The discussion below was originally published in a slightly different form in Children's Literature 24. For other extracts from the same article, see Under Adult Control and Home for a Doll For more details, see the end of the paper. Frances Armstrong |
What did girls do with dollhouses when left entirely to their own devices? Almost certainly, the most popular activity was the acting out of daily domestic routine. As far as we can tell (and see A History of Dollhouse Play for details of how we might find out), this preference is consistent in children of all periods and places. The following description of a young French duchess at play in 1630 has a timeless quality: The dolls were undressed and put to bed every evening; they were dressed again the next day; they were made to eat; they were made to take their medicine. One day she wished to make them bathe, and had the great sorrow of being forbidden. (Quoted in Flora Gill Jacobs, A History of Dolls' Houses , 91) The children's author Alice Corkran said of her dolls that "events in their home were the faithful mirror of what happened in ours" (Corkran, Girl's Realm 2: 41). Rather than boring repetition, such exact mirroring could be a kind of journal-keeping, and could also challenge one's miniaturizing skills. An anonymous account of 1888 gives a detailed example of this kind of activity: the girl concerned always got her dolls out of bed in the morning, dressed them, and gave them breakfast before settling them down to their school lessons with the little schoolbooks she had made specially for them. There they remained until her own lessons were finished; later the dolls "took a walk along the front of the bookcase or on the mantelpiece." Dinner was followed by more lessons, tea, and baths, after which "mamma" came to wish the small ones goodnight. The older daughters and their parents then enjoyed an evening of music and cards. Papa locked up the house, and all went to bed. In this case, a similar regularity prevailed in the girl's own home, and her mother commended her "for doing the duty of this toy house," but it is clear from the details of the description--a lengthy one--that the mother did not adopt a controlling role. She did add encouragement by making accessories such as a full deck of little playing cards. Such accounts show striking similarities across time and place. In this kind of play, social class is the greatest source of difference, since dollhouse games require leisure and space as well as materials. There are, of course, accounts from many places and periods of dolls and dollhouses improvized from sticks, rags, and stones, but historians of play seldom mention that the word "baby-house" was apparently used even by well-to-do children to refer to a very simple arrangement of furniture with no enclosing walls. In Eleanor Fenn's Juvenile Correspondence (1783) the fictional six-year-old Miss Mary Gentle says, in a letter from boarding school: "I have set my bureau on a window-seat--and that is our baby-house" (24). Seventy years later, Prentiss tells how Little Susy spends part of her second birthday making "a pretty baby-house in one corner of the room," and then decides she can make a better one; "she pulled it down, threw her toys all about the floor, and began again" (Prentiss 22-23). Some of these improvised baby-houses may have had little of the visual appeal of the expensive detailed model, but it seems that even sticks and stones they were quite adequate for imaginative play. At the other extreme, rich children who were not over-supervised in their play reportedly enjoyed games of domestic ritual as much as poorer children did. Royal children seem to have taken particular delight in games of domestic routine. Princess Charlotte of Belgium, writing in 1848 to thank Queen Victoria for the gift of a dollhouse, says that "every morning I dress my doll and give her a good breakfast; and the day after her arrival she gave a great rout at which all my dolls were invited. Sometimes she plays at drafts on her pretty little draft-board and every evening I undress her and put her to bed." Even within this exclusive group, reasons for enjoying routine games may have varied: some princesses may have longed to live "ordinary" lives, while some (like the one who became Queen Victoria) did in fact live very simply. "Routs" like the one mentioned by Princess Charlotte, and parties of any kind, were a frequent occurrence because they gave one a chance to use the tiny dishes and utensils that were a great source of pleasure to so many (including such fictional characters as Gulliver and Dickens's Barkis in David Copperfield). Parties provided variety without violating routine, and visiting dolls opened up new imaginative possibilities. A disadvantage was that once the tempting array of tiny dishes was in place, the small scale made it nearly impossible to put the dolls through the motions of eating. (Food was in any case likely to be glued to the plates.) At this point many children happily compromised on scale and fed the dolls (and themselves) with real cakes provided by sympathetic mothers or cooks. The