Literary Doll Tidbits

For dolls in horror; aug. 28; eva simms continued:

Simms writes that the doll is the child’s “primary entry into the world of the imagination” because “the doll, among all the toys, comes closest to imitating the child’s own body: and thus “lends itself to an imaginative representation of the human world” (672). With dolls, Simms goes on to argue, a child can play at any adult rule or in any adult situation, house, school, grocery store, restaurant (672), even jail, prison, and execution. Rilke also rights that “[we] found our orientation through the doll” (Rilke Quoted in Simms 672).

Why dolls are destroyed; simms at 674:

“Without the child’s compassion and imagination, the doll is a corpse” (Simms 675).

Simms explains the aggression towards toys, dolls in particular, Rilke and others write about is explained in the following manner; if the doll, “the representation of the human form, does not fulfill its promise of warmth and companionship, it will be destroyed”(675).

Rilke on the art dolls Lotte Pritzel crated for adult collectors in the 1920s, pictured in von Boehn’s Dolls, at ap._____________________

“. . . there are no children in their lives: this would be, in a certain sense, the condition of their origin, that he world of children was past and over. In these figures the doll has at last outgrown the understanding, the sympathy, the pleasure, and the soul of the child, it has become independent, grown-up, prematurely old, it has entered upon all the unrealities of its own life”(Rilke 1) In the case of the dolls in these horror movies, they have become animated of their own accord, and in many cases, vengeful and destructive.

The dolls of Alcott, Woody and the other toys in Toy story, Miss Hitty, and Holly and other dolls in search of little girls to love them, they wait the next child owner so that they may, indeed, regain “the understanding, they sympathy, the pleasure, and the soul of the child” (Rilke 1).

From a critique of Heinrich von Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theater(1810); He writes that “[t]he joy of these dolls [marionettes] is that they are unselfconscious, free from affectation, and weightless” (quoted in mo-nochrome.livejournal.com 1).

Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys,” “The toy is the child’s earliest initiation into an example of art, and when mature age comes, the perfected examples will not give his mind the same enthusiasms, or the same sense of conviction” (quoted in nytimes.com 2/26/1989, 1).

In 1989, a group of photographers who photographed toy figures and dolls, including David Levinthal, Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons, staged a show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington called “Surrogate Selves” (1). These photo studies were based on the common theme that a child is a companion for the child, who injects it with imaginary life, that the doll in “scaled-down dimensions and simplified features . . is often designed to look ;so real it’s almost alive’ as well a vehicle for unrestricted fantasy” (1). The artists’ fascinations with this exhibit was with dolls “almost alive but clearly fake” (1).


On Claude Levi-Strauss:

“Children create imaginary world by acting on and through their toys” (Wiseman 1). Uses an example from Levi-Strauss’s childhood where using a box and a Japanese etching, Levi-Strauss created an entire Japanese house. [footnote; did Godden know this anecdote when she wrote Miss Happiness and Miss Flower?”]

Baudelaire, discussed in Wiseman, cheap homemade toys spark the imagination best 91).


There are many kinds of responses to various artifacts, according to Alfred Gell, “terror, desire, awe, fascination, etc”( Gell p. 6 quoted in Wiseman 5).