The Lost Daughter

Elena’s missing doll, Nani, is the central symbol of The Lost Daughter. To Leda, the doll is “the shining testimony of perfect motherhood” (62): It symbolizes the bond between Nina and Elena, a bond that seems so different from Leda’s troubled relationships with both her mother and her daughters. However, up close, the doll is dirty and ugly, suggesting that the beauty of motherhood is an illusion. Seeing Nina and Elena play with the doll reminds Leda of her own unhappy childhood, living in fear of her mother’s threats to leave. It also reminds her of her struggles as a young mother raising two daughters. She feels jealous of what Nina and Elena have as both a mother and a daughter, and she takes Nani to complicate Nina’s motherhood.

Elena’s doll also reminds Leda of Mina, her beloved childhood toy. When Bianca mistreated Mina, Leda was angry and hurt. She wanted Bianca to love the doll because it was important to her. In this way, the doll becomes a symbol of what Leda lost in becoming a mother. Motherhood forced Leda to give everything up: her childhood toy, but also her career and her independence. She lost the ability to have things that were important to her and respected by others. By taking Nani, Leda symbolically tries to reclaim some of what she lost when she became a mother.

Leda also compares mothers to dolls, recalling that she used to treat her mother like a doll, dressing her and combing her hair, but that her mother disliked it and pulled away. The experience was so painful to Leda that she vowed to let her daughters play with her however they liked, “patiently” becoming their doll. However, like her mother, she grows to dislike this kind of play, during which her body feels “inanimate” and “without desires.” Dolls thus symbolize for Leda the way mothers are objectified, reduced to things or “functions.” When Leda becomes her daughters’ doll, she ceases to exist as anything else.