The following is an extract, slightly changed, from my article "The Dollhouse as Ludic Space," published in Children's Literature 24, pages 23 to 54.  Obviously, one might say, a dollhouse is a place for dolls.  But literature has nothing much to say about dollhouse dolls, and what there is tends to present a negative image.  Modern miniaturist enthusiasts may be disappointed if they go in innocence to Ibsen's play A Doll's House and find that the heroine longs to leave a home that imprisons her.  That play dates from 1879; even by 1864 Charles Dickens's heroine Bella had rejected the role of dollhouse doll (Our Mutual Friend 746).  Dollhouse dolls, it seems, are less satisfactory as playthings than most dolls are.  They are often little more than part of the dollhouse furnishings.  While large dolls are likely to be "friends," to share an intimate individual relationship with a girl, dollhouse dolls are part of the social entity of their house, and are made to interact with one another rather than with a particular girl.  They are kept, literally, at arm's length.  This means that even if a child recognizes their dolls' lives as restricted, she does not necessarily internalize their woes; she may, indeed, see them as a means of parody.            The problem is not that these dolls are stuck in dreary domesticity.  Some of their suffering may be caused by difficulties that are specific to the dollhouse, with no direct human parallel.  Most dollhouses are poorly designed.  Even a distant observer could see the problems: as R.C. Lehmann puts it, writing as "little Queenie" in  Punch (1901), a dollhouse is "devided into four compart- ments, like a rabit hutch.  . . . There is no trace of any hall, or even passidge.  There are no doors, so if a droin-room doll should find herself in the kitchen or nursery by any chance, there she has got to remane until some cumpationat hand releases her to her propper sphere!"  ([Lehmann] 268)           Dollhouse furnishings were often much more successfully miniaturized than the house itself, but beautifully-made miniature accessories tend to show up by contrast the clumsiness of many dolls.  Surrounded by realistically detailed small accessories, dolls are awkward, unstable and inflexible.  As E.F. Benson put it, "the only voluntary and self-impelled movement a Doll can make is to fall down."   It was often the male dolls, lacking the support of a long skirt, who were "decidedly shaky" (Gwynfryn 708), a tendency that was sometimes taken to indicate moral weakness.  In fiction the inability to move is sometimes made comic, as when a doll is kept perpetually ironing because she tends to fall over when assigned to other tasks ("Aunt Laura" 7), or when John the footman is "stuck to the carpet for the present" (Edith n.pag.).            Action was further hampered by the stiffness of the dolls, their relatively heavy clothing obstructing joints intended to be flexible.  Dollhouse dolls were notorious for their inability to sit properly: "They have a tendency to sprawl in their gorgeous drawing-rooms in the most ungainly fashion, and if you try to straighten their backs you have to bring their chins to their knees" (Corkran 47).  Ernest Shepard and his brother, having gained possession of their sister's old dollhouse, found an alternative: modelling wax fixed the dolls firmly into their chairs, so that "the wretched creatures . . . were condemned to sit at rigid attention instead of sliding off on to the floor" (Shepard 167).   A sophisticated, but perhaps unintentional, solution is found in a room from the eighteenth- century "Mon Plaisir" collection: as Faith Eaton remarks, the five dolls in this room--and even the lady in a portrait on the wall--seem to be leaning back in order to gaze at the elaborately painted ceiling (Eaton 38-39).  Unrealistic though stiffly-posed dolls might be, they were often amusing, and even falling down and sliding off chairs are actions that can come as pleasant surprises to children who are quite well aware that dolls cannot "really" move on their own.                       Dollhouse dolls tended to lack individuality: the prettier wax or china dolls were likely to be the ladies of the house, and the coarser wooden dolls became servants.  Black dolls almost always seemed to be called "Dinah" and to stay in the kitchen.  At another extreme, some doll households were such a mixed bunch that realistic play must have been almost impossible: one fictional group included "a Zouave, a Nun, a Red Riding Hood, [and] a Highlander," an even wider range of personalities turning up for parties ("Aunt Laura" 17-18).  Such mixtures of characters offer new possibilities for interaction and comic incong- ruities, of course, and stereotyped dolls could be a source of amusement too if they were reassigned to an incongruous status.  Alice Corkran remembers that when too many guests had been invited to a dinner party it might be necessary to "relieve the pressure at table" by demoting some dolls to "take service with the cook" (Corkran 41).  In the Graham Montgomery dollhouse, "Mr. Bligh" was discovered after spending several years at the back of a drawer; his wife having found a new husband, he settled for the role of gardener (and a "splen- did set of gardener's implements") (Latham 57).           