Hyper-real dolls: the fetish of desire

BEATRIZ JAGUARIBE
THE SHOCK OF THE REAL

I know, I know it was necessary to have things like this, things

that gave in to everything. The simplest romantic relationship was
beyond our understanding, we could not have lived and had
I had negotiations with a person who was something; at the limit,
we could have entered into this person and lost ourselves in them.
With the doll we were forced to assert ourselves, because if
if we had yielded to her, we would not have found a person
some (...) was so abyssally devoid of fantasy that
our imagination has become tireless in dealing with it
(Rainer Maria Rilke)1

(...) prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the
representation to reality, appearance to being (Feuerbach,
1843).

Barbies like Sleeping Beauties stacked in plastic tomb boxes; mannequins

spectral in the night windows; galleries of wax figures in petrified gestures;
hyper-real dolls shimmering on computer screens. As material artifacts,
artistic inventions or objects of desire, dolls are empty figures that we fill
with our fantasies. But as a material object made of porcelain, wax, plastic,
made of wood, cloth or metal, the doll has a tangible presence in the world. Devoid of
consciousness, the doll gives in to everything since it is a toy in our hands and a
fantasy in our minds. But in representing the female figure, it also kindles
imaginative projections that fill the void of your non-person. Hence the wrap of
unusual that illuminates like a surreal halo. In your false eyes that do not reflect.
our gaze, we have the strangeness of duplication that refers us to the tenuous boundary
between life and death. Like inorganic objects, dolls can be manipulated,
altered, destroyed, beautified, but they do not die. However, in their bodies
petrified, in their duplication of the human figure suggest the repose of the dead.
at the same time, the painted features, the hair to be styled, the body to be dressed

1Iknow, I know it was necessary for us to have things of this kind, which acquiesced in everything.
simplest love relationships were quite beyond our comprehension, we could not possibly have lived and
had dealings with a person who was something; at most, we could only have entered into such a person
and have lost ourselves there. With the doll we were forced to assert ourselves, for, had we surrendered
ourselves to it, there would then have been no one there at all (…) it was so abysmally devoid of
fantasy, that our imagination became inexhaustible in dealing with it (...).” “Reflections on the doll”
of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, cited in the essay by Marina Warner 'Waxworks and Wonderlands' from the book
Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances, edited by Lynne Cook and Peter Wollen, New York: New
Press, 1995, p. 195. The translation of the quote into Portuguese is mine.
they induce actions, games, and imaginative play that mimic real life. How much
the more realistic the doll, the more the strangeness of its figure becomes powerful. Led to
extreme, the fascination with the doll becomes a fetish for the female figure. In dolls
what seductive women represent, this fetish is loaded with eroticism and unveils
a displacement of desire.
Although the fascination with the doll has a long cultural history, I want
explore a specific aspect of this imaginary that emphasizes the doll as an object
of erotic projections. The erotic doll reveals the fetish of desire. This fetish of
desire, in turn, reflects a particularly modern condition in that
it translates a "structure of feeling" and a content of experience marked by appeal
visual, by consumer seduction, by the projection of mirrored eroticism upon oneself in
fantastical subjectivity surrounding an object. The fetish emerges as a result of
displaced desire in the tenuous zone between the real and the fictional in a world of individuals

whose living spaces are filled with consumer objects and fantasies
media-related. The interaction with the wish doll occurs, therefore, within the framework of

disenchantment of modernity and acts as an enchanting practice. The

fetishist desire calls into question the experience of the real through the hyper-real duplication of

female figure in the doll. In other words, the fetish takes on dimensions that make
with the doll being experienced as something hyper-real that may or may not replace
the direct contact with organic women.
In the following pages, I intend to explore the doll fetish on three levels
distinct although closely related: the doll as a representation object
artistic in the image (photographic, cinematic, and virtual) and in literary narrative; the
doll as merchandise and material object; and, finally, the doll not in its sense
literal object material, but in its metaphorical connotation as an emblem of
models of beauty and feminine seduction that permeate the fashion world, the modeling of
bodies and the advertising and consumerist sales. At all these levels, the concept of
fetish emerges as something that fosters a particular type of experience.
These considerations have an eminently essayistic character and do not aim
to delineate a cultural history of the doll, nor do they intend to analyze it in detail

compared to the representation of the same in the different artistic registers of

romanticism, realism, modernism, and avant-gardes. Such considerations deserve a
advantaged study that exceeds the intentions of this essay. Instead of this course so
broadly, what I seek here is to tread a selective perspective on the representations of this fetish
with the intention of interpreting a facet of the modern experience in which the fascination with
objects, images and representations undermine the very meaning of the real. Through the figure
From the doll, what I seek to inquire is how cultural imagination, in its aspects
artistic, advertising, and subjective, translates a particular type of experience that affects
about the figure of the feminine as a hyper-real incarnation fabricated under the male gaze
the feminine. In the heterosexual male gaze, there is the erotic desire of possession projected

about the fetish doll, the feminine gaze involves the doll in its own self-modeling
corporeal and subjective of the woman.

Finally, I would argue that if the imagery surrounding the doll as

the seductive female figure has a vast repertoire that encompasses everything from fantastic tales
from Hoffman, in the principles of the 19th century, to narratives about digital beauties that
we shine on virtual screens, the presence of the doll as an idealization of beauty
feminine has gained a more pronounced impact in contemporary times due to
accentuated worship of the body. Worship that is manufactured by the power of image and by marketing.

of the beauty of top models, the models women, the animated dolls of fashion
ephemeral. In considerations about the doll as an artistic and material representation
I make use of a selective repertoire of Latin American and European artists and writers.
In the analysis of the doll as a product of female and media self-modeling, I focus
my view on the particular Brazilian case and the national obsession with body worship,
the sell of youth, the idealization of the blonde nymphet represented at the end of the years
from 1980 by the image of the fairy godmother Xuxa and her entourage of blonde teenagers.
In its different forms, the doll, like any material object
it also changed according to the new techniques for the production of goods in
capitalist world. The material transformation of the doll culminates in beauty
digital art raises, within the themes of artistic representation, two investigative strands: the
doll as a technical artifact and the doll as an erotic toy. The first,
it concerns the reduplication of human figures through technology and the consequent
blurring of boundaries between the organic and the artificial. This breaking of boundaries
it installs a zone of discursive ambiguity, because if the loss of human singularity
it awakens anxiety, the refinement of technique incites the celebration of new
possibilities of creating ideal figures. The second thematic cut does not emphasize the
technological invention in the sense of the artificial creation of beings, but focuses on the impact
hyper-real visual and sensory of the doll that awakens desires and offers forms of
vicarious experience with the object. If in the technical cut there is the possibility of indefinition
between the human and the artificial doll, in the latter, the passivity of the doll itself hyper-
the real becomes an attractive because it allows compensatory fanciful projections
that contrast with the 'realistic' frustrations of everyday life. Muses of fetish, the
dolls proliferate through the domain of image. In digital heroines, the dolls
cybernetic beings become divas of the image world, they are fantasies endowed with visibility
hyper-real, they are cyber mermaids that refer us to the voyeurism of projections.
In films and narratives that emphasized the 'shock of the real,' there was a demand
for a realistic aesthetic capable of producing the 'effect of reality' that met a
expectation for a compelling experience. The aim was to break the saturation of the
images emphasizing other images carrying the shock that would trigger the
cathartic intensification and social denunciation. Already in the domains of the cyber hyper-reality, the

enchantment emerges before the power of evocation of the image that makes the colors
of the real world pales. While representation of the feminine, the figure of the doll
does not necessarily obey the dictates of the hyper-real. After all, there are dolls
fantastical of all kinds that do not refer us to the realistic models of verisimilitude.
Meanwhile, the impact of the duplication of the image, whether through the material presence of the

statue, store mannequin, wax doll, plastic doll, whether through

A photographic or digitized image evokes the astonishment of the simulacrum infiltrated in the

reality. The doll awakens the fanciful interactions of the imagination precisely because
it has the strangeness of the duplication of the image or the figure. What is at stake
it is a playful game of imagination and desire that can be ignited by a mere
plastic doll how much for a female robot. Obviously, the technology and the
fantasy of the android or the woman-robot establishes an order of hyper-reality in which the
demarcation lines between the human and the machine are practically found
erased. The more sophisticated and complex the technology used for the
the doll's assembly, but it will awaken the effect of hyper-realism. The technological factor
acts, above all, in the erosion between the human and the machine, altering the nature of
our experience and introducing new repertoires to the vocabulary of the erotic and the
loving. In this sense, the technological path outlines the long trajectory of desire.
mimetic of transforming inert matter into life. Something that dates back to mythical accounts
of the sculptor Pygmalion sculpting his statue of the ideal woman Galatea, to the tales of
fairy tales in which dolls become people, to literary accounts about women
automaton, to the erotic dolls from sex shops and finally, to video games
populated by simulated women. Such imaginaries also attach to the means
media and advertisers in which legions of fans are mesmerized by the divas of
cinema and television duplicated in photographic images, in pinup advertisements
seductive, in the images of fashion mannequins. Finally culminates in the
incorporation of these images into the very construction of the body. People submit themselves.

the plastic surgeries to transform themselves into the Barbies and Galateas of beauty ideals
contemporaries. The girls dye their hair blond and buy accessories from
Xuxa in an attempt to embody the media ideal conveyed on the screen.
The doll fetish, therefore, finds itself at a crossroads between reification
the seduction of commodities, the estrangement of the unusual, the mediation of mimetic imagery
and the promise of an enchanting experience.