potential for drama contained within routine might be suggested by setting up the dollhouse like a stage, with action frozen at a particular moment, ready for the next scene to begin. Girls who had not thought of this themselves might take a hint from Edith and Milly's Housekeeping, where Milly prepares a dinner-party in careful detail before her friend Edith arrives. A slight crisis has been caused by the late departure of afternoon visitors, who had tiresomely called too close to dinner-time; the evening's guests are now about to arrive, and the pheasants are being basted in the kitchen. While many real children find real parties uncomfortable because of the high standards of dress and behaviour required, the small scale of a dollhouse party paradoxically allows perfection to co-exist with incongruity, so that mistakes bring laughter, not chaos. Delighted that such tiny knives and forks and plates could be made at all, players hardly notice discrepancies or omissions. If they do, the prevailing sense of play makes these part of the fun. Memories of dollhouse play often imply that lapses of decorum were greatly enjoyed: Alice Corkran, for instance, records that arranging a dollhouse dinner party was a "supreme delight," but the details she remembers are details of disaster, caused by the "delicious sense of hurry-scurry": the housemaid's broom left by the dining-room table, or a frying-pan reposing on the drawing-room sofa (Corkran 41). I would distinguish between these "lapses" and deliberate attempts at subversion: an observing adult, one imagines, might be amused to see the frying-pan in the wrong place, but might be disturbed to encounter the hostess embracing the footman. Even on serious occasions like weddings or funerals, unexpected incongruities can provide welcome relief to all but the most compulsive-obsessive personalities, without seriously disrupting the mood. The small scale of the dollhouse diminishes the risk of disaster, but it also creates distance. A dollhouse doll is a convenient size to put in a pocket, but perhaps too small for the child to identify with her? The evidence suggests that this was not a major problem. Furniture was simply removed from the dollhouse, and set up on the floor, so that dolls of any size could participate. The dolls' owners could be either controllers or participants. In the story about Edith and Milly, the illustrations to that story take liberties with proportion, so that the girls' relative hugeness is reduced, and their actions almost blend into those of the dolls. At the end of the story, the line between small and large house is pleasantly blurred: "And now it was evening--the lamp was lighted, and the kettle sang on the hearth. Milly sat on her little stool by the fire . . ." (Edith, n. pag.). Illustrations tend to open up the dollhouse rather than emphasize its prison-like quality, often showing pieces of furniture unceremoniously placed on the floor in front of the house, play apparently continuing as if still contained by miniature walls. Sometimes the dolls and furniture remained in the dollhouse while the children acted out the roles themselves; sometimes large-scale dolls and their furniture were used, the dollhouse acting as backdrop. For children who put a high value on realism, the difference in scale could then be explained as a matter of artistic perspective. Girls could choose the distance and perspective appropriate for each occasion, as one girl did when "playing at 'Death.'" She had experienced no deaths in her own family, but her mother had often commented on the drawn blinds of a house that indicated a family in mourning. So every week the child spent her "Saturday Penny" on a small doll, which she immediately put to bed in her dollhouse. Rather than nursing the invalid or acting out a death-bed scene, she busied herself making blinds for the dollhouse windows, and then wheeled her large doll in its carriage past the dollhouse, remarking that someone must have died. Unceremoniously she then buried the small doll in the garden, removed the blinds from the windows, and took the large doll past the dollhouse again, commenting that the funeral must have taken place. "I was no longer a little girl with her doll, but a mother with her child, dignified, knowledgeable and full of concern" (McCrea 56). In this case the dollhouse becomes the home of strangers, where death can be safely contained; the girl playing mother is left glowing with satisfaction, having reassured the doll--and herself--by means of a ritual that placed death as something she could cope with for the moment. Writing in old age, this narrator maintains that "I had no pre-occupation with death, no secret fear of dying," and she may be right; but dollhouse play did give her the opportunity to act out anxieties that she might not have recognized. The small scale of a dollhouse allows control, and a degree of privacy: modern therapists often give child clients the opportunity to play with dollhouse settings, in the hopes that hidden fears and preoccupations will come to the surface. No doubt children of earlier centuries used dollhouse play