What from one point of view is a healthy breaking down of stereotypes could, of course, be seen as heedless disregard for a doll's individuality.  The same might be said of gender change: when a male doll's legs got broken (a frequent occurrence), he might be turned into a female, defective legs hidden under a skirt.  As dollhouse historian Ann Sizer has remarked, male dolls tend to get mislaid or maimed (Sizer 35); in Ann Sharp's dollhouse, for instance, Sir William Johnson is "lost to posterity," only a slip of paper bearing his name surviving ([Jones] 712).  When not the result of a broken leg, the disappear- ance of male dolls could reflect a dislike or fear of men, or simply a child's desire to mirror more accurately the daytime household as she knows it, with its preponderance of women.           Looked at from the girl's point of view, this ability to refashion miniature people so easily, changing even their class or gender, may be a sign of em- powerment.  But from the doll's point of view, such a change may be a reminder of its helplessness.  From the point of view of an observing adult in the later nineteenth century, the passive dollhouse doll was a suitable model for the compliant housewife; were girls aware of this implication, and made to feel guilty?           Children's literature before 1920 seldom views dollhouses through dolls' eyes.  Many stories of this period featuring dolls as heroines give them extremely exciting lives, but the action is always outside the dollhouse, and indeed usually outside every kind of house, dolls finding themselves on city streets, in gypsy camps, or in garbage dumps or rivers.  These stories constitute a subgenre of children's literature: dolls are moved passively through a series of misfortunes and a series of owners.  If stories of wanderers like Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews are labelled "picaresque," these dolls' stories belong to the same group, though because dolls are usually dependent on others in their wanderings, they remind us more of Defoe's Moll Flanders, or of Robinson Crusoe before he settled down on his island.            One story that includes both "doll picaresque" elements and a few references to dollhouse life is Julia Charlotte Maitland's The Doll and Her Friends (1858).  "Lady Seraphina" is one of the earliest fictional dolls small enough (at six inches high) to fit into even the smaller (one-twelfth scale) dollhouses that had by 1858 become the norm.  She is more fortunate than true picaresque heroines in that she moves only from maker to toystore to Rose's home, where she lives for many years in her own dollhouse before being sent to the home of a servant's niece.  Her house is only an adapted packing case, as Hablot Browne's illustration shows (though Browne makes the doll too big); she likes it because it is a place of her own, where she does not feel like "an insignificant pigmy in the vast abodes of the colossal race of man" (31).             Anxieties do beset her: although Rose's nice brother Willy has made her some furniture, she believes that he does not care for her personally.  She also finds herself socially isolated, placed between her owner Rose and the cook and footman who are accessories rather than fellow-inhabitants (the footman, typically, has a broken leg).  "I did not quite comprehend the use of my ser- vants, as Rose herself did all the work of my house; but she said they were indispensable" (34).  Clearly Rose is in charge, and Seraphina does not have much of a sense of possession, but the doll remains fond of her house, and looks longingly towards it while being hanged by cruel cousin Geoffrey (52-- Browne's illustration softens this humiliating incident).  "Home" for Lady Seraphina, as for the girls and boys in most children's stories, is a safe place to return to after adventuring, not a prison from which one needs to escape.           Maitland takes pains to adopt a doll's point of view, and early on Lady Seraphina learns to distinguish between herself and human beings.  The careful distinctions she draws prevent readers from making easy parallels  between dollhouse dolls and housewives.  Dolls, she admits, are dependents, even slaves, and their mental and moral qualities "exist rather in the minds of our admirers than in our own persons"; while dolls may influence "house-wifery, neatness, and industry," they do so silently and unconsciously (Maitland 1-2).  Like other fictional dolls of this period,  Lady Seraphina is quite clear that her purpose is to be "of use," and she says that she feels no pain, thus implying that children need not feel guilty when they choose to transform (or mutilate) her.  To a doll, there is no such thing as abuse.  The text as a whole does not licence wanton destruction, though; Geoffrey learns from a long discussion with his older cousin Margaret that dolls' owners can feel pain (57).           A thoughtful reader of Maitland's story would be able to understand Ibsen's metaphor without seeing it as a negative comment on dolls or dollhouses; but she might get a very different message from James Mason's The Doll's Letters to Her Mistress, published serially in the Girl's Own Paper of 1881.  