The doll fetish and the experience through the image

In his study, Material culture in the social world, Tim Dant evokes the origins of
The modern meaning of fetish and fetishism was, according to
consensus, originating from the work of Charles de Brosses who, writing in 1760, used
the term to describe the religious practices of the worship of objects. By Brosses
coined the term to refer to the worship of inanimate objects as gods.2Yes
Valerie Steele in her book, Fetish, Sex and Power, clarifies that "The word fetish has
a double meaning, denoting a magical charm and also a manufacturing, a
artifact, a work of apparent signals3.
In its historical context, Steele suggests "At the beginning of the 19th century, the
the fetish term had extended to refer to anything that was
irrationally adored. Disagreeing with Dant, Steele stipulates that 'Alfred Binet was the
first to use the word fetishism in something resembling the psychological sense
modern in his essay 'The Fetishism in Love' published in the Philosophical Review
in 1887.4
What would be the modern version of the word fetish? Although there may be some
variations on the historical origin of the term fetish, there is an academic consensus that places
this concept in two basic aspects. On one hand, the fetish is associated with

2See Tim Dant, Material Culture in the Social World, Buckingham, Philadelphia, Open University Press,
1999, p. 42.
3See Valerie Steele, Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power, Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1997, p.13.
4Id. 13
psychoanalytic interpretation, notably, Freud's analysis that encompasses the fetish
as a result of a castration anxiety triggered by the sight of the female sex.
According to Steele, "According to Freud, the only way in which the
an adult fetishist can overcome their 'aversion to real female genitals' is
equipping women with characteristics that make them tolerable sexual objects.
the fetish object would function as 'a proof of triumph over the threat of castration and
a protection against her.5The other association of the word fetish is given by the perspective of
Marx positions fetishism as the enchantment with commodities and objects in which
these are endowed with immanent meanings that obscure historical work
exploitative that was triggered for its manufacture. In both versions, there is the
displacement of desire and a strong emphasis on visuality as a triggering factor of
fetish.
According to the studies of Martin Jay, Jonathan Crary, and others, modernity
it sedimented the dominance of visuality over the other senses.6Such predominance of
The vision and the status granted to mimetic representation have increased since its appearance.

from the typography of Gutenberg to the technological invention of visuality machines such
like the photographic camera, the cinematographic camera, television and finally the
resources of virtual and digitized images. In fact, the modernity of the 19th centuries and
XX attests to a unique reproduction of sacred and profane images put to the service of a
variety of speeches, ideologies, and market sales.
The fetishistic desire in these cultural representations is not necessarily
tied to the fears of castration in the Freudian sense. And although it has the content of
reification interview in Marxist criticism, what seems relevant to me to underline is that the
fetish refers, initially, to a vicarious visibility that permeates a form
specific to subjective experience. The doll becomes an ambiguous subject-object of
playful, erotic, and magical fantasies.
Alongside the banalization, the boredom of déjà-vu and the saturation caused by
constant reproduction of images, consumer culture, and the arts of advertising
they also introduce the enchantment of fantasy and imagination. Although produced by
market strategies governed by the instrumental rationality of profit, such
enchantment also projects a dreamlike light on things and creates the fetish of desire.

5Id.23
6See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994 and Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision
and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1995
When commenting on Walter Benjamin's fascination with the powers of mimesis, Michael
Taussig suggests that "As I interpret it (...) the most striking part of the analysis of
Benjamin on modern mimetic machines, particularly in relation to the
mimetic powers that are sought in advertising images, it is your view that it is
precisely the property of such play machines and even restore this
faded sense of the particularity of the sensual contact that animates the fetish. This game
restorer transforms what he designated as ‘aura’ (which I identify here with the
commodity fetish) to create a meaning very different from the marvelous.7
In Benjamin, the reification of commodities indeed conceals their process of
production, but there is something more in this apprehension of the object. This something more relates to the

dreams, fantasies, and desires that the sight of such objects triggers. It is not just about
to dismantle the ideological, but to understand that these objects speak to us of desires
and experiences of happiness. Hence, the importance that Benjamin will attribute to
perishable consumer goods, to the passages of Paris that, just like a Pompeii
petrified objects of past consumption reveal to us the dreams of achievement of
past eras help us to see our own fantasies of the present.
Through montage, both Benjamin and the surrealists will invest in
reconfiguration of advertising image, shifting it from its selling intent to
reveal a landscape of the unusual. In this gaze over consumer objects, the
mannequins stand out as privileged objects of strangeness. The photographs of
Atget, so appreciated by the surrealists, reveals these windows populated by mannequins
of fashion, smiling dolls, dentures hanging in the void, rows of glass eyes
and the pyramids of decapitated wigs. In its duplication of the human figure, the mannequin
emerges as something incongruent and mysterious. Be like a fashion mannequin displaying the
clothes of the moment, whether as a realistic wax figure or hyper-real image, the
the doll creates that ambiguous zone of juxtaposition between the animated and the inanimate.

Meanwhile, as Taussig suggests, the mimetic power of an object like the doll
goes beyond visibility. It is not just a photographic view, although it can be
that, but the presence of the 'strange', what Freud referred to as the
uncanny, the return of the repressed that remained erased and that arises invoking

7
See Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge.
1993, p. 23.
repressed memories, a fetish of displaced desire that gains strength in your
mimetic appearance.8
In its secularized version, the worship of images refers to the desire for
re-enchantment of the world by endowing objects with meanings as if they were
immanent properties instead of subjective projections or cultural displacements
symbolic acts performed by the worshiper. The object is elevated to the status of a subject and is seen

as a bearer of enchantments. The criticism of Marx and Freud retains this point in
common. In both, the appearance of the object replaces a real relationship with the world

material. In the valorization of the object, human beings become more objectified and the
more humanized objects.
In the literary and imagetic journey about the doll fetish, what stands out is
precisely the obsessive and enchanting nature of the image of the eroticized doll. In
fantastic tales by Hoffman (1776-1822), in the pioneering science fiction of Villiers
de L'Isle Adam (1866), our surrealist stories, in the film Metropolis by Fritz Lang
(1926) or in contemporary hyper-real imagery, the appearance of the doll in the imaginary
artistic generally prefigures the limiting situation of an intense erotic or loving desire
what is deviant and destabilizing. In this sense, it is about the fetish of the feminine that
replaces the very figure of real women. In some narratives and images, the
dolls are hyper-real simulacra that usurp the common appearance of women
organic. In others, its artificial properties cast the charm of the animated object.
The imaginaries of romanticism, fantastic literature, and surrealism will have
a special attraction for the figure of the doll. The doll as a robot, android, beauty
digital or cyborg is an essential part of the vein of fiction literature and filmography
scientific. The doll made of wax, plastic, silicone, or latex has a strong presence.
in the world of fashion and advertising, in erotic games and in hyper entertainment
real.
In this journey of fascination with the female image, there is, evidently, a
diverse relationship between the genders. The emphasis on the adult female doll endowed with strong

sexualized charge has a diverse impact between men and women. If the majority
part of these dolls and the associated stories are authored by men, the games
electronics with dolls and their image are closely associated with the repertoire of
female. If contemporary science fictions or cyberpunk stories rely on

8See Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”, Pelican Freud Library, 14, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985.
legions of female writers, the inventions of seductive dolls that appear to be
real women are marked by the male imaginary. These same dolls
desirable, however, contribute to the self-modeling of women whether in
sale of beauty products, whether in clothing or in the conception of seduction.
It is worth noting, in the trajectory of the feminine models engendered by the doll, the

singular and iconic case of Barbie. Created in 1959, her appearance caused a
consumer revolution. Unlike baby or child dolls, the Barbie doll
represents a young woman with curves and large breasts, has a boyfriend, though
that this is embodied in the bland Ken and, above all, has a wide range of accessories
consumption that ranges from the pink car, hair dryer, wardrobe to a house with a pool in
Hollywood style. The unusual success of this doll that later on at the whim of the
multicultural times gain distinct colors and exotic garb as it
consacrates as an icon of the object-woman-consumption and at the same time enables infinite
playful antics around your figure.9The doll is also a projection of image that
can be invented in multiple narratives, including the recent ones in which it
set it up as a cult item in the drag world.
As Peter Berger pointed out in his book Ways of Seeing (1972), one of the
historical conditions of the manufacturing of femininity associated with ideals of beauty and
Seduction is that women have been educated to see themselves as being seen. Laura Mulvey
design this phenomenon as the condition of 'to-be-looked-atness' that positions the gaze
masculine over the feminine object.10There is an internalization of a supposed gaze
male who validates and evaluates. The doll as a representation of a feminine double.
sharpen this unfolding of the mirror. Hence, the fetish of the doll will have connotations and

such diverse uses not only according to historical moments, but also in
dispute between the forms of representation of the feminine and the masculine.
The narratives and representations of dolls in films and novels engage in a dialogue,

evidently, with the materiality of the dolls produced in the world of merchandise and
of technology. Hence, the fascination of Hoffman's fantastic literature (1776-1822) with the

9See the book edited by Yona Zeldis McDonough, The Barbie Chronicles. New York: Touchstone, 1999.
Steven Dubin in his essay "Who's that Girl? The World of Barbie Deconstructed" comments that "The
Barbie is sold in 140 countries. According to Smithsonian magazine, if you line up each one of the
dolls that were sold in the first thirty years—lined up at the end of the strands
silky at notably curved feet— you would go around the world four times" (p. 19). The translation of the
my quote in English.
10 See the book by Peter Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin Books, 1972 and the essay by Laura Mulvey.

