Ink Tea Stone Leaf

In an era where people increasingly know themselves through their relationships to high technology, it helps to examine our relationships with older technologies – the kinds of things that we have long stopped thinking of as such. Toys are one such ancient innovation, solutions to the perennial problem of boredom, and tools for the expansion of the imagination. Dolls are among the oldest of toys, present in virtually every culture and constructed from every conceivable material. As representations of the human form, they are especially ripe for metaphor: the way we treat our dolls can speak volumes of how we regard people.

The way we house our dolls can also be a particularly rich vein for metaphor. That a doll should even need a house when it already “lives” in one with its owner is remarkable; a doll’s owner derives pleasure from duplicating their own material world in miniature, though others may recoil from the uncanny display of tiny false people living in tiny false dwellings. A dollhouse can seem to be the home of our dearest fantasies, or it can seem to be a mockery of the truth of our existence.

Why do I bring all of this up? I am a longtime fan of miniatures, small works of art built to invoke what is large, transcending the reality of scale through the skillful application of detail and perspective. Well-constructed miniature things are triumphs of the imagination, seductive in their presentation of immaculate, self-contained worlds. Their artificial and uncanny nature, however, raises dark questions about the impulses that drive us to create these small worlds.

There is no shortage of similar examples in popular culture (including the highest grossing film of last year), and endless ways that they can comment on that multitudinous construct, “the human condition.” To that end, I have some brief reflections on four very different works that I’ve enjoyed recently, all of which engage with dolls and dollhouses in a metaphorical sense, though not necessarily in a literal sense. To assuage the fears of those who can’t stand dolls in whatever manifestation, I promise to include no pictures.

The Secret World of Arrietty

It has been far too many years since I have read Mary Norton’s children’s novel The Borrowers, the story of tiny people living underfoot of unsuspecting humans, making their way in life by occupying small hidden spaces and scavenging what little things they can use. Earlier this year, however, I was able to rewatch the 2010 animated adaptation by Hiromasa Yonebayashi for Studio Ghibli. Like many films in the Ghibli canon, Arietty is a gorgeously hand-rendered fantasia of colors, which imbues its setting with heightened physical reality. The animators employ their skills to great effect in conveying the translation of scale that turns ordinary places into expansive spaces of dramatic possibility, and tiny morsels of sugar into precious treasure.

To understand the world of the Borrowers, it is necessary to emphasize that despite their proportions they are not “dolls.” Arrietty and her family have more in common with small household spirits of folklore, such as pixies or brownies, using their small stature to keep themselves secret. Their own home (hidden in the human house’s foundation), as well as their furniture, clothing, and other possessions, are cobbled together from miniature human artifacts they have appropriated, shaped to the Borrowers’ own ends. The effect is fantastically cozy, and obviously the result of ingenuity and skill. The Borrowers are ultimately dependent on humans for their standard of living (where else would they get sugar cubes?), but not for their own lives.

There is an enduring fascination, however, between the Borrowers and the human family who have managed to catch occasional glimpses of them. This fascination leads the humans to construct a custom house on Borrower-scale, furnished with custom luxuries. By the end of the movie, however, it is clear that Arrietty’s family cannot live safely in the house once the humans are definitively aware of their presence, much less in a bespoke dollhouse. The reason is precisely because they are not dolls, and the bittersweet truth that even a child’s kindest intentions cannot make up for the loss of freedom.

The movie never quite answers the question of whether it may ever be possible for Borrowers to live openly among humans, though it is doubtful they can remain absolutely secret anywhere they go. Rather than a sweeping generalization about human nature, the suggestion seems to be that people are simply too variable to uncritically entrust your rights and safety to their good will. The price of relying on that good will to live in comfort is too high. Their world is larger when they make it for themselves.