The "Baroness" is an unpleasantly supercilious doll who has learned to read and write while listening to her mistress's lessons, and who now boasts about her own superiority in spelling.  On one level, she seems a welcome example of a doll with a mind: she has a sense of her own cultural history--she knows that the fairies have disappeared, and fears that dolls will follow them into extinction--and she responds with animation to a boy's challenge that she is capable of more than saying "Mamma" and "Papa."  Unfortunately, while writing the history of her ancestors she overturns her candle; she suffers a startlingly lurid fiery death, and her dollhouse is destroyed.  If that were the whole story, it would read as a warning--direct or ironic--against female learning, or at the least against burning the midnight oil; but this interpretation would not fit with the emphasis on the Baroness's aristocratic pride, or with the fact that the "real" house nearly burns down too.  It would also not explain the long central section of the book in which the doll sends her girl owner on a futile hunt for treasure, in order to teach her the shallowness of material wealth, a moral to which the author returns in the final sentences.  Mason's intention is unclear, but one suspects that since the story would have been read when Ibsen's play was attracting great attention, many readers would have taken the Baroness as a warning against unconventional dollhouse behaviour, and against female intellectual pretensions in particular.           Racketty-Packetty House, written by Frances Hodgson Burnett a quarter of a century later, has a much more relaxed tone.  Going up in flames with one's dollhouse is a threat here too, but the dolls face it with equanimity--"they never sat up all night with Trouble" (48)--partly because they believe that burning is not painful to dolls made of wood.  Those dolls who enjoy the boring life of Tidy Castle are not condemned, but Lady Patsy chooses to break her leg in order "to get a change" (62).  For the dolls of the old house, nothing is more important than having fun.  These characters are distinctly dolls, and cannot easily be put to metaphorical use.           Lucinda and Jane, the mindless dolls in Beatrix Potter's Tale of Two Bad Mice, are clear examples of the kind of dollhouse doll no girl would want to emulate.  They are defined entirely by what they do not do; the readers' sympathies are with the mouse intruders, who detect and destroy what is most irritatingly unreal, the plaster food, and then create a cosy household with the furniture they steal. When Hunca Munca sets up a daily routine of housecleaning as compensation for the theft, the impassive dolls are unlikely to be grateful; the real beneficiary of the housecleaning will surely be the girl who owns the dollhouse, and who will perhaps be able to spend more time with the skipping rope and badminton rackets always pictured alongside it.           To my mind, the most interesting account of dollhouse life is found in "Professor Green" (1906), a short story by Ada Wallas that is clearly written for what Girl's Realm called "the modern girl."  Soon after Ibsen's Doll's House was first performed, Ada Wallas (then Radford) was a student at Newnham College, Cambridge; by 1906 she was married to Professor Graham Wallas and had a small daughter who went on to an academic career at Newnham herself.  The story features a "real" professor and his daughter; her dollhouse in turn is the home of the miniature Professor Green.                The first part of the story, set within the dollhouse, suggests that life there need not be intellectually constricting: Professor Green, his wife, and their friends have an intelligent discussion about dolls' cultural history, comparing the New and the Old in Doll's House Land.  (The Old food is solid but inedible, like fish glued to a plate, while the New consists of "biscuits and sugar and hot messes" [Wallas 124-25]; the Old fires were made of red tinsel while the New fires were laid like real ones, though not lit.)  As in Maitland's story, the subject matter reminds one that these are dolls, not symbols.  Wallas (who later wrote a study of early feminists)  makes her points subtly, often by reversal: instead of an imprisoned housewife doll, she gives us Professor Green, who in fact has escaped to the sanctity of the dollhouse, after a previous owner had put him in charge of her Noah's Ark.  He now spends his time peacefully writing a History of the Universe: "No smaller subject would have comforted him; in its largeness he found comfort" (Wallas 123).  The comic contrast of subject matter and physical size is enhanced by a family joke: Wallas's husband Graham was the author of such works as The Art of Thought, Human Nature in Politics, and The Great Society.  Wallas's story, like James Mason's, brings intellectual activity into the dollhouse, but without the penalty Mason imposes; the Greens, like Lady Seraphina, the Racketty-Packetty dolls, and the Bad Mice, enjoy the cosiness of home without feeling trapped by its littleness.  