University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Dollplay: narrative rituals in nineteenth-century Britain

(USC Thesis Other)

Dollplay: narrative rituals in nineteenth-century Britain

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

DOLLPLAY:

NARRATIVE RITUALS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

by

Brianna Beehler

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2021

Copyright 2021 Brianna Beehler

ii
Acknowledgements

This project began with a seminar paper I wrote my first semester for Hilary Schor’s
course on Bleak House and narrative theory, and I am grateful to have found a chair who found
my early ideas and questions interesting––and who has continued to think through those ideas
with me for the rest of my tenure as a graduate student. This project has undoubtedly benefited
from her rigorous attention to detail, her extensive knowledge of nineteenth-century literature
and culture, her imagination, and her willingness to read countless drafts. I am also grateful to
my other committee members, who together have greatly influenced this project and my thinking
for the better: collectively, they helped this project––and me––“grow up.” Joe Boone has been a
supportive reader since the very beginning, and I feel extremely fortunate to have benefited from
his generous feedback and mentorship, from my 501 to the completion of this manuscript. Kate
Flint’s courses on “Victorian Visual Culture” and “Victorian Bestsellers” were extremely
formative, initially interesting me in the relationship between literature and material culture, as
was her brilliance as a teacher and scholar. Devin Griffiths has been a welcome guide through
the nineteenth century, as well as the world of academia, which I have greatly appreciated. Last,
but certainly not least, I am grateful for Elinor Accampo’s instruction, especially the opportunity
to think through the history of dolls in her course, “Studies in European History: 1789-1914,”
and her careful attention to my prose.
The members of my writing group, which has included over the years since we began in
the fall of 2015, Gerald Maa, Mike Bennett, Rebecca Ehrhardt, Darby Walters, Michael P.
Berlin, Anne Sullivan, and Abigail Droge, were a saving grace more than once, and they were
also the first to recognize that this might be a project about dolls. Fondly known only as “Writing
Group,” this group of individuals reviewed my fields list, quizzed me in preparation for quals,

iii
read my articles multiple times, looked at syllabi, seminar papers, chapters, grant proposals,
cover letters, abstracts––in short, read almost every word I wrote as a graduate student, except
perhaps for these, which feel less adequate as a result. They continued to believe in this project
(and me) at moments where I felt lost and discouraged, and I am grateful for years of coffee,
cocktails, rooftop parties, brunch, laughter, and meetings across Los Angeles, and, when the
world changed in 2020, to a continued virtual community. My colleagues Corinna McClanahan
Schroeder, Dagmar Van Engen, Sanders Bernstein, Zach Mann, Grace Franklin, Amanda Ruud,
my entire entering cohort, and too many wonderful others to name here, have also provided
thoughtful commentary and comradery during years of thinking, writing, revising, and traversing
the many freeways and alleyways of our strange and beautiful Los Angeles.
I am also indebted to all of my brilliant students, but for the purposes of this project most
especially to those who participated in my Thematic Option Honors College courses on “Dolls”
and “Imaginary Friends,” who led me to rethink the relationship between dolls, the living, and
those who are gone. Their curiosity and enthusiasm reminded me why I had begun my graduate
studies in the first place, and they brought meaning to work that can sometimes feel disconnected
from the world we live in. To the audience members who attended presentations from this
dissertation at NASSR, NAVSA, INCS, and the Dickens Project Winter Conference (most
especially to my two faculty readers, John Jordan and Carolyn Williams): thank you for your
questions, suggestions, and interest. Members of the C19 Anglophone Collective who
participated in a workshop of “Charlotte Brontë’s Paper Dolls,” and the attendees of the Fall
2019 English Department’s Dissertation Chapter Symposium, treated versions of this project
with great attention and care, pushing me to think more expansively.

iv
This project would have looked very different without the generous funding I received to
visit European archives and focus on writing during my years at USC. For these resources and
time, I am also grateful to the Council for European Studies at Columbia University for a 2020-
2021 Mellon-Council for European Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the Ralph and
Jean Hovel Foundation for funding three separate research trips to Germany up and down the
Spielzeugstraße, the Visual Studies Research Institute, and the USC English department.
Gratitude is also owed to the USC Graduate School for funding a 2019-2020 Research
Enhancement Advanced PhD Fellowship and 2020 Summer Research and Writing Grant. I also
wish to thank librarians and staff at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, the Deutsches
Spielzeugmuseum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood for their knowledge and
expertise during my research trips. Special thanks are due to Julia Novakovic, Archivist at the
Strong National Museum of Play.
A version of Chapter Two initially appeared as “The Doll’s Gift: Ventriloquizing Bleak
House” in the 75th issue of Nineteenth-Century Literature in the summer of 2020 and I am
grateful not only for the permission to include that material here, but also to the editors, readers,
and staff for their feedback and careful editing, which pushed me to think more broadly about
Dickens and narrative form. A version of Chapter One is forthcoming from English Literary
History as “Charlotte Brontë’s Paper Dolls,” and I am grateful to my anonymous reader for many
thoughtful suggestions on streamlining the argument and bringing the essay’s larger concerns to
the surface.
I could never have completed this project without the unfailing support of my family,
especially my sister, Chelle, with whom I have shared many narrative rituals since childhood; my
spouse, Davis, who now knows more about dolls than he probably ever thought possible (and

