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Playing with Size and Reality: The Fascination of a Dolls’ House World
Abstract
The dolls’ house as children’s plaything is anything but simple. Inasmuch as the dolls’ house may be the reproduction of domestic ideals on a minute scale and an educational model prompting girls to become good housewives, this article argues that it is also a means and space to express imagination, creativity, and agency. Including a short history of the development of dolls’ houses, this article considers how the image of the dolls’ house is significant in the depiction of a perfect domestic world through the examination of selected dolls’ house stories in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century and adult women’s autobiographical recollections of dolls’ house play in their Victorian childhood. Secondly, the article also examines some lesser-known children’s fiction set inside the dolls’ house or in a miniature world, such as Edith Nesbit’s The Magic City (1910) and offers a close reading of Doris Davey’s My Dolly’s Home (1921), to discuss how literary representations of dolls’ houses and depictions of children’s adventures into miniature worlds juxtapose size contrasts and provoke readers’ unconscious anxieties about the boundaries between imagination and reality.
... Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria commissioned a miniature replica of his house as a gift for his daughter. This dolls' house emerged as a representation of the adult world of the elite class, featuring rooms filled with luxurious detailed furnishings (Wei & Chen, 2015). Similar examples were produced in Nuremberg, Germany, and these examples laid the foundation for modern dolls' houses. ...
... The second type was commissioned for girls to experience home life, household organization, and chores. Those made for girls were objects of domestic education (Wei & Chen, 2015). ...
... Dolls' houses began to become widespread among children during the 18th century. They were now made not only for adults but also for children (Wei & Chen, 2015). One notable dolls' house from the 18th century was the Tate Baby House, constructed in 1760. ...
This study discusses the complex cultural relationship of dolls’ houses with gender
roles, societal norms, dolls, and toys, while also considering dolls’ houses as interactive display objects that reflect domestic interiors. The study examines various dolls’ houses from different periods, ranging from the seventeenth century to the present, within Young Victoria & Albert Collection, London. This examination highlights the fundamental elements of interior spaces within dolls’ houses and provides insight into the historical use of dolls’ houses as educational materials designed to teach girls household chores and organization. Even today, toy dolls’ houses are given to girls and are criticized as metaphors dictating the societal role of women. By focusing on the user experience of dolls’ houses as complex and behavior-directing objects, this study aims to bring a fresh perspective to related discussions. This study focuses on the user experience of the Nuremberg House as a typical example of early modern dolls’ houses and analyzes the user experience shown in an ASMR video demonstrating the placement process by museum collection experts. The user experience involves thinking about the interior and
placing necessary items while outside and how textiles, patterns, wood, metal, glass, and colors diversify the experience. The experience notes that observing familiar objects such as chairs, beds, closets, pitchers, and plates at one’s fingertips gently opens the doors to an extraordinary and fascinating world, where hand and eye coordination take their place in another realm. It is stated that the primary purpose of a miniature model is to allow users to dream along with it. The user experience takes place under the enchanting influence of the miniature along with a sense of privacy. The miniature is perceived as an ideal, or we think that we can learn something from it. Therefore, behaviors related to this ideal are also emphasized and taught. In other words, while experiencing a miniature model, a vision for the future is developed. In this context, the use and impact of dolls’
houses should be addressed seriously in terms of gender equality and social norms.
However, a conscious effort and the necessity of social change must be emphasized in these interactions.
Keywords: Domestic interiors; interactive display objects; dolls’ houses; gender roles; user experience.
... The big impact of these dolls is prominent in more than just the popularity of porcelain dolls. There were issues with the domestic aspects of these dolls with things like their doll houses (Chen, 2015). These problems will be discussed later on, however, this was the beginning of concerns involving the negative impacts of these dolls. ...
... It confuses the difference between imagination and reality, where children can be confused about a family dynamic. Oftentimes, the "mother" doll is shown to be the primary source of all cooking and cleaning in the household, which can create stereotypes of what society thinks women should act like (Chen, 2015). The Victorian era of femininity is out of date and is not necessarily depicting the same women of today. ...
