Who is Dolores and why is she Haunting me
When I first made my short story Dolores public, I got a message from someone I haven’t spoken to in a long time. They reached out to tell me how much they enjoyed reading it. They wanted to know more about Dolores, who these excerpts were from and why they were talking about her. They compared her to a riddle.
To say I was surprised would be an understatement. No matter how much you love what you’ve written, there’s always that old fat writer’s critic that sits in the back of your mind yelling at you that you’re shite and cringe and should stay in your room with the door locked for eternity. So to hear that someone I had only spoken to a handful of times, was so affected by a character I had created… I could have cried.
But what was really wonderful was when they messaged me again a few days later, telling me they were still thinking about Dolores. She was haunting them. I knew the feeling, she haunted me too.
Dolores was created because somewhere, deep inside of me, she exists: an ephemeral spirit that I found myself always noticing, always thinking about. I knew that she was dangerous, but wanted to believe she was sweet. She was an embodiment of shameful things: she liked being watched, being promiscuous, feeling like people desired her, scaring people, forcing people away from each other. But Dolores was also underpinned by a distinct sadness that permeated all of her actions- she was motivated by a deep inability to belong anywhere, or be pinned down to anything. Writing these little fragments of her was like recording every moment where I felt most vulnerable, every moment where I knew I did not fit in, every moment of sadness that turned to a wave of reckless desperation. These little moments of peculiarity, these tiny bursts of intensity, were when I felt Dolores speak through me. Yes, I literally wrote everything. But I am also the one you could attribute to each mosaic that completes her complicated story, because Dolores was born from my wildest and worst feelings.
A page of my journal while brainstorming
I first encountered the name Dolores on google when I was younger. I did the classic thing that you do when you’re a kid of the 21st century and your DS runs out of charge- I googled the meaning of my name. I found out that Lola is a derivative of Dolores, which is a Spanish name that translates to “pains”. For this reason, the word Dolores was used in descriptions of the Holy Virgin Mary who was often referred to as “Our Lady of Sorrows”. It was a name that had historical connotations to sadness, but also of matriarchal power and seduction. You might understand why I wasn’t particularly happy about the outcome of this little experiment, especially when my best friend Zoe’s name meant “life” and my other best friend Charlotte’s name meant “freedom”. I was the dark lady of sorrows in a room of sanguine daisies. You could say I was born with the Dolores curse and this was a foreshadowing of the years to come.
I encountered the name again in the opening of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita:
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”
I was older this time, and suddenly the idea of being Dolores didn’t sound unappealing- it actually excited me. I wanted to be Dolores. I adopted her as my alter ego. When I was starting out The Divine Archive, I considered calling it ‘Dolores Divine’. Dolores has been in the back of my mind for a long time- she was the shadow of me, holding space for the things I didn’t necessarily want to be at the forefront of my personality. Maybe this is why I dove deep into some archives of photos I took when I was a teenager to use in the physical book: she was always there, I just didn’t know how to introduce her to the world yet.
One of the original photos that feature on the final page. I took these when I was 17
The fact that Dolores had these dark, sorrowful connotations on a global scale made me think that everyone was secretly haunted by a Dolores in some way: an intense emotion they couldn’t quite place, a voice they couldn’t escape from, a doubt, a plea, a strange desire for revenge.
One of my biggest literary inspirations I found in creating my story was a poem by Algernon Charles- Swinburne titled ‘Dolores’. Every second stanza ends in repeating lines that build an almost mystic view of the character. These were my favourite:
Ah beautiful passionate body
That never has ached with a heart!
On thy mouth though the kisses are bloody,
Though they sting till it shudder and smart,
More kind than the love we adore is,
They hurt not the heart or the brain,
O bitter and tender Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain.
I have passed from the outermost portal
To the shrine where a sin is a prayer;
What care though the service be mortal?
O our Lady of Torture, what care?
All thine the last wine that I pour is,
The last in the chalice we drain,
O fierce and luxurious Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain.
Every contradiction of these final two lines demonstrated just how nuanced this idea of a woman was, how fickle she could be, how she could be warped and transformed in different lights. I wanted to try my best to capture that through my own writing. I tried to explore these nuances as much as I could before starting to write. I was reading Villanelle poems, odes and sonnets, trying to figure out all the different ways I could express the character of Dolores. I was reading polyphonic narratives like The Chocolate War and The Virgin Suicides. I was researching famous socialites like Marchesa Casati and actresses like Dolores Del Rio. I imagined how others perceived these people, and worked on a way I could combine this kaleidescope of perspectives into one cohesive narrative. For the first time, my Dolores alter-ego had fully come to the forefront of my life and I saw her in everything and everyone.
Mexican film star Dolores Del Rio
It was important to reach this all-consuming state. Readers will notice that every excerpt about Dolores implies that she has consumed the speaker entirely, even if they do not necessarily admit it.
It was important for me to present Dolores as a visual story, however I was initially wary about including photos of myself. Because she was so mysterious, I wanted readers to imagine how she looked to them rather than being shown. In the end, it worked out, because I realised I possessed a lot of the physical qualities that I represented Dolores having: the dark hair, pale skin, a haunting gaze. Dolores was more than just my alter-ego: she was also my style icon.
The first excerpt I wrote remained at the beginning of the book when I completed it. It’s a free-verse poem that describes an encounter with Dolores in a nightclub. I wanted it to feel visceral straight away, almost like a painting coming to life with a new stroke or movement in every line. I also wrote the final line “Dolores is nobody to me” last. In this way, it felt a bit like a cleansing, like I had dredged up all the different pieces of this ghostly character, and now I was passing her onto the next person. “Dolores is nobody to me” is a lie- she’s probably everything to me. But I also had to embody the parts of me that have wanted to kill her at some point. I figured maybe by the end of the book, the reader might be so uncomfortable that they’d want to kill her too, so in the last passage, the reader really owns that statement.
But it doesn’t really matter how much I try to get rid of her, once you acknowledge the Dolores that lives inside of you, she haunts you forever, shapeshifting into your truest love, your worst hate, your biggest crime, or your most chilling fears. Dolores is a true ghost, but not one that I’m scared of.
Read Dolores here.