to express their unconscious feelings too, but the greater the privacy and the deeper the feelings, the less likely such play is to have been recorded in writing, or even remembered. Only traces, like the doll under the mattress, remain. As a writer of 1870 said about the dolls in Ann Sharp's baby-house, still bearing the nametags pinned on them in about 1697, "It is quite tantalizing to see her little people all standing there as she is said to have placed them nearly two hundred years ago, and never to know what she meant by it all" (Gwynfryn 708). We do have one very convincing account of how a child used dollhouse play to cope with emotional stress, in this case the recent sudden death of both her sisters. "Fannie H.H. (aged 9 1/2 years)," writing to Harper's Bazaar for Children in 1889, describes how she and her sisters had enjoyed playing with their dollhouses, and how after they died she was afraid that she could not play with her own dollhouse any more. Following an aunt's suggestion, though, she ingeniously combined all three dollhouses into a school, with thirteen dormitories and five pianos. Fannie found relief not by acting out a painful event, but by creative thinking and refashioning; the tone of the letter suggests that she is pleased and proud with the results, and ready to start acting out new kinds of narrative. Dollhouses were not places of restriction for her--they could be transformed. Strangely, perhaps, even the most extreme stress seldom seems to end in the wilful destruction of a dollhouse. There are many gruesome accounts of dolls being viciously mutilated by both girls and boys, but dollhouses themselves seem to have been very safe as ludic spaces, even when not under direct adult control. Over-enthusiastic renovation could be dangerous, as could the accidental or experimental misuse of miniature candles and lamps; girls as well as boys might be to blame. There seems to have been an awareness that to destroy an entire dollhouse would not bring enough satisfaction to outweigh the severity of the punishment that would follow. One angry boy went so far as to break a dollhouse window, but then he removed the "King" and "Queen" inhabitants, and burnt them on the "real" fireplace, rather than setting the dollhouse alight. The incident was considered significant enough to be mentioned in a family account a century later (Greene, FDH 37). Adapted from Frances Armstrong, "The dollhouse as ludic space," in Children's Literature 24 (1996). For works cited, see Combined Bibliography. |
The dollhouse: a child's place? |
Toys in Miniature: Frances Armstrong |
What did girls do with dollhouses when left entirely to their own devices? Almost certainly, the most popular activity was the acting out of daily domestic routine. As far as we can tell (and see A History of Dollhouse Play for details of how we might find out), this preference is consistent in children of all periods and places. The following description of a young French duchess at play in 1630 has a timeless quality: The dolls were undressed and put to bed every evening; they were dressed again the next day; they were made to eat; they were made to take their medicine. One day she wished to make them bathe, and had the great sorrow of being forbidden. (Quoted in Flora Gill Jacobs, A History of Dolls' Houses , 91) The children's author Alice Corkran said of her dolls that "events in their home were the faithful mirror of what happened in ours" (Corkran, Girl's Realm 2: 41). Rather than boring repetition, such exact mirroring could be a kind of journal-keeping, and could also challenge one's miniaturizing skills. An anonymous account of 1888 gives a detailed example of this kind of activity: the girl concerned always got her dolls out of bed in the morning, dressed them, and gave them breakfast before settling them down to their school lessons with the little schoolbooks she had made specially for them. There they remained until her own lessons were finished; later the dolls "took a walk along the front of the bookcase or on the mantelpiece." Dinner was followed by more lessons, tea, and baths, after which "mamma" came to wish the small ones goodnight. The older daughters and their parents then enjoyed an evening of music and cards. Papa locked up the house, and all went to bed. In this case, a similar regularity prevailed in the girl's own home, and her mother commended her "for doing the duty of this toy house," but it is clear from the details of the description--a lengthy one--that the mother did not adopt a controlling role. She did add encouragement by making accessories such as a full deck of little playing cards. Such accounts show striking similarities across time and place. In this kind of play, social class is the greatest source of difference, since dollhouse games require leisure and space as well as materials. There are, of course, accounts from many places and periods of dolls and dollhouses improvized from sticks, rags, and stones, but historians of play seldom mention that the word "baby-house" was apparently used even by well-to-do children to refer to a very simple arrangement of