Except for Mason's, all these stories could be reassuring to girls who might have been picked up the negative connotations of dollhouse life from adult literature.  For any readers who were worried about the political correctness of dollhouse play (see other sections of this article), Ada Wallas's story offers answers on many levels.  The early adult concern that dollhouses encouraged pride had already faded by this time, as mass-produced and home-made miniatures became the norm; in the second part of "Professor Green," where the point of view shifts from doll's to child's level, making one's own accessories for the dollhouse is most of the fun.  "Neatness and completeness" are not adult-imposed demands here, but rather ways of making life more pleasant for the dolls: Professor Green is happy that Diana, his present owner does not incessantly houseclean, but he is pleased too when she notices that he could do with his own waste-basket.  Diana does not find dollhouse play confining: she builds an outdoor house for a china gardener and his wife, and brings the indoor family on visits; she expresses her special interest, reading, by making books for the dolls, and works through a personal problem of shyness towards her own father by modelling Professor Green on him.            The security of Diana's dollhouse as a ludic space of her own is challenged by the arrival of cousin Richard, stereotyped in advance by Diana as a destructive boy; in fact, Richard admires the dollhouse as much as she does, and secretly begins to make just the right accessories and additions himself, culminating with what all sources agree to be the most desirable feature in a dollhouse, a staircase.  The story ends with the discovery that Richard and Diana have been working towards the same goal.           No one would want to escape from this dollhouse; Richard and Diana observe the dolls and respond to their needs.  Family traditions are perpetuated and new activities introduced.  Diana had pretended to have no interest in dollhouses because she believed that boys only attack what one cares about; she is liberated from her fear, and Richard earns his place as a contributor to the household.  Unfortunately, though perhaps appropriately, this story that offers so attractive a model of dollhouse play for the "modern girl" has not become well known outside its own family tradition; the only copy I have encountered so far was given to the Newnham College Library by Wallas's daughter.  It deserves a wider audience. Frances Armstrong, "The  dollhouse as ludic space," in Children's Literature 24, 23-54. For details about works cited, see Combined Bibliography.

The dollhouse: home for a doll?

Toys in Miniature: Frances Armstrong

The following is an extract, slightly changed, from my article "The Dollhouse as Ludic Space," published in Children's Literature 24, pages 23 to 54.  Obviously, one might say, a dollhouse is a place for dolls.  But literature has nothing much to say about dollhouse dolls, and what there is tends to present a negative image.  Modern miniaturist enthusiasts may be disappointed if they go in innocence to Ibsen's play A Doll's House and find that the heroine longs to leave a home that imprisons her.  That play dates from 1879; even by 1864 Charles Dickens's heroine Bella had rejected the role of dollhouse doll (Our Mutual Friend 746).  Dollhouse dolls, it seems, are less satisfactory as playthings than most dolls are.  They are often little more than part of the dollhouse furnishings.  While large dolls are likely to be "friends," to share an intimate individual relationship with a girl, dollhouse dolls are part of the social entity of their house, and are made to interact with one another rather than with a particular girl.  They are kept, literally, at arm's length.  This means that even if a child recognizes their dolls' lives as restricted, she does not necessarily internalize their woes; she may, indeed, see them as a means of parody.            The problem is not that these dolls are stuck in dreary domesticity.  Some of their suffering may be caused by difficulties that are specific to the dollhouse, with no direct human parallel.  Most dollhouses are poorly designed.  Even a distant observer could see the problems: as R.C. Lehmann puts it, writing as "little Queenie" in  Punch (1901), a dollhouse is "devided into four compart- ments, like a rabit hutch.  . . . There is no trace of any hall, or even passidge.  There are no doors, so if a droin-room doll should find herself in the kitchen or nursery by any chance, there she has got to remane until some cumpationat hand releases her to her propper sphere!"  ([Lehmann] 268)           Dollhouse furnishings were often much more successfully miniaturized than the house itself, but beautifully-made miniature accessories tend to show up by contrast the clumsiness of many dolls.  Surrounded by realistically detailed small accessories, dolls are awkward, unstable and inflexible.  As E.F. Benson put it, "the only voluntary and self-impelled movement a Doll can make is to fall down."   It was often the male dolls, lacking the support of a long skirt, who were "decidedly shaky" (Gwynfryn 708), a tendency that was sometimes taken to indicate moral weakness.  