Visual pleasure and narrative cinema"The Experience of Cinema, organized by Ismail Xavier, São Paulo:
Graal, 1991.
automatons, the machine imaginary built by Villiers L’Isle Adam (1866) with the
mechanical woman whose inventor is Edison himself, the doll's fetish in the account.
Hydrangeas (1949) by the Uruguayan Felisberto Hernández inspired both by the mannequin of
just as in the cult of images of the cinematograph, the iconic image of the woman-robot
in the film Metropolis (1926) by Fritz Lang that inaugurates the series of artificial women
dedicated in science fiction narratives, this is just to cite a few examples
centers of a vast repertoire.
Through the selective typological bias that favors the construction of the doll
as a desire fetish, this trajectory of literary and cinematic representation of
the doll emphasizes three issues: the technical possibility of the invention of representations
hyper-realistic artificial beings that surpass the human; the doll as a displacement of
erotic desire and a source of imaginary projections that replicate an ideal woman; the
doll as an inanimate being whose "effect of the real" establishes a phantasmagoria with the
experience of death.11

11
See Vanessa Schwartz, in the thought-provoking essay 'The Cinematic Spectator Before the Apparatus'
cinema: the public's taste for reality in late 19th century Paris. Cinema and the invention of life
modern, organization Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2001, p. 411-440.
In this essay, Schwartz suggests that the public absorbed the new technique precisely because it
merged with a growing desire for a realistic representation of reality. While commenting on the training
from a cinematic audience in Paris at the end of the 19th century, Schwartz centralizes his argument not
in the famous landscapes of panoramas or viewscapes, but in the morbid attraction exerted by the morgue
the inhabitants of the city of light. Before the inauguration of the Wax Museum with its realistic replicas, a
one of the great attractions for the Parisian public, especially for the less privileged classes, was going to the
mortuary to visualize in loco the bodies of the dead. The mortuary in Paris, according to the research of
Schwartz was a major tourist attraction, being included in travel guides as one of the places to
will be visited in the city. The crowd that gathered around the exposed dead bodies was a
people who went to the morgue to see up close the corpses whose deaths were accidental or violent
previously reported in the newspapers. Having read the account of the death, the public sought the illustration
Live from the news described. The morgue employees, in turn, attended to this demand from the public.
placing the dead in theatrical scenarios. This was the case of a child who passed away for reasons
dark whose fully clothed corpse sitting in a velvet chair was contemplated by the public
eager for sensations. With the triumph of the Wax Museum, the contemplation of the dead faded, but
the fascination for the spectacle of realistic representation persisted, which would later reach its peak in
production of the cinematic image. The suggestion contained in Schwartz's essay is that voyeurism
it becomes an inevitable condition in increasingly urban societies permeated by mediations of
spectacle present in the parades of goods, in the news of the newspapers and in the ways of
entertainment. But, this same spectacle causes a desire for the 'real', for the intensification of a
experience through visuality. The vision of the dead encoded by the narrative of newspapers, the
wax mannequins imitating with maximum verisimilitude famous people and finally the realism of
cinematic images enhance this desire to experience representation as if it were 'the real'
thing.
In current terms, the German artist-doctor Gunther von Hagen exposes the 'shock of the real' in his use
from real corpses for the creation of sculptures that cite canonical works of art. Hagens
subject the received corpses to sophisticated embalming processes. But instead of
simply showing frozen dead bodies, something that would resemble the desire for the "effect of the real"
displayed by the old morgue of Paris, the sculptor scales the corpses revealing the entrails, the veins, the
anatomy framework in a macabre theatrical spectacularization. It is noted, in this case, of this artist that the
The received corpses usually come from China or some 'peripheral' country.
Representations of the doll: technical dolls

Unlike the doll that comes to life in children's stories, Olímpia, the doll
the mechanics of the famous story by Hoffman 'The Sandman' is not a doll that
animates through magical means, it is not part of that enchanted repertoire of imagination
infant that populates inert beings with secret life, is not a character from fairy tales and
stories of children's literature in which the theme of the humanized doll is recurring, neither is she

is situated in the religious imaginary that perceives the image as a bearer of spirits
hidden. The fantastic element in Hoffman's tale is not given by the inversion of the order.
the rationale of the world through magic, but from the subjective point of view of the character

Central, Natanael. Meanwhile, the appearance of the mechanical doll leads to a contagion.
social mimetic where the boundaries between the human and the mechanical, momentarily,
they destabilize. "The Sand Man" is also a tale about the perception of the real and
from the experience in which Natanael's delirious imagination is contrasted with regulation
rationale of his fiancée Clara. Still in this vein, "The Sandman" thematizes the
estrangement (unheimlich) of the duplication of people or events that were repressed
for traumatic memories.12
Natanael, a young student, meets and falls hopelessly in love with Olímpia.
strange and silent daughter of the inventor Spallanzani. The love for Olympia erases the image
of his fiancée Clara and fuels his imagination. Indifferent to the opinions of others who
they considered the young woman strangely rigid and silent, for Natanael "Had never had
a listener so charming, for she neither embroidered nor knitted, did not look out the window,
did not feed the birds and did not play with cute puppies or kitties. Not
was either gathering little papers or distracting herself with anything in her hands, she didn't even need to hold back

12
Freud, as is known, had a particular fondness for the story 'The Sandman' by Hoffman. In his...
interpretation, there is a particular emphasis on the figure of the sinister Coppelius that is replicated in the appearance of the
barometer seller Coppola. The sinister and the strangeness of Hoffman's tale affect not only the
figure of the mechanical doll, but in the castrating and threatening presence of Coppelius-Coppolo. For a
interpretation of Hoffman's tale, see the book by Oscar Cesarotto, In the Eye of the Other: The 'Man of
"Sand" according to Hoffman, Freud, and Gaiman, São Paulo: Iluminuras, 1996.
a yawn or a slight clearing of the throat. In summary, she stared at her beloved for hours without moving or

to adjust, and that gaze became increasingly intense and alive.13

When Olímpia is finally revealed as an inert doll, a restlessness
permeates the community: "(...) an abominable distrust grew stealthily.
regarding human figures. In order to convince themselves that they would not be in love
a wooden doll, several lovers demanded that their beloveds sang and
they danced a little off rhythm, so that, when they heard a reading, they would embroider,

they knitted and played with the little dog etc. but, above all, that they did not just listen
and sometimes spoke in a way that the words truly demonstrated what
they thought and felt.14While telling the story of the doll fetish, what the tale of
Hoffman expresses the restlessness about the human fate in the face of mechanization.
industrial. Would humans, in this new mechanical world, be transforming themselves
in objects? At the same time, Hoffman's tale illustrates a consideration about the
fantasies of the romantic imagination, the narcissistic obsession of contemplating the world made to

our image, of endowing the chimeras of the imagination with a power of seduction and
correspondence crystallized in the reciprocity of loving glances when such an exchange is the
subjective projection onto an object. Both the projection that Natanael weaves onto the doll,
as far as the distrust that the mechanical artifact arouses in the community affects the
the importance of authenticity as a factor shaping the real. In its loving projection,
Natanael glimpses, in the doll's eyes, the most authentic expression of communication.
elevated and passionate although Olympias eyes are mirrors without consciousness. Already
for the other boys who did not succumb to the delusion of the fetish, there is established a

distrust towards loved women, which is why they wish to verify authenticity
of the same insisting on imperfection. Dancing out of rhythm, being distracted, yawning
during gatherings, those gestures previously considered uncivilized become the landmarks
of authenticity, they inform the spontaneity of the organic against regulation without
free will of the mechanical doll.
In Hoffman's tale, the mechanical woman is discredited and the model of
passive femininity, merely aesthetic and without free will becomes a reason for
anxiety, in the precursor novel by Villier de L’Isle Adam, A Eva Futura (1885), the
mechanical doll is raised to a new complexity and subjectivity. The result of ingenuity