v
who has been known to speak at length about this project to unsuspecting fellow physicians in
the ICU); mein Bruder, Cecil, who provided invaluable assistance with my work in German
archives and translations, and who, along with the many other inhabitants of Trinidad, a fifth-
floor walk-up apartment in Munich, sheltered, fed, and made me ride bicycles across three
summers; and my parents, grandparents, and chosen family (John!), who let me take my time.
Perhaps it is inevitable that a project that spans such a great length of time is also marked
by so much loss. My first chapter, “Charlotte Brontë’s Paper Dolls,” is dedicated to the
irreplaceable Brian Agler (1989-2020); brilliant writer and comic, beloved friend, husband, and
father; for whom there is no number of books, no amount of laughter, that can fill the space left
behind.

vi
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

ii
List of Figures

vii
Abbreviations

viii
Abstract

ix
Introduction: Bury, Break, Throw

1
Chapter One: Charlotte Brontë’s Paper Dolls

30
Chapter Two: Charles Dickens, Ventriloquist

68
Chapter Three: George Eliot Practices Throwing

106
Chapter Four: Keeping Secrets with Alice and Henry James

145
Coda: Unstitching

185
Bibliography

193
Appendix

213

vii
List of Figures

0.1 Queen Victoria Doll by Mrs. Peck of the “Dolls’ Home” (V&A Museum of Childhood).
0.2 Toy soldiers from H.G. Wells’s Floor Games.
0.3 Film stills from Der Werdegang einer Puppe (The Development of a Doll) (1917) (Das
Bundesarchiv).
0.4 Image of girls carrying baskets of dolls from Olive Thorne’s “How Dolls are Made”
(1875).
0.5 Puppenwerkstatt im Nachmittagslicht (1923) by Armin Reumann.
0.6 Images of children laboring within the toy industry in Germany.
0.7 Image from “The Making of Common Things: Dolls,” in Chatterbox, no. 27, 1893, p.
216.
0.8 Images of girls dressing hair from Olive Thorne’s “How Dolls are Made” (1875).
0.9 Title image from Martin Hardie’s “The Land of Dolls,” in The Children’s Friend.
0.10 Rows of eyeless doll heads in Martin Hardie’s “The Land of Dolls,” in the Children’s
Friend.
0.11 Dolls wait their turn in Martin Hardie’s “The Land of Dolls,” in The Children’s Friend.
0.12 Dolls with eyes take on life in Martin Hardie’s “The Land of Dolls,” in The Children’s
Friend.
0.13 Drawing from a 1906 doll’s eye patent by Daniel Gifford (European Patent Office
Espacenet Database).
0.14 Drawing from a 1901 doll patent by Robert Purvis (European Patent Office Espacenet
Database).
0.15 Illustration of Ethel as part of minstrel act from Ethel’s Adventures in Doll Country.

1.1 “Emma” (Coburger Puppenmuseum) and “Elsie” with letter (Loring Greenough House).
1.2 Image of a doll funeral from The Daily Picayune, January 3, 1897.
1.3 Close Up of Little Book by Charlotte Brontë, 1830 (Brontë Parsonage Museum).
1.4 A porcelain German Frozen Charlotte (The Strong National Museum of Play).

4.1 Depictions of female factory workers making Edison’s phonograph doll in the April 26,
1890 issue of Scientific American.

5.1 The Keating Dollhouse tombstone in Cincinnati, Ohio.
5.2 Interior views of the Keating Dollhouse.
5.3 The dollhouse grave marker of Vivian May Allison in Connersville, Indiana.

viii
Abbreviations

DC David Copperfield
EW The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë
GEL The George Eliot Letters
JE Jane Eyre
LCB The Letters of Charlotte Brontë
LCD The Letters of Charles Dickens
WH Wuthering Heights
WPBB Works of Patrick Branwell Brontë
WMK What Maisie Knew

ix
Abstract

In this project, I examine unexpectedly widespread nineteenth-century cultural practices
that took place as forms of dollplay––such as ventriloquism, funerals, and surgical dissections––
and argue that these practices gave rise to a wide range of narrative experiments that shaped the
novel’s form. As dolls were reimagined in the nineteenth century, they became more lifelike:
dolls began to talk, walk, and open and close their eyes. These technological innovations led to
surprising cultural and narrative forms, and while patents show that dollmakers often designed
dolls to foster motherly emotions and domestic behaviors such as nursing, sewing, and cuddling,
both parents and children imagined their own practices. I argue that these practices evolved into
narrative rituals that shaped the way stories are told.
Each chapter connects a particular practice that evolved around and through dollplay to a
novelist whose work invoked those practices to reimagine the novel’s form. My first chapter
examines fictional and autobiographical accounts of children holding funerals for their dolls and
then digging them back up again, arguing that this practice led to a fiction of death’s reversibility
that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s fiction. The practice of ventriloquism greatly informs our
reading of Charles Dickens’s narrative structure, in which readers witness Dickens’s attempts to
recreate, and, in the case of Bleak House (1852-3), redefine moments of personal childhood
suffering. George Eliot, too, sought to reframe her childhood self, taking up the child’s habit of
throwing consciousness into––and out of––dolls, and showing that an abandoned doll can retain
its animation (and thus its hold upon our empathy) in her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876).
But if dolls can tell us much, they can also be withholding, and in my final chapter I consider
how narrative refusals (keeping a secret, rather than telling it) in dollplay and Alice James’s

