Mirror effects in Casa de Muñecas, a kaleidoscopic book

Abstract

Patricia Esteban Erlés’ first book of flash fiction, Casa de Muñecas (2012, Páginas de Espuma), is made up of one hundred miniatures divided into ten sections, each of which corresponds to one of the rooms in the Victorian dollhouse evoked by the title. With its singular peritexts, and particularly Sara Morante’s fascinating illustrations, the book belongs to the ever-shifting and indefinable genre of fantasy literature. By examining the role of mirrors –in both a strict literal sense and a broader figurative sense– this article suggests that specularity, which emerges through a series of repetitions, inversions, symmetries and semantic oscillations, is the founding or dominant principle at the heart of the book, from its genesis to the reading experience. In order to demonstrate this, I will examine how mirrors –thematic, intersemiotic, structural or transtextual– underpin the book as a whole, becoming a generalised metaphor for the Freudian uncanny which is both a revelation of the obscure and an act of feminist revenge through the destruction of patriarchal codes. The book emerges as a kaleidoscopic work, made up of an infinite combination of flickering mirror effects, especially through the reinforced affinity between fantasy and flash fiction, which is emblematic of a form of cubic literature.