Sarah Fevri

From traditional wooden houses to Barbie Dreamhouse, dollhouses are often assumed to be children’s playthings. However, dollhouses are not mere toys, but also used as symbols and signifiers of class, gender roles, and societal norms. In media, dollhouses serve as metaphors of multiple things: the unfamiliar, domestic virtues, control, girlhood, and familial intimacy (see Chen 279–81, Leszkiewicz). For example, in Hereditary (2018), the dollhouse is a significant part of the narrative, reflecting Annie’s tumultuous relationship with her mother and her attempts to control her own life (Briefel 320).

In her book, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, and the Souvenir, Susan Stewart posits that “the miniature is a cultural product” (55) performing in particular ways within the physical world. She argues further that, in the realm of the miniature, toys present the appearance of reality, further testing the boundaries between “materiality and meaning” (57). The inanimate miniature captures life arrested in time and space. When it becomes animated, however, it projects another world. It turns into a fantasy that parallels, but never quite intersects, with reality.

Sharp Objects, an HBO miniseries released in 2018 and adapted from Gillian Flynn’s novel of the same name, tells the story of Camille Parker who has to go back to her hometown to report on a series of murders of young girls. While the mystery of the brutal murders looms over Wind Gap, Missouri, another thing looms over Camille – her past trauma. By going back home, she has to relive her damaging childhood, particularly the abuse inflicted by her mother, Adora Crellin. Moreover, as she struggles to understand the murders and navigate her painful childhood history in the house, Camille’s days in Wind Gap also involve her with her young half-sister, Amma Crellin.

The show first introduces Amma when Camille arrives in Wind Gap. She is sitting on a bench and smoking with her friends. Later, Camille meets Amma and her friends again, but this time, they’re wearing roller skates and taking away the memorial flowers for her missing friends. Not long after, a bystander finds the dead body of one of the missing girls not far from where they’re standing. Amma’s first appearance in the series is thus quite dark. However, this side of Amma is juxtaposed with how she is under her mother’s roof.

In the same episode, Camille goes back to Adora’s house. Amma descends the stairs of the house, in a modest sundress with a bow in her hair. She greets Camille sweetly, then she pulls Camille over to show her dollhouse. Amma takes a lot of care of the dollhouse, paying attention to small details, calling it “her fancy.” The dollhouse is an exact miniaturized replica of Adora’s house. However, it contains a painting with the word “GIRL” etched onto it, a word that is not there when the next scene shows the actual painting. A mysterious air accrues around Amma because of the vastly different ways she presents herself inside and outside of Adora’s house, but one thing is sure: her dollhouse represents an intrinsic part of her identity.

Amma’s surface

In her book, Stewart writes that the dollhouse articulates the tension of the interior and exterior (61). This complexity is exemplified in Amma’s dollhouse. On the surface, it may seem that her dollhouse represents one side of her – the Amma that lives under Adora’s roof, an obedient mama’s girl who wears frilly dresses with a bow in her hair and spends her time playing with her dollhouse. The other Amma wears more revealing clothes and peruses around her small town with her fellow miscreants, dabbling in juvenile delinquency. While the two sides of Amma may seem like conflicting depictions, I would argue that Amma’s dollhouse acts as a site that reveals this contradiction forms her girlhood.

Stewart further addresses how toys present “a projection of the world of everyday life” so as to “test the relation between materiality and meaning” (57). Amma’s dollhouse does exactly this. Placed in the living room of Adora’s house, the dollhouse appears in the background of all that happens in the dwelling. The dollhouse acts as a suspended mirror of Adora’s legacy Southern house and, with this, the dollhouse reflects Amma’s exterior space.

The home – and the domestic space generally – is a common thematic element linked to the female subject. Moreover, historically, marriage and female domesticity have provided acceptance and stability in the society of the American South, specifically, due to the influences of evangelical Christians – regardless of how turbulent the family dynamic actually is (McMillen 15, 20, 37, 92).  This parallels the expectations for ‘womanhood’ in Wind Gap. The women in Wind Gap expend the utmost care on their families and fully inhabit the heteronormative expectations placed upon them. When Camille spends an afternoon with her high school friends, one mentions going back to work because she wants to find a purpose. That’s met with shock from the group, with one saying, “You have a purpose. Don’t let feminism tell you what to do with your family.” Later on, one of Camille’s friends mentions, “I don’t think part of your heart can ever work if you don’t have kids.” And, “I didn’t really become a woman until I felt McKenzie inside of me.”