In fiction the inability to move is sometimes made comic, as when a doll is kept perpetually ironing because she tends to fall over when assigned to other tasks ("Aunt Laura" 7), or when John the footman is "stuck to the carpet for the present" (Edith n.pag.).            Action was further hampered by the stiffness of the dolls, their relatively heavy clothing obstructing joints intended to be flexible.  Dollhouse dolls were notorious for their inability to sit properly: "They have a tendency to sprawl in their gorgeous drawing-rooms in the most ungainly fashion, and if you try to straighten their backs you have to bring their chins to their knees" (Corkran 47).  Ernest Shepard and his brother, having gained possession of their sister's old dollhouse, found an alternative: modelling wax fixed the dolls firmly into their chairs, so that "the wretched creatures . . . were condemned to sit at rigid attention instead of sliding off on to the floor" (Shepard 167).   A sophisticated, but perhaps unintentional, solution is found in a room from the eighteenth- century "Mon Plaisir" collection: as Faith Eaton remarks, the five dolls in this room--and even the lady in a portrait on the wall--seem to be leaning back in order to gaze at the elaborately painted ceiling (Eaton 38-39).  Unrealistic though stiffly-posed dolls might be, they were often amusing, and even falling down and sliding off chairs are actions that can come as pleasant surprises to children who are quite well aware that dolls cannot "really" move on their own.                       Dollhouse dolls tended to lack individuality: the prettier wax or china dolls were likely to be the ladies of the house, and the coarser wooden dolls became servants.  Black dolls almost always seemed to be called "Dinah" and to stay in the kitchen.  At another extreme, some doll households were such a mixed bunch that realistic play must have been almost impossible: one fictional group included "a Zouave, a Nun, a Red Riding Hood, [and] a Highlander," an even wider range of personalities turning up for parties ("Aunt Laura" 17-18).  Such mixtures of characters offer new possibilities for interaction and comic incong- ruities, of course, and stereotyped dolls could be a source of amusement too if they were reassigned to an incongruous status.  Alice Corkran remembers that when too many guests had been invited to a dinner party it might be necessary to "relieve the pressure at table" by demoting some dolls to "take service with the cook" (Corkran 41).  In the Graham Montgomery dollhouse, "Mr. Bligh" was discovered after spending several years at the back of a drawer; his wife having found a new husband, he settled for the role of gardener (and a "splen- did set of gardener's implements") (Latham 57).           What from one point of view is a healthy breaking down of stereotypes could, of course, be seen as heedless disregard for a doll's individuality.  The same might be said of gender change: when a male doll's legs got broken (a frequent occurrence), he might be turned into a female, defective legs hidden under a skirt.  As dollhouse historian Ann Sizer has remarked, male dolls tend to get mislaid or maimed (Sizer 35); in Ann Sharp's dollhouse, for instance, Sir William Johnson is "lost to posterity," only a slip of paper bearing his name surviving ([Jones] 712).  When not the result of a broken leg, the disappear- ance of male dolls could reflect a dislike or fear of men, or simply a child's desire to mirror more accurately the daytime household as she knows it, with its preponderance of women.           Looked at from the girl's point of view, this ability to refashion miniature people so easily, changing even their class or gender, may be a sign of em- powerment.  But from the doll's point of view, such a change may be a reminder of its helplessness.  From the point of view of an observing adult in the later nineteenth century, the passive dollhouse doll was a suitable model for the compliant housewife; were girls aware of this implication, and made to feel guilty?           Children's literature before 1920 seldom views dollhouses through dolls' eyes.  Many stories of this period featuring dolls as heroines give them extremely exciting lives, but the action is always outside the dollhouse, and indeed usually outside every kind of house, dolls finding themselves on city streets, in gypsy camps, or in garbage dumps or rivers.  These stories constitute a subgenre of children's literature: dolls are moved passively through a series of misfortunes and a series of owners.  If stories of wanderers like Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews are labelled "picaresque," these dolls' stories belong to the same group, though because dolls are usually dependent on others in their wanderings, they remind us more of Defoe's Moll Flanders, or of Robinson Crusoe before he settled down on his island.            One story that includes both "doll picaresque" elements and a few references to dollhouse life is Julia Charlotte Maitland's The Doll and Her Friends (1858).  "Lady Seraphina" is one of the earliest fictional dolls small enough (at six inches high) to fit into even the smaller (one-twelfth scale) dollhouses that had by 1858 become the norm.  