Frida Kahlo's Me and My Doll

Frida knows she cannot have children. Her life is irremediably empty and bleak, like the bed she sits on. The doll beside her is naked like a newborn, and one might think Frida intends it as a substitute for the child denied to her. But it is a substitute of little real importance — so much so that Frida holds a cigarette in her hand, something a mother would not do while with her baby. Yet Frida's face shows no expression of unhappiness, or worse, despair, but rather of defiance, as if she were saying: the world around me is empty and bleak, I am denied a child, but I will not give up — I am a living, beautiful woman, capable of being the mother of a flesh-and-blood creature and not of a doll. I will not surrender, and hope — indeed, certainty — lights up my gaze and gives harmony to my figure.