x
diary shaped Henry James’s late elusive style. In doing so, I trace out a new history of the novel,
as well as of women, children, and the objects that resembled them.

1
Introduction:
Bury, Break, Throw

We stumble over many dolls as we wander through the nineteenth century. One might
expect to come across these worn faces in the nursery, sitting neglected in a corner or bundled in
a crib, but we also find them in surprising places: on a stage performing magic tricks, buried in
the garden, afire upon altars, and reciting the Lord’s Prayer at Paris Exhibitions. Dolls took part
in cultural practices as imagined by the dollmakers who designed them and adults who bought
them, but they also, in turn, created new practices along with the children who played with them.
These practices play out in stories, diaries, production narratives, and––most significantly in this
project––novels, where dolls appear folded in nightgowns, beaten in attics, listening to secret
confidences, and exhumed from the grave. The doll itself will slowly slip from the pages of this
dissertation (as it has from many a child’s hand), but its many games, tricks, and rituals are taken
up and examined in the complex narrative forms it inspired. A book, we will find, is rather doll-
like.
One may be forgiven for assuming the doll’s relative unimportance, as this was a view
taken even by those most likely to profit from the doll’s pervasive presence in nineteenth-century
culture. In his 1832 book, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Charles Babbage
cites an interview with a Birmingham manufacturer, Mr. Ostler, who uses dolls’ eyes as an
example of the great importance of “trifles” and the rate at which they are consumed (201).
Ostler explains that eighteen years earlier, a man asked him to supply dolls’ eyes, a request that
“half-offended” Ostler who thought it an insult to his status to be asked to produce such an
insignificant item (199). But after being shown extensive rooms filled to the brim with doll parts,
the manufacturer realizes that the man “wanted a great many eyes” (199; emphasis added 200).
Ostler does not learn how to make the dolls’ eyes until nearly eighteen years later, but even then
2
he concludes that the production of dolls’ eyes will garner a massive profit: “I last night took the
present very reduced price of that article (less than half now of what it was then), and calculating
that every child in this country not using a doll till two years old, and throwing it aside at seven,
and having a new one annually, I satisfied myself that the eyes alone would produce a circulation
of a great many thousand pounds” (201). For a skilled manufacturer, these “trifles” offer a
profitable business opportunity.
As Babbage concludes, one of the most important considerations for a manufacturer
before production is “[t]he quantity of any new article likely to be consumed,” and by 1832 dolls
were already being mass-produced and consumed in vast quantities and had been for the past two
decades as doll production took off within Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
(199). By mid-century, the mass-produced and increasingly life-like doll was a common sight
and reference point across Europe. In her preface to Memoirs of a Doll (1856), Julie Gouraud
asks off-handedly “and who has not seen a doll?,” suggesting, of course, that everyone has (x).
Dolls were ubiquitous and in constant need of replacement (making them a profitable business
opportunity), and they also played significant cultural roles as British citizens became
increasingly interested in how and where dolls were produced, used, and discarded. Some of the
most prominent dolls within the nineteenth-century British imagination were the 132 that
belonged to Queen Victoria. When Frances Low published an article titled “Queen Victoria’s
Dolls” about the monarch’s collection in the September 1892 issue of Strand Magazine, she
emphasized to readers how Queen Victoria’s dollplay demonstrates her early “qualities of self
control, patience, steadiness of purpose, and womanliness” (223).
1
If, as Low implies, an

1
Due to the large interest in the article, Low expanded it into a book with color illustrations and
further details on individual figures that was published in 1894. She also wrote a follow up
3
ordinary child playing with her dolls suggests a promising instinct to “play the part of mother,”
how much more reassuring is the image of a young princess, whose care for her dolls is a sign of
her future compassion as a ruler (Low and her readers appear untroubled by the fact that in 1833,
“the dolls were packed away”) (223; 224). But dollplay was not reserved for monarchs alone and
Queen Victoria herself became a doll in the hands of her subjects: the dollmaker Mrs. Peck
reports in the December 11, 1897 issue of Home Chat that she models her “‘Queen’ dolls” from
an 1837 photograph of Queen Victoria (see figure 0.1) (665). Her Majesty’s subjects may have
been dolls in her hands, but she was also one in theirs.
Historians and literary critics have not failed to note the doll’s cultural role during this
period and there are three book-length studies on nineteenth-century dolls: Miriam Forman-
Brunell’s Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-
1930 (1993), Juliette Peer’s The Fashion Doll: From Bébé Jumeau to Barbie (2004), and
Eugenia Gonzalez’s “Galatea’s Daughters: Dolls, Female Identity and the Material Imagination
in Victorian Literature and Culture” (2012). Each of these extended studies on nineteenth-
century dolls seeks to reconsider the doll as a significant cultural object by approaching the
nineteenth-century doll from both historical and literary angles. From considering the ways in
which female dollmakers and doll-players undermined patriarchal assumptions (Forman-Brunell)
to interpreting the ways in which dolls acted as sites of imaginative potential in literature
(Gonzalez), these critics grant the doll a subversive agency in nineteenth-century literature and
culture. I build on their progress by interpreting the doll’s historical development and role in
cultural practices as being critical to narrative experimentation in the nineteenth century,