13
See The Sandman. Fantastic Tales. Translation by Claudia Cavalcanti, Rio de Janeiro, Imago,
1993.
14Id. 144
of inventor Edison, which is a fictional version of the historical Edison, the doll
Hadaly is an android, that is, an artificial creature endowed with a hyper-appearance.
real. Instead of the limited repertoire of the Olympic mechanics, Hadaly surpasses in realism
the very women of flesh and bone. The most sophisticated science and technology were
crafted for its making. Made to appease the romantic desires of the young
English aristocrat Lord Ewald, the android Hadaly was designed in the image and
similarity to the singer Alicia Clary. But while Alicia Clary was endowed with beauty
appearance and petty, whimsical spirit, the beautiful Hadaly radiated empathy and
enchantment. Immune to time, the wear of old age, and emotional turmoil,
Hadaly represents the prolongation of the moments of delight of passionate love without the

tiring clashes of everyday life. She is the continuous epiphany, the photographic moment
ephemeral that gains prolonged breath, the perfect appearance endowed with reciprocity
technique. In Hoffman's narrative, the delusions of romantic love were criticized,
aspiration for dialogue between peers, elective affinities, and spontaneity− something that
it will resonate in the configuration of romantic marriage− were also desired in the
figure of a woman who spoke, expressed herself, and demonstrated her own individuality. Already in the

Eva Futura, the inventor Edison has a theory of love-passion and condition
feminine designed on the bases of the femme fatale of the decadent imaginary
coupled with the scientistic theories of the late 19th century. From this amalgamation, arises the

the notion that technique and science will be the authorities of the future; passionate love
romantic would be a mere illusory projection. Above all, the flesh-and-blood femme fatale
it is configured as a full-blown shrew full of deceptive tricks. According to Edison, the
femme fatales with their makeup, trinkets, and manipulations are already the product of

If the assimilation or amalgamation of the artificial with the human being can
produce such catastrophes, and since such women, physically and morally, have a lot of
andreidas, ghost by ghost, chimera by chimera, why wouldn't it have to be
accept the artificial woman?15In the passionate illusions awakened by the femme fatales
made up, there is the premonition of destruction and the reduction of men to mere puppets
of desire. Andreida has the gift of "(...) nullifying, in just a few hours, all desires
low and degrading that a loving heart may have closed within its entrails,
this through the solemn saturation that produces the treatment with it.16

15See Villiers de L'Isle Adam, La Eva Futura, Madrid: Valdemar, 1998, p. 197. The translation of the version in
Spanish to Portuguese is mine.
16Id. 198
 The charm of andreida lies in the perfect combination of aesthetic beauty and
loving elevation. Its hyper-realism contrasts with the artificial fabrication of women
fatal. However, in his romantic exchange with the doll, Lord Ewald contemplates
about the limitations of love with a 'being without consciousness'. Composed of different
engineering and chemistry techniques, Hadaly, however, does not have self-awareness since
your thoughts are projections of the medium Sowana. Just as there is a dialogue between
the technical imaginaries interviewed from the perspective of scientific progress and the repertoires

artistic elements of literary decadence, there is also, in Eva Futura, a dialogue between the

science and the enchanting magician. Hadaly is both an enchanted doll and a robot
technician. Although it is the essence of technological perfections, it can only express itself and

thinking through spiritist means. The crossing of technique and magic evokes the
ambiguities generated by the emergence of any technical novelty.17
But in the combination of technique and enchantment, Edison inaugurates its new
rules for the invention of the human. It is noted that, in this social engineering project, the
Andreidas are always feminine and emerge as correctives of the inauthenticity of
organic women camouflaged by the use of artifices and social representation of
papers. Identical to organic women, the andreids possess spiritual elevation and the
magnificence of the sublime that should awaken a loving and spiritual pedagogy
in man. Thus, upon encountering the figure of Hadaly, Lord Ewald thinks he is
in front of Alicia Clary, your beloved imperfect. She even goes so far as to reject the idea of
artificial doll, for Alicia at that moment seemed perfect to him: "—Oh, what
I am foolish!—he murmured—He dreamed of a toy of sacrilege, whose appearance
would make me smile. Oh absurd insensitive doll! (...) At the same time, Miss Alicia Clary
she stood up and, resting her hands laden with jewels on the young man's shoulders

sparkling, I said to him with a supernatural, unforgettable voice I had already heard—Do not me
Do you recognize me? I am Hadaly.18In fact, one of the elements that characterized the doll-
Andreida were your precious rings that served as control mechanisms for your
mechanical anatomy. At this moment of recognition, Lord Ewald "Takes your hand:
it was Alicia's hand. It approached her neck and her neckline: it was her. The eyes were hers,

17
Author of the most emblematic realistic novels of the 19th century French, Balzac had apprehension
in front of the camera since she considered it endowed with a power of appropriation of the different
layers of being that envelop the body. Each photographic plate represented a peeling of this.
subjectivating epidermis. Conversely, there was, in the 19th century, a spiritualist belief in the ability
of the camera capturing the appearance of spirits, in bringing out ectoplasms from the bodies of
photographed.
18Id. 301
but her gaze was sublime (...) He definitely thought that the woman represented by
that mysterious doll by your side had never contained anything that made you
to enjoy a sweet and sublime moment of passion like the one that had just passed...
Perhaps I would have never known such delight, if that splendid one had not existed.
machine for producing the ideal. The words spoken by Hadaly had been uttered by the
a real comedian without emotion, understanding, as by someone who represents a character,
(…) The false Alicia seemed more natural than the true one.19
EmA Eva Futura a loving pedagogy, technique and magic, and the enchantment with
the hyper-real works in the sense of cultural purification and the advocacy of substitution
of the organic woman for the doll of male desires. This substitution is justified.
through the theory that only the technical doll would be able to reveal another
nature, an uncorrupted nature by artifice, that is, technique will create purity
of a hyper-real nature. If in the Garden of Eden, the biblical Eve caused the expulsion
of the man from paradise, now, the future Eve introduces man to a new garden of
delicacies distancing him from the artifices of decadent culture. The domestication of nature and the
the transformation of the real is completed in the reinvention of the feminine and in a projection of the

male desires and aspirations that culminate in the fetish doll of enchantment.
Eva Futura will defeat the artificial femme fatale because she will create another.

entirely technical nature that, however, would be governed by the highest ideals.
While the femme fatale displays the worst of worlds, the lie of artifice and provocation
sensory of organic desire, the andreidas inaugurate a new world of total technique
coupled with the idealism of supreme love.
In Eva Futura, the technical doll defeats the femme fatale in the famous movie.
In Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the mechanical robot is the very incarnation of the seductive woman.
malignant. The female machine distills a seductive lasciviousness that destabilizes the preaching.
peaceful and Christian of the labor leader Maria. Again, enchantment and coherence come together.

technique that culminates in an extraordinary scene where disguised as Maria, the robot
dance with erotic movements among Eastern idols. The content of this scene in which the
the mechanical doll moves seductively between images, underscores the dangers of
idolatry and weaves the equation between technique and enchantment. Contrary to optimism
scientificista of A Eva Futuraque, however, as a work of fiction has a prose
adjective of symbolism, Metropolis introduces cinematographic visuality

19Id. 302, 303

avant-garde of the future without endorsing the glorified preaching of futurism. The robot

feminine destabilizes not only because it has a devastating 'effect of the real', but
also because it mirrors the notion of sexualized and unruly femininity.20EmA
Eva Futura, nature must be replaced by technique and the loving pedagogy of
sublime sepulchral to the passionate illusions. Already in Metropolis, there is a simplistic rescue of the

human nature centered on the values of social fraternity that hovers above the
class divergences. The technique dehumanizes the workers tied to the gears and the
transforms into slaves of the clock and the production line. This same technique produces the
seductive robot in the image and likeness of the woman. But, in the final resolution, the robot is

liquidated and the leader of the workers falls in love with the boss's son. Projected
as the Christian redeemer, the leader of the workers, Mary, defeats the idolatrous robot and suspends

not only the struggle of classes, but also the threat of unchecked female sexuality
symbolized by the robot. The ambiguity of the technical legacy, however, remains without
resolution.
In the novel The Invention of Morel (1940) by the Argentine Adolfo Bioy Casares,
technique not only destabilizes the boundaries between the human and the image as
also introduces a derealization of the world through the parallel coexistence between the
organic reality and the world of virtual simulacrum. Anticipating the creation of reality
the 'Morel machine' is a sophisticated apparatus that not only reproduces images
identical to the real, also endows them with movement, thickness, colors, and smells.
Meanwhile, those who are subjected to the effects of the machine are also phagocytosed by it.
The machine immortalizes the spectral image and kills the fleshly body. In Bioy's novel
Casares, the virtual simulacrum, unlike the mechanical doll, of the android or the robot
technician, cannot interact with the real world because virtual reality is configured
like the spectral reproduction of something that no longer exists. In love with the image

mockery of Faustine, the narrator-protagonist, a fugitive on a deserted island ravaged

through the specters of Morel's machine, one can only contemplate the superposition of
simulacrum of the real.
The simulated images repeat the usual week of Morel's friends in
island. Against the screen of empty nature, the images rehearse the same gestures,
they walk the same paths, exchange the same words and eternalize the void. They are

20
See critic Andreas Huyssen's analysis of the vamp as a robot in 'The Vamp and the Machine:'
Fritz Lang's Metropolis in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, p. 65-82.
in a 'paradise' without redemption, in an eternity without revelation. However, in your eagerness

loving, the protagonist seeks to insert, in this reduplicative choreography of the real, a
fictional narrative of love. He has his picture taken by the camera next to his beloved Faustine.
Introduce, in the week lived by the protagonists photographed by the machine, your own
Image coming from another temporal moment. By being photographed, one is condemned to death.

