what is meant by birthday. Was I born into this world on the 21st of September or was it on that day that I departed all things human to become this? My gentlemen parents are forever reluctant to illuminate such simple matters. One would think it bad taste to dwell on such subjects. Louis looks puzzled, then miserable, before he returns to the evening paper. And Lestat, he smiles and plays a little Mozart for me, then answers with a shrug: "It was the day you were born to us."
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?" He has given me thirty such dolls over the years if recollection serves me. And recollection never
does anything else. Each doll has been exactly like the rest. They would crowd me out of my bedroom if I kept them. But I do not keep them. I burn them, sooner or later. I smash their china faces with the poker. I
watch the fire eat their hair. I can't say that I like doing this. After all, the dolls are beautiful. And they do resemble me. Yet, it becomes the appropriate gesture. The doll expects it. So do I.
And now he has brought me another, and he stands in my doorway staring at me afterwards, as if my question cut him. And the expression on his face is so dark suddenly, I think, this cannot be my Lestat.
I wish that I could hate him. I wish that I could hate them both. But they defeat me not with their strength but with their weakness. They are so loving! And so pleasing to look at. Mon Dieu, how the women go after them!
As he stood there watching me, watching me examine this doll he had given me, I asked him sharply:
"Do you like what you see?"
"You don't want them anymore, do you?" he whispered.
"Would you want them," I asked, "if you were me?"
The expression on his face grew even darker. Never have I seen him the way he looked. A scorching heat came into his face, and it seemed he blinked to clear his vision. His perfect vision. He left me and went into the parlor. I went after him. In truth, I couldn't bear to see him the way he was, yet I pursued him. "Would you like them," I asked, "if you were me?"
He stared at me as if I frightened him, and he a man of six feet and I a child no more than half that, at best.
"Am I beautiful to you?" I demanded.
He went past me down the hall, out the back door. But I caught up with him. I held tight to his sleeve as he stood at the top of the stairs. "Answer me!" I said to him. "Look at me. What do you see?"
He was in a dreadful state. I thought he'd pull away, laugh, flash his usual brimming colors. But instead he dropped to his knees before me and took hold of both my arms. He kissed me roughly on-the mouth. "I love you," he whispered. "I love you!" As if it were a curse he laid on me, and then he spoke this poetry to me:
Cover her face;
mine eyes dazzle;
she died young.
Webster it is, I am almost certain. One of those plays Lestat so loves. I wonder . . . will Louis be pleased by this little poem? I cannot imagine why not. It is small but very pretty.
Claudia's mind grows up but her body remains that of a little girl. This moment, when Claudia's rage at her fate overtakes the peace of the family and destroys it, seems to be the one most people feel is the defining moment of her character and her story. It's not for me, that comes a little later, but I see why it's the usual answer.
Claudia tricks Lestat into drinking from a poisoned victim, then cuts his throat and has Louis dump the body in the swamp. Lestat returns to their townhouse a few nights later, a ruined wreck but very much alive, and Louis and Claudia barely escape through burning down the building.
Now, the really strange thing about the various adaptations and revisits/retcons in later books is that none of them touch on Part 2 of Interview -- all of them skip it and go on directly to Part 3, in Paris.
I'm sure that this is at least in part because the questions raised about the mythology of the book's universe in Part 2 are completely different to those established in the Chronicles two through twelve, where you've got ancient demons and heaven and hell and things, very centred around Egypt and Rome.
The never-utilised Part 2 of Interview, on the other hand, documents Claudia and Louis' adventures in Transylvania and surrounding countries, where they search for other vampires. This section is where I 'met' the Claudia I became wildly fond of.
'Don't you sense the danger?' I whispered to her. 'Can't you breathe it like the air?' One of those quick, elusive smiles played on her lips, as she turned towards the slope. The lantern pitched a pathway through the rising forest. One small, white hand drew the wool of her cape close, and she moved forward.
'Wait only for a moment...'
'Fear's your enemy...' she answered, but she did not stop.
She proceeded ahead of the light, feet sure, even as the tall grass gave way gradually to low heaps of rubble, and the forest thickened, and the distant tower vanished with the fading of the moon and the great weaving of the branches overhead. Soon the sound and scent of the horses died on the low wind.
'Be en garde,' Claudia whispered, as she moved, relentlessly, pausing only now and again where the tangled vines and rock made it seem for moments there was a shelter. But the ruins were ancient. Whether plague or fire or a foreign enemy had ravaged the town, we couldn't know. Only the monastery truly remained.
Now something whispered in the dark that was like the wind and the leaves, but it was neither. I saw Claudia's back straighten, saw the flash of her white palm as she slowed her step. Then I knew it was water, winding its way slowly down the mountain, and I saw it far ahead through the black trunks, a straight, moonlit waterfall descending to a boiling pool below.
Claudia emerged silhouetted against the fall, her hand clutching a bare root in the moist earth beside it; and now I saw her climbing hand over hand up the overgrown cliff, her arm trembling ever so slightly, her small boots dangling, then digging in to hold, then swinging free again. The water was cold, and it made the air fragrant and light all around it, so that for a moment I rested. Nothing stirred around me in the forest. I listened, senses quietly separating the tune of the leaves, but nothing else stirred. And then it struck me gradually, like a chill coming over my arms and my throat and finally my face, that the night was too desolate, too lifeless. It was as if even the birds had shunned this place, as well as all the myriad creatures that should have been moving about the banks of this stream.
But Claudia, above me on the ledge, was reaching for the lantern, her cape brushing my face. I lifted it, so that suddenly she sprang into light, like an eerie cherub. She put her hand out for me as if, despite her small size, she could help me up the embankment. In a moment we were moving on again, over the stream, up the mountain. 'Do you sense it?' I whispered. 'It's too still.'
But her hand tightened on mine, as if to say, `Quiet.' The hill was growing steeper, and the quiet was unnerving. I tried to stare at the limits of the light, to see each new bark as it loomed before us. Something did move, and I reached for Claudia, almost pulling her sharply near to me. But it was only a reptile, shooting through the leaves with a whip of his tail. The leaves settled. But Claudia moved back against me, under the folds of my cape, a hand firmly clasping the cloth of my coat; and she seemed to propel me forward, my cape falling over the loose fabric of her own.
Soon the scent of the water was gone, and when the moon shone clear for an instant I could see right ahead of us what appeared to be a break in the woods. Claudia firmly clasped the lantern and shut its metal door. I moved to stop this, my hand struggling with hers; but then she said to me quietly, 'Close your eyes for an instant, and then open them slowly. And when you do, you will see it.'
A chill rose over me as I did this, during which I held fast to her shoulder. But then I opened my eyes and saw beyond the distant bark of the trees the long, low walls of the monastery and the high square top of the massive tower. Far beyond it, above an immense black valley, gleamed the snow-capped peaks of the mountains. 'Come,' she said to me, 'quiet, as if your body has no weight.' And she started without hesitation right towards those walls, right towards whatever might have been waiting in their shelter.
They find vampires, but the vampires they find are mindless revenants who sleep in their graves. No answers, no grand mythologies, just more questions and horror and dark forests and castles.