article titled “Distinguished Women and their Dolls,” which appeared in the Strand Magazine in
July 1894.
4
particularly for the novel. My literary approach therefore resonates most clearly with work by
literary critics––Gonzalez, Sharon Marcus in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and
Marriage in Victorian England (2007), and Robin Bernstein in Racial Innocence: Performing
American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011).
2

Much of the work by literary critics on nineteenth-century dolls has been heavily
influenced and driven by psychoanalysis and feminist and queer theory, which define the doll as
a female plaything or stand-in. Robyn Schiffman, Marcus, and Victoria Ford Smith each argue
that dolls in nineteenth-century literature are sites of repressed desires, memories, and emotions,
although each critic differs on what those repressed feelings are exactly. What these readings
have in common, however, is that they are often limited to themes of sexuality and sexual desire.
This is not all that the doll has to tell us, and certainly not the only way that we see them being
used and interacted with in novels. As others have shown, dolls were also signs of colonialism
(Emily Madsen), fashion (Ben Moore), trauma (Christopher Pittard, “Travelling Doll”), and
racial violence (Bernstein) within literature. “Dollplay” builds on the tradition of considering the
doll’s role as both a sign of what is repressed––or to use Robyn Warhol’s term, “unnarratable”––
and as a tool for exploring broader questions about the nineteenth-century novel and narrative
itself (221).
Since dolls were so diverse and continually evolving in form in the nineteenth century,
my definition of a doll in this project relies as much on function as on appearance. In this project,

2
Gonzalez, Marcus, and Bernstein hare hardly alone, however. See also Robyn L Schiffman’s
“Wax-Work, Clock-Work, and Puppet-Shews: Bleak House and the Uncanny” (2001); Victoria
Ford Smith’s “Dolls and Imaginative Agency in Bradford, Pardoe, and Dickens” (2009); Emily
Madsen’s “Phiz’s Black Doll: Integrating Text and Etching in Bleak House” (2013); Ben
Moore’s “The Dolls’ Dressmaker Re(ad)dressed: Jenny Wren’s Critique of Childhood,
Femininity, and Appearance” (2016); and Christopher Pittard’s “The Travelling Doll Wonder:
Dickens, Secular Magic, and Bleak House” (2016).
5
a “doll” meets one or both of the following definitions. The first, “an image of a human being
(commonly of a child or lady) used as a plaything,” comes from the Oxford English Dictionary,
although as this project will show, the doll’s actual resemblance to a human being often requires
leaps of the imagination (“doll, n.1”). This is why I also apply a second definition, in which a
doll is a small object that is treated through child’s play as if it were a human being, being
spoken to, loved, abused, and tended to. Subsequently, when Joe Moshenska evocatively asks in
his study of the Reformation if we should consider an icon or broken crucifix that is given to a
child to play with as a doll (“Are we justified in thinking of these objects in these terms––to
understand the polemical intent behind iconoclastic child’s play as the transformation of an idol
into a doll? Does the Christ-figure attached to the crucifix in Cologne become a doll once his
arms are snapped off and he is placed in a playing child’s hands?”), my answer is yes (42). For
the same reason, I would consider the sword that the young Cosette bundles up and sings “My
mother is dead!” to in Les Misérables (1862) to be a kind of doll (2:97).
The practices such treatment and play inspired created narrative experiments, which, as
this project will unfold in each of its chapters, took shape as some of the nineteenth-century
novel’s most radical forms. My methodology is thus grounded in the connection between
technological development, cultural practices, and narrative form. In nineteenth-century Britain,
modern notions of childhood, mass production of dolls and evolutions in doll-making, and new
forms of literary production developed alongside of and in relation to one another. New
developments in toy production fostered particular kinds of play that performed outsized cultural
roles and, in turn, shaped surprising narrative forms. As dolls were buried, broken, and thrown,
so, too, was narrative voice and form.
6
Beginning with the history of and fascination with the nineteenth-century doll industry,
the following pages map out the cultural significance projected onto dolls by dollmakers and
other adults and then traces how those cultural roles were reinvented by nineteenth-century
children. It then considers how the cultural practices children imagined influenced narrative
rituals, or repeated forms of narrative experimentation, that shaped the novel’s form. By taking
up the doll (and learning how to put it away) in the works of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens,
George Eliot, and Alice and Henry James, I show that dollplay gave rise to a revolution in form
and consciousness that readers, in turn, will pick up, discard, bury, and rediscover.