The fictional legacy of his life alongside the beloved woman remains: "My soul does not
it passed to the image otherwise I would have died, I would have stopped seeing (maybe) Faustine,

to be with her in a view that no one will collect. The person who, based on
in this information, invent a machine capable of gathering the disaggregated presences,
I will make a plea: Look for us, Faustine and me, let me enter the heaven of
"Faustine's consciousness. It will be a pious act."21

Qual era o teor do amor do protagonista por Faustine? Quem é Faustine? Como
doll-image, Faustine is like a film diva that the narrator contemplates.
in a film of the real. It does not dialogue with the image, does not penetrate into your consciousness, does not

exchanging reciprocal glances. Just like Hadaly, Faustine is impervious to time. But, if
in the interaction with Hadaly, Lord Ewald lives a romantic fiction whose plot he constructs,

with Faustine, the protagonist can merely be the voyeur of his own passion. In
Edison's preaching, the love-passion for the organic woman was a summation of illusions.
deviated. Faustine is the doll that welcomes the projections of the voyeur. Her presence and the

the theory of love adjacent to your figure underscores the notion that the other is not us
accessible, but it is a chimera created by the desire of our imagination that inaugurates a
conversation of us with the other self. In our mirrored image, we see our eyes in
Selling, in the projection of the imagetic doll we created a mediator. The more technified
The realist doll, but the mimetic desire is gratified, generating a world in images.
Unlike the inaccessible simulacrum image of Faustine for her admirer, and
unlike the mechanics and limited Olympians, the androids of Blade Runner (1982) in
Cult film by Ridley Scott are technical beings created for specific functions that
interact with humans in the devastated setting of the city of Los Angeles. Similar to
in the future, the androids of Blade Runner were created by the
more sophisticated techniques, but while the futuristic science of Villier de L’Isle Adam is
fits within the parameters of the 19th century, Scott's science fiction, updating the
Philip Dick's romance invents artificial intelligence and with it the creation of

21See Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, Rio de Janeiro, Rocco, 1986, p. 124.
subjectivity, of memory, of consciousness and of free will. This consciousness is
programmed, memories of the past are artificially installed, but, differently
of Hadaly who did not have a voice of its own and lived in an eternal present, the androids
they acquire experience. This experience is what guides the autonomous creation of their
consciousnesses. If there is a false temporality implanted by virtual memory, there is
also a temporality lived by the being-machine-in-the-world. It is from this
lived experience that the androids rehearse their rebellion because they refuse to be
deprogrammed and condemned to the junkyard of scrap. In Blade Runner the "rules
for the human park" they deliberate a rigid selection process in which the beings most
eugenics have access to the world of extra-terrestrial colonies while the urban riffraff

remains trapped in a contaminated terrestrial city. While Hadaly was out

specifically programmed to meet the desires of Lord Ewald, the android
Rachel, the ultimate example of the simulacrum, emerges as an autonomous being that, in fact,

is unaware of its own machine-like nature. The love story between the hunter of
androids Deckard, the one who must deactivate the rebellious androids, and the doll-
Simulacrum Rachel is configured as the romance between the human and the conscious machine.
If nature has been abolished by civilizational devastation, now, this culture of technique
definitely broke the barriers between human and machine. However, even
In this fiction, the temporality of man and machine differs from each other.
Reduplicated in photographs, digitized in machines, recorded and filmed, the
humans die and their images endure in the material duration of the object. As for the android
Without an expiration date, it can be 'eternally' recapped.

Erotic dolls

After conquering an extensive list of women, Casanova, in his weary decline,

find the ideal woman. A mechanical doll with vast skirts and curls that he possesses
In a final shiver. With this scene, Fellini ends his film Casanova (1976).
In this outcome, it stages the paradox of the compulsive seducer. All the women of
Casanova was the object of a possessive itinerant desire that renewed and exhausted itself.
in each new conquest. Just like the insatiable consumer, Casanova sought the
delirium of seduction, the novelty of the erotic, the triumph of possession only to soon fall afterwards

of boredom. At the end of the conquest journey, the exhausted Casanova no longer needs to exert
the powers of seduction and can finally enjoy the inert and silent doll
realizing the fetish of the mirrored desire upon oneself. The seductive libertine ends
seduced by his own desire.
In Fellini's version of the myth of Casanova, the libertine is governed by
wishes that can finally only be satisfied narcissistically. The doll is the mediator.
from this meeting of desire with its mirror. The women themselves seduced by
Conquistador are discarded dolls.
In Fellini's Casanova, the doll represents both mirrored desire and
the defeat of seduction, since it cancels the action on the world and ends the conqueror
in his own self-gratifying cocoon, in the famous love affair of the painter Kokoschka
with the muse Alma Mahler, the doll acted as a compensatory fetish for the loss of the
real woman.
From 1912 to 1915, the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka lived a crackling passion.
by Alma Mahler, a beauty seven years older than him, widow of the composer
Mahler, muse of the Viennese milieu. In the intensity of his romantic rapture for
Alma, Kokoschka made 20 paintings, 70 drawings, a mural, and lastly, seven fans.
illustrative where emerge, between the folds of the paper, the figures of him and Alma in the
various phases of love. In the turbulent passion of the two, Oskar was the most committed and
Alma, who had numerous admirers and would marry highly illustrious figures.
from the European artistic scene, eventually distancing herself from the lover feeling constrained by

your jealousy and possessiveness. Kokoschka goes to war. He is seriously injured and in
hospital asks for Alma's presence, who, however, refuses to see him. In 1918, living
in Germany, Kokschka still nurtures passions for Alma who, however, is committed to
not to rekindle the old passion.
In the paintings that Kokoschka created of Alma, she emerges in a variety of
faces. The soul emerges naked and entwined with its body in a loving representation of
couple, in another frame, Alma nestles against Oskar's reclining body and both
are depicted in a tumultuous and choppy sea. In several drawings, Alma is the figure
maternal, Eurydice, sphinx or the enigmatic Mona Lisa. The illustrated fans, for their
they account for the progression of the romance and Kokoschka's impasses in face of fear
of losing Alma to some admirer. When, therefore, in 1918, Kokoschka
order a life-sized doll, made in the shape and likeness of Alma
Mahler, the possibilities of the couple's reunion are buried. In a letter to the manufacturer.
of dolls Hermine Moos, Kokoschka makes clear: "Please do your best to ensure that
my sense of touch is able to feel pleasure in those parts where the layers of
fat and muscle suddenly transform into a sinuous layer of skin.22
The arrival of the doll causes a strong commotion among the household staff and circulates

Through Dresden rumors of the romantic and erotic relationship between Kokoschka and the doll Alma.

In his own words:

I wanted to have a life-size replica of Alma! I looked for the best craftsman.
female I knew. I took it upon myself to ensure that she had all the photographs of
Soul and her measurements so that she could create the doll she had in mind.
I waited anxiously for it to be delivered. To dress her in the same
soul elegance, I bought dresses and lingerie from the best houses in Paris.
In those days, there was an elderly steward who worked for me and a young woman.
a maid named Hulda. The butler became so excited at the idea of putting
the eyes in this completely amazing creature that on the day the chest arrived and
the two loaders carefully began to unpack the doll, he
had a stroke. When Hulda saw the Schweigsame Frau, the "silent woman,"
meanwhile, she was on cloud nine, and as for me, I was captivated! It was so
beautiful as Soul although her breasts and hips were filled with powder
madeira.23

According to Kokoschka's second testimony, it was Hulda who took on the role of fantasizing.

unusual stories about the boss and the doll, because in the words of the painter:

Everyone in Dresden was gossiping about my strange behavior.

with the doll. Finally, after having drawn and painted it several times,
I decided to get rid of her. She had completely healed me from my passion.
So I threw a huge champagne party with chamber music during the
which Hulda exhibited the doll with all its beautiful clothes for the last time.
When dawn arrived− I was pretty drunk, like, by the way, everyone else.
world− I decapitated it in the garden and broke a bottle of red wine over it.
head. The next day, a patrol of police officers took a look through the gate and
I sell what apparently was the naked body of a woman covered in blood, they
they invaded the house suspecting it to be a crime of passion. And while the
that's what it was (...) because that night, I killed Alma.24

When he portrayed Alma in his paintings and drawings, Kokoschka sought

metaphorizing the intensity of your love experience by reinventing a pictorial Soul
what would endure beyond the organic Soul. The paintings bear witness and density
symbolic to the loving bond of both, they cut out and frame the shards of
passion in an evocative panel where the noises of the world's gears are obliterated
to highlight the central focus of that romantic encounter. Kokoschka paints Alma because
loves her because he finds in her the heart of a vital experience. Transforming her into