So they go back to the little village they stopped in at, so they can sleep somewhere comfy for the day. And Louis decides that the best disguise is impersonating John Winchester.
In a moment I was hammering on the door of the inn. As it opened, I put my hood up around my face tightly and held Claudia beneath my cape in a bundle. 'Your village is rid of the vampire!' I said to the woman, who stared at me in astonishment. I was clutching the crucifix which she'd given me. 'Thanks be to God he's dead. You'll find the remains in the tower. Tell this to your people at once.'
I pushed past her into the inn.
The gathering was roused into commotion instantly, but I insisted that I was tired beyond endurance. I must pray and rest. They were to get my chest from the carriage and bring it to a decent room where I might sleep. But a message was to come for me from the bishop at Varna and for this, and this only, was I to be awakened.
'Tell the good father when he arrives that the vampire is dead, and then give him food and drink and have him wait for me,' I said. The woman was crossing herself. 'You understand,' I said to her, as I hurried towards the stairs, 'I couldn't reveal my mission to you until after the vampire had been. . . '
'Yes, yes,' she said to me. 'But you are not a priest . . .the child!'
'No, only too well-versed in these matters. The Unholy One is no match for me,' I said to her.
Then, in Part 3 of the novel, we're back on well-walked ground: Paris.
I'm not going to quote much of the Paris section, because this post is already getting ridiculously long, but here're a couple of my favourite moments in The Epic Decay Of Claudia And Louis:
I shut the door behind me just as she was taking off her cape, and, in a flurry of golden raindrops, she shook it, shook her hair. The ribbons crushed from the bonnet fell loose and I felt a palpable relief to see the childish dress, those ribbons, and something wonderfully comforting in her arms, a small china doll.
Still she said nothing to me; she was fussing with the doll. Jointed somehow with hooks or wire beneath its flouncing dress, its tiny feet tinkled like a bell. 'It's a lady, doll,' she said, looking up at me. 'See? A lady doll.' She put it on the dresser.
'So it is,' I whispered.
'A woman made it,' she said. 'She makes baby dolls, all the same, baby dolls, a shop of baby dolls, until I said to her, " I want a lady doll. " '
It was taunting, mysterious. She sat there now with the wet strands of hair streaking her high forehead, intent on that doll. 'Do you know why she made it for me?' she asked. I was wishing now the room had shadows, that I could retreat from the warm circle of the superfluous fire into some darkness, that I wasn't sitting on the bed as if on a lighted stage, seeing her before me and in her mirrors, puffed sleeves and puffed sleeves.
'Because you are a beautiful child and she wanted to make you happy,' I said, my voice small and foreign to myself.
She was laughing soundlessly. 'A beautiful child,' she said glancing up at me. 'Is that what you still think I am?' And her face went dark as again she played with the doll, her fingers pushing the tiny crocheted neckline down toward the china breasts. 'Yes, I resemble her baby dolls, I am her baby dolls. You should see her working in that shop; bent on her dolls, each with the same face, lips.' Her finger touched her own lip. Something seemed to shift suddenly, something within the very walls of the room itself, and the mirrors trembled with her image as if the earth had sighed beneath the foundations. Carriages rumbled in the streets; but they were too far away.
And then I saw what her still childish figure was doing: in one hand she held the doll, the other to her lips; and the hand that held the doll was crushing it, crushing it and popping it so it bobbed and broke in a heap of glass that fell now from her open, bloody hand onto the carpet. She wrung the tiny dress to make a shower of littering particles as I averted my eyes, only to see her in the tilted mirror over the fire, see her eyes scanning me from my feet to the top of my head. She moved through that mirror towards me and drew close on the bed.
'Why do you look away, why don't you look at me?' she asked, her voice very smooth, very like a silver bell. But then she laughed softly, a woman's laugh, and said, `Did you think I'd be your daughter forever? Are you the father of fools, the fool of fathers?'
'Your tone is unkind with me,' I answered.
'Hmmm . . . unkind.' I think she nodded. She was a blaze in the corner of my eye, blue flames, golden flames.
'And what do they think of you,' I asked as gently as I could, 'out there?' I gestured to the open window.
'Many things.' She smiled. 'Many things. Men are marvelous at explanations: Have you see the "little people" in the parks, the circuses, the freaks that men pay money to laugh at?'
'I was a sorcerer's apprentice only!' I burst out suddenly, despite myself. 'Apprentice!' I said. I wanted to touch her, to stroke her hair, but I sat there afraid of her, her anger like a match about to kindle.
Again she smiled, and then she drew my hand into her lap and covered it as best she could with her own. 'Apprentice, yes,' she laughed. 'But tell me one thing, one thing from that lofty height. What was it like . . . making love?'
I was walking away from her before I meant to, I was searching like a dim-wilted mortal man for cape and gloves. 'You don't remember?' she asked with perfect calm, as I put my hand on the brass door handle.
I stopped, feeling her eyes on my back, ashamed, and then I turned around and made as if to think, Where am I going, what shall I do, why do I stand here?
'It was something hurried,' I said, trying now to meet her eyes. How perfectly, coldly blue they were. How earnest. 'And... it was seldom savored... something acute that was quickly lost. I think that it was the pale shadow of killing.'
'Ahhh . . .' she said. 'Like hurting you as I do now . . . that is also the pale shadow of killing.'
'Yes, madam,' I said to her. 'I am inclined to believe that is correct.' And bowing swiftly, I bade her good-night.
Claudia and Louis discover the Theatre of the Vampires, a coven run by the eternal sixteen-year-old Armand. Armand has a longstanding hatred of Lestat and a deep attraction to Louis, and in Claudia he has the perfect catalyst to alter the standing he has with both.
When a still-alive Lestat comes to Armand for help and healing blood, he tells Armand about the two vampires who rose up against him, not knowing that Louis and Claudia are already in Paris.
Ostensibly as punishment for trying to kill Lestat; really more to do with the fact that she's seen as an abomination in her tiny form; and truthfully because to do so will break Lestat's heart, and leave Louis free to be Armand's companion, Armand and his Theatre Vampires execute Claudia by locking her out in the sunlight, where she burns to death.
Early versions of the Interview novel had Claudia leaving Louis to venture off with three vampire brothers, but Anne Rice realised that she was trying to work through her daughter's death by giving Claudia a happy ending when the only thing that would really help her would be to experience the same loss over again through Louis and Lestat's loss of Claudia.
"I want everybody to cry when Claudia dies, just like they did for Little Nell." -- Anne Rice
That's the end of the core 'canon' of Claudia, in the first three of the Vampire Chronicles. But see, the thing is, of all the characters I've been fond of, the one most like Claudia in terms of texts and coherency is probably Jason Todd. Different versions for different universes, inconsistent characterisation as a ghost, retcons of increasing violence and tragedy....
Basically, if you're a fictional character and Mary digs you, you're probably in for a world of hurting, even if you're already dead. I'm just, er, lucky that way, I guess.
The Claudia of the 2006 musical is, as I mentioned earlier, ten years old when she's turned into a vampire. She meets Lestat on the street, as she crawls from person to person in search of someone to come help her mother. She notes that Lestat's hands are cold, 'like Mother's', thereby letting the audience know that she's quite alone in the world. She asks Lestat if he's an angel; he hesitates and then, with a smile, answers yes.