Historically, 12-inch dolls have been modeled after the “ideal woman”, with unrealistic proportions of adult females. These dolls have been shown through previous research to contribute to the negative body perception that is found amongst the youth. When efforts were made to make dolls more inclusive, the body remained a curvy, sexualized design. These dramatic proportions encourage young children to compare their own self to the doll creating these negative body perceptions. I used data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to find the average body measurements of girls 5-10 in order to find the average body type of the girls who are most likely playing with 12-inch dolls. Then, I converted these measurements to a 12-inch scale. From there, I used a 3D model generator to help design a doll with those average measurements. After my doll was designed and constructed, I used dolls from the past and present to compare the body types of each doll. The doll I constructed has a more childlike shape, in comparison to the other dolls who have more hyper-skinny or hyper-curvy figures. My doll is more akin to what real girls look like, creating less of a dramatic comparison from the young girl body to the dolls. This, in an ideal setting, lowers the negative body perception of young children.
... Not all dollhouses are toys for children. Instead, early dollhouses were objects of display, designed by adults in largely in middle-and upper-class households to demonstrate its owner's decorating taste and wealth through a display of expensive miniaturized decor (Chen, 2015). ...
... In the nineteenth century, dollhouses gained a pedagogical function as "baby houses" to teach girls housekeeping skills, to encourage moral values such as tidiness, and to repress undesirable behaviors such as selfishness or envy (Chen, 2015). Later, Barbie's various career playsets suggest society's changing visions of appropriate training for girls' futures (Forman-Brunell, 2009). ...
Background
Today, children play in transmedia franchises that bring together media characters, toys, and everyday consumer goods with games, apps, and websites in complex mergers of childhood cultures, digital literacies, consumer practices, and corporate agendas. Recent research on youth videogames and virtual worlds suggests the productive possibilities and tensions in children's imaginative engagements on these commercial playgrounds.
Purpose
Transmedia websites are conceptualized and analyzed as virtual dollhouses, or assemblages of toys, stories, and imagination that converge digital media, popular media, and social media. In this framing, transmedia websites are not texts to be read but contexts to inhabit. Are virtual dollhouses safe places where children can reimagine the worlds they know and play the worlds they imagine? Are girls doing more than playing simple repetitive games, dressing up avatars, caring for pets, and decorating rooms in virtual dollhouses?
Research Design
Nexus analysis tracks the histories and social functions of traditional doll-houses, then examines the monsterhigh.com website for these functions and converging practices. In nexus analysis, when practices repeat or support one another across imaginaries, shared normative expectations for ideal players and performances are thickened and amplified. Similarly, conflicting practices create ruptures that disrupt expected trajectories and usual ways of doing things. Nexus analysis of website and game designs and children's YouTube videos identifies repetitions of social practices with the dolls in the commercial website and in child-made films on YouTube social media, making visible the resonances across converging cultural imaginaries as well as ruptures that open opportunities for player agency and redesign.
Conclusions
As children engage the pretense of virtual dollhouses, they play out blended activities that are at once both simulated and real: dressing their avatars, creating imagined profiles, shopping, playing games, purchasing in-app goods, watching and “liking” videos, recruiting followers/friends, and affiliating with the brand and other fans. These lived-in practices align with particular visions of girlhood that circulate naturalized and normalizing expectations for girls that also converge in these concentrations of media. However, examination of the digital dress-up and online doll play that children produce and share on social media shows that players also make use of the complexity that convergence produces. Children remake imaginaries for their own purposes in ways that both reproduce and rupture these expectations. The analysis points up the need for (a) nuanced and expanded research on children's transmedia engagements, (b) productive play and digital literacies, and (c) critical media literacy in schools.
