The Fantasy of the Monstrous Husband in Pere Calders’s «La clau de ferro»

Pere Calders’s work has been regarded as fantastic and gothic metafiction, for his short stories are often ironical rewritings of the genre’s main storylines and tropes. However, from a psychoanalytic approach, this dialogue with literary tradition can also be understood as an exploration of the meaning of fantasy or the way fiction shapes personal identity as well as social reality and culture. This idea is clearly apparent in one of Calders’s short stories, «La clau de ferro» —«The iron key»—, in which a man, in order to gain social notoriety, creates a make-believe mysterious character similar to the uncanny heroes of gothic novels. This seductive fantasy becomes so powerful that it ends up substituting reality, which the protagonists of the story are unable to accept.