After becoming a vampire, she takes to the life completely, and protests when Louis and Lestat scold her. Her song in this scene, the first of two she has in the show, is a tirade against them: You took me from the streets to complete this union / Do you expect some little saint, kneeling for communion?
I've linked to the video of this song in an earlier post or two, so I won't again, but it really is one of the highlight moments of the whole show.
As the years pass, however, Claudia's feelings on her situation do a reversal. She fought hard for Louis and Lestat to see her as what she was, a vampire child, but now she's something different and all they see is that vampire child she used to be.
I had really mixed feelings on Claudia's second song, "I'll Never Have That Chance", the first few times I heard it. I still don't adore it, but I think it makes a lot more sense to me now that I can see that musical-Claudia and book-Claudia are as different as, say, post- and pre-crisis Jason Todd.
Book-Claudia would never lament that she'll never have "a wedding dress of virgin white", "a cottage in the country", "the miracle of giving birth", or "the arching of a rainbow", but book-Claudia had no memory of herself as a human; she only lamented her shape based on the vampire woman she would have liked to be, rather than the human who had died before becoming it.
Musical-Claudia, on the other hand, mourns the child she was. When she and Lestat fight, she spits "Oh, Lestat! My angel." at him, to which he answers "must I pay for that forever?". "You lied to me!" she cries. "I thought I was going to heaven!"
Later, at the Theatre, when Armand accuses her of trying to kill Lestat, Claudia replies "he killed ME! He snatched me from my mortal life!" and Lestat, protesting along with Louis that Armand must let Claudia go, declares that taking Claudia's life from her was a far greater crime than what she did to him.
After Claudia is dead, Lestat quietly pleads with Louis to go back to New Orleans with him, the words too desperate to be anything but monotone. "Please, Louis. Our child is ashes."
If a vampire's ashes aren't scattered, a shred of consciousness remains. Armand wants to leave Claudia unscattered as a final punishment, but Lestat gathers handfuls and lets them off into the wind.
In the finale of the San Francisco show, Lestat drinks from the Queen of the Damned. This links him up with the spirits of all the other vampires, even those who have died. He hears Louis speak of endlessly struggling with his vampire nature; Armand admit that his heart is withered; Nicki's refuge from madness in music. Claudia tells him that an angel came down and caught her ashes up.
This line makes the relationship of Claudia and Lestat into a full circle: she thinks he is her angel, taking her into the afterlife. He lies to her and agrees, and she throws the lie back at him as a curse, but in the end he's the only angel she's got and the only mercy that can set her free into whatever afterlife awaits.
Too bad the whole scene was cut from the Broadway version, really.
Then, there are the later Chronicles. Claudia recurs throughout them, as flashbacks and hauntings. When Lestat manages to trade bodies with a human magician, he spends a huge amount of time dreaming and hallucinating that Claudia is nearby. They never discuss the fact that Lestat has done what Claudia always wanted to do -- inhabit a different body -- but talk at great length about evil and second chances. In the end, she refuses to be his conscience.
"I told you I would do it again," I said to Claudia.
"Why do you bother to explain to me," she asked. "You know perfectly well that I never asked you any questions about it. I've been dead for years and years."
Lestat and Louis eventually move back into the townhouse they once shared with Claudia, now completely rebuilt from the long-ago fire.
The past will not be recovered. The past will be perfectly eclipsed.
"Won't it, Claudia?" I whispered, standing in the back parlour. Nothing answered me. No sounds of a harpsichord or the canary singing in its cage. But I should have songbirds again, yes, many of them, and the house would be full of the rich rampaging music of Haydn or Mozart.
Oh, my darling, wish you were here!
Claudia also appears as a ghost to Jesse, a young paranormal investigator.
It was dark when she opened her eyes. The pain in her head had woken her up. The digital clock on the dresser said ten thirty. Thirst, terrible thirst, and the glass by the bed was empty. Someone else was in the room.
She turned over on her back. Light through the thin white curtains. Yes, there. A child, a little girl. She was sitting in the chair against the wall.
Jesse could just see the outline clearly-the long yellow hair, the puff-sleeved dress, the dangling legs that didn't touch the floor. She tried to focus. Child . . . not possible. Apparition. No. Something occupying space.
Something malevolent. Menace- And the child was looking at her.
Claudia.
She scrambled out of the bed, half falling, the bag in her arms still as she backed up against the wall. The little girl got up. There was the clear sound of her feet on the carpet. The sense of menace seemed to grow stronger. The child moved into the light from the window as she came towards Jesse, and the light struck her blue eyes, her rounded cheeks, her soft naked little arms.
Jesse screamed.
Louis encounters her, too:
"The gates can't be locked to you, Claudia," he said, the tears rising in his eyes. His voice was strong and sure. "That would be too monstrous a cruelty-."
"To whom, Father?" she answered, cutting off his words. "Too monstrous a cruelty to you? I suffer, Father, I suffer and I wander; I know nothing, and all I once knew seems illusory! I have nothing, Father. My senses are not even a memory. I have nothing here at all."
The voice grew weaker, yet it was clearly audible. Her exquisite face was infused with a look of discovery.
"Did you think I'd tell you nursery stories about Lestat's angels?" she asked with a low kindly tone. "Did you think I'd paint a picture of the glassy heavens with palaces and mansions? Did you think I'd sing to you some song learnt from the Morning Stars? No, Father, you will not draw such ethereal comfort from me."
On went her subdued voice: "And when you come following me I shall be lost again, Father. How can I promise that I shall be there to witness your cries or tears?"
This conversation is rather obviously out-of-step with every other book-Claudia piece, as can be seen by comparing that quote with ones earlier in this post. It's an inconsistency which other characters later attempt to explain.
"But you do believe that it was Claudia?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," she said. Her eyes were still red around the edges from her crying. I saw the tears standing there. "It was Claudia," she declared. "Or that thing which now calls itself Claudia, but the words it spoke? They were lies."
"How can you know that?"
"The same way I know when a human being is lying to me. The same way I know when someone's read another one's mind and is preying upon that other's weakness. The spirit was hostile, once called into our realm. The spirit was confused. The spirit told lies."
But, you know, mileage may vary. What seems really out-of-character to me for the character might ring completely true for someone else.
The passage that makes me really leery of canon beyond the first three (or even one) of the Chronicles is from Armand's story, though. This was one of the later books, and... I don't know. It makes me flinch in the same way that extra-horrible retellings of Jason Todd being killed by the Joker make me flinch. You don't need to make horror more horrible with each repetition! Really! I promise, it's horrible enough to start with! Don't over-egg the horror pudding!
She died more horribly than anyone has ever imagined, and I have not the strength now to tell the tale. Let me say only that before she was shoved out into a brick-lined air well to await the death sentence of the god Phoebus, I tried to grant her fondest wish, that she should have the body of a woman, a fit shape for the tragic dimension of her soul.
Well, in my clumsy alchemy, slicing heads from bodies and stumbling to transplant one to another, I failed. Some night when I am drunk on the blood of many victims, and more accustomed than I am now to confession, I will recount it, my crude and sinister operations, conducted with a sorcerer's willfulness and a boy's blundering, and describe in grim and grotesque detail the writhing jerking catastrophe that rose from beneath my scalpel and my surgical needle and thread.
