Claudia’s Analysis [Entrevista con el vampiro]

Interview with the Vampire, essentially, is the fruit of the grief and helplessness that Anne Rice had to go through after the death of her little daughter, Michelle, from leukemia. After three years of alcoholism, Anne Rice began writing this classic vampire novel. With her publication he achieved the necessary success to dedicate himself to fully mourning her loss.

In another comment, Anne Rice adds:

What does Anne Rice mean by “lost love”? Not certainly to a romantic love, but rather to a certain nostalgia, a certain melancholy, a certain longing or mourning that, ultimately, accompanies the vampire throughout his entire existence. The only exception in Anne Rice’s work to this paradigm is Claudia

Louis de Pointe du Lac, in Interview with the Vampire, reflects on little Claudia’s undead state:

Claudia was a five-year-old girl who lived in the poor neighborhoods of 18th century New Orleans, devastated by the plague. She lost her parents to the plague, and we first meet her in an abandoned house, next to the body of her dead mother. Anne Rice describes her as very small in size, and delicate in shape, with long golden curls and porcelain skin. Louis de Pointe du Lac, the protagonist of Interview with the Vampire, finds her. She begs him to “wake up” her mother. Louis, on the other hand, attacks Claudia but feels immediate regret, and abandons her there to die.

However, Claudia is “saved” by Lestat de Lioncourt, Louis’ vampire creator; and the girl is eventually taken to Louis’s wealthy home in the heart of New Orleans. There, Lestat turns her into a vampire.

Furthermore, Lestat tells the girl that she is now his “daughter”, and that she is in the family. Although Louis is initially horrified at the idea of ​​a child-vampire, he and Claudia become very attached, and the three form a close relationship and lead a family lifestyle for the next few decades.

Although the three vampires spend many years in this apparent stability and luxury, Claudia slowly begins to distance herself more and more, insisting on her self-sufficiency, and even obtaining her own miniature coffin so that she does not have to sleep with either Lestat or Louis during daylight hours. Claudia becomes self-taught and philosophical under Louis’ tutelage. She also becomes a ferocious killer under Lestat’s direction, appearing to her victims as an innocent angel to lure them to their deaths.

As the decades pass, Claudia feels increasingly dissatisfied and irritated at being constantly “dressed like a doll” by both of her parents. Her frustration leads her to kill a mother and daughter and leave their corpses to rot in the kitchen of the house. When her act is discovered by Lestat and Louis, she becomes enraged and informs them that she is no longer a little girl, but that she is trapped in the body of a five-year-old girl and unable to develop.

Desperate, Claudia wants to mature physically and become an adult woman, but she will never have that chance. After all, she never had a choice, she never asked to become a vampire in the first place, which is why she hates both of her parents more than she ever thought was possible.

Anne Rice’s cycle of novels examines some of the problems that vampirism embodies, not only in individual terms, but in archetypal terms; and one of them is melancholy. Claudia, of course, stars as the melancholic ghost of the missing child who haunts and torments us. However, it is from Louis’ perspective that these melancholy ghosts come into focus. In fact, Louis’s melancholy organizes the entire novel, and in some ways distorts his observations. He is, in essence, the modern man destined for suicide because he cannot survive his immortality, he cannot renounce the “lost love”, he cannot kill, he can only murder and cry incessantly. His approach, of course, distorts the rest of the characters, and Claudia is no exception.

Claudia, created by Louis and Lestat, is on the side of killing. There is no attachment in her to some “lost love”; However, she is also trapped in a kind of loop in which she constantly relives the loss of her mother.

At one point, Louis feels a death impulse against himself, but then he hears a little girl crying:

For years, Lestat hasn’t gone out to kill, but now he suddenly finds himself drawn to the girl who can’t abandon her dead mother. This increase in his murderous impulse leads him to bite the girl, but not kill her. He just leaves her there to die. It is Lestat who completes the birth of this vampire daughter, Claudia.

In Interview with the Vampire, then, vampirism is reduced to Louis’s perspective, which maintains a convergence between vampirism and humanity. In other words, Louis is too human; On the other hand, Claudia externalizes a much deeper connection of disconnection with humanity. That’s why she can push for Lestat’s destruction without having to take his place.

Claudia, of course, is fueled by the energy of Michelle, the dead daughter that Anne Rice cannot mourn, not directly, not openly in the novel, but outside of it. This is established very subtly in the figure of Madeline, who is also incapable of mourning her dead daughter, thus becoming Claudia’s eternally maternal protector.

