The Artificial Silk Girl Literary Elements

Historical Fiction, Classic

Pre-Nazi Germany in the beginning of the 1900s

Doris the narrator and the point of view is first-person

Absurd, lonely, informal, condescending

Doris is the protagonist, and she is also her own antagonist.

Doris wants to become a star. She wants to become a famous actor but many things hinder her. She is poor, and she did not complete her education.

Another conflict she faces is an internal conflict where she wants to stop working like a prostitute, attracting men and earning money from sleeping with them. She knows that this debases her, but it is her only source of money. She is always hesitant whether to make the man she'll meet next her last one or not.

When Doris realizes how much Ernst loves his wife and wants her to return, she leaves him and asks his wife to return to him. She decides to finally settle with Karl, one of the men she met, and search for her way to stardom. She makes up her mind to stop meeting men and exposing her body to any man that offers money.

"But I want to write like a movie, because my life is like that and it's going to become even more so".

By writing this, Doris foreshadows that the events in her life are going to be like a movie, cliched, with ups and downs, and finally she will settle.

"I'm going to be a star, and then everything I do will be right - I'll never have to be careful about what I do or say. I don't have to calculate my words or my actions - I can just be drunk- nothing can happen to me anymore, no loss, no disdain, because I am a star."

Doris understates the responsibility of being famous. She believes that as soon as she reaches that level, her life will become a paradise. She doesn't know that she will have to care about everything she says or does because she will be watched and spied on in every second of her life.

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"On Nurnberger Strasse there's a restaurant with gathered curtains that only Russians got to - it has wallpaper that reminds you of frozen cherries with sunny flowers - very funny - and an old Russian Moscow as a picture and a tiny madonna in the corner. And small lamps, a little bit white and a little bit red, if you're tall you'll hit your head on the ceiling(...)The girls are wearing little white aprons and they're pretty, like dolls with big eyes and Russian language - and with their elegant faces they can prove to anyone that they are the wives of generals. The men have small black toothbrush-like mustaches - the band is singing - it's a language that sounds like soft mayonnaise, so sweet."

"I'll do anything, anything at all, but I won't work."

Although Doris's main objective when she comes to Berlin was to find work, when Ernst actually finds her one, she completely refuses, agreeing to do anything else but to work.

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"The coat wants me and I want it"