Let me say here, she was herself again, hideously wounded, a botched reassemblage of the angelic child she'd been before my attempts, when she was locked out in the brutal morning to meet her death with a clear mind. The fire of Heaven destroyed the awful unhealed evidence of my Satanic surgery as it turned her to a monument in ash. No evidence remained of her last hours within the torture chamber of my makeshift laboratory. No one need ever have known what I say now.
For many a year, she haunted me. I could not strike from my mind the faltering image of her girlish head and tumbling curls fixed awkwardly with gross black stitching to the flailing, faltering and falling body of a female vampire whose discarded head I'd thrown into the fire.
Ah, what a grand disaster was that, the child-headed monster woman unable to speak, dancing in a frenetic circle, the blood gurgling from her shuddering mouth, her eyes rolling, arms flapping like the broken
bones of invisible wings.
It was a truth I vowed to conceal forever from Louis de Pointe du Lac and all whoever questioned me.
Better let them think that I had condemned her without trying to effect her escape, both from the vampires of the theatre and from the wretched dilemma of her small, enticing, flat-chested and silken-skinned angelic form.
She was not fit for deliverance after the failure of my butchery; she was as a prisoner subjected to the cruelty of the rack who can only smile bitterly and dreamily as she is led, torn and miserable, to the final horror of the stake. She was as a hopeless patient, in the reeking antiseptic death cubicle of a modern hospital, freed at last from the hands of youthful and overzealous doctors, to give up the ghost on a
white pillow alone.
Enough. I won't relive it.
I will not.
I never loved her. I didn't know how.
I carried out my schemes in chilling detachment and with fiendish pragmatism. Being condemned and therefore being nothing and no one, she was a perfect specimen for my whim. That was the horror of it, the secret horror which eclipsed any faith I might have pleaded later in the high-blown courage of my experiments. And so the secret remained with me, with Armand, who had witnessed centuries of unspeakable and refined cruelties, a story unfit for the tender ears of a desperate Louis, who could never have borne such descriptions of her degradation or suffering, and who did not truly, in his soul, survive her death, cruel as it was.
As for the others, my stupid cynical flock, who listened so lasciviously at my door to the screaming, who maybe guessed the extent of my failed wizardry, those vampires died by Louis's hand.
Indeed the entire theatre paid for his grief and his rage, and justly so perhaps.
I can make no judgment.
... yeah.
In less gross recent developments, the child vampire has now become a staple of the genre, showing up everywhere from the movie Near Dark to the Hero Quest video games to the Buffy comics.
Now, Buffy has a kind of wackified relationship with the Vampire Chronicles. Buffy makes cracks about lame wannabe vampires who call themselves Lestat, but Spike's backstory with his mother is a skewed homage Lestat's own history. Angel speaks scathingly of the whole morbid undead chic thing, but has just as much whiny angst as Louis without any of the style.
The framing story for the Tales of the Vampires miniseries, written by Joss Whedon, includes a character that's rather like... well...
Last, but not least, remember in my Nicki post how I talked about Savage Garden, the superstar nineties pop band I still adore? Remember Darren, the lead singer, and his unabashed Chronicles love?
Well, this one time, Darren needed to pick an actress to play his love interest in a video clip. Who'd he pick?
Oh, Darren, I LOVE YOU LIKE I LOVE LIBRARIES. <333333
And, uh, I think this post is well past the point of too long. Um. Hi!
'Fire purifies...' Claudia said.
And I said, 'No, fire merely destroys...'
So today, we're going to talk about Claudia. Which actually means we're going to talk about how Mary got started writing fanfiction; the dorkitude of Darren Hayes; vampire as metaphor; the weird relationship between Buffy and the Vampire Chronicles; John Winchester as everyone's role model; and why the myriad versions of Jason Todd give Mary no problem as a fan. And some other stuff. Um. Possibly even a kitchen sink*!
*Full of blood.
Years before I knew about fanfiction, I started writing stories in my head about Claudia. She was the first character I ever did that about. Over the years, I've tried to put at least a little of that epic tale-in-my-head -- what I can remember of it, anyway -- down into a document, but the two tries I've had at it (once at sixteen, once at seventeen) didn't even start to grasp all the stuff I used to daydream about. Small pieces of this unwritten story still turn up in my writing even now.
Now, re-reading Interview at 25, it surprises me how much I still have the same perception of Claudia that I did as a fourteen-year-old. I stand by the plots I dreamed up about her, because the motivations I remember giving her ring true for the character I'm now meeting on the page in the novel. It's a little aback-taking to realise I was canny at this stuff from word go.
Anyway. My point is that Claudia is a character who taught me a lot about characters. About anti-heroines and villains, adults and children, personalities and one-note gimmicks. About how it's possible to love a character even if you don't like them.
Even if you haven't read Interview with the Vampire or any of the sequels, you're probably at least a little aware of Claudia as a character. Turned into a vampire at age five (or twelve, or three, or ten, depending on your source material), she's stuck that way forever.
To think that that's all there is to her, however, is a mistake. That's just the core of the Claudia legend, the same way 'Nicki was Lestat's mortal lover' is the core of the Nicki legend. It's the part that stays constant even when the rest evolves and changes to fit new versions of the tale.
Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire following the death of her daughter, Michelle, from cancer. The date given for Claudia's transformation into a vampire -- 21st September -- was Michelle's birthday.
The theme of Claudia as a surrogate for a lost child has moved closer and closer to the fore with every new version of the story: in the novel, the dollmaker Madeline loves Claudia because Madeline's own daughter has died. In the 1994 film, Louis is given a new backstory including a child who died at birth. This backstory is used in the musical as well, but with the baby dying later in infancy.
For me, though, the really compelling concept that Claudia can stand as an avatar of is the woman who isn't reacted to as a woman. A friend of mine who's in her fifties has often remarked to me that once a woman gets past a certain age, she becomes completely invisible in public. She simply ceases to be in the eyes of the other people around her, in a very real way.
After my friend first mentioned it with regard to age, a few years ago, I started noticing other instances where it can happen. I've noticed it in relation to myself, as someone overweight; in relation to friends with genetic conditions which make their body shapes other than the magazine standard; in relation to non-white friends in predominantly Caucasian environments; in relation to the visibly poor amongst the wealthy. There are a thousand ways in which a woman's sexuality can be seen as null and void; a huge number of those ways are based on simply not seeing that woman as a woman.
Claudia's particular predicament has the unheimlich edge, the nightmare twist that makes the situation a viscerally repulsive idea, but the core of universal meaning remains. If you spend your life striving to be seen for who you are, to battle the automatic assumptions of those around you, then that forces you to become a fighter. That's part of why I ended up falling so hard for the character, I think. I'll get to the other possible reasons later.
This is the short version of Claudia's mortal life, common to all the different incarnations: she was a poverty-stricken young orphan in New Orleans, sick with the plague when turned into a vampire. Lestat decided to make her a vampire as a way to keep Louis from leaving him, because their relationship is somewhat rather really a lot rocky.