At the other end is the scene where Claudia herself remains next to the corpse of her mother, whose death she does not recognize. This sad scenario of disconnection between mother and daughter is recycled in Claudia through her cult of miniature dolls and kingdoms of her. In fact, Claudia discovers Madeleine in a toy store full of dolls. When Louis interviews Madeline for the position of Claudia’s partner, we witness a very strange moment:

When Louis steps forward and makes Madeleine one of them, he confides in Claudia:

Madeleine is the monster of total grief, the death impulse that was inside Louis for so long. She is wearing the locket of her dead daughter, whose death must go unnoticed; That’s why Louis orders him to close it; and this confinement is what programs his relationship with Claudia.

Once turned into a vampire, Madeleine builds a doll-sized mortuary habitat for Claudia, a substitute for her dead daughter. All the elements of the death cult that are exchanged in Anne Rice’s novel between Claudia and her dead mother hint at how deep and immeasurable the pain and mourning of the death of a child is.

Louis and Lestat “play” with Claudia in a similar way to how a child plays with dolls, however, unlike a doll, Claudia is not an inanimate object. At first, Claudia enjoys the dolls and toys she is given, but, as she matures mentally, it becomes evident that her toys and her doll-like appearance represent her confinement within a childlike physique.

Made of porcelain, the dolls project the image that girls are vulnerable and innocent, but, as inanimate objects, they lack personality and individualized physical traits. The problem with this image is that it does not grant agency or autonomy. Claudia, forever trapped in the body of a five-year-old girl, will be eternally perceived as a child, and restricted to a lower social status.

In this way, Claudia begins to see the dolls as a symbol of her own social distortion, believing that a mature body would give her the agency and equality she craves. The fact that Louis and Lestat do not respect her as an adult exacerbates her frustration with her childlike body. So much so that Louis admits:

Louis also tells Lestat:

Despite knowing that Claudia is a woman, Louis and Lestat’s behavior towards her does not change. Consequently, Claudia’s resentment toward her creator continues to grow until she decides to act. For her part, Louis and Lestat underestimate Claudia’s inner turmoil, so neither anticipates that she could direct her predatory abilities toward them.

After learning the story of his origins, Claudia decides that she and Louis must get rid of Lestat. She tells Louis that Lestat has made them slaves, but that they can free themselves by killing him. Since Lestat, in this context, is the patriarchal father, Claudia’s murderous desire symbolizes her attempt to escape her misogynistic position.

Under the pretext of offering a gift to Lestat, Claudia brings home two small children. Her behavior towards Lestat changes during this scene, going from confrontational to harmonious. When she enters the room to talk to Lestat, she sits at the piano with her “hands crossed and her face resting on them,” which gives her a childish aura. She continues telling him sweetly and softly:

Distracted by his childish performance, Lestat accepts the peace offering; However, Claudia has drugged the children, infecting her blood. Claudia’s patricide rejects the social narrative of childhood through the reuse of the innocent and vulnerable image of a girl to commit murder.

Despite murdering Lestat, Claudia fails to be admitted to adulthood. Being perceived as a girl because of her appearance, she remains frustrated. After visiting Madeleine, a grieving mother who makes dolls in the image of her deceased daughter, Claudia asks Louis:

Louis responds by telling her that she is a beautiful girl, so Madeleine made the figure to make her happy. Enraged by Louis’ continued insistence that she is a girl, Claudia brutally destroys the doll:

, I am your dolls. You should see her working in that store; leaning over her wrists, each one with the same face, the same lips.

His finger touched his lips. And then I saw what her still childlike figure was doing: in one hand she held the doll, the other on her lips; and the hand that held the doll crushed it, so that it swung and broke into a heap of porcelain that now fell from his open, bloody hand, onto the carpet.]

The crushing of the doll represents Claudia’s anger at her perpetual imprisonment in a girl’s body. She crushes the model of the “ideal girl” in an attempt to free herself once again from this state of submission.

Unfortunately, Claudia is graphically murdered within the novel. Her belief that her physical body prevents him from having autonomy from her leads her to seek a solution. Her first two attempts to gain her freedom fail to bring about a change in her situation, and when Lestat reappears, Claudia realizes that gaining autonomy is impossible while she resides in the body of a girl. In response, Claudia concludes that the only way to free herself is to have an adult form.

With the help of Armand, a vampire who longs to have Louis to himself, Claudia orchestrates a last-ditch effort to achieve a body that matches her mental state. Armand dismantles Claudia’s body, decapitating her and reattaching her head to the body of an adult vampire. The transformation is not sustainable, but Armand cannot reverse that damage, and he leaves this mutilated version of Claudia in the light…