She is more fortunate than true picaresque heroines in that she moves only from maker to toystore to Rose's home, where she lives for many years in her own dollhouse before being sent to the home of a servant's niece.  Her house is only an adapted packing case, as Hablot Browne's illustration shows (though Browne makes the doll too big); she likes it because it is a place of her own, where she does not feel like "an insignificant pigmy in the vast abodes of the colossal race of man" (31).             Anxieties do beset her: although Rose's nice brother Willy has made her some furniture, she believes that he does not care for her personally.  She also finds herself socially isolated, placed between her owner Rose and the cook and footman who are accessories rather than fellow-inhabitants (the footman, typically, has a broken leg).  "I did not quite comprehend the use of my ser- vants, as Rose herself did all the work of my house; but she said they were indispensable" (34).  Clearly Rose is in charge, and Seraphina does not have much of a sense of possession, but the doll remains fond of her house, and looks longingly towards it while being hanged by cruel cousin Geoffrey (52-- Browne's illustration softens this humiliating incident).  "Home" for Lady Seraphina, as for the girls and boys in most children's stories, is a safe place to return to after adventuring, not a prison from which one needs to escape.           Maitland takes pains to adopt a doll's point of view, and early on Lady Seraphina learns to distinguish between herself and human beings.  The careful distinctions she draws prevent readers from making easy parallels  between dollhouse dolls and housewives.  Dolls, she admits, are dependents, even slaves, and their mental and moral qualities "exist rather in the minds of our admirers than in our own persons"; while dolls may influence "house-wifery, neatness, and industry," they do so silently and unconsciously (Maitland 1-2).  Like other fictional dolls of this period,  Lady Seraphina is quite clear that her purpose is to be "of use," and she says that she feels no pain, thus implying that children need not feel guilty when they choose to transform (or mutilate) her.  To a doll, there is no such thing as abuse.  The text as a whole does not licence wanton destruction, though; Geoffrey learns from a long discussion with his older cousin Margaret that dolls' owners can feel pain (57).           A thoughtful reader of Maitland's story would be able to understand Ibsen's metaphor without seeing it as a negative comment on dolls or dollhouses; but she might get a very different message from James Mason's The Doll's Letters to Her Mistress, published serially in the Girl's Own Paper of 1881.  The "Baroness" is an unpleasantly supercilious doll who has learned to read and write while listening to her mistress's lessons, and who now boasts about her own superiority in spelling.  On one level, she seems a welcome example of a doll with a mind: she has a sense of her own cultural history--she knows that the fairies have disappeared, and fears that dolls will follow them into extinction--and she responds with animation to a boy's challenge that she is capable of more than saying "Mamma" and "Papa."  Unfortunately, while writing the history of her ancestors she overturns her candle; she suffers a startlingly lurid fiery death, and her dollhouse is destroyed.  If that were the whole story, it would read as a warning--direct or ironic--against female learning, or at the least against burning the midnight oil; but this interpretation would not fit with the emphasis on the Baroness's aristocratic pride, or with the fact that the "real" house nearly burns down too.  It would also not explain the long central section of the book in which the doll sends her girl owner on a futile hunt for treasure, in order to teach her the shallowness of material wealth, a moral to which the author returns in the final sentences.  Mason's intention is unclear, but one suspects that since the story would have been read when Ibsen's play was attracting great attention, many readers would have taken the Baroness as a warning against unconventional dollhouse behaviour, and against female intellectual pretensions in particular.           Racketty-Packetty House, written by Frances Hodgson Burnett a quarter of a century later, has a much more relaxed tone.  Going up in flames with one's dollhouse is a threat here too, but the dolls face it with equanimity--"they never sat up all night with Trouble" (48)--partly because they believe that burning is not painful to dolls made of wood.  Those dolls who enjoy the boring life of Tidy Castle are not condemned, but Lady Patsy chooses to break her leg in order "to get a change" (62).  For the dolls of the old house, nothing is more important than having fun.  These characters are distinctly dolls, and cannot easily be put to metaphorical use.           Lucinda and Jane, the mindless dolls in Beatrix Potter's Tale of Two Bad Mice, are clear examples of the kind of dollhouse doll no girl would want to emulate.  