(Lestat and Louis have a wonderful duet in the San Francisco version of the musical, called 'Embrace It', which is basically the emo vampire version of 'I'll Never Tell' and includes Lestat's marvelously snippy I don't think that I can take another night / Of your craving for the light / This wilting flower act / That questions wrong from right.)
So Lestat gives Louis a child. Though there's a gag in the musical --
Claudia: I've never had a father before.
Lestat: Now you have two!
(cue audience giggles)
-- about the family arrangement, Louis essentially plays the role of Claudia's mother during her childhood.
(At one point in the evolution from novel to screen, it was suggested to Anne Rice that there was no way the story would get away with the epic love story of Lestat and Louis, so Rice wrote a draft in which Louis was a young woman who cross-dressed and lived as a man in order to maintain ownership of the family plantation.
I've mused to myself whether Louis' genderqueer potential is why the movie and stage versions give him a dead wife. It's almost like the stories are saying that sure, he's got this thing with Lestat, but he had this great straight love affair in his mortal life and experienced fatherhood, so the relationships he had with Lestat and Claudia are echoes of that.
To which I say, whatever.)
In the original draft of the novel, Claudia's three years old. In the published version she's closer to five or six. The 1994 film used a twelve-year-old actress so as to get a greater depth of performance (and so as not to scar a small child for life with the experience of playing Claudia) but kept the essentials of the book character. The musical's Claudia describes herself as having been ten years old when she died, and her senses of self as an ex-human and as a vampire are markedly different to the other Claudias.
But we'll get there soon! For now, let's meet the happy family:
Lestat says:
All during the nineteenth century, vampires were "discovered " by the literary writers of Europe. Lord Ruthven, the creation of Dr. Polidori, gave way to Sir Francis Varney in the penny dreadfuls, and later came Sheridan Le Fanu's magnificent and sensuous Countess Carmilla Karnstein, and finally the big ape of the vampires, the hirsute Slav Count Dracula, who though he can turn himself into a bat or dematerialize at will, nevertheless crawls down the wall of his castle in the manner of a lizard apparently for fun-all of these creations and many like them feeding the insatiable appetite for "gothic and fantastical tales. "
We were the essence of that nineteenth-century conception, aristocratically aloof, unfailingly elegant, and invariably merciless, and cleaving to each other in a land ripe for, but untroubled by, others of our kind. Maybe we had found the perfect moment in history, the perfect balance between the monstrous and the human, the time when that "vampiric romance " born in my imagination amid the colorful brocades of the ancient regime should find its greatest enhancement in the flowing black cape, the black top hat, and the little girl's luminous curls spilling down from their violet ribbon to the puffed sleeves of her diaphanous silk dress.
Louis says:
One night, long gone by, was as material to me as if I were in it still, but I didn't tell her. She was desperate in that night, running away from Lestat, who had urged her to kill a woman in the street from whom she'd backed off, clearly alarmed. I was sure the woman had resembled her mother.
Finally she'd escaped us entirely, but I'd found her in the armoire, beneath the jackets and coats, clinging to her doll. And, carrying her to her crib, I sat beside her and sang to her, and she stared at me as she clung to that doll, as if trying blindly and mysteriously to calm a pain she herself did not begin to understand. Can you picture it, this splendid domesticity, dim lamps, the vampire father singing to the vampire daughter? Only the doll had a human face, only the doll.
Claudia says:
September 21, 1836:
This is my birthday present from Louis. Use as I like, he tells me. But perhaps I should like to copy into it those occasional poems which strike my fancy, and read these to him now and then?
I do not understand entirely what is meant by birthday. Was I born into this world on the 21st of September or was it on that day that I departed all things human to become this? My gentlemen parents are forever reluctant to illuminate such simple matters. One would think it bad taste to dwell on such subjects. Louis looks puzzled, then miserable, before he returns to the evening paper. And Lestat, he smiles and plays a little Mozart for me, then answers with a shrug: "It was the day you were born to us."
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?" He has given me thirty such dolls over the years if recollection serves me. And recollection never
does anything else. Each doll has been exactly like the rest. They would crowd me out of my bedroom if I kept them. But I do not keep them. I burn them, sooner or later. I smash their china faces with the poker. I
watch the fire eat their hair. I can't say that I like doing this. After all, the dolls are beautiful. And they do resemble me. Yet, it becomes the appropriate gesture. The doll expects it. So do I.
And now he has brought me another, and he stands in my doorway staring at me afterwards, as if my question cut him. And the expression on his face is so dark suddenly, I think, this cannot be my Lestat.
I wish that I could hate him. I wish that I could hate them both. But they defeat me not with their strength but with their weakness. They are so loving! And so pleasing to look at. Mon Dieu, how the women go after them!
As he stood there watching me, watching me examine this doll he had given me, I asked him sharply:
"Do you like what you see?"
"You don't want them anymore, do you?" he whispered.
"Would you want them," I asked, "if you were me?"
The expression on his face grew even darker. Never have I seen him the way he looked. A scorching heat came into his face, and it seemed he blinked to clear his vision. His perfect vision. He left me and went into the parlor. I went after him. In truth, I couldn't bear to see him the way he was, yet I pursued him. "Would you like them," I asked, "if you were me?"
He stared at me as if I frightened him, and he a man of six feet and I a child no more than half that, at best.
"Am I beautiful to you?" I demanded.
He went past me down the hall, out the back door. But I caught up with him. I held tight to his sleeve as he stood at the top of the stairs. "Answer me!" I said to him. "Look at me. What do you see?"
He was in a dreadful state. I thought he'd pull away, laugh, flash his usual brimming colors. But instead he dropped to his knees before me and took hold of both my arms. He kissed me roughly on-the mouth. "I love you," he whispered. "I love you!" As if it were a curse he laid on me, and then he spoke this poetry to me:
Cover her face;
mine eyes dazzle;
she died young.
Webster it is, I am almost certain. One of those plays Lestat so loves. I wonder . . . will Louis be pleased by this little poem? I cannot imagine why not. It is small but very pretty.
Claudia's mind grows up but her body remains that of a little girl. This moment, when Claudia's rage at her fate overtakes the peace of the family and destroys it, seems to be the one most people feel is the defining moment of her character and her story. It's not for me, that comes a little later, but I see why it's the usual answer.
Claudia tricks Lestat into drinking from a poisoned victim, then cuts his throat and has Louis dump the body in the swamp. Lestat returns to their townhouse a few nights later, a ruined wreck but very much alive, and Louis and Claudia barely escape through burning down the building.
Now, the really strange thing about the various adaptations and revisits/retcons in later books is that none of them touch on Part 2 of Interview -- all of them skip it and go on directly to Part 3, in Paris.
I'm sure that this is at least in part because the questions raised about the mythology of the book's universe in Part 2 are completely different to those established in the Chronicles two through twelve, where you've got ancient demons and heaven and hell and things, very centred around Egypt and Rome.
The never-utilised Part 2 of Interview, on the other hand, documents Claudia and Louis' adventures in Transylvania and surrounding countries, where they search for other vampires. This section is where I 'met' the Claudia I became wildly fond of.