“Kingdom of Dolls”: The Nineteenth-Century Doll Industry
As Babbage’s example shows, dolls were being played with and mass-produced well
before the young Victoria began her collection. Indeed, toy dolls have been an important cultural
object since ancient times around the world.
3
But within Europe, doll production evolved
substantially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Max Von Boehn carefully details in
his foundational history, Dolls and Puppets (1932). During the eighteenth century, the Parisian
fashion industry used dolls as tangible catalogues that traveled throughout Europe and across the
Atlantic to New York advertising new designs (Von Boehn 134-148). However, dolls were also
popular as children’s toys during this period and were in such high demand that in the year 1700
the city of Nuremberg had six of their own master doll-makers (122). Their products were then
shipped abroad, so that the painter Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (1751-1829) claimed
during a visit that “There is scarcely a child in the civilised world who has not played with a
Nuremberg toy and been delighted with it” (qtd. in Schwarz 207). In Germany, a center for doll

3
See Max Von Boehn (102-109).
7
production in the nineteenth century, changing notions of children’s education and the rise of the
middle-class family led to an increased desire for doll production as “[t]he demand for toys rose
considerably” (Der Bedarf an Spielzeug stieg beträchtlich) (Kleine Welten 28). Toys of all kinds
were highly sought after, but in Germany, which would go on to produce two-thirds of dolls
within Europe and half throughout the entire world by 1910 (Von Boehn 166), these toys often
took the form of dolls.
The public demand for toy dolls not only fueled production, but also led to technological
innovation. German dollmakers in the Meininger Oberland began by making dolls from wood
taken from the region’s rich forests, so that in 1735 the magistrate Ernst Heinrich Sonnhoff, who
wrote a detailed economic report on the region, described only “toys made from wood”
(Spielwaren aus Holz) (Kleine Welten 22).
4
While wooden toys remain common throughout the
nineteenth century even as new materials came into fashion, they were less expensive and, for
that reason, were sometimes considered of a lower class. George Dodd expresses this opinion in
an article published June 11, 1853 in Household Words, claiming that dolls for “the little
peasant” are “made of unmistakeable wood” (352). According to Dodd, part of the reason for
this change in the wooden doll’s status is that dollmakers cannot afford to take the time to craft
detailed wooden dolls when they are sold to “the shopkeepers at a farthing apiece” (353). The
result is a poor doll whose “body has very little symmetry, and [whose] legs and arms are little
better than bits of lath” (352). As the value of the wooden dolls decreased, so did the artisanship
in their making.

4
The workers who made these wooden figures were known as “white-makers” (Weißmacher)––
the carved products would then be sent to skilled painters who would transform the toys into
bright products for sale, showing that the separation of labor in production began well before the
introduction of mass production (Kleine Welten 20).
8
The wooden doll’s fall from favor is also partly due to the introduction of new materials
that replaced it. A significant improvement came from the invention of papier mâché––a
malleable mixture made out of left-over paper, glue, and filler that was moldable while damp,
and which allowed facial features to be easily shaped.
5
Papier mâché’s malleability also meant
that dolls could be produced with the use of molds, greatly expediting production. Initially
approved for German production in 1805, papier mâché reached its full impact when in 1818
dollmakers began to use a “Mother Form” (Mutterform), from which identical forms could be
“born” (Kleine Welten 27). German skill with this material reached the international stage when
the figure “Gulliver in Lilliput” (designed by Adolf Fleischmann) was displayed at the 1851
Great Exhibition in London.
Papier mâché remained a popular material for dollmaking well into the nineteenth
century, even as finer materials and methods were developed. Dodd describes how “middle-class
dolls” were often made from this material: “The head may perchance be made of paper or
pasteboard or papier mâché […] The maker has by him a wax model for each kind and form of
head; from this model he makes a mould, and in this mould he fashions impressions made of a
kind of sugar-paper; a grey, grimy, unfeminine sort of face is thus produced” (353). These faces
were then dipped in wax, giving them a more lifelike appearance and producing what is known

5
Before turning from wood to papier mâché, Sonneberg dollmakers worked with a different
moldable material that they developed in 1740 and that solidified their position as preeminent
toymakers within the Meininger Oberland region. This material, a dough made out of watered-
down glue and rye flour, allowed makers to freely-form figures or attach molded pieces to
wooden bases. However, this material also posed significant problems because it kept being
eaten by mice during transport overseas. The economist Emanuel Sax wrote in his 1882 history
of the region, Das Meininger Oberland, that “The dough mass from bread flour and watered-
down glue was a delicacy for mice” (Die Teigmasse aus Brotmehl und Leimwasser war ein
Leckerbissen für die Mäuse), and in part because of this there are very few of these items still in
existence today (my translation, qtd. in Kleine Welten 22).
9
as a “composition doll” (353). Molds were also used for producing dolls made wholly from wax
and gutta-percha, which by 1850 was an increasingly popular material.
6

Toy soldiers, which I categorize as types of dolls within this project, followed a different,
although similar, process. German toymakers cast Zinnfiguren (tin figures), two-dimensional tin
or pewter military figures, from slate molds, a practice that dominated the toy soldier market
through most of the nineteenth century, although this changed when British makers developed
the hollow-cast toy soldier in 1893 (Brown, “Models” 529-30). H.G. Wells wrote of toy soldiers
in his 1911 Floor Games that they “used to be flat, small creatures in my own boyhood, in
comparison with the magnificent beings one can buy to-day […] There has been enormous
improvement in our national physique in this respect” (23). The accompanying image makes
clear that Wells views the improvement in toy soldiers as due to the development of a British
industry at the end of the nineteenth century in the creation of toy soldiers that favored larger,
three-dimensional figures (see figure 0.2). Smaller, simpler soldiers bear the label “Made in
Germany,” while larger, more detailed soldiers proudly declare “English Made” (23).
7
However,
both Zinnfiguren and hollow-cast British toy soldiers were, like dolls made of papier mâché and
wax, mass-produced and widely distributed.

6
See Dodd (353) and Von Boehn (155). Gutta percha is a rubber-like substance made from the
sap of a Malaysian tree of the same name that, when heated, can be molded into various shapes
that will hold.
7
The rise of British doll and toy production at the end of the nineteenth century appears directly
related to growing anti-German sentiment. One British company, L. Rees & Company, was
perhaps started by Leon Rees as a result of the first World War. Frank L. Rees describes the
company’s history in a letter dated May 25
th
, 1973, stating that the first factory was built “with
the backing of the government and the Evening News […] during the first World War at
Peckham” (Rees). Then, until World War Two, “L. Rees & Company Limited were one of the
biggest importers of dolls from all over the world, but principally from Germany where you will
know that they came from the Sonnoberg [sic] and Waltershausen areas” (Rees).
10
The suggestion that dolls are “born” from the Mother Form during the papier mâché
production process was a popular one in the nineteenth century, which saw an increased interest
in speculation regarding the origins of material things. As Gonzalez argues, dolls particularly
inspired production narratives of their history and origins (“What remains?” 335). Many of these
narratives focused on Germany, and particularly the doll-making center, Sonneberg, which due
to a high concentration of dollmakers (reportedly 12,000 in 1893), won itself the reputation as
“the kingdom of dolls” (“What remains?” 338). In one such 1851 tale titled May’s Doll: Where
Its Dress Came From, a little girl speaks of her doll and its origins in lively terms: “how am I to
find out who made my doll, and how she became so beautiful and so gay? I cannot find all this
out” (qtd. in “What remains?” 335). The doll appears full of vitality, even as the girl
acknowledges that someone “made” her.
Doll production thus often signified a coming to life, but it also at the same time evoked
death. Martin Hardie, author of the “The Land of Dolls,” which appeared in the English
Illustrated Magazine in 1904, describes a scene eerily reminiscent of Frankenstein’s solitary and
ghastly pursuits while walking through the “kingdom of dolls” (282). “As you go through
Sonneberg streets towards sun-down,” Hardie writes, “you meet a constant procession of small
carts, laden high with headless bodies of dolls. Women and children stream past with great
baskets strapped upon their backs, full to the brim, with heads, arms, legs, shoes, and little
garments. It seems like some grim and ghastly funeral cortege, till you remember that these
disjuncta membra are dolls in the making” (283). Such a hustle and bustle of dollmakers and doll
parts seems at odds with the solemnity of a funeral and the short 1917 documentary film Der
Werdegang einer Puppe (The Development of a Doll) represents the busy stream of workers
carrying doll parts to a factory in Sonneberg in a different light (see figure 0.3). The rush of
11
activity is not grim, but rather pictures commercial success. The illustration in Olive Thorne’s
“How Dolls are Made” (1875), renders this scene again differently, calmly and joyfully
presenting three girls carrying baskets of dolls neatly tucked in, as if they were tiny infants only
just born (see figure 0.4). But the inanimate doll body disquiets Hardie, and the vitality of so
much action cannot undo the grimness of their association with death. Hardie’s description of
this strange funereal scene occurs on the same page as an image caption announcing, “And first
of all the dolls are born, of course,” highlighting the fine line that doll production straddles as a
spectacle of life or death (283).
Machines only increased the eeriness of doll production. Laura Starr cites a report in her
1908 history, The Doll Book, from Vance Thompson describing a visit to Nuremberg that echoes
many of Hardie’s feelings:
There is a special machine for stamping out the hands. I should not like to confess how
long I stood in front of it, fascinated by the steady stream of queer little hands that fell
ceaselessly from the iron monster––it was awful, uncanny, hypnotizing. Indeed, the
whole sight was grim and monstrous. The low factory rooms were misty with steam and
lit by strange, red-glowing fires; always the great steel machines pulsed and clanged; and
through the mist sweaty giants of men went to and fro with heaps of little greenish arms
and legs––until you began to think that some new Herod had killed all the little people in
the world. (p. 167)
Thompson’s illustration of the doll factory rooms focuses on death, like Hardie’s, but it also