22The account of Kokoschka's passion for Alma Mahler is beautifully illustrated and narrated in the book of
Alfred Weidinger, Kokoschka and Alma Mahler, New York: Prestel, 1996, p. 90.
23Id. 92
24Ibid
art, monumentalizes and aestheticizes your passionate bond. Koskoschka paints in style
expressionist with thick and turbulent brushstrokes, draws with a strong pencil full of
pathos. Painted as a avant-garde artist distancing himself from the academic canons of
realistic painting, therefore, the images of him and Alma that emerge in the painting and in
drawings are configurations that express emotional density and allegorical connotations
without making use of mimetic verisimilitude. With the fetish of the doll, the process occurs
inverse. Built to maximize the 'effect of the real', the fetish doll
it existed to replace the organic Soul, to provide the vicarious experience of a
presence that was no longer accessible, to encourage the playful game of fantasy, to
to exorcise and transform the loved and impeded woman into a disposable object. However,
when depicting the doll in his paintings and drawings, Kokoschka represents it as
expressionist figure revealing how the fetish created by passion is, once again
transmuted, into art.
The artistic aestheticization of the doll fetish reaches a culminating expression in
extraordinary novel, The Hydrangeas (1949), by the Uruguayan writer Felisberto
Hernández. In EmAs Hortênsias, the doll fetish takes on such a dimension that it usurps the

presence of the true woman. It is not a mechanism of projection, but of

substitution of the real by the fictional. If every loving interaction involves an invention of
another according to the perspective of passionate eyes, this manufacturing has ballast in
reality to the extent that it is contested, challenged, strained, and questioned by
the very object/subject of passion and by social circumstances. In Kokoshka's story,
the experience of authenticity with the real woman could not be transplanted to the
doll, but already in As Hortênsias, the unbridled passion for the fanciful doll comes from,
precisely, from the obsession of the fanciful gaze that cancels the dialogue with the world and elects

an inanimate object as a source of passion.

In the Kokoshka-Alma-Doll relationship, we have a circuit between experience
vivid and its crystallization in artistic representation; the creation of the realistic fetish enables
such a series of real actions such as dressing the doll, celebrating her and, finally,
decapitate her, as well as triggers imaginative projections that metaphorize in the very
interaction with the doll and its artistic representation. In The Hydrangeas, there is
the creation of the doll and artistic sublimation becomes a vicarious experience, the erotic act
about the doll cancels artistic distancing and at the same time makes life
fictional.
 Without using the creation of alternative worlds from fantasy literature and without
to appropriate the assembly of surrealist estrangement, the narrative of The Hortensias
reveals how the obsession with the doll fetish modifies the very production of it
regulatory everyday life and comes from the enchanting world fabricated in fashion, cinema and

advertising. Just like Nathanael and Lord Ewald, Horácio also falls in love with a
doll. This doll is neither mechanical nor robotic, but rather a descendant of mannequins.
in fashion. Meanwhile, when Horácio, the owner of a clothing factory, orders from the inventor

Facundo made a doll in the image and likeness of his wife, Maria Hortensia, he
moves the doll Hortensia out of the sales realm and transforms it into a family icon.
For Maria, the doll was the daughter they never had, while for Horário, Hortência was a
disturbing object of desire. An object of desire that he wanted to perfect and make increasingly
more realistic. In his quest to forge a hyper-real doll, Horácio demands
that Hortênsia acquires an increasingly realistic configuration that culminates in the
female reproduction in its toy anatomy. The unexpected view of sex
the Hortensia causes in Maria, Horacio's wife, the revelation of the provocation
fetishist. Looking at the sexual doll creates in him the astonishment of the reduplication in which

your own sexuality is canceled in favor of the imitative artifact. Sheltered in the house of
a relative, Maria reads in the newspaper the advertisement for the Hortensia dolls: 'Are you ugly? Don't be'

Don't worry. Are you shy? Don't worry. In a Hydrangea, you will find love.
silent, without fights, without agonizing quarrels, without complaints.25Facundo and Horacio
they had launched an entire line of sex dolls for domestic use.
If in the fictions about the mechanical woman, fear arises in the concern for
breaking down barriers between the human and the technical, in the novel The Hortensias, the seduction of

doll fetish contaminates the city. This seduction, however, does not concern the
the properly technical character of the doll, but to its idealized seductive realism
configured in the sexed object that replaces the experience of human exchange. The
Hydrangeas are mannequin dolls, and as such they present, in their own
bodies, the fetish of the commodity. They are the advertising embodiment of desire, they are the

seductive mimetic appearance that, if they do not foster emotional demand, stir up desire
from possession, the yearning for consumption in each new version. Horatio not only betrays his

own woman with the doll made in her image, as she is also not satisfied with the

25Id, 254
original Hortensia doll and seeks other Hortensias, blondes, blacks, brunettes, others
fetish dolls to appease your desire.
Still married, Horário and Maria "played" with doll mannequins that were
placed in showcases of allegorical scenes. There was a theatricality put on stage, the
Dolls were petrified pantomimes and they were also divas of a silent cinema.
accompanied by a live soundtrack. But with the sexual Hydrangeas, the theatrical milestone
the cinematic fades away and the seductive doll acts as a material object, like
tangible erotic fetish without a defined narrative blurring the boundaries between the real and the

imaginary. Each solitary man projects his own plot onto his doll
cinematic of desires, yearnings, and frustrations. While the women of real life
they age and display a flow of emotions, the Hydrangeas are enigmatic creatures of
silence, ornamental screens that receive the arabesques of masculine imagination.
Hydrangeas, besides being disposable like the fluctuations of fashion, are also objects
susceptible to metaphorization. If in advertising the object is wrapped in an enchantment
previously stipulated by the advertising message, plot of the ad and image
portrayed, with the Hydrangeas, the consumer's desire projects imaginary narratives
about the doll and makes the substitution of the real for the imaginary. The painted mouth and sex
artificial are metaphorized as real and at the same time are desired because they are
unreal.
As a fictional narrative, The Hortensias translates not only the famous surrealist fascination

by the mannequin as an ambiguous representation of the human-inhuman and the dead/alive

as it also projects onto the figure of the doll the gaze of strangeness and of
wonderful. In the figure of the beautiful erotic doll that is unusually real and at the same
inert and unconscious time, the strangeness of the world of consumption acquires a
unusual expression. Prosaic dolls of desire, the Hortensias, however, possess the
patina of the strange because they bring to light the erotic fetish and highlight the
the dynamics of modern socialization saturated by the objects in circulation. In the interaction

between consumers and objects, bodies are mirrored and mirror themselves: women
they become doll-manikins and the doll-manikins take on the configuration of
women.
Just as the surrealists celebrated the photos of the unrealistic mannequins in
fashion windows, the advertising announcements of socks floating in the night air of the city,
the neon light glasses flashing on the facade of a building, the Hydrangeas
Montevideans, in the windows of the Primavera store, also pulse with the strange.
enchantment of the incongruous. It is a displacement of the gaze in which the
objects glimpsed in the very urban fabric of the city acquire a potentialization
a diverse aesthetic from its sales purpose. Thus, the ads become magical and
they acquire an unusual aesthetic calling the gaze not only to consumption
acquisitive, but also for the urban epiphany. In Montevideo of the cinematograph and the
fashion launch, the dolls in the store window metaphorize modernization of
desire for an urban life guided by the consumption of objects. However, while
sexual dolls, the Hydrangeas play a role, yet more innovative and unsettling,
they penetrate the family home like advertising banners of erotic intimacy.
They thus mark a new form of relationship in which the fetish of the object
lives with and, in some instances, surpasses personal relationships. While sexual dolls,
The hydrangeas anticipate the erotic 'real dolls' currently manufactured for consumption.
sexual and the "digital beauties" that shine on screens enticing internet users to project
about your cybernetic silhouettes emotions that lack human reciprocity.26

Hyper-realistic dolls

Programmed to sell from plastic sandals to telephone installations,

designed to be sensual fighters in video games or muses
Pornographic, digital dolls are female figures whose style of representation
varies from hyper-realism to fantastic virtual. In some, notably, the beauties
Japanese digitals, the seductive effect of the image is enhanced by the emphasis on artifice. The
Japanese nymphets, the virtual cyber 'idols' are designed to be dolls.
animated. The charm of their unreality is what captivates us because they represent something
magical, the nonexistent matter that comes to life and pulses, the unfathomable gaze of the sphinx

which, however, lacks mystery. Already other dolls are meticulously programmed
to generate the maximum realistic effect. They are hyper-real dolls that demonstrate such
sharpness of outline and such precision of details that they offer us the amazement of a

