Nick Joaquin's Dollhouse

I've always been fascinated with the idea of making myself smaller and fitting into tiny magic spaces. I used to make little caves of cloth, hooked on free-standing bookshelves, and nearby drawers. The cave was more like a flimsy tent. But it was my secret hide-away. (Some secret. Everyone knew where it was. And when I'd try to escape my afternoon nap, Nana ALWAYS found me. Wonder why.) I used to stare at pretty things, like a stone on one of my mother's rings, or a malachite egg we had in living room. I used to think that if I willed it, I'd be small enough to fit into the little world inside the stone. Something that beautiful HAD to be magic. I was a bit strange.

So I've always been obsessed with Elang Uling. It's Nick Joaquin's version of Cinderella and in this version, there is a dollhouse where Ela escapes to when the housework gets her down. She opens the cupboard, and takes Mama's little hand and steps into the dollhouse where she gets hot food, a warm bath and fresh clothes. Everytime I read that book, I feel like I could almost step into the dollhouse with her. After years and years, I read the story again and to be honest, the language was a bit disappointing. Joaquin was, for lack of a better word, a bit corny at times. But the dollhouse still drew me in.

There's another story about a dollhouse in Carol Ann Duffy's The Stolen Childhood and other Dark Fairy Tales.
[I was puttering about in the library when I came across the book. Good stuff. There was a story about a woman who wanted to be young so she cut out her step-daughter's shadow with a pair of scissors, snip snip. And she cut out her own, snip snip. And made a trade. But let's get back on track...]
Anyway, it's about a little doll-girl, who lived with her little doll-family in a perfect little doll-house. But then she started to grow. And grow until she was monstrous-large for their little doll-world. (Kinda reminded me of Kafka's Metamorphosis, or Roth's The Breast-- except that she doesn't turn into anything gross or ridiculous. She just gets really big. Like Alice did at times in wonderland.) And when she grew too big, she realised that she was in a room her size, where there were toys her size and a bed her size. And then her own-sized mother came up to tuck her in. She grew up and grew old in this large-sized world and was happy most of the time. But when she was very very old, she took out the dollhouse and cried to see her little doll-family inside. And she grew smaller and smaller until the little old lady was small enough to step back inside.

Another story of hte miniature that I kept re-reading was Karls Nilssen, the Elf from my old Childcraft volumes. In this story, a little boy is very lonely becasue his sister just died. He's alone in his room when he hears a little voice under his bed and meets this elf. In order to visit with his friend, he creeps under his bed and touches a nail right above the mousehole and says something like: kilevippen or some other word like it. He takes furniture from his sister's dollhouse to furnish his friend's new apartment and finds an old butterdish so they can take a bath together and they play all day. (This account is beginning to sound more gay than I first intended. The things you realise while you're busy typing away...hm.)

Why am I so obsessed with exploring small spaces? With the idea of becoming miniature and stepping into a cloth cave a dollhouse a mousehole? Maybe it's the interiority, the safety of the small and virtually unseen. Maybe I just want to redecorate a mousehole. If I were Freudian, I'd probably say that I had fantasies of regressing back into the womb. But Freud is silly as hell and there's nothing interesting about returning into a slippery bag of blood and embryotic fluid. Truth, I don't know why I like this. I just sounds like a fun sort of thing to do.

***
I'm writing a paper on Elang Uling for my Critical Theories and Perspectives class. Wheee! I'm using Bakhtin's idea of the chronotope with a Feminist (and slightly Marxist) agenda to 'expose the latent ideologies in the text'.
*Let me take a minute to wipe the blood from my nose.*
Now, what I just said was: I'm going to look at how time and space are constructed in the story-- particularly the time and space of the dollhouse-- and look into how this interacts with and affects the women in this story. Elang Uling is as weak and as annoying as most other Cinderellas and while she's safe and happy in the dollhouse, there's really no other place for her is there? She's defined by this house. I don't think I'll be ruining the story for myself by picking on Ela and the construction of women in the text. I was always only after the dollhouse anyway. I wanted to step into the dollhouse and have a good time. (Oh 'time-out'. Another Bakhtinian idea in children's lit. Aba...) And I guess by writing this paper, I'll be in effect, stepping in and out of that dollhouse myself.