The Doll as Other

A little blurb from a Humanities class I used to teach. Enjoy!

The Doll as The "Other"

When you loved dolls and studied them, you started to love all kinds of people, too, because you saw the virtue in their
expressions, how carefully they had been sculpted, the parts contrived to create the triumph of this or that remarkable face.

Anne Rice, Taltos.

As long as there have been human beings, there have been dolls. From the oldest surviving representation of the human figure, the so-called Venus of Willendorf, to the modern and controversial icon of femininity and fashion, Barbie, (TM), human beings have been engrossed in creating miniature or artificial representations of themselves. At first, such images satisfied religious and ritual functions; early idols often took human form because humans saw their gods as higher, larger, more perfect representations of themselves. Egyptians buried small dolls or Ushabti with their dead to take the place of living people, once interred alive to serve the king. These little figures represent every member of the Pharaoh's court, down to the servants and concubines. Then, the doll or figure evolved into a toy, a companion for lonely people of all ages, a mannikin to advertise fashions, a text to record history. For example, Mme. Tussaud, the famous wax modeler, began by modelling portrait dolls of the Royal Court that the French aristocracy used to amuse themselves. Other so-called dolls or automata were exact images of their owners. Some were so realistic, that they startled the ancient and Medieval world. In fact, Thomas Acquinas is said to have destroyed one such mechanical doll that belonged to his master because its constant chattering disturbed his studies. Moreover, stories of figures that are formed from inanimate matter and given life by their creator abound in myths of various culture, culminating in the story of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Shelley was aware of the history of automata in her work, and was familiar with the celebrity their makers enjoyed. Historians Carl Fox and Max von Boehn analyze the link between the Frankensteins' monsters and Golems of literature and dolls in their respective books.

Furthermore dolls have been made for magical, even diabolical purposes, so there exist to this day voodoo dolls and ancestor figures all over the world. Like all dolls, these and their more benign sisters are "others" or dopplegängers of their creators. They resemble their makers and wear their clothing. As a result, there are as many different types of dolls as there are people.
In fact, dolls have played the role of "other" from the time of the Venus figures to the present day. This paper will allude to various authors whose works discuss the doll as "other," or muse, including Strabo, Polybius, Ben Jonson, Cervantes, the Brontës, George Eliot, Rilke, Victor Hugo, Yeats, Dickens, Joyce, Rumer Godden, and Anne Rice.