'Don't you sense the danger?' I whispered to her. 'Can't you breathe it like the air?' One of those quick, elusive smiles played on her lips, as she turned towards the slope. The lantern pitched a pathway through the rising forest. One small, white hand drew the wool of her cape close, and she moved forward.
'Wait only for a moment...'
'Fear's your enemy...' she answered, but she did not stop.
She proceeded ahead of the light, feet sure, even as the tall grass gave way gradually to low heaps of rubble, and the forest thickened, and the distant tower vanished with the fading of the moon and the great weaving of the branches overhead. Soon the sound and scent of the horses died on the low wind.
'Be en garde,' Claudia whispered, as she moved, relentlessly, pausing only now and again where the tangled vines and rock made it seem for moments there was a shelter. But the ruins were ancient. Whether plague or fire or a foreign enemy had ravaged the town, we couldn't know. Only the monastery truly remained.
Now something whispered in the dark that was like the wind and the leaves, but it was neither. I saw Claudia's back straighten, saw the flash of her white palm as she slowed her step. Then I knew it was water, winding its way slowly down the mountain, and I saw it far ahead through the black trunks, a straight, moonlit waterfall descending to a boiling pool below.
Claudia emerged silhouetted against the fall, her hand clutching a bare root in the moist earth beside it; and now I saw her climbing hand over hand up the overgrown cliff, her arm trembling ever so slightly, her small boots dangling, then digging in to hold, then swinging free again. The water was cold, and it made the air fragrant and light all around it, so that for a moment I rested. Nothing stirred around me in the forest. I listened, senses quietly separating the tune of the leaves, but nothing else stirred. And then it struck me gradually, like a chill coming over my arms and my throat and finally my face, that the night was too desolate, too lifeless. It was as if even the birds had shunned this place, as well as all the myriad creatures that should have been moving about the banks of this stream.
But Claudia, above me on the ledge, was reaching for the lantern, her cape brushing my face. I lifted it, so that suddenly she sprang into light, like an eerie cherub. She put her hand out for me as if, despite her small size, she could help me up the embankment. In a moment we were moving on again, over the stream, up the mountain. 'Do you sense it?' I whispered. 'It's too still.'
But her hand tightened on mine, as if to say, `Quiet.' The hill was growing steeper, and the quiet was unnerving. I tried to stare at the limits of the light, to see each new bark as it loomed before us. Something did move, and I reached for Claudia, almost pulling her sharply near to me. But it was only a reptile, shooting through the leaves with a whip of his tail. The leaves settled. But Claudia moved back against me, under the folds of my cape, a hand firmly clasping the cloth of my coat; and she seemed to propel me forward, my cape falling over the loose fabric of her own.
Soon the scent of the water was gone, and when the moon shone clear for an instant I could see right ahead of us what appeared to be a break in the woods. Claudia firmly clasped the lantern and shut its metal door. I moved to stop this, my hand struggling with hers; but then she said to me quietly, 'Close your eyes for an instant, and then open them slowly. And when you do, you will see it.'
A chill rose over me as I did this, during which I held fast to her shoulder. But then I opened my eyes and saw beyond the distant bark of the trees the long, low walls of the monastery and the high square top of the massive tower. Far beyond it, above an immense black valley, gleamed the snow-capped peaks of the mountains. 'Come,' she said to me, 'quiet, as if your body has no weight.' And she started without hesitation right towards those walls, right towards whatever might have been waiting in their shelter.
They find vampires, but the vampires they find are mindless revenants who sleep in their graves. No answers, no grand mythologies, just more questions and horror and dark forests and castles.
So they go back to the little village they stopped in at, so they can sleep somewhere comfy for the day. And Louis decides that the best disguise is impersonating John Winchester.
In a moment I was hammering on the door of the inn. As it opened, I put my hood up around my face tightly and held Claudia beneath my cape in a bundle. 'Your village is rid of the vampire!' I said to the woman, who stared at me in astonishment. I was clutching the crucifix which she'd given me. 'Thanks be to God he's dead. You'll find the remains in the tower. Tell this to your people at once.'
I pushed past her into the inn.
The gathering was roused into commotion instantly, but I insisted that I was tired beyond endurance. I must pray and rest. They were to get my chest from the carriage and bring it to a decent room where I might sleep. But a message was to come for me from the bishop at Varna and for this, and this only, was I to be awakened.
'Tell the good father when he arrives that the vampire is dead, and then give him food and drink and have him wait for me,' I said. The woman was crossing herself. 'You understand,' I said to her, as I hurried towards the stairs, 'I couldn't reveal my mission to you until after the vampire had been. . . '
'Yes, yes,' she said to me. 'But you are not a priest . . .the child!'
'No, only too well-versed in these matters. The Unholy One is no match for me,' I said to her.
Then, in Part 3 of the novel, we're back on well-walked ground: Paris.
I'm not going to quote much of the Paris section, because this post is already getting ridiculously long, but here're a couple of my favourite moments in The Epic Decay Of Claudia And Louis:
I shut the door behind me just as she was taking off her cape, and, in a flurry of golden raindrops, she shook it, shook her hair. The ribbons crushed from the bonnet fell loose and I felt a palpable relief to see the childish dress, those ribbons, and something wonderfully comforting in her arms, a small china doll.
Still she said nothing to me; she was fussing with the doll. Jointed somehow with hooks or wire beneath its flouncing dress, its tiny feet tinkled like a bell. 'It's a lady, doll,' she said, looking up at me. 'See? A lady doll.' She put it on the dresser.
'So it is,' I whispered.
'A woman made it,' she said. 'She makes baby dolls, all the same, baby dolls, a shop of baby dolls, until I said to her, " I want a lady doll. " '
It was taunting, mysterious. She sat there now with the wet strands of hair streaking her high forehead, intent on that doll. 'Do you know why she made it for me?' she asked. I was wishing now the room had shadows, that I could retreat from the warm circle of the superfluous fire into some darkness, that I wasn't sitting on the bed as if on a lighted stage, seeing her before me and in her mirrors, puffed sleeves and puffed sleeves.
'Because you are a beautiful child and she wanted to make you happy,' I said, my voice small and foreign to myself.
She was laughing soundlessly. 'A beautiful child,' she said glancing up at me. 'Is that what you still think I am?' And her face went dark as again she played with the doll, her fingers pushing the tiny crocheted neckline down toward the china breasts. 'Yes, I resemble her baby dolls, I am her baby dolls. You should see her working in that shop; bent on her dolls, each with the same face, lips.' Her finger touched her own lip. Something seemed to shift suddenly, something within the very walls of the room itself, and the mirrors trembled with her image as if the earth had sighed beneath the foundations. Carriages rumbled in the streets; but they were too far away.
And then I saw what her still childish figure was doing: in one hand she held the doll, the other to her lips; and the hand that held the doll was crushing it, crushing it and popping it so it bobbed and broke in a heap of glass that fell now from her open, bloody hand onto the carpet. She wrung the tiny dress to make a shower of littering particles as I averted my eyes, only to see her in the tilted mirror over the fire, see her eyes scanning me from my feet to the top of my head. She moved through that mirror towards me and drew close on the bed.
