The Youngest Doll

by Rosario Ferré

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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 show more 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. show less

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2 reviews
Note: I read only the title story:

A surreal story of revenge and the creative ways in which women overcome patriarchal society.
Her short stories are like puzzles or riddles.

Common themes: social classes; relationships; city vs country; Puerto Rico vs the U.S.; truth (subjective)

A good quote from her: "Anger has caused innumerable women writers to write well." -Ferre'

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61+ Works 983 Members
Rosario Josefina Ferré was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico on September 28, 1938. She received a bachelor's degree in English literature from Manhattanville College, a master's degree in literature from the University of Puerto Rico, and a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from the University of Maryland. She was a professor of Latin American show more literature at several universities including the University of California, Rutgers University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Puerto Rico. She was a novelist, poet, essayist, and children's book author. She was the editor of the literary magazine Loading and Unloading Zone as well as a newspaper columnist and critic. She wrote several books in Spanish and English including The House on the Lagoon, Eccentric Neighborhoods, and Sweet Diamond Dust: And Other Stories. She died on February 18, 2016 at the age of 77. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

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Canonical title
The Youngest Doll
Original publication date
1991

Classifications

Genres
Fiction and Literature, General Fiction
DDC/MDS
863Literature & rhetoricSpanish, Portuguese, Galician literaturesSpanish fiction
LCC
PQ7440 .F45 .P313Language and LiteratureFrench, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese literaturesSpanish literatureProvincial, local, colonial, etc.Spanish America
BISAC

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Members
84
Popularity
377,894
Reviews
2
Rating
(4.08)
Languages
English, Spanish
Media
Paper, Ebook
ISBNs
3
ASINs
1