furniture with no enclosing walls. In Eleanor Fenn's Juvenile Correspondence (1783) the fictional six-year-old Miss Mary Gentle says, in a letter from boarding school: "I have set my bureau on a window-seat--and that is our baby-house" (24). Seventy years later, Prentiss tells how Little Susy spends part of her second birthday making "a pretty baby-house in one corner of the room," and then decides she can make a better one; "she pulled it down, threw her toys all about the floor, and began again" (Prentiss 22-23). Some of these improvised baby-houses may have had little of the visual appeal of the expensive detailed model, but it seems that even sticks and stones they were quite adequate for imaginative play. At the other extreme, rich children who were not over-supervised in their play reportedly enjoyed games of domestic ritual as much as poorer children did. Royal children seem to have taken particular delight in games of domestic routine. Princess Charlotte of Belgium, writing in 1848 to thank Queen Victoria for the gift of a dollhouse, says that "every morning I dress my doll and give her a good breakfast; and the day after her arrival she gave a great rout at which all my dolls were invited. Sometimes she plays at drafts on her pretty little draft-board and every evening I undress her and put her to bed." Even within this exclusive group, reasons for enjoying routine games may have varied: some princesses may have longed to live "ordinary" lives, while some (like the one who became Queen Victoria) did in fact live very simply. "Routs" like the one mentioned by Princess Charlotte, and parties of any kind, were a frequent occurrence because they gave one a chance to use the tiny dishes and utensils that were a great source of pleasure to so many (including such fictional characters as Gulliver and Dickens's Barkis in David Copperfield). Parties provided variety without violating routine, and visiting dolls opened up new imaginative possibilities. A disadvantage was that once the tempting array of tiny dishes was in place, the small scale made it nearly impossible to put the dolls through the motions of eating. (Food was in any case likely to be glued to the plates.) At this point many children happily compromised on scale and fed the dolls (and themselves) with real cakes provided by sympathetic mothers or cooks. The potential for drama contained within routine might be suggested by setting up the dollhouse like a stage, with action frozen at a particular moment, ready for the next scene to begin. Girls who had not thought of this themselves might take a hint from Edith and Milly's Housekeeping, where Milly prepares a dinner-party in careful detail before her friend Edith arrives. A slight crisis has been caused by the late departure of afternoon visitors, who had tiresomely called too close to dinner-time; the evening's guests are now about to arrive, and the pheasants are being basted in the kitchen. While many real children find real parties uncomfortable because of the high standards of dress and behaviour required, the small scale of a dollhouse party paradoxically allows perfection to co-exist with incongruity, so that mistakes bring laughter, not chaos. Delighted that such tiny knives and forks and plates could be made at all, players hardly notice discrepancies or omissions. If they do, the prevailing sense of play makes these part of the fun. Memories of dollhouse play often imply that lapses of decorum were greatly enjoyed: Alice Corkran, for instance, records that arranging a dollhouse dinner party was a "supreme delight," but the details she remembers are details of disaster, caused by the "delicious sense of hurry-scurry": the housemaid's broom left by the dining-room table, or a frying-pan reposing on the drawing-room sofa (Corkran 41). I would distinguish between these "lapses" and deliberate attempts at subversion: an observing adult, one imagines, might be amused to see the frying-pan in the wrong place, but might be disturbed to encounter the hostess embracing the footman. Even on serious occasions like weddings or funerals, unexpected incongruities can provide welcome relief to all but the most compulsive-obsessive personalities, without seriously disrupting the mood. The small scale of the dollhouse diminishes the risk of disaster, but it also creates distance. A dollhouse doll is a convenient size to put in a pocket, but perhaps too small for the child to identify with her? The evidence suggests that this was not a major problem. Furniture was simply removed from the dollhouse, and set up on the floor, so that dolls of any size could participate. The dolls' owners could be either controllers or participants. In the story about Edith and Milly, the illustrations to that story take liberties with proportion, so that the girls' relative hugeness is reduced, and their actions almost blend into those of the dolls. At the end of the story, the line between small and large house is pleasantly blurred: "And now it was evening--the lamp was lighted, and the kettle sang on the hearth. Milly sat on her little stool by the fire . . ." (Edith, n. pag.). Illustrations