A Doll’s House

In 1869, playwright Henrik Ibsen finished writing The League of Youth, a satire on contemporary Norwegian politics and society. One of the play’s minor characters, a woman named Selma, finds that her husband Erik has been touched by a potentially ruinous scandal. When Erik declares that they must share these troubles together, she gives a remarkable speech:

“How I’ve longed to share your troubles! But if ever I asked about anything I was sent about my business with a clever joke. You dressed me like a doll, and played with me as they play with a child. Oh, it would have been so wonderful to suffer with you. I’m a serious person, with a longing for all the higher, more inspiring things in life. And it’s only now – when Erik has nothing else – that I’m good enough.”

Ten years later, Ibsen wrote another play that focused more squarely on the unequal status of men and women in the context of marriage. Titled Et dukkehjem, conventionally translated A Doll’s House, it became one of his most performed works and a literary classic. A Doll’s House draws on and fictionalizes the real experiences of a friend of Ibsen’s family to enlarge the metaphor, taking a close look at the experience of women who are treated as irresponsible children by those who claim to love them.

The protagonist, Nora, is superficially a happy woman with an upwardly mobile husband (Torvald) who gladly provides for her and their three children while showering them all with gratuitous affection. Just underneath the surface, however, Nora is being extorted by a man she once borrowed money from, having forged her dying father’s signature to secure the funds needed to allow Torvald to make a lifesaving journey to Italy. As the depth of Nora’s troubles is revealed, Ibsen makes clear that her unequal status as a wife – legally unable to borrow money on her own, economically unable to risk the early death of her husband with small children to care for – has enclosed her in a trap that a husband in her position would never have had to walk into in the first place.

Torvald, again, loves Nora dearly. He particularly loves dressing her in beautiful clothes, watching her dance a tarantella at parties, and calling her diminutive pet names while providing overbearing “guidance” as to her personal habits and household management. In the astonishing climax of the play, the revelation of Nora’s secret is transformed into a reckoning for Torvald, who can scarcely believe that his wife is no longer happy playing the part of his adoring wife, trading on her beauty and affected sweetness to gain all the things she is prevented from earning for herself.

A Doll’s House was sometimes criticized in its day for its radical take on the ethics of heterosexual marriage, as well as the characterization of Nora, who seems vindicated in the final confrontation despite confessing to a crime and declaring her intention to abandon her family. Its stature as a great work and the passage of time have largely quieted this criticism, but one needs only to look online for a few minutes to discern that the relevant attitudes toward women’s liberation and independence are still being freely expressed. It is exactly the point that Nora’s decision to leave is a radical step, because the events of the play have made it clear that the status quo is impossible to maintain except by her complete surrender. Circumstances simply do not give her more than these two choices, and that is not merely a conceit of Ibsen’s scenario.

When Nora and Torvald’s marriage is broken, Nora walks out with the intention of remaking herself as a human being, something she could never truly achieved in the confines of a home built to display her as the jewel of her husband’s success, or store her away for his occasional enjoyment. A Doll’s House cuts to the core of enduring myths about domesticity, revealing the illusion that sustains the inequality and leaves people unfulfilled and less than human.

Dollhouse

From 2009 to 2010, the Fox network aired a science fiction drama created by Joss Whedon, which I will confess right now I am only about halfway through watching for the first time. The plot of Dollhouse is run through with mysteries and twists, but its larger thematic concerns are apparent from the beginning. The Dollhouse of the title is an underground organization with the ability to reprogram human minds, erasing memories and replacing them with custom-made personalities and skills, rented out to wealthy clients for whatever purpose at all. The Dollhouse justifies itself as a purveyor of fantasy experiences, their “dolls” having willingly signed contracts that supposedly guarantee the return of their original personalities after a set term.

The thoroughly paranoid and clandestine nature of the Dollhouse, however, reveals what is obvious from the get-go: their operation is a grotesque human trafficking ring, recruiting vulnerable individuals and subjecting them to dangerous and exploitative jobs, selling as “fantasy” the work of real human bodies. Though the powerful and well-connected are clearly implicated in the Dollhouse’s work, there is no question that what they are doing is flagrantly illegal, and that they would go to murderous lengths to preserve secrecy.

The plot of Dollhouse centers on “Echo,” a woman who signed up for mysterious reasons and whose disappearance is being investigated as part of the FBI probe into the Dollhouse’s inner workings. Despite the repeated erasure and rewriting of Echo’s mind, self-awareness and elements of her former personality gradually reemerge, even as she and the other dolls are subjected to violence, sexual exploitation, and psychological manipulation. That’s about all that I can tell you about the overarching plot as, again, I am only about halfway through. What I have seen so far, however, is a fascinating exploration of human identity and self-determination.

The science-fiction setting allows the show to pose a question at the extreme of possibility: is it ever alright to treat people as things? What if they signed a contract? What if, between “missions”, they lived in perfect comfort, without even the capacity to worry about their circumstances? What if you could truly guarantee they’d never remember a thing about it? When does it really become a fantasy after all?

Whether as toys or as tools, the dolls of Dollhouse represent the scientific conclusion of the logic of slavery. There is no limit to what can be done to a person if you can place them within the illusion of non-personhood, and no limit to what the people in control might do to them if they become convinced by their own illusions.

The White Album

In 1968, the British rock band Family released an album called Music in a Doll’s House. This put a damper on plans by the significantly more well-known British rock band, the Beatles, who in that same year had been planning to issue their next album, A Doll’s House. Changing direction, the Beatles gave the album no special title at all, calling it simply The Beatles. Its plain white cover then inspired its popular nickname, which has in turn become a common trope for other musicians to emulate or parody.

The White Album has achieved legendary status not only for its cypher of a cover, but for its length, musical diversity, and the air of mystery surrounding its lyrical symbolism and the alleged inclusion of hidden messages, whether played backwards or forwards. Despite the inclusion of light material and clever parodies, violence and death are recurring motifs, and obsessive listeners have long combed its songs for evidence of radical politics and confirmation of conspiracy theories. The mystique of “the White Album” allows for many interpretations, a great blank for the audience to project its fantasies upon.

So what, if you’ll pardon the speculation, if it had been called A Doll’s House anyway? How would history have viewed The Beatles in the light of a real title, especially one with such obvious symbolism?

Despite its reputation as a sprawling mishmash of styles and competing personalities, the White Album is actually quite orderly. In the original two-record format, the songs are sequenced in such a way that none of the four sides is dominated by the voices of either John Lennon or Paul McCartney, while George Harrison is allowed one of his own compositions on each side. Each pair of sides feels almost like a subtle distortion of the other, as in a fun house mirror. Listening to The Beatles can seem like walking through a series of small rooms, some of them noisy and chaotic, all of them deliberately crafted for contrast.

A Doll’s House would have fit brilliantly into a recurring pattern of titles that expressed the increasing alienation the Beatles experienced as a massively famous act. In 1964 they were already advertising their work as Beatles For Sale, suggesting an awareness that fame might be turning the four men themselves into commodities. 1965’s Rubber Soul seemed to acknowledge an ersatz quality to their output, even as their artistic ambitions were really beginning to flower, while 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was in essence an elaborate play-acting of a fictional group, complete with costumes and cardboard cutouts. In each case, the Beatles were preoccupied with finding out who they really were in an environment that variously identified them as idols, or prophets, or cartoon characters.

Of all the songs on The Beatles that might have made A Doll’s House a most appropriate title, the theme is strongly suggested by track three, “Glass Onion.” Lennon delivers a series of references to other songs by the group, dropped like catnip for those inclined to over-analyze his words and infer deep symbolism in obscure passages. The real subtext of the song, however, is plain for any one to hear: “I am bullshitting you; none of this is actually what it appears to be.”

In light of all this, perhaps A Doll’s House was too on the nose after all, and would have only held the White Album back from acquiring its incomparable mystique. But mystique, in the end, is only another kind of fantasy, delightful to behold yet lacking in solidity. One can only wonder whether it would have served the band’s purpose to emphasize the artifice.