The Dollhouse
Amma’s prize possession is a scale-model (though still unusually over-sized) dollhouse replica of her mother’s Victorian manor home. Amma is a strangely precocious thirteen-year-old girl who seems to bounce back and forth between the child behind her and the woman ahead of her. In an equally strange way this conflict between what was and what will be taking place in the what is of the present is symbolized by the dollhouse which she insists must be an absolutely perfect and exacting miniature model of the real thing. As a result, the failure of the dollhouse to live up to this ideal can lead to extremely childish tantrums while in the end, the dollhouse becomes very a much a symbol of, for lack of a better word, maturity.
Camille’s Cuts
Camille is a cutter; the common vernacular term for a person who indulges in self-injury as a misplaced psychotherapeutic self-treatment to deal with trauma and emotional instability. Camille is no ordinary cutter who simply leaves geometric patterns as the traces of her dalliances with sharp objects. Literally her entire body not covered by modest shirts and jeans is almost a diary carved in flesh of words that have taken on special meaning in the narrative of her past: “Whine, milk, hurt, bleed.” The cutting can be interpreted as symbolism on a number of levels including repossession of her sexually abused body and a concerted effort to desexualize herself as merely a body to be objectified by men. At its most elemental level, however, the purposeful decision to self-harm with words indicates a symbolic urge to communicate; a cry for understanding and caring that goes unheard and unseen by a passive and oblivious public.
Alcohol
Camille is a problem drinker who muses in her narrative prose that she views liquor as a lubricant that keeps the “sharp thoughts” in one’s head from gaining the traction necessary to become sharp actions. It is the empty kind of philosophizing that drunks do to convince themselves that their weakness is tragic, of course, but it does speak to the symbolism of alcohol in the novel as wildly wrong-headed means of attempting to soothe wounds.
Teeth
Two young girls are murdered and a gruesome aspect ties then irrefutably together as the work of the same killer: all their teeth have been horrifically extracted using a simple tool like a pair of pliers. It is a little difficult to discuss the symbolism of the teeth without giving away the plot and a discussion of symbolism is not the place for such spoilers. Suffice to say that when all is revealed, the removal of the teeth and, more specifically, the purpose of the extraction, serve as a chilling symbol of both the depths of depravity to which any human being is subject as well as the blind spot that still remains in the collective psyche of society when it comes to the who and why of murder.
Wind Gap
The gruesome murders occur in the narrator’s small hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri. She is working as a journalist in Chicago which is close enough that it makes sense to send her back there to cover the story. Chicago has long been and is still infamous for always being at or near the top of the list in terms of murders per year. So there is irony in sending a reporter from the big city to the small town to get a scoop on a story about evil in the heartland. Without giving too much away, this irony is further deepened when she returns to the big bad city unwitting bringing malevolence with her. Wind Gap thus become a symbol for assumptions: the devil may not reside in the big city at all, but may instead be smiling and waving at you from the other side of a white picket fence in a town you’ve never heard of.
