During The Miserable Mill, Violet bears the emotional burden on what’s going on with Klaus. As the oldest Baudelaire child, she feels responsible for looking after her younger brother and sister as her parents told her. Sure her parents probably meant along the lines of making sure Klaus didn’t stick his fingers in an electrical outlet or Sunny didn’t eat rat poison. Now that their parents are dead, Violet takes the blame when something goes wrong, like Count Olaf trying to hurt them or steal their money. In this book, she feels that Klaus’s strange behavior is somehow her fault. Thus, she has to figure it out and make everything better. Now that she knows that Dr. Orwell is hypnotizing him, she’s still at a loss to find out how to get him to snap out of it.

The song I chose to view Violet’s state of mind through her emotional rollercoaster is “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” from The Phantom of the Opera. In the original version, Christine is mourning for her late father at his grave. Here Violet isn’t just trying to talk to her dead parents, she’s also at a loss for what to do about Klaus. Because she doesn’t know how to fix him.

“Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” (ASOUE Version)

Sung by Violet Baudelaire

You were once my two companions
You were all that mattered
You were once my mum and father
Then my world was shattered

Wishing you were somehow here again
Wishing you were somehow near
Sometimes it seemed,
If I just dreamed
Somehow you would be here

Wishing I could hear your voice again
Knowing that I never would
Dreaming of you won’t help me to do
All that you dreamed I could

I swore I’d look after our Klaus
But this time I didn’t
He wanted to leave this sawmill
And I made him stay here

He’s acting strange
It’s all my fault
Nobody else can fix him

Wishing you were somehow here again
Wishing we could say goodbye
Try to forgive, teach me to live
Give me the strength to try
I can invent, fix anything
So how can I fix my brother?
I don’t know what to do
Not sure I can fix him