They are defined entirely by what they do not do; the readers' sympathies are with the mouse intruders, who detect and destroy what is most irritatingly unreal, the plaster food, and then create a cosy household with the furniture they steal. When Hunca Munca sets up a daily routine of housecleaning as compensation for the theft, the impassive dolls are unlikely to be grateful; the real beneficiary of the housecleaning will surely be the girl who owns the dollhouse, and who will perhaps be able to spend more time with the skipping rope and badminton rackets always pictured alongside it.           To my mind, the most interesting account of dollhouse life is found in "Professor Green" (1906), a short story by Ada Wallas that is clearly written for what Girl's Realm called "the modern girl."  Soon after Ibsen's Doll's House was first performed, Ada Wallas (then Radford) was a student at Newnham College, Cambridge; by 1906 she was married to Professor Graham Wallas and had a small daughter who went on to an academic career at Newnham herself.  The story features a "real" professor and his daughter; her dollhouse in turn is the home of the miniature Professor Green.                The first part of the story, set within the dollhouse, suggests that life there need not be intellectually constricting: Professor Green, his wife, and their friends have an intelligent discussion about dolls' cultural history, comparing the New and the Old in Doll's House Land.  (The Old food is solid but inedible, like fish glued to a plate, while the New consists of "biscuits and sugar and hot messes" [Wallas 124-25]; the Old fires were made of red tinsel while the New fires were laid like real ones, though not lit.)  As in Maitland's story, the subject matter reminds one that these are dolls, not symbols.  Wallas (who later wrote a study of early feminists)  makes her points subtly, often by reversal: instead of an imprisoned housewife doll, she gives us Professor Green, who in fact has escaped to the sanctity of the dollhouse, after a previous owner had put him in charge of her Noah's Ark.  He now spends his time peacefully writing a History of the Universe: "No smaller subject would have comforted him; in its largeness he found comfort" (Wallas 123).  The comic contrast of subject matter and physical size is enhanced by a family joke: Wallas's husband Graham was the author of such works as The Art of Thought, Human Nature in Politics, and The Great Society.  Wallas's story, like James Mason's, brings intellectual activity into the dollhouse, but without the penalty Mason imposes; the Greens, like Lady Seraphina, the Racketty-Packetty dolls, and the Bad Mice, enjoy the cosiness of home without feeling trapped by its littleness.  Except for Mason's, all these stories could be reassuring to girls who might have been picked up the negative connotations of dollhouse life from adult literature.  For any readers who were worried about the political correctness of dollhouse play (see other sections of this article), Ada Wallas's story offers answers on many levels.  The early adult concern that dollhouses encouraged pride had already faded by this time, as mass-produced and home-made miniatures became the norm; in the second part of "Professor Green," where the point of view shifts from doll's to child's level, making one's own accessories for the dollhouse is most of the fun.  "Neatness and completeness" are not adult-imposed demands here, but rather ways of making life more pleasant for the dolls: Professor Green is happy that Diana, his present owner does not incessantly houseclean, but he is pleased too when she notices that he could do with his own waste-basket.  Diana does not find dollhouse play confining: she builds an outdoor house for a china gardener and his wife, and brings the indoor family on visits; she expresses her special interest, reading, by making books for the dolls, and works through a personal problem of shyness towards her own father by modelling Professor Green on him.            The security of Diana's dollhouse as a ludic space of her own is challenged by the arrival of cousin Richard, stereotyped in advance by Diana as a destructive boy; in fact, Richard admires the dollhouse as much as she does, and secretly begins to make just the right accessories and additions himself, culminating with what all sources agree to be the most desirable feature in a dollhouse, a staircase.  The story ends with the discovery that Richard and Diana have been working towards the same goal.           No one would want to escape from this dollhouse; Richard and Diana observe the dolls and respond to their needs.  Family traditions are perpetuated and new activities introduced.  Diana had pretended to have no interest in dollhouses because she believed that boys only attack what one cares about; she is liberated from her fear, and Richard earns his place as a contributor to the household.  Unfortunately, though perhaps appropriately, this story that offers so attractive a model of dollhouse play for the "modern girl" has not become well known outside its own family tradition; the only copy I have encountered so far was given to the Newnham College Library by Wallas's daughter.  It deserves a wider audience. Frances Armstrong, "The  dollhouse as ludic space," in Children's Literature 24, 23-54. For details about works cited, see Combined Bibliography.