Inhabiting the Miniature: Feminine Domestic Space between Prison and Subversion in Casa de muñecas and Casa de geishas

Abstract

This article reads Ana María Shua's Casa de geishas (1992) alongside Patricia Esteban Erlés's Casa de muñecas (2012) in order to ask why the house, so often figured as shelter, works in women's flash fiction as prison, mirror, and spell. Through a theme-based comparison organised around three axes, we argue that both writers reduce woman to a domestic miniature, doll or geisha, a copy without an original, only to turn that confinement against itself through humour, the subversive rewriting of fairy tales, and the fire that reduces the home to ash. Across their differences of tradition and temperament, the study uncovers a shared, transatlantic imaginary of enclosure, one in which brevity, the very bars of the cage, becomes also the file that saws through them.