Doll Worksheet

Title: The Doll Queen            Author: Carlos Fuentes (Mexico)                Year of Publication: 1964                                              

Genre/Sub-genre: short story, mystery, coming of age

Language Style: symbolic realism, elegant, a memory

Tone: sad, serious, nostalgic, reminiscent, dream-like

Place/Setting:The park (210) childhood neighborhood, Amilamia's house, walking on the street, The Bureau of Records. afternoon, shadows, a city park, a concrete bench vs wrough-iron green-painted bench(210), " the sun offends me" (213), a damp park (213), a one story house-with an azotea(212)

Social Class: upper middle class (Carlos), lower middle class (Amilamia), lower to poor class

Time Frame: a couple of days, flashback to 15 years ago. Also, nine or ten months pass.   one afternoon -his first visit to the house, one night "kept me awake all night" (213) second visit, "yesterday" (218), 10 month later (221)                                                                              

Characters:

• Carlos: lonely, bored, unmarried, curious
• Young Carlos: likes to read, attends a good school, attends operas
• Young Amilamia: vampire-like
• Amilamia: wheelchair, deformed, smoker, 7 yr old child, serious, frozen, blue-checked apron, grey eyes (218), chubby cheeked, smooth brown hair, then 22 yrs (211), lives in what used to be an elegant neighborhood (212), well brought up, spontaneous (208)
• Amilamia's mother and father:
• Narrator - Carlos (222), flashbackk to a 14 yr old (210), sex (210), now 29 yr old, bacherlor, educated (211), upper middle class family, goes on vacations, goes to prep school, is taken to ballets as a child, he lies in order lto enter the house, he goes to the Bureau of Records (obsessed), " I despised myself" (218)
• The mother - old lady with no expression, salt and pepper hair(213)

Ambiance: reminiscent, childlike, dark, flashbacks, surreal, disillusioned, hallucination

Themes/Motifs: alienation, change, memories, symbolism, love, dreams, loneliness, loss

Proper Nouns: Bureau of Records, Strogoff, Huckleberry, Milday de Winter, Genevieve de Barbante

Senses:

• touch: “to tickle my ear with down from a dandelion she blew towards me” “holding hands” (210), (208)
• sounds: “humming with her eyes closed, imitating the voices of birds, dogs, cats, hens, and horses.” (209), “flood-tide of whistles, bells, voices, sobs, engines, radios, imprecations” (211), “the squeal of a knife-sharpener here, the hammering of a shoe-repairman there,” ”The music of an organ-grinder reaches my ears, mingled with the voices of children’s rounds” (211), “I can hear a harsh and irregular breathing” (212), "hinges creaked"
• sight: “smooth hair changing in the reflection of the light” (209), “All I can see is that starched little blue-checked apron” (212), everything he sees in the room on pages 219-220.
• smell: “disagreeable odor of stale tobacco” (212), “magical immediacy an odor of damp benediction that seems to sir the humus and precipitate the fermentation of everything living with its roots in the dust.” (221),"The odor overpowers everything else"
• taste:

Symbolic Images:

• Amilamia = Carlos's past
• the bench = a coffin
• the hill =_____
• the map =_________
• Colors: “gold dust and greyish scal,” (207), white hands (214)
• “Amilamia in the distance, a point on the spot where the hill began to descend form a lake of clover towards the flat meadow where I, sitting on the bench, used to read” (208) = __________
• “Eucalyptus tree” (209) = __________
• Numbers: “Four hand guide my body.” (219) = __________
• “Rain is beginning to fall in large isolated drops” (221) = Carlos's hope (?)

Symbolic Elements:

Was Amilamia a Vampire?: “who would stop behind me…mischievous spirit, one afternoon, had not chosen to tickle my ear with down from a dandelion she blew towards me…” (208), the entire last paragraph on (208)-he uses words and descriptions like “ingenuousness of her years” and “seemed artificial”, “hanging upside down” (209), “occasionally pausing on the damaged end of the peach, a nibble bite...where little teeth have left their mark” (216)

"...Old fashioned rosaries.." (214) 

Oddities:

• “But the wax and rubber faces observing me” (217),
• “the presence of flowers is so strong here they seem to take on the quality of living flesh” (219),
• “I withdraw my fingers form the false cadaver.” (220)

Cultural Elements:

• Death: "What was she like, senor? Tell us what she was like, please." (218) In this culture, talking about death is not taboo. Talking about the deceased is a way to move on and fondly remember loved ones. In the United States, it would almost be considered rude to 'bring up' the death of someone especially a family member.

Literary Devices

• Simile: "it takes its seat like a yellow Mogol upon the throne of my hallucination"  “I must remember her fixed forever in time, as in a photograph album.” (208),
• Personification: “book whose pages had revived the ghost associated with the childish calligraphy.” (207), “as the three decades of the chapelet whisper through her fingers.” (215), “nausea crawls in my stomach” (220)
• Flashback: Part I with Carlos’s reminiscent dreams of Amilamia (208-10)
• Foreshadowing: “blue checked apron” (209), “green bench” (209),
• Hyperbole: “ancient treetrunks” (209)
• Imagery: 

Intriguing Quote:

• "that steep slope we rolled down together, was this. A barely elecated patch of dark stubble with no more heights and depths than those my memory had created."
• “She asked my name and after considering it very seriously, she told me hers with a smile while if not candid, was not too rehearsed.” (208),
• “as if she could divine in my eyes the images born of the pages.” (209),
• “Where are you? Don’t you know you’re not supposed to answer the door? Go back! Devil’s spawn! Do I have to beat you again?” (222)
• "...stopping before the grove of pines and eucalyptus I recognize the smallness of the bosky enclosure that my memory has insisted on drawing with an amplitude that allowed sufficient space for the vast swell of my imagination." (210) - I picked this quote because Carlos's choice of words show that he went to an upper class school, for example: eucalyptus, bosky,and amplitude.
• "...the woman rocks, as the three decades of the chaplet whisper through her fingers." (215)
• Foreign or Unfamiliar Terms:

“azotea” a flat roof or terrace roof (212)

"eucalyptus"  a fast-growing evergreen Australasian tree that has been widely introduced elsewhere. (210)

"bosky" wooded; covered by trees or bushes (210)

Dictionary Work: