This panel examines how the material culture surrounding dolls has shaped various literary genres from the Victorian period to today. In the mid-nineteenth century dolls were, as Eugenia Gonzalez has shown, for the first time mass-produced and marketed as feminine children’s playthings, suddenly appearing in markets, shops, and drawing rooms as well as in both adult and children’s literature. Despite their pervasive cultural and literary presence, however, dolls are often trivialized or overlooked in literary criticism. In a 2012 introduction to a special issue of Girlhood Studies on the historical and contemporary significance of dolls, feminist historian Miriam Forman–Brunell notes that this critical oversight is due to the traditional interpretation of the doll as the symbolic center of the patriarchal construction of femininity. While recent feminist and cultural debates have sought to complicate particular doll figures––specifically, the iconic Barbie doll (see M.G. Lord, Erica Rand, and Mary Rogers)––most of the dolls produced since the Victorian period remain unexamined or considered merely in terms of the intentions behind their production.

This MLA special session will in part overturn the assumption that dolls are simply patriarchal constructions that scripted female behaviors and, furthermore, will argue that by turning our attention away from how dolls were produced to how they were actually engaged with by doll players, we can see that children and women often subverted and complicated the behaviors that particular dolls were meant to elicit. For, not only did nineteenth- and twentieth-century technological experimentation make dolls more complex, affordable, and omnipresent, but also girls and young women often engaged with their dolls in ways that were anything but passive.

As the following papers will all demonstrate, dolls were created with varying intentions, inspiring strikingly different behaviors (and, consequently) literary forms in which doll-playing writers sought to articulate their place in the world. Each of the following papers thus shares a methodological theory: that by looking at the material figure of the doll and by studying the ways in which women of all ages responded to these figures in both practice and writing, we may learn how women writers attempted to animate new literary modes, and thus new understandings of female subjectivity. To promote discussion, this panel consists of only three papers, each of which will be strictly limited to 18 minutes.

In “Burying the Doll, Unburying the Dead,” Brianna Beehler frames our discussion on dolls, animation, and genre by examining how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children subverted funerary practices through doll play. While nineteenth-century parents were encouraging their daughters to practice the rites of mourning through holding funerals for their dolls (a practice popularized by Queen Victoria’s long mourning period in Britain, but which was prevalent in both English and American stories and periodicals), these young girls found that doll burials actually held equal promise of reanimation: according to the child’s logic, if it can be buried, it can be dug back up again. Beehler argues that this fiction of reversibility becomes an important influence for Charlotte Brontë, who sought to reanimate her deceased sisters in her only historical novel, Shirley (1849).

While recent scholarship has begun to interrogate the relationship between dolls and race (most notably Robin Bernstein’s groundbreaking Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights [NYU 2011]), Erica Kanesaka Kalnay will crucially note in her paper, “‘To Be a Japanese Doll’: Kathleen Tamagawa’s Mixed-Race Tragicomedy,” that this work has so far focused solely on a black-white racial paradigm. Kalnay significantly expands the scholarly conversation on dolls and race by attending to the role of Asian American critical perspectives. She begins with a consideration of dakki-ningyo, or “hugging dolls,” traditional Japanese dolls that with their soft bodies and “unbreakable” composition heads, not only embodied familiar Western ambivalences regarding Asian sexuality, but also reflected anxieties about interracial love and the ambiguous status of Eurasian children. According to Kalnay, Kathleen Tamagawa, a U.S. born half-Japanese woman who describes being typed as a “cute” Japanese doll, uses this conceit to frame interracial love as a tragicomedy, associating her mixed-race identity with a genre of mixed affects.

Building on her work on post-war poetry and inanimate forms of address, Professor Ann Keniston argues in “Dolls, the Marketplace, and the Lyric” that dolls in 21st-century American poems (specifically, Mary Jo Bang’s A Doll for Throwing [2017] and Mary Ruefle’s My Private Property [2016]) consider not only contemporary economic anxieties but also concerns with animation and voice essential to lyric poetry. Bang’s work, based on the life and photographs of Bauhaus member Lucia Moholy-Nagy, associates dolls with violence: in Keniston’s reading, the sequence alludes both to Bauhaus dolls designed to pop back up when thrown and to Moholy-Nagy’s male counterparts’ appropriation of her photo collages and negatives. While, Keniston argues, Bang uses violence against dolls to consider the art market’s transformation of artists and their productions into objects of exchange, Ruefle’s title poem anatomizes the economic and cultural processes that collected Congolese shrunken heads for a Belgian museum. Keniston finds that neither poet fully animates her invoked dolls, but she concludes that both use dolls to link contemporary economic and poetic concerns with (de)animation, which are especially evident in recent claims that poetry itself is dead.

This panel grants attention to that which has been traditionally ignored, demonstrating that dolls, and the cultural practices and affects they inspired, animated literary genres––historical fiction, tragicomedy, lyric––as well as new understandings of subjectivity. It is not just that dolls are ubiquitous, little remarked upon, and easily dismissed as childish things; it is that the doll was the vehicle by which particular literary genres “grew up.” In the words of Emily Dickinson, “And They can put it with my Dolls / My childhood, and the string of spools.” That is, while women writers may want to “put away” their dolls, they remain central to their maturation into adulthood and authorship. This panel thus traces out a new history of women, children, and the objects they used to reimagine what, for them, it means to be human.