While the show never explicitly confirms whether Adora agrees with the sentiment, it does show how Adora puts care and attention towards shaping the image of a perfect family. During the very first episode, Amma tells Camille, “You know how she is. I’m just her little doll to dress up.” This will come full circle when, in the last episode, she also tells Camille that she needs to be Adora’s good girl, while she is playing with her dollhouse. These layers of exterior settings and pressures are crucial in further uncovering a deeper layer represented by the dollhouse: Amma’s interiority.

Amma’s interior space

In addressing the complexity of the dollhouse, Stewart proposes there’s another layer: that the dollhouse also balances the strains of two layers of interiority – a fantasy and a prison or “limits of otherness” (65). The dollhouse represents a “materialized secret,” disclosing an “infinitely profound interiority” (61). In uncovering how the dollhouse depicts Amma’s interiority, it’s important to understand that Amma’s seemingly ever-changing personality is a part of her identity. Frank, et al. argue that a general characteristic of adolescent girls’ identity formation is the existence of contradictory attempts at both individuality and conformity (27). While this may be differently experienced by girls depending on their circumstances, there is this pattern of needing acceptance where girls might want to be “like the others but better than the group, to belong but to be herself” (Frank, et al. 27). This tension is displayed throughout the show as Amma tries to build her interior identity while navigating her exterior spaces, the external places and pressures that inform her decisions and character.

When the show first introduces Amma, it immediately presents two quite different sides. The Amma that hangs out with her peers is carefree and delinquent. However, under Adora’s roof, Amma is more docile. In navigating her mother’s expectations, Amma turns into her “good girl” persona. Dressing the way her mother wants: a “little doll to dress up.” In the first episode, Amma says to Camille, “Mama would go bananas if she, you know, saw me in my civvies.” Camille is surprised by Amma’s choice of words. ‘Civvies,’ according to the Cambridge dictionary, denotes the plain clothes that are not part of a uniform. The sundresses Amma wears serve one thing: to conform to her mother’s ideals – and they are indeed a kind of ‘uniform.’

One big reveal of the show is that Adora is secretly poisoning her daughters, exhibiting Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome (MBP), when parents or caretakers fabricate their children’s illnesses (Schreir and Libow 5). While this syndrome is associated with several behaviours, one that is exhibited by Adora is her incessant need for attention. In episode seven, a nurse mentions that MBP was usually characteristic of “Mothers who need to be worshipped, to be heroes.” When Camille drew back from Adora, Adora started poisoning her little sister Marian to keep her docile under her care, which resulted in her death. Years later, with Camille moving out, Adora started doing the same thing to Amma.

Though manifested in a different way, Adora’s desire for attention is also shared by Amma, as exemplified throughout the show. Every time attention and approval are taken away from her, Amma does all she can to revert the attention back to herself. In episode five, Amma tells Adora about Camille’s article when Adora is focusing on getting Camille a dress. During Calhoun Day, Amma runs away when the audience’s attention is diverted away from her because a fight ensues. Furthermore, there are instances in which Amma uses her dollhouse to monopolize her mother’s full attention, like in episode one when Amma asks Adora to bring her to the fabric store.

The thing is, Amma was always fully aware of what her mother was doing. She asks Camille, “She gave you the blue?” in reference to the poison that Adora feeds them. While Amma might seem like she’s accepting the poison, figuratively and literally, she also struggles with Adora’s pressure that she be perfect. She asks her mother, “Is that why you want me to stay little?” adding, “No, I’m not as good. You can never be as good as someone dead.”

Even though she gives in to her mother’s MBP, Amma nonetheless does attempt to assert her autonomy by also repelling her mother’s idea of perfection. In episode seven, Adora comes into Amma’s room carrying bottles of medicine when Amma is playing with her dollhouse. Amma is hungover because she was partying the night before, so Adora asks Amma to go to bed – at which Amma exclaims, “I’m not really sick.” While Amma is still clingy towards Adora, Adora is infuriated, claiming that Amma doesn’t need her anymore. When Adora says, “playtime’s over,” Amma yields. Ultimately, reflecting on the dollhouse’s ties to Amma’s exteriority, the dollhouse could be seen as a representation of her conformity to both the society that she lives in and her mother’s view of perfection, even as it also acts as Amma’s site of agency.

The dollhouse and the struggle for agency

Steven Millhauser has asserted that miniaturization represents “a desire to possess a world more completely,” an invitation “to become God” (135). Nancy Wei-Ning Chen further describes how scales of smallness present a feeling of control, suggesting an ability to switch the order of things (282). Those who play with dollhouse are enabled to dominate and gain full control of the miniature versions of large and real things. Amma’s dollhouse is a miniature of the house she lives in, accompanied by a miniaturized version of Amma and both of her parents. This is a way for Amma to manipulate and take full control over the doll versions of her parents – the act of taking care of the dollhouse asserting her power over it and, eventually, over Adora. Amma’s having a lack of power in the house is contrasted with her full control over what goes in her dollhouse. In episode two, Amma is bonding with Adora over her dollhouse. Then, Amma starts screaming, “This isn’t right,” asserting herself over her mother, insisting that the dollhouse is the one thing over which she has autonomy and control.

