Why is Nina stabbing Leda?

Nina’s hatpin attack is an exteriorization of what the film describes as the suffocating weight of motherhood. Throughout the movie, we see how much Nina struggles, from Leda’s sympathetic perspective as someone who’s been through it before. They share a kinship of those who share the same kind of lived experience, in this case motherhood. Mum-to-be Callie (Dagmara DomiÅ„czyk), who is eager to become a mother herself but has yet to experience motherhood, is obviously seen as a stranger to this connection, despite the examples of upbringing that ‘she fulfills. From Leda and Nina’s perspective, Callie chooses education; it is not imposed, global, on it. Or at least it hasn’t been.

In the third act, when Nina comes to Leda’s to look for the keys to a future meeting with the lover Will, she also comes to ask Leda a desperate question: it will pass, right? This weight. This burden. This demand to always be available to feed, without ever having enough help, time or space for anything else. “You’re so young and it’s not going. None of that goes through, ”Leda tells her, and that’s what prompts Nina to stab Leda with the hatpin, a symbol of femininity that Leda associates with her grandmother, in Leda’s womb. She’s not crazy about dolls, not really. She feels betrayed by this person she thought she understood, and by the realization that Leda might be right. That it will not pass. Never. Not with the way society is structured, with different rules and expectations for fathers and mothers. Not with the way society expects women to martyr themselves on the altar of motherhood and not have complicated feelings about the sacrifices that this entails.

In this way, Leda’s injury is also brought on by the overwhelming weight of motherhood and the rage Leda and Nina feel because of it. The anger and frustration they feel that they have no other option on how to be a mother other than the all-consuming. It is the quiet, sustained cruelty of motherhood as it is culturally constructed and made tangible in a kind of violence that more people understand and weight on.

What does the doll represent in The Lost Girl?

Dolls are symbols of motherhood. Our society tends to give them to little girls as a means of practicing and performing care, just as their mothers are supposed to do for them. From an early age, we condition our daughters to be mothers. There is nothing inherently wrong with feeding, of course, quite the contrary. The ability to nurture is extremely important to every society and can be a beautiful and rewarding act. However, we disproportionately impose the burden of educating girls and women, expecting half of the population to do all the emotional labor for family, friendships, workplaces and others. types of community. When children are small and parents get older, women are expected to take care of them, and this is expected to come naturally and without complaint, as if giving dolls to girls as soon as possible. ‘they are small and telling us we should love them had nothing to do with that. As if all girls dream of the exact same thing and even if they do, this dream should come at the expense of all other dreams or parts of her.

With the doll, Leda tries maternity again for the size. She cleans the doll and dresses it in new clothes. When Nina asks why she took it and then kept it, she can’t explain her fascination with it; she doesn’t understand herself. It’s the same kind of confusion she has around her own identity as a mother – not the love she has for her children, but the relationship she has with the culturally constructed boxes that we refer to as. “Motherhood” and in which we trap women. Perhaps by keeping him away from Nina and Elena, she is trying to break the cycle of forced education, an act of punishment and mercy at the same time.

Does Leda die at the end of The Lost Girl?

The film ends with Leda sitting on the beach after being woken up by the waves, talking on the phone with her two adult daughters. She laughed through tears as she spoke to them, peeling an orange like she did for her children when they were young. This time, she peels it for herself; they don’t have the ability to have a play or demand a performance, although she has the ability, I guess, to offer it to them.