26Seethe analogy between the figure of the sleeping woman and the doll in the film Talk to Her by Almodóvar.
belo Yasunari Kawabata, The House of the Sleeping Beauties, São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2004. For a
optimistic and Latinized version of the Japanese book see the novel by Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of
my sad whores, Rio de Janeiro, Record, 2005.
realism that surpasses our reality seen with the naked eye. It is, above all, a
enhancement of the gaze through the cybernetic image. However, differently from the
image captured by the camera, these female figures do not exist outside of the
they do not have any backing in the real world, they are simulacra stripped of the
traces that make the photographic image an index of the world. They are so fictional.
how much the characters that inhabit the pages of literature books. But while the
Characters described by printed words invite us to imagine their forms.
visuals, the digital dolls, even those that are protagonists of narrative plots
shine, above all, for their seductive appearance. If literary characters examine
thoughts, digital dolls inhibit subjective introspection. They are images that
I unleash desires without tearing the thin veil of appearance. In the eyes of hyper-real dolls.
that do not return our gaze, the unusual emerges on the surface of the image.
With hyper-real images, the sensation of 'the real thing' is something distinct from
Pygmalion and Galatea syndrome. Under the passionate fingers of the sculptor Pygmalion, the
marble statue Galatea will be tinged with life, her marble limbs gain
the rosy color of the fresh meat and the ideal woman emerges fully to satisfy all desires
from its creator. However, in the interaction with the images of the hyper-realistic dolls

cybernetic, the connection that the image has with reality does not matter and what
it mesmerizes the internet user; it is the vision of this perfect creation whose idealized realism is pleasing.

more than the prosaic figures of flesh and bone. If with the divas of cinema and the muses
From fashion, there is a vast imagery apparatus that redesigns them as seductive images,
in the case of digital beauties, the challenge is to find a woman who embodies the
image. In this sense, one can notice the indignation of internet users with the embodiment of the

heroine Lara Croft played by actress Angelina Jolie.27In all interactions with the dolls
virtual ones, whether drawn in the fantastic imagination or projected in the canons of
mimetic realism, what is at stake is the enhancement of desire within
specific frameworks of the repertoires of imagination offered by the apparatus itself
technological. In this sense, the interactivity that is highlighted as a positive activity and
the user's agency has restrictive limitations, whether it concerns a game like the
Singles, designed as a romantic and erotic version of The Sims, or Playboy.
Mansion or any other game that promotes the encounter between desire and figuration
erotic; between user and technological mediation of the image. Something distinct occurs in

27Refer to the impact of digital dolls in Elaine Zancanela's master's thesis, Beauties.
Digital: the representations of the feminine and the new communication technologies. ECO/UFRJ, 2004.
navigation through erotic chats, in the exchange of emails between users because although
let imagination be the guiding thread of this communication, it is an imagination that
redesign according to the responses and demands of real users. These users,
evidently, they communicate in a virtual space that is independent of the specificity of the
your geographical spaces, but they are not limited to a previously established repertoire

stipulated. Above all, although this may change with virtual communication
coupled with webcams, the exchange in emails, blogs, and chats still takes place through
midway through the written word. In fact, the great appeal of cyber dating is the capture
of the other through the seduction of writing. The boundaries between the real and the fictional are

permanently negotiated because epistolary writing weaves imaginary characters

which, however, come from a real person. In relationships that materialize
outside of cyberspace, the adjustments between imagination and everyday life are tested with the
due couplings.
In radical contrast to the loving-erotic interaction between real users, the
The dolls advertised as 'Real Dolls' promise erotic delights without the wear and tear.
adjustments of affective communication between people. Except for one single doll.
male and a model of a transvestite doll, Real Dolls are sensualized dolls
female dolls made in the most realistic way possible for sexual uses. The dolls should
they can be ordered and the user has a menu of female types (blondes, Asians,
latinas) that you can choose to your liking. They are life-sized, flexible dolls,
with realistic hair and sex sculpted with the proper indentations and protrusions.
On the site, there are user statements about the delights of the Real Doll such as
like: 'Best sex I've ever had! I swear to God! This Real Doll is better than
a real woman, fantastic! I love her. This Real Doll is real. I swear! Better
than a woman! My woman... May God take away all my gains if I
was lying! I take a lie detection test! I swear on my children! I did
And it was accomplished! I did it and I am proud to have done it! It was wonderful!”. Still in
another excerpt from the site "I just received my Real Doll this morning. I believe I am
in love. THANK YOU! Leah is beautiful and her breasts are AMAZING! I can't do
stop being astonished at how she looks and feels REAL! You made me a guy
happy and I hope it continues and makes other guys happy(www.realdolls.com) . Treating-
it is from an American website, there is a minimum of polyphonic dissent such as that contained in

a declaration from a woman who says 'I am a 30-year-old woman who has come this far'
website through a friend (...) was sickening. I have to say that, although not
I have a doll, I'm amazed at what you all managed to do with them!
The doll looks so real that it's scary. Have you thought about recorded voices? The only
but what I see is that men can decide that they prefer these women
perfectly formed (...)" In variations around the same theme, there are still others.
statements suggesting the creation of celebrity Real Dolls such as Pamela
Anderson or Marilyn Monroe. Finally, there are the cautious who emphasize the
contribution of the Real Doll as a mechanism that protects the spouse from threats of
lawyers who would sue you for infidelity and strip your financial resources,
if it were about cheating with a real woman. With the Real Doll, nothing.
can be legally pursued, after all, a man cannot be cheating on his wife with
an object. Evidently, on the Real Doll site it matters little if the statements
users' anonymous statements are indeed true or advertising inventions. The statements
about the astonishing realism of the doll and the gratification derived from its beauty and
passive sexuality is an add-on to photographic advertising. They give a 'real effect' to the
vicarious experience and promote the release of the erotic enhanced by the desire that the
another expressed by the doll.
The play with the Real Doll also gives it a value of action and
interactivity for the user different from the contemplation of films or photographs
pornographic. The doll occupies a material and tangible position in the real world although the
a network of associations surrounding your hyper-real figure is being plotted to obliterate
the existence of flesh-and-blood women. Women who complain, age, ask
pension, fall ill, challenge, after all, demonstrate a tiresome subjective autonomy
for this type of instrumental male desire. It is noticeable the site's concern in
reproduce the supposed speech of married men, of men who feel 'proud' of
what they did in an elliptical attempt to unlink the doll fetish from any
perverted pathology. The 'normality' of users and the realistic perfection of the doll
assure that we are in the best of worlds. A world where men finally
they can play with dolls without feeling effeminate for it. On the contrary, in
enigmatic figure of the doll all projections are possible and the social consequences
are fully negligible. After all, the secret of the doll lies in its materiality.
realistic and in its full disposability.
The purpose of Real Dolls is to promote the sale of desire in the materialization of
female doll, but for this act of erotic consumption to be successful it is necessary that both
emphasize the realism of the doll while promoting its fetish as an object. Have sex
with the Real Doll means weaving an option for the enchanted object and for that
the doll must be beautiful, erotic, perfect. The emptiness of its 'non-being' invites to a

full of advertising clichés. The Real Dolls, especially, in the photographs

the site resembles the erotic models of Playboy that, in turn, depend on
technical resources to resemble dolls more and more. In this mirroring between
perfect dolls and doll-like women are a well-established repertoire of the beautiful, the erotic and
of the seducer. The fetish depends on the enchantment that brings to light desire, pleasure, the
enjoyment and obliterates the dirty, the secretion, the ugly, and death.

The disconcerting specter behind the Real Dolls, the mutilated corpse of the
it was built in the work of Hans Bellmer in the 1930s.28Acclaimed by the
surrealists, the German Bellmer disturbingly expressed the dark side of
fetish of erotic dolls and the figure of the feminine. Throughout her career, she built
a variety of dolls and photographed them. Bellmer's dolls are creatures
dismembered, mutilated, monstrous and incongruently sexualized. They are figures that
they have the anatomy of young pubescent girls and some of them wear shoes of
doll and the short socks are characteristics of adolescents in school phase. But, the
dismemberment of their bodies in which everything recombines and breaks, the legs and
breasts without faces, faces without arms, the trunk supporting two sets of legs,
all this dismantling and reassembly translate the astonishment of the sinister. The dolls of
Bellmer, which can be interpreted both as a critique of Nazi eugenics or as
a revelation of the surreal ambiguities of the repressed and the feminine were
welcomed in the context of the avant-garde repertoire. They sought, among other things,
dissolve the advertising enchantment of the store mannequin doll, of the erotic doll
of the postcards and the doll from the advertising campaign. But the reach of this criticism was
relatively modest in that its images did not achieve wide
popularization. Bellmer's victimized dolls show, in the dismembered bodies,
in skinned sex, sadomasochism possesses and the death drive. What differentiates the
Bellmer's dolls from the media imaginary of terror is the acute presence of the
estrangement, of the unusual that cannot be tamed.
In your disturbing setup, these dolls were defeated because their
strange bodies allowed little room for consumption. Above all, they have a
morbid and sinister anti-aesthetic of complex absorption. Bellmer's dolls, in fact,

28Fora recent interpretation of the work of Hans Bellmer, see Sue Taylor's book, Hans Bellmer: The
Anatomy of Anxiety
they distance themselves from the sadomasochistic images of dolls produced in magazines of
decades of the 1940s and 50s such as Bizarre and other publications of the genre. In these

Bizarre collections in other related drawings, sadomasochism, fetish, the

Torturous and dark sexual practices are palpable, but they acquire an aesthetic patina.
They cater to a consumer niche that is expressed in the purchase of accessories, in creation

themed bars or sex lounges shaped to meet specific desires of

a clientele. That is, the dolls of dark desire packaged as merchandise
consumption proliferates and the mainstream beauty dolls, the Real Dolls of seduction
feminine not only multiply but also constitute an entire network of
female self-modifications.29