En este artículo se analiza la influencia de la moda y el gótico en la configuración del sujeto femenino dentro de la antología de microrrelatos Casa de muñecas (2012), de Patricia Esteban Erlés (Zaragoza, 1972). A través de una revisión de la teorización sobre las casas de muñecas, y el rol de las muñecas según la estética gótica, se aproximará a las ansiedades del sujeto femenino posmoderno español a través de la moda. El vestido goticuqui, que ciñe y coarta el cuerpo, articula la caracterización de las protagonistas. Estos seres femeninos se encuentran restringidas por los valores de una vida intrafamiliar tradicional y claustrofóbica. Las muñecas y sus dueñas se rebelan ante un papel de sumisión y la estética del gótico distorsiona sus comportamientos normativos.
Dolls’ houses, miniature theme parks, model dioramas, etc. fascinate many people. Despite the popularity of miniatures, little scholarly attention has been paid to the reasons behind the fascination. In this article, I review and compare previously unconnected theories from various disciplines – including anthropology, art theory, literary studies, and others – and discuss different theses as to why people feel drawn to miniatures. I commence with a summary of rather affective aspects that have been proposed to explain miniatures' appeal and follow this with a discussion of values engulfed in miniatures and an account of more cognitive aspects. As the discussion progresses, ten theses are developed in response to the question of what makes miniatures so appealing. These include: scaling effects, admiration of craft, the illusion of control, empathy and indulging in ideal worlds, notions of tension related to miniatures’ elusiveness, learning from the model, and offering criticism. The conclusion draws these insights together and argues that the concepts of easy-access art, enchantment, craft appreciation, idealization, and multifarious vantage points are useful to help explain why people are fascinated by miniature models.
This article is part of the Global Perspectives Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata, and focuses on an unusual work, Tings Chak’s Undocumented, a graphic text on the detention centers in Canada. It argues that Canadian cities incorporate heterotopias—refugee spaces—that invert the city spaces. The refugee centers themselves invoke an architectural uncanny when they function as home and not-quite-home, in Chak’s depiction, inhabited by human simulacra. The centers are also spaces where punishment technology defines the space. Finally, it argues that Chak forces us to see how travel, displacement, and mobility terminate in spaces that constitute the very antithesis of movement.
In the nineteenth century, miniature books and curiosities proliferated; in particular, thumb Bibles, miniature synopses of the Bible, experienced widespread popularity. Intended to provide children with a simplified introduction to Biblical narratives and religious instruction, thumb Bibles illustrate the mediation of religious instruction through material culture. The presence and influence of religious groups in the publishing industry, paired with publishers’ new-found capacity to cater to middle-class demand for novelty children’s books, created an environment in which thumb Bibles’ popularity soared. This article begins by tracing the thumb-Bible genre from its development in the seventeenth century to its immense popularity in the Victorian era. It considers how their physical forms, connected to ‘toy books’, integrate play and religious instruction. This essay considers one example of this popular genre, The Little Picture Testament, published by Charles Tilt in 1839. A detailed description of the book’s bibliographic elements will familiarize the reader with the work, and an outline of its production and reception will then situate its literary production within its material, cultural, and religious contexts. Ultimately, this essay considers how The Little Picture Testament confronts and condenses the intricacies of the Bible, all while captivating its child audience.
Twenty-first-century children's literature research has witnessed a material turn in strong response to the 1990s perception of childhood and the fictional child as social constructions. Cultural theories have generated fruitful approaches to children's fiction through the lenses of gender, class, race and sexual orientation, and psychoanalytically oriented theories have explored ways of representing childhood as a projection of (adult) interiority, but the physical existence of children as represented in their fictional worlds has been obscured by constructed social and psychological hierarchies. Recent directions in literary studies, such as ecocriticism, posthumanism, disability studies and cognitive criticism, are refocusing scholarly attention on the physicality of children's bodies and the environment. This trend does not signal a return to essentialism but reflects the complexity, plurality and ambiguity of our understanding of childhood and its representation in fiction for young audiences. This article examines some current trends in international children's literature research with a particular focus on materiality. © 2016 International Research Society for Children's Literature.
A number of pronk poppenhuisen, or “dollhouses for show” were commissioned in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Netherlands for adult women. The large wooden cabinets with multiple partitioned spaces construct a fully furnished Dutch home in miniature, complete
with dolls representing family, servants, and pets. The dollhouses have been primarily regarded as sophisticated collections enjoyed by elite female connoisseurs. This study will investigate the surviving dollhouses of Petronella de la Court, Petronella Dunois, and Petronella Oortman as complex
didactic objects that prescribed an ideal domestic identity for Dutch mothers and wives in the early modern Netherlands, in part through a three-dimensional structure that encouraged a tactile, physically interactive relationship with the viewer. Manipulation of the dolls within selective,
gendered architectural spaces allowed the dollhouse owners to visualize the ideal Dutch home and “perform” their appropriate role within it as productive, disciplined, and orderly wives, mothers, and domestic managers.
Everything was happening so oddly that she didn’t feel a bit surprised at finding the Red Queen and the White Queen sitting close to her, one on each side: she would have liked very much to ask them how they came there, but she feared...
"The modern girl . . . is tired of living in a doll's house," says the first editor of The Girl's Realm; earlier generations were brought up under the rule of "Don't," but for the girl of 1899, the rule is "Do" (The Editor 216). The dollhouse metaphor evidently needed no explanation; it had been twenty years since the heroine of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House had startled audiences by walking away from a belittling domestic life. Yet one of the things a modern girl could do, according to an article only five pages earlier, was help make a dollhouse for her younger sisters. Might she not have wondered whether she was encouraging those sisters to perpetuate an ideal she had already rejected? Or was Ibsen's title by then a dead metaphor—perhaps a metaphor that had never had much connection with small girls at play?
Taking as an initial hypothesis the idea that by 1899 there were two distinct meanings attached to dollhouses—as metaphorical places of imprisonment for women and as actual structures used in play—I set out to trace the textual history of dollhouses. Precursors of Ibsen's metaphorical dollhouse are easily found in a series of references in Dickens's later novels. Bella Wilfer wanted to be worthier than a doll in a dollhouse (Our Mutual Friend 746); Esther Summerson, given a miniature version of Bleak House on her marriage, soon expanded what she saw as "quite a rustic cottage of doll's rooms; but such a lovely place" (Bleak House 912); she was preceded by the unhappy example of David Copperfield's wife, Dora, who was unable to stop behaving like a doll, and by Little Em'ly, who chose disgrace rather than live in a "little house . . . as neat and complete as a doll's parlour" (David Copperfield 501). In Dickens's earlier novels, however, dollhouse living is delightful, particularly in The Old Curiosity Shop and Martin Chuzzlewit. To the best of my knowledge, the pejorative metaphor of the dollhouse (or baby-house) as a place of restriction is rare in any texts before David Copperfield—though likening women to dolls goes back much further.1
The dollhouse metaphor as developed by Dickens and Ibsen, then, seems to have had a short history in comparison with the history of the dollhouse itself. Miniaturized domestic settings are found in Egyptian tombs dating from about 2000 B.C.; dollhouses in their current Western form go back to the mid-sixteenth century. But the hypothesis of two distinct sets of meanings is too simple: neither dollhouses themselves nor textual references to them can be divided neatly into adult and child categories. It is true that adults have used dollhouses for their own purposes (as I am doing in this essay), but the purposes may be playful as well as analytic or didactic; it is also true that children's dollhouse play may carry its own conscious or intended metaphorical meanings, but these are rather different from those of Ibsen and Dickens. Although early dollhouses were valuable artifacts supplied and controlled by adults, it seems quite clear that most girls were able to regard dollhouses as their own ludic spaces, places dedicated to their own play, rather than as sites for training in compliance. Showing flexibility and individuality, they interspersed reassuring enactment of routine with humorous or subversive innovation and readily improvised both narratives and accessories.
