A gentle maiden aunt who has been victimized for years unexpectedly
retaliates through her talent for making life-sized dolls filled
with honey. "The Youngest Doll," based on a family anecdote, is a
stunning literary expression of Rosario Ferre's feminist and social
concerns. It is the premier story in a collection that was
originally published in Spanish in 1976 as "Papeles de Pandora" and
is now translated into English by the author. The daughter of a
former governor of Puerto Rico, Ferre portrays women loosening the
constraints that have bound them to a patriarchal culture. Anger
takes creative rather than polemical form in ten stories that
started Ferre on her way to becoming a leading woman writer in
Latin America.
The upper-middle-class women in "The Youngest Doll," mostly
married to macho men, rebel against their doll-like existence or
retreat into fantasy, those without money or the right skin color
are even more oppressed. In terms of power and influence, these
women stand in the same relation to men as Puerto Rico itself does
to the United States, and Ferre stretches artistic boundaries in
writing about their situation. The stories, moving from the
realistic to the nightmarish, are deeply, felt, full of irony and
black humor, often experimental in form. The imagery is striking:
an architect dreams about a beautiful bridge that "would open and
close its arches like alligators making love"; a Mercedes Benz
"shines in the dark like a chromium rhinoceros." One story, "The
Sleeping Beauty," is a collage of letters, announcements, and photo
captions that allows chilling conclusions to be drawn from what is
not written. The collection includes Ferre's discussion of "When
Women Love Men," a story about a prostitute and a society lady who
unite in order to survive, and one that illustrates the woman
writer's "art of dissembling anger through irony." In closing, she
considers how her experience as a Latin American woman with ties to
the United States has brought to her writing a dual cultural
perspective.
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