'Why do you look away, why don't you look at me?' she asked, her voice very smooth, very like a silver bell. But then she laughed softly, a woman's laugh, and said, `Did you think I'd be your daughter forever? Are you the father of fools, the fool of fathers?'
'Your tone is unkind with me,' I answered.
'Hmmm . . . unkind.' I think she nodded. She was a blaze in the corner of my eye, blue flames, golden flames.
'And what do they think of you,' I asked as gently as I could, 'out there?' I gestured to the open window.
'Many things.' She smiled. 'Many things. Men are marvelous at explanations: Have you see the "little people" in the parks, the circuses, the freaks that men pay money to laugh at?'
'I was a sorcerer's apprentice only!' I burst out suddenly, despite myself. 'Apprentice!' I said. I wanted to touch her, to stroke her hair, but I sat there afraid of her, her anger like a match about to kindle.
Again she smiled, and then she drew my hand into her lap and covered it as best she could with her own. 'Apprentice, yes,' she laughed. 'But tell me one thing, one thing from that lofty height. What was it like . . . making love?'
I was walking away from her before I meant to, I was searching like a dim-wilted mortal man for cape and gloves. 'You don't remember?' she asked with perfect calm, as I put my hand on the brass door handle.
I stopped, feeling her eyes on my back, ashamed, and then I turned around and made as if to think, Where am I going, what shall I do, why do I stand here?
'It was something hurried,' I said, trying now to meet her eyes. How perfectly, coldly blue they were. How earnest. 'And... it was seldom savored... something acute that was quickly lost. I think that it was the pale shadow of killing.'
'Ahhh . . .' she said. 'Like hurting you as I do now . . . that is also the pale shadow of killing.'
'Yes, madam,' I said to her. 'I am inclined to believe that is correct.' And bowing swiftly, I bade her good-night.
Claudia and Louis discover the Theatre of the Vampires, a coven run by the eternal sixteen-year-old Armand. Armand has a longstanding hatred of Lestat and a deep attraction to Louis, and in Claudia he has the perfect catalyst to alter the standing he has with both.
When a still-alive Lestat comes to Armand for help and healing blood, he tells Armand about the two vampires who rose up against him, not knowing that Louis and Claudia are already in Paris.
Ostensibly as punishment for trying to kill Lestat; really more to do with the fact that she's seen as an abomination in her tiny form; and truthfully because to do so will break Lestat's heart, and leave Louis free to be Armand's companion, Armand and his Theatre Vampires execute Claudia by locking her out in the sunlight, where she burns to death.
Early versions of the Interview novel had Claudia leaving Louis to venture off with three vampire brothers, but Anne Rice realised that she was trying to work through her daughter's death by giving Claudia a happy ending when the only thing that would really help her would be to experience the same loss over again through Louis and Lestat's loss of Claudia.
"I want everybody to cry when Claudia dies, just like they did for Little Nell." -- Anne Rice
That's the end of the core 'canon' of Claudia, in the first three of the Vampire Chronicles. But see, the thing is, of all the characters I've been fond of, the one most like Claudia in terms of texts and coherency is probably Jason Todd. Different versions for different universes, inconsistent characterisation as a ghost, retcons of increasing violence and tragedy....
Basically, if you're a fictional character and Mary digs you, you're probably in for a world of hurting, even if you're already dead. I'm just, er, lucky that way, I guess.
The Claudia of the 2006 musical is, as I mentioned earlier, ten years old when she's turned into a vampire. She meets Lestat on the street, as she crawls from person to person in search of someone to come help her mother. She notes that Lestat's hands are cold, 'like Mother's', thereby letting the audience know that she's quite alone in the world. She asks Lestat if he's an angel; he hesitates and then, with a smile, answers yes.
After becoming a vampire, she takes to the life completely, and protests when Louis and Lestat scold her. Her song in this scene, the first of two she has in the show, is a tirade against them: You took me from the streets to complete this union / Do you expect some little saint, kneeling for communion?
I've linked to the video of this song in an earlier post or two, so I won't again, but it really is one of the highlight moments of the whole show.
As the years pass, however, Claudia's feelings on her situation do a reversal. She fought hard for Louis and Lestat to see her as what she was, a vampire child, but now she's something different and all they see is that vampire child she used to be.
I had really mixed feelings on Claudia's second song, "I'll Never Have That Chance", the first few times I heard it. I still don't adore it, but I think it makes a lot more sense to me now that I can see that musical-Claudia and book-Claudia are as different as, say, post- and pre-crisis Jason Todd.
Book-Claudia would never lament that she'll never have "a wedding dress of virgin white", "a cottage in the country", "the miracle of giving birth", or "the arching of a rainbow", but book-Claudia had no memory of herself as a human; she only lamented her shape based on the vampire woman she would have liked to be, rather than the human who had died before becoming it.
Musical-Claudia, on the other hand, mourns the child she was. When she and Lestat fight, she spits "Oh, Lestat! My angel." at him, to which he answers "must I pay for that forever?". "You lied to me!" she cries. "I thought I was going to heaven!"
Later, at the Theatre, when Armand accuses her of trying to kill Lestat, Claudia replies "he killed ME! He snatched me from my mortal life!" and Lestat, protesting along with Louis that Armand must let Claudia go, declares that taking Claudia's life from her was a far greater crime than what she did to him.
After Claudia is dead, Lestat quietly pleads with Louis to go back to New Orleans with him, the words too desperate to be anything but monotone. "Please, Louis. Our child is ashes."
If a vampire's ashes aren't scattered, a shred of consciousness remains. Armand wants to leave Claudia unscattered as a final punishment, but Lestat gathers handfuls and lets them off into the wind.
In the finale of the San Francisco show, Lestat drinks from the Queen of the Damned. This links him up with the spirits of all the other vampires, even those who have died. He hears Louis speak of endlessly struggling with his vampire nature; Armand admit that his heart is withered; Nicki's refuge from madness in music. Claudia tells him that an angel came down and caught her ashes up.
This line makes the relationship of Claudia and Lestat into a full circle: she thinks he is her angel, taking her into the afterlife. He lies to her and agrees, and she throws the lie back at him as a curse, but in the end he's the only angel she's got and the only mercy that can set her free into whatever afterlife awaits.
Too bad the whole scene was cut from the Broadway version, really.
Then, there are the later Chronicles. Claudia recurs throughout them, as flashbacks and hauntings. When Lestat manages to trade bodies with a human magician, he spends a huge amount of time dreaming and hallucinating that Claudia is nearby. They never discuss the fact that Lestat has done what Claudia always wanted to do -- inhabit a different body -- but talk at great length about evil and second chances. In the end, she refuses to be his conscience.
"I told you I would do it again," I said to Claudia.
"Why do you bother to explain to me," she asked. "You know perfectly well that I never asked you any questions about it. I've been dead for years and years."
Lestat and Louis eventually move back into the townhouse they once shared with Claudia, now completely rebuilt from the long-ago fire.
The past will not be recovered. The past will be perfectly eclipsed.
"Won't it, Claudia?" I whispered, standing in the back parlour. Nothing answered me. No sounds of a harpsichord or the canary singing in its cage. But I should have songbirds again, yes, many of them, and the house would be full of the rich rampaging music of Haydn or Mozart.
