Teeth Symbol Analysis

Ann Nash and Natalie Keene, the two little girls whose murders set the events of the novel in motion, are both found—months apart and in separate places—with all of their teeth pulled from their mouth. The violent and deliberate nature of the extractions, which would have required an enormous amount of force and dedication points (at least in the eyes of the investigators) to a large and disturbed suspect—a man, presumably, who wanted to defile and deform his victims in a grotesque way. Once the truth about the murders comes out, at the very end of the novel—after Adora has already been arrested for the crimes, when the truth about her Munchausen by Proxy murder of her daughter Marian is revealed and a pair of dainty pliers is found in her house—it comes to light that Adora’s thirteen-year-old daughter (and Camille’s own half-sister) Amma was actually the one responsible for the deaths of Natalie and Ann, as well as the violent tooth extractions. Amma, who has for a long while been obsessed with perfectly matching the details of her four-foot-tall dollhouse to the specifications of her mother’s own home, needed the girls’ teeth to detail the ivory floors of her mother’s bedroom. When Ann and Natalie, both of whom her mother had been tutoring and paying extra attention to, got on Amma’s nerves, she killed them and plucked their teeth from their dead mouths, all in service of her own project.

The teeth, then, symbolize an overturning of femininity and the stereotypes of girlhood and womanhood. Because of the physical strength and emotional detachment officials decide must have been necessary for the murderer to remove the teeth, they focus only on male suspects, even throwing Natalie’s innocent brother John Keene into the mix. The detectives and policemen fail to believe that a woman could have been responsible for these crimes—let alone an “innocent” thirteen-year-old girl. Amma has proven herself to Camille to be a complicated figure whose femininity and innocence is largely a construct well before the shocking twist is revealed—Amma takes hard drugs, has sex with boys (and forces her friends to do the same), and dresses up like a little “doll” for Adora while putting on saucy outfits to go out on the town at night. Amma is both vulnerable to Adora’s ministrations and is complicit in them—even when her mother feeds her poisons that she knows will make her sick, Amma welcomes the concoctions, knowing that the bond between her and Adora will grow stronger the more readily she submits to her mother’s care. The teeth that Amma pulls from the mouths of her murder victims and then uses to decorate the floor of her dollhouse—a decidedly feminine and little-girlish project—are the most tangible symbol both of Amma’s rage and of her destruction of the expectations people have of women and little girls more specifically.