ABSTRACT
Dolls are created in imitation of humans. They are empty humanoid shells without life which the observer can turn into recipients of the past intended to overcome present threats. In Carlos Fuentes’s text “La muñeca reina” [“The Doll Queen” 1954], the threat is the uncanny presence of Amilamia. She is a hunchbacked woman whose parents describe as an evil breed and who is kept hidden so much that the narrator does not see her until the last lines of the story. In an attempt to silence her deformed present condition, her parents claim she died at the age of seven, when she was a charming beautiful girl. They honor her memory in an altar of dolls where the central object is a coffin containing a porcelain doll that resembles her in all proportions as a child, but that the narrator recognizes as a false corpse. The couple needs to ask the narrator, a former friend of Amilamia’s childhood, what the girl was like, since, after fifteen years, their memories are blurred and they doubt how much the inert object really resembles the child. The purpose of this paper is first to analyze how the uncanny presence of adult Amilamia and her deformed adult body makes it impossible for the narrator to stick to his past memories of the girl anymore; similarly, it invalidates her parents’ attempt to impose the permanence of her past in the dead image of eternal childhood presented by the porcelain doll. Secondly, I explore the connection of these two failed attempts to impose the past with the idealization of the past that prevents Mexicans from facing the existence of an incompletely formed nation in the present.