Oh, my darling, wish you were here!
Claudia also appears as a ghost to Jesse, a young paranormal investigator.
It was dark when she opened her eyes. The pain in her head had woken her up. The digital clock on the dresser said ten thirty. Thirst, terrible thirst, and the glass by the bed was empty. Someone else was in the room.
She turned over on her back. Light through the thin white curtains. Yes, there. A child, a little girl. She was sitting in the chair against the wall.
Jesse could just see the outline clearly-the long yellow hair, the puff-sleeved dress, the dangling legs that didn't touch the floor. She tried to focus. Child . . . not possible. Apparition. No. Something occupying space.
Something malevolent. Menace- And the child was looking at her.
Claudia.
She scrambled out of the bed, half falling, the bag in her arms still as she backed up against the wall. The little girl got up. There was the clear sound of her feet on the carpet. The sense of menace seemed to grow stronger. The child moved into the light from the window as she came towards Jesse, and the light struck her blue eyes, her rounded cheeks, her soft naked little arms.
Jesse screamed.
Louis encounters her, too:
"The gates can't be locked to you, Claudia," he said, the tears rising in his eyes. His voice was strong and sure. "That would be too monstrous a cruelty-."
"To whom, Father?" she answered, cutting off his words. "Too monstrous a cruelty to you? I suffer, Father, I suffer and I wander; I know nothing, and all I once knew seems illusory! I have nothing, Father. My senses are not even a memory. I have nothing here at all."
The voice grew weaker, yet it was clearly audible. Her exquisite face was infused with a look of discovery.
"Did you think I'd tell you nursery stories about Lestat's angels?" she asked with a low kindly tone. "Did you think I'd paint a picture of the glassy heavens with palaces and mansions? Did you think I'd sing to you some song learnt from the Morning Stars? No, Father, you will not draw such ethereal comfort from me."
On went her subdued voice: "And when you come following me I shall be lost again, Father. How can I promise that I shall be there to witness your cries or tears?"
This conversation is rather obviously out-of-step with every other book-Claudia piece, as can be seen by comparing that quote with ones earlier in this post. It's an inconsistency which other characters later attempt to explain.
"But you do believe that it was Claudia?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," she said. Her eyes were still red around the edges from her crying. I saw the tears standing there. "It was Claudia," she declared. "Or that thing which now calls itself Claudia, but the words it spoke? They were lies."
"How can you know that?"
"The same way I know when a human being is lying to me. The same way I know when someone's read another one's mind and is preying upon that other's weakness. The spirit was hostile, once called into our realm. The spirit was confused. The spirit told lies."
But, you know, mileage may vary. What seems really out-of-character to me for the character might ring completely true for someone else.
The passage that makes me really leery of canon beyond the first three (or even one) of the Chronicles is from Armand's story, though. This was one of the later books, and... I don't know. It makes me flinch in the same way that extra-horrible retellings of Jason Todd being killed by the Joker make me flinch. You don't need to make horror more horrible with each repetition! Really! I promise, it's horrible enough to start with! Don't over-egg the horror pudding!
She died more horribly than anyone has ever imagined, and I have not the strength now to tell the tale. Let me say only that before she was shoved out into a brick-lined air well to await the death sentence of the god Phoebus, I tried to grant her fondest wish, that she should have the body of a woman, a fit shape for the tragic dimension of her soul.
Well, in my clumsy alchemy, slicing heads from bodies and stumbling to transplant one to another, I failed. Some night when I am drunk on the blood of many victims, and more accustomed than I am now to confession, I will recount it, my crude and sinister operations, conducted with a sorcerer's willfulness and a boy's blundering, and describe in grim and grotesque detail the writhing jerking catastrophe that rose from beneath my scalpel and my surgical needle and thread.
Let me say here, she was herself again, hideously wounded, a botched reassemblage of the angelic child she'd been before my attempts, when she was locked out in the brutal morning to meet her death with a clear mind. The fire of Heaven destroyed the awful unhealed evidence of my Satanic surgery as it turned her to a monument in ash. No evidence remained of her last hours within the torture chamber of my makeshift laboratory. No one need ever have known what I say now.
For many a year, she haunted me. I could not strike from my mind the faltering image of her girlish head and tumbling curls fixed awkwardly with gross black stitching to the flailing, faltering and falling body of a female vampire whose discarded head I'd thrown into the fire.
Ah, what a grand disaster was that, the child-headed monster woman unable to speak, dancing in a frenetic circle, the blood gurgling from her shuddering mouth, her eyes rolling, arms flapping like the broken
bones of invisible wings.
It was a truth I vowed to conceal forever from Louis de Pointe du Lac and all whoever questioned me.
Better let them think that I had condemned her without trying to effect her escape, both from the vampires of the theatre and from the wretched dilemma of her small, enticing, flat-chested and silken-skinned angelic form.
She was not fit for deliverance after the failure of my butchery; she was as a prisoner subjected to the cruelty of the rack who can only smile bitterly and dreamily as she is led, torn and miserable, to the final horror of the stake. She was as a hopeless patient, in the reeking antiseptic death cubicle of a modern hospital, freed at last from the hands of youthful and overzealous doctors, to give up the ghost on a
white pillow alone.
Enough. I won't relive it.
I will not.
I never loved her. I didn't know how.
I carried out my schemes in chilling detachment and with fiendish pragmatism. Being condemned and therefore being nothing and no one, she was a perfect specimen for my whim. That was the horror of it, the secret horror which eclipsed any faith I might have pleaded later in the high-blown courage of my experiments. And so the secret remained with me, with Armand, who had witnessed centuries of unspeakable and refined cruelties, a story unfit for the tender ears of a desperate Louis, who could never have borne such descriptions of her degradation or suffering, and who did not truly, in his soul, survive her death, cruel as it was.
As for the others, my stupid cynical flock, who listened so lasciviously at my door to the screaming, who maybe guessed the extent of my failed wizardry, those vampires died by Louis's hand.
Indeed the entire theatre paid for his grief and his rage, and justly so perhaps.
I can make no judgment.
... yeah.
In less gross recent developments, the child vampire has now become a staple of the genre, showing up everywhere from the movie Near Dark to the Hero Quest video games to the Buffy comics.
Now, Buffy has a kind of wackified relationship with the Vampire Chronicles. Buffy makes cracks about lame wannabe vampires who call themselves Lestat, but Spike's backstory with his mother is a skewed homage Lestat's own history. Angel speaks scathingly of the whole morbid undead chic thing, but has just as much whiny angst as Louis without any of the style.
The framing story for the Tales of the Vampires miniseries, written by Joss Whedon, includes a character that's rather like... well...
Last, but not least, remember in my Nicki post how I talked about Savage Garden, the superstar nineties pop band I still adore? Remember Darren, the lead singer, and his unabashed Chronicles love?
Well, this one time, Darren needed to pick an actress to play his love interest in a video clip. Who'd he pick?
Oh, Darren, I LOVE YOU LIKE I LOVE LIBRARIES. <333333
And, uh, I think this post is well past the point of too long. Um. Hi!
'Fire purifies...' Claudia said.
And I said, 'No, fire merely destroys...'