“The Doll” (1980)

This story by Joyce Carol Oates shows how sharp she can be at creating memorable effects even as she works with staples of horror. Here a professional woman, age 44, president of a private college, is visiting a city she has never been to before, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She sees what she is certain must have been the model for a dollhouse she had as a girl, a present for her 4th birthday. It was a big dollhouse—36 inches high—and detailed by a craftsman, some distant relative. She has fond memories of the dollhouse and seeing a mansion that looks just like it unsettles her. She stops the car, leaves the key in the ignition and her purse on the front seat, and stands before the house in reverie, trying to decide whether to ring the doorbell and introduce herself. She thinks she must be connected to this family somehow. But she decides to continue on to the conference she is in town for. But later that night she can’t sleep. She’s no stranger to insomnia and decides to pay that call at the mansion after all. This idea alone makes me nervous. It’s after 10 but before 11. She thinks it might not be too late if there are lights on downstairs. What follows is the centerpiece of the story, which seems most likely to be a dream (if you’re looking for the rational explanation here). It moves like a dream, feels like a dream—never easy to do, but Oates pulls it off. She has also calibrated her college president’s point in life, just beyond child-bearing age and never with time for a man. “I am not opposed to marriage for myself, she once said, with unintentional naivete, but it would take so much time to become acquainted, to go out with him, and talk.” The dream explores, at almost shockingly primal levels, how she views herself—as a doll. A simulacrum of a real woman, just as the simulacrum she meets in the mansion is that of a real man (in appearance it looks suspiciously like one of her childhood dolls). Oates’s descriptive language blurs the line and then she lets sharp edges flash out unexpectedly. It’s partly a playtime fantasy with dolls, but the bottom can fall out and leave the abyss on plain view. But the next day she’s up and back at the conference again.

Joyce Carol Oates, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque
Story not available online.