Similarly, Amma also asserts her agency when she’s hanging out with her peers. While she wears her “civvies,” she asserts her role as the leader of the pack. In episode three, she tells Camille that her friends love her and that, “They’d do anything for me. I just ask, they’re my besties.” However, throughout the series Amma slips and reveals how she still has some anxieties about being accepted. In episode four, Amma confesses to Camille: “Sometimes I show off in front of my friends, I get carried away.” Also, in episode six, Amma tells Camille that it’s different with girls. She said that being with boys, she can just let them “do stuff” while still having full control. With girls, she says, “I can get them to do what I want, but they don’t like me.” and Camille replies, “It’s safer to be feared than to be loved.” We then found out that Amma led her peers in the brutal assault of the dead girls.

Analyzing reports of violent crimes by young women, a Swedish study by Petterson, as quoted in Azad and Carlsson (103), argues that violence is used to assert dominance and maintain hierarchies. Amma is on top of the food chain amongst her peers, a contrast with her social positioning at home. Azad and Carlsson note that delinquency is “neither a tool for rejecting femininity or gender roles, nor a way to perform masculinity. Rather, it was a way to expand the role of ‘girl’” (114) – and that there are risks, vulnerabilities and other reasons that would push adolescent girls to enact violence.

In the last scene of the last episode, Camille finds Amma’s deepest secret in her dollhouse. Laid on the floor of Adora’s bedroom within the dollhouse are rows of meticulously arranged teeth, uncovering Amma’s concealed interiority: that she’s the mastermind of all the killings in Wind Gap. Her purpose in crafting this scene was intentional: she’s mirroring her mother’s pride in her ivory tiles. In episode five there are scenes when Adora is flaunting these tiles, which she got “before anybody knew what endangered was,” adding that the flooring is her family’s legacy and should “last forever.” Amma mimics her mother by having her own ivory tiles, made with the teeth of the girls who captured her mother’s attention. While the teeth-studded floor exhibits her capacity for violence, in a twisted way, Amma also continues her mother’s legacy in her own little home. This reveals Amma’s efforts both to conform to her mother’s view of legacy and to assert her individuality (against both her mother and her peers) through horrific crimes.

While the show never really answers the question of where Amma’s wickedness comes from, whether it’s hereditary or a by-product of the cycle of the generational abuse that runs through her family, it’s clear that this violence is part of her identity. Even though there’s no justification for the horrible things that Amma does, her shifting personality and violent crime is an amalgamation of her experience of being a girl, with all of its monstrosity, complexity, and tensions. All captured in her quaint, yet grotesque, dollhouse.

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Works Cited

Azad, Azadé, and Johanna Carlsson. “‘Being a girl is a challenge . . . Maybe that’s why it’s so important to be proud of it’: Gender Identity and Performances of Femininity in Young Females with Limited Delinquency.” Women and Criminal Justice, vol. 36, no. 2, 2024, pp. 100–17.

Briefel, Aviva. “The Terror of Very Small Worlds: Hereditary and the Miniature Scales of Horror.” Discourse, vol. 44, no. 3, 2022, pp. 314–27, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48752945.

Chen, Nancy Wei-Ning. “Playing with Size and Reality: The Fascination of a Dolls’ House World.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 46, no. 3, 2015, pp. 278–95, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10583-014-9234-y.

“Civvies.” Cambridge Dictionary, dictionary.cambridge.org/. Accessed 28 Apr. 2026.

Frank, Lawrence K., et al. “Personality Development in Adolescent Girls.” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, vol. 16, no. 1, 1951, pp. 1–316, https://doi.org/10.2307/1165506.

Leszkiewicz, Anna. “The Rise of The Creepy Doll’s House.” New Statesman, 3 Aug. 2021, www.newstatesman.com/culture/film/2018/10/dolls-houses-hereditary-sharp-objects-miniaturist-halloween-dollhouse. Accessed 20 Feb. 2026.

McMillen, Sally G. Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South. 3rd ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.

Millhauser, Steven. “The Fascination of the Miniature.” Grand Street, vol. 2, no. 4, 1983, pp. 128–35, https://doi.org/10.2307/25006539.

Schreier, Herbert A., and Judith A. Libow. Hurting for Love: Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome. Guilford Press, 1993.

Noxon, Marti, creators. Sharp Objects. Entertainment One Television USA, 2018.

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press, 1993.