tend to open up the dollhouse rather than emphasize its prison-like quality, often showing pieces of furniture unceremoniously placed on the floor in front of the house, play apparently continuing as if still contained by miniature walls. Sometimes the dolls and furniture remained in the dollhouse while the children acted out the roles themselves; sometimes large-scale dolls and their furniture were used, the dollhouse acting as backdrop. For children who put a high value on realism, the difference in scale could then be explained as a matter of artistic perspective. Girls could choose the distance and perspective appropriate for each occasion, as one girl did when "playing at 'Death.'" She had experienced no deaths in her own family, but her mother had often commented on the drawn blinds of a house that indicated a family in mourning. So every week the child spent her "Saturday Penny" on a small doll, which she immediately put to bed in her dollhouse. Rather than nursing the invalid or acting out a death-bed scene, she busied herself making blinds for the dollhouse windows, and then wheeled her large doll in its carriage past the dollhouse, remarking that someone must have died. Unceremoniously she then buried the small doll in the garden, removed the blinds from the windows, and took the large doll past the dollhouse again, commenting that the funeral must have taken place. "I was no longer a little girl with her doll, but a mother with her child, dignified, knowledgeable and full of concern" (McCrea 56). In this case the dollhouse becomes the home of strangers, where death can be safely contained; the girl playing mother is left glowing with satisfaction, having reassured the doll--and herself--by means of a ritual that placed death as something she could cope with for the moment. Writing in old age, this narrator maintains that "I had no pre-occupation with death, no secret fear of dying," and she may be right; but dollhouse play did give her the opportunity to act out anxieties that she might not have recognized. The small scale of a dollhouse allows control, and a degree of privacy: modern therapists often give child clients the opportunity to play with dollhouse settings, in the hopes that hidden fears and preoccupations will come to the surface. No doubt children of earlier centuries used dollhouse play to express their unconscious feelings too, but the greater the privacy and the deeper the feelings, the less likely such play is to have been recorded in writing, or even remembered. Only traces, like the doll under the mattress, remain. As a writer of 1870 said about the dolls in Ann Sharp's baby-house, still bearing the nametags pinned on them in about 1697, "It is quite tantalizing to see her little people all standing there as she is said to have placed them nearly two hundred years ago, and never to know what she meant by it all" (Gwynfryn 708). We do have one very convincing account of how a child used dollhouse play to cope with emotional stress, in this case the recent sudden death of both her sisters. "Fannie H.H. (aged 9 1/2 years)," writing to Harper's Bazaar for Children in 1889, describes how she and her sisters had enjoyed playing with their dollhouses, and how after they died she was afraid that she could not play with her own dollhouse any more. Following an aunt's suggestion, though, she ingeniously combined all three dollhouses into a school, with thirteen dormitories and five pianos. Fannie found relief not by acting out a painful event, but by creative thinking and refashioning; the tone of the letter suggests that she is pleased and proud with the results, and ready to start acting out new kinds of narrative. Dollhouses were not places of restriction for her--they could be transformed. Strangely, perhaps, even the most extreme stress seldom seems to end in the wilful destruction of a dollhouse. There are many gruesome accounts of dolls being viciously mutilated by both girls and boys, but dollhouses themselves seem to have been very safe as ludic spaces, even when not under direct adult control. Over-enthusiastic renovation could be dangerous, as could the accidental or experimental misuse of miniature candles and lamps; girls as well as boys might be to blame. There seems to have been an awareness that to destroy an entire dollhouse would not bring enough satisfaction to outweigh the severity of the punishment that would follow. One angry boy went so far as to break a dollhouse window, but then he removed the "King" and "Queen" inhabitants, and burnt them on the "real" fireplace, rather than setting the dollhouse alight. The incident was considered significant enough to be mentioned in a family account a century later (Greene, FDH 37). Adapted from Frances Armstrong, "The dollhouse as ludic space," in Children's Literature 24 (1996). For works cited, see Combined Bibliography. |
The discussion below was originally published in a slightly different form in Children's Literature 24. For other extracts from the same article, see Under Adult Control and Home for a Doll For more details, see the end of the paper. Frances Armstrong |