evokes a futuristic setting filled with “steam,” “fires,” and “great steel machines.” In this
apocalyptic image, “all the little people in the world” have been murdered in a reenactment of
the Massacre of the Innocents, yet the scene is also filled with production and activity: the little
12
hands fall in a “steady stream,” the machine pulses away, and the men run to and fro, laden with
peculiar “greenish arms and legs.”
The scene of doll production thus captivated the nineteenth-century imagination, but as
Gonzalez notes, these magical and strange scenes were often accompanied by stark reminders of
the harsh realities that plagued dollmakers, which included children who would never play with
or learn to love the dolls they helped make (“what remains?” 338-9). Images of doll production
in articles for English children did not reflect the lack of light Starr notes––“[Dolls’ eyes] are
made in cellars and basements, where there is scarcely a hand’s breadth of sunshine to cheer the
weary artists” (167)––but Armin Reumann’s later 1923-24 paintings of Sonneberg doll
workshops capture the dark interiors and huddled forms of busy dollmakers (see figure 0.5).
Those men running back and forth and women and children carrying heavy baskets worked hard
for little pay: Dodd hypothesizes that “Little girls would look sad to learn what a small fractional
part of a penny a woman receives for stuffing a pair of arms” (353), one article claims that a
family in the region would receive no more than “30 pfennigs, or 6 cents for each doll” (“Doll
Making in Thuringia” 243), and Hardie dwells on “the old story of the sweating system, the same
sad tragedy of crowded rooms and small wages, of women and children, ‘the young, young
children,’ toiling from early morning till late night,” musing that the children who make dolls
cannot possibly associate them with joy (284). He asks, “Their whole work is to make a happy
Christmastide for others. What of their own?” (284). For these toiling children, dolls had very
little association with play. When asked how he feels living amongst “billions of dolls” and other
toys, one young toymaker responds that “he will have nothing to do with them, except as the
means by which he can learn to gain his own bread” (Howitt 776). The mysteries of the doll only
appealed to children who did not participate in their making.
13
Despite the seeming sympathy for the plight of these children, several authors of these
exposés of the nineteenth-century doll industry bury the child dollmakers’ suffering by
emphasizing the labor as occurring in distant, romanticized places. Margaret Howitt opens “A
Tribe of Toymakers” with the words, “Far away from England […],” and then goes on to
describe a region that is a “Wonderland” (772), while others, like F.M. Holmes in “Making
Dolls’ Eyes: A Curious Industry,” attractively located the workers as “peasants in their own
homes, on the German mountains” (104). Howitt’s “Wonderland” begins to break down when
she wonders, “Are all the toys in Grödenthal carved by the old and infirm?” (Howitt 775). The
young and healthy quickly become so, as is the case with a girl named Nanna, who has “a pallid,
sickly look” Howitt connects to her occupation painting dolls that in addition to “bringing in
little profit, being very poorly paid for, is extremely pernicious, as the health is often injured by
the employment of white lead, arsenic, and other poisonous paints” (773). But this image of
Nanna’s suffering is enveloped within the opening descriptions of Wonderland and the
concluding descriptions of an idealized landscape where “great mountains are congealed
spectres” and “heavens are filled with waves of glory” (776). The children’s labor becomes part
of the picturesque imagery, and provides opportunities––as Dodd does when he claims that
“Little girls would look sad”––to add to this image by imagining young British girls
compassionately thinking of their German peers working away at their dolls.
But British girls were not to be made too sad and the visual imagery that accompanied
these articles emphasized their joy and erased German children’s labor. This is notably in
contrast to the documentary Der Werdegang einer Puppe, which does capture children at work
beside adults, carrying boxes and moving parts in an assembly line within a Sonneberg doll
factory, as well as photographs taken of families at work in the region around the turn of the
14
century (see figure 0.6). While a column on “The Making of Common Things” in Chatterbox
bemoans that children “engaged in [dollmaking] cannot help detesting dolls” (215), it does not,
as Gonzalez notes, “go on to express sympathy with these young workers, nor is the description
followed by any plea for reform” (“What remains?” 339). Instead, the full-page image that
follows the Chatterbox article effectively erases the children whose labor it mentions, placing a
presumably British girl at center who gazes lovingly into the face of her doll, while scenes of
adult doll-production and idealized play surround her (see figure 0.7). Thorne’s article does
include images of girls in scenes of doll production, but their labor (combing doll’s hair and
carrying baskets of dolls tucked under blankets like infants) rather closely resembles play (see
figure 0.8). The narrator directly addresses an English child about the history of her doll,
Rosabel, and does note on the final page of this six-page article that “The children who live in
that fairy land, however, care very little for toys; the poor creatures are all workers […] The pay
is small, and every one of the family must help” (233). However, the narrator then quickly cuts
back to the narratee’s doll––“But to go back to Rosabel”––realigning the child’s sympathies with
her inanimate companion (233).