I have taken 1690 as the starting date for this essay because the first written evidence in English of children playing with dollhouses comes from the baby-house given to Ann Sharp, who was born in 1691. The evidence is believed to be in her own hand, name tags that have remained pinned to the dolls in the house ever since (Greene, English Dolls' Houses 87). Although many baby-houses were made in the decades that followed, for children as well as for adult collectors, the first detailed textual references to children playing with them seem to come from the 1780s, when literature for or about children became more prevalent.2 To make things more difficult, the term baby-house during this period often means merely an arrangement...
Early modern prescriptive literature about household spatial and social ordering primarily informs us of elite male views. Few contemporary sources exist to suggest women's notions about these issues. Early modern dollhouses could shed some light on the views of both sexes, as makers, patrons, and collectors of such objects. Such artefacts have rarely been considered a source for historic perceptions of households and family in scholarly analyses. In particular, by interpreting the meanings of extant structures, their furnishings, dolls, and surrounding documentation produced by the elite Dutch women who created and collected them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an important female-oriented vision of the idealised early modern household emerges.
Ever since children have learned to read, there has been childrenâs literature. Childrenâs Literature charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesopâs fables to Mother Goose, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Peter Pan, from Where the Wild Things Are to Harry Potter. The only single-volume work to capture the rich and diverse history of childrenâs literature in its full panorama, this extraordinary book reveals why J. R. R. Tolkien, Dr. Seuss, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Beatrix Potter, and many others, despite their divergent styles and subject matter, have all resonated with generations of readers. Childrenâs Literature is an exhilarating quest across centuries, continents, and genres to discover how, and why, we first fall in love with the written word. âLerer has accomplished something magical. Unlike the many handbooks to childrenâs literature that synopsize, evaluate, or otherwise guide adults in the selection of materials for children, this work presents a true critical history of the genre. . . . Scholarly, erudite, and all but exhaustive, it is also entertaining and accessible. Lerer takes his subject seriously without making it dull.ââLibrary Journal (starred review) âLererâs history reminds us of the wealth of literature written during the past 2,600 years. . . . With his vast and multidimensional knowledge of literature, he underscores the vital role it plays in forming a childâs imagination. We are made, he suggests, by the books we read.ââSan Francisco Chronicle âThere are dazzling chapters on John Locke and Empire, and nonsense, and Darwin, but Lererâs most interesting chapter focuses on girlsâ fiction. . . . A brilliant series of readings.ââDiane Purkiss, Times Literary Supplement
The Book of the Queen’s Doll’s House
- A C Benson
- Sir Lawrence
- Weaver
Amusement for Little Girls’ Leisure Hours
- Mary Elliott
The Little Girls’ Housekeeping
- Mrs
- Mitford
Dora’s Dolls’ House. A Story for the Young
- Louisa Greene
- Lilias
The Collector’s History of Dolls’ Houses, Doll’s House Dolls, and Miniatures London
- Constance King
- Eileen
- Constance Eileen King
Wings and the Child: Or, the Building of Magic Cities
- E Nesbit
The Queen’s Doll’s House and Some Others. Pearson’s Magazine
- Reginald Pound
The Little Girl’s Keepsake; or, Pleasing Stories for the Home Fire Side
- Louisa Stanley
Mistress Masham’s Repose
- T H White
Our Dolls’ House. Little Folks
- Mary A M Marks
The Story of a Doll-House
- Katharine Pyle
About Toys and Games
- Lady Barker
- Mary Barker
- Anne
A Nineteenth-Century Childhood London
- Mary Maccarthy
- Josefa
- Mary Josefa MacCarthy
Aunt Mary’s Tales, for the Entertainment and Improvement of Little Girls
- Mary Robson
My Dolly’s Home. London: Simpkin
- Doris Davey