Brazilian media dolls

The screens of Brazilian televisions in the 1980s were populated by teenagers.

pululantes wearing scanty clothes, wearing white boots and displaying,
indefatigably, blonde hair. It was the lively entourage of the Paquitas led by the
ex-model, once an actress in erotic films, ex-girlfriend of Pelé, the famous Xuxa
transformed into the fairy godmother of childhood erotization. With gestures, blowing kisses to
auditorium and to the young participants, Xuxa represented something radically new in
television programming. This novelty was not the selling of products associated with
childish world, did not reside in the effects of an entertainment stripped of any
critical, informative or playfully intelligent content. The novelty of Xuxa is that she
she was envisioned as a real Barbie, a large seductive blonde doll accompanied by
aerobic exercises of sexualized nymphets.30The proliferation of Xuxa clothes, Xuxa shoes,
props Xuxa adorned an entire generation of Brazilian children in outfits of

29 The contemporary counterpart of the Real Dolls of fetish consumption can be found in the work of the sculptor.
American Duane Hanson who creates hyper-realistic sculptures of ordinary and mundane people. Sculptures
that when they reproduce hyper-realistically typological people from the American world, they astonish not only because of
"effect of the real", but also by the prosaic ugliness contained in the figures of fat housewives dressed
of pink polyester with rolls in the hair, or of awkward tourists with flamboyant clothes or
grumpy employees wearing their respective work uniforms. Meanwhile, in Real Dolls we have the
fetish projection of desire, in the second, there is the estrangement of the duplication of grotesque figures,
typological, banal, and realistic that cast an unsettling light on our own human configuration.
30 There are numerous references to Xuxa and to a lesser extent the Paquitas in Brazilian newspapers and even in
foreign press. Amelia Simpson in her book, Xuxa, São Paulo, Sumaré, 1994, offers a
repertoire of meanings of the media diva.
minimulheres. Girls dressed as seductive dolls. After the Xuxa phenomenon, it happened.
a whole lineage of blonde hosts of children's programs.
The blonde adolescents were the media link between the child and adult world.
They reflected the Queen of the Little Ones, but at the same time introduced something

disturbing in the continuous projection of ambiguous sexuality.

Since the famous book Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov, the idea of the nymphet has
became popular in the media.31The character Lolita from Nabokov, in turn, was
interview as the American teenager of the 1950s who represented something more
more liberalized, innovative and consumerist than the European teenager. Unlike the
fascist celebration of the disciplined and athletic youth or of the communist preaching of
young revolutionary carrying the party's emblems, the American Lolita was the young
hedonistic and eroticized. The pin-up doll, the teenager who displays something childish,
more than just seduction.
Meanwhile, the essence of the issue in Nabokov's brilliant book is the condition of

ninfeta as a special creation because she represents a girl who has a

erotic evocation and power of seduction that distinguishes her from others who are merely beautiful.

The saga of the nymphet is narrated by her stepfather and rapist, the sophisticated European Humbert.

Humbert. The girl's journey is tragic, as she finds herself ensnared in a world of
luxurious adults with whom you have little negotiating ground. And after all, the gaze
what distinguishes Lolita from other teenagers is a look created by the narrator in her
self-defense, he projects onto the girl characteristics of voluptuousness, she is also
a creature of your narrative imagination. While the novel, Lolita, presents a
sophisticated and nuanced interpretation of transgressive desire and violence
ambiguity that surrounds the unequal power relations between the adult man Humbert
Humbert and the young Lolita. But, if few have read Nabokov's book or have taken a closer look

about the complexity of its narrative configuration, the concept of the provocative girl
The sensual has become so popular that it has become a common figure in the imagination.
mediatic and in an entire consumer niche of the market. However, the Lolita-nymphet of
Nabokov had a unique quality, something that could not be serialized.
Nabokov's nymphet was, above all, a special creature in the circuit of girls.
norms and the target of forbidden desires. What becomes diverse in the images of this
contemporary idols, just like in the very construction of the Paquitas is domestication

31See Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita. São Paulo: Folha de São Paulo, 2003.
from the seductive transgression, its simultaneous banalization and glamorization. On one hand,
with the cult of the body, the emphasis on sensuality and the exaltation of sex, the girls
immersed in media culture are compelled, through advertising promotions,
music video clips and the sale of accessories to enhance themselves as Lolitas.
But the promotion of the mainstream nymphet seeks to neutralize the impact of both desire
transgressor regarding the uniqueness of their own nymphs. Above all, it reiterates the preaching of

that the feminine is constituted on the fabrication of sensual appearance.

The trajectory of the media Lolita-Paquitas has personal variations and
own peculiarities, but was marked by the sign of external control. Named with
infantilized nicknames, but dressed in a seductive manner, smiling compulsively,
jumping excitedly, the Paquitas were the enchanted dolls of a fairy tale
which also applied to adults. The blonde hair fetish, the media visibility, the
The choreography 'innocent' of the program, in turn, placed them on a level above the
anonymous Lolitas who prostitute themselves in the corners of Brazil. They were Lolitas without

narrative, images of desire without fulfillment, an evocation of the beautiful girl-child

playing with sexuality.
The television demand for blonde hair, which was later moderated
through the critical reactions of the press and other sectors, it has its foundation in the trajectory

of the social construction of Brazilian beauty. While in the 1970s wrapped by

rhetoric of valuing the national, Sonia Braga, with a vast untamed dark mane,
emerged as a sex symbol, in the 1980s the appreciation of blondes reemerges.
as a beauty model to be emulated. In a society marked by miscegenation
racial, the valorization of the blond beauty model reflects strong contradictions of self-
representation. On one hand, the exaltation of the blonde doll accompanies the trends
predominant in the Western model that constitute the very global market, by
on the contrary, it translates the fascination with others, the glamour of what one does not have, the rejection

colonized by its own figure. However, those blonde nymphets also thematize a
a particularly Brazilian way of lightening one's hair to the extent that the hair is light
it aligns with a tropicalized, languid, and mixed-body game. As mentioned,
the obligation of 'blondeness' has been gradually undermined by the demand for representation
multiracial, however the relevant point of this issue is the emergence of a new vein of
consumer market and sales of teen models. The doll-girls distance themselves
both models of the youth 'rebel without a cause' of the 50s, of the youth
politicized of the 1960s and the countercultural youth of the 70s. But with its
media hypervisibility and sensual exposure, these girls also do not align
with the models of the modest and dreamy young girl, the reading girl of novels
from Madame Delly in the 1950s. Without its own singularity, it also distinguishes itself from

young starlets like the Judy Garlands of Hollywood, among others. As a model of
Social emulation, the Lolitas-Paquitas represent a new pedagogy of consumption.
They encouraged legions of Brazilian girls to see themselves as manufactured images in
intersection between body movements and clothing accessories. They are part of the new
ephemeral celebrities; media figures who lack qualities, skills or
singular characteristics, but which are elevated to instant fame by the glamour of
media visibility. They symbolize, just like top models, a new era of divas.
Like the model mannequins, the Paquitas-Dolls are advertising pieces, aren't they?
they need to demonstrate, in addition to their beautiful figure, acting talents like diva-actresses,

nor are they mere coat hangers as the models were in previous decades
previous ones because they do not sell only accessories, but automodeling of
femininity in which the message inscribed in their youthful anatomies is the promise of
eternal youth, playful eroticism and beauty that withstands daily wear and tear. How the
beautiful dormants of fairy tales and literary narratives, the images of these
erotized nymphets activate an ancient repertoire of mysterious female beauty
And passive. It remains to be seen if they will awaken from the enchanted spell that goes beyond the media screen.

The fascination of the erotic doll as an image, narrative, material object or

Body invention brings forth a torrent of repertoires that have new and old.
packagings. As part of the erotic and loving imagination, the ambiguous figure of the doll
reveals to us both the fascination of fanciful projections that are part of any
imaginative and enchanting interaction as the impasses that this vicarious imaginary
produces. It stages, in this sense, the experience trapped between fetishistic desire and the
look; between the imagistic presence and the noises of reality. Romantic literature,
fantastic and surreal will make extensive use of the doll figure as a sphinx of strangeness
that places us on the threshold between the inanimate object and the unusual replica. As an object

technological manifests in digital beauties, cyborg creatures or mechanical robots of the

narratives and science fiction films, the technical doll stimulates both seduction and the
fear of our dehumanization illustrates the loss of what the romantics idealized
like the 'deep being', or to use a more antiquated word, the dissolution of
the essential "soul" of each one. As bearers of beauty, the dolls, in their aspect
advertisers embody themselves in model mannequins, divas of the teen world and idols of
fabrics. Objects of emulation of thousands of anonymous women, the ideals of beauty-
Dolls promote millionaire industries of cosmetics and plastic surgeries. How
playful toy, the doll also transcends its fetish and reveals to us ways to create
characters that animate the everyday theater of our invented subjectivity.