As much as these authors attempted to cast the poor working conditions of dollmaking as
a distant problem, dollmakers and sellers also faced trying circumstances within England,
descriptions of which matched those of dollmakers in Germany. Henry Mayhew describes these
circumstances in London Labour and the London Poor (1851) when he concludes that “The
making of dolls, like that of many a thing required for a mere recreation, a toy, a pastime, is
often carried on amidst squalor, wretchedness, or privation, or––to use a word I have frequently
heard among the poor––‘pinching’” (1:445). While articles such as “Where Toys Come From,”
seek to frame doll production as solely occurring in regions outside England, Mayhew’s
15
description shows that this was not the case, and the scenes he describes echoes the vocabulary
used in articles depicting doll production in Germany. The author of “Where Toys Come From”
states that “[t]he quaint old city of Nuremberg is an important centre of the [dollmaking] trade
and many of its inhabitants, even down to the smallest children, are engaged in their production”
(1138). The reference to the “smallest children” is almost buried in this description of the toy-
making industry, where, the article further notes, the workers “live most wretchedly” (1138).
Whether in an idealized German city or in the streets of London, authors of accounts on the toy-
making industry found that doll-makers worked for small pay and lived “wretchedly.”
The distancing of the girl who plays with the doll in a London drawing room from the
one who risks her health painting the doll’s rosy cheeks in a dark Sonneberg workroom was in
part due not to geographic distance, but to Karl Marx’s theory of alienation. As Gonzalez
persuasively argues, the mass production and subdivision of labor in doll manufacturing meant
that “[i]n the process of producing one kind of life-less body, the living bodies of the workers
become life-less themselves” (“what remains?” 341). Of course, the doll does not remain
lifeless––as we shall see in the following chapters, children imbued their dolls with life, emotion,
and consciousness through their play. But the doll’s material history shows that part of the doll’s
life comes from its manufacturing process, which, as Gonzalez notes follows Marx’s reasoning
in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 “where the product of labour takes on a life
of its own” (341). The doll’s vitality comes at the expense of the workers, who appear wooden
and lifeless in comparison.
The doll industry thus became a source of fascination and individual developments in
doll design were equally beguiling. Early nineteenth-century inventions, including the ball joint,
moveable necks, china heads, and the use of “realistic substitutes” for hair (such as flax, silk,
16
mohair, and human hair) as opposed to paint, meant that dolls became more lifelike and
moveable, and this in turn stirred the nineteenth-century imagination (Von Boehn 155). By 1826,
dolls could close their eyes, walk by themselves, and even say “Papa” and “Mamma” when
squeezed (Von Boehn 155).
8
Dolls’ eyes proved, as with Babbage’s example, not only a
productive source of income, but a particular source of interest. Mayhew’s interview with a
London doll’s eye maker reveals that the same person made eyes for both dolls and humans
(3:242). The human eyes are “so like nature” that Mayhew describes a sensation “most peculiar,
and far from pleasant” when looking at them (3:242). The human eyes are so real-looking, that
the eye-maker claims that “There is a lady customer of mine who has been married three years to
her husband, and I believe he doesn’t know that she has a false eye to this day” (3:242). These
glass human eyes were indistinguishable from natural ones, and dolls’ eyes were often equally
convincing, giving the destabilizing effect of looking into a doll’s face and finding human-like
eyes staring back. The etymology behind the word “pupil” shows that looking into natural
human eyes has long had its own unsettling effect, blurring the difference between doll and
person. The word “pupil” derives from the Latin pūpilla, “transferred use of pūpilla female child,
also doll […] so called on account of the small reflected image seen when looking into
someone’s pupil” (“pupil, n.2”). When you look into the eyes of another, you see a small
reflection of yourself––as a doll.
With dolls, however, what was often more disturbing than the presence of realistic eyes
was their absence. In his detailed report of the dolls’ eye-making industry, Holmes’s description

8
Von Boehn attributes the first talking doll to Mälzel, the inventor of the metronome, who took
out an 1827 patent in Paris for a speaking doll (155), but Patrick Feaster notes an earlier French
patent was initially approved for Johann Nepomuk for a “talking doll, which pronounces the two
words papa and maman” in 1823-24 (para. 2). Regardless of who invented the first speaking
doll, French doll-makers were at the forefront of such innovations.
17
of “empty-headed creatures” that have heads that “are quite hollow, eyeless, and scalpless, and
with a large hole in the crown through which the eyes can be fastened,” is unnerving precisely
because of the missing eyes and open head (105). The title image (see figure 0.9) evokes this
strangeness by picturing an eyeless doll with the sign reading “BLIND” slung around her neck.
Deprived of eyes of her own, she is engulfed in eyeballs that swarm around her as insects,
amphibians, and strange legged creatures. Without her eyes, she cannot see, yet she is the object
of scrutiny from countless pupils that fix their gaze upon her, making her appear helpless and
comparably inanimate. Rows of eyeless heads and dolls await their turn for eye insertion in
further accompanying images (see figures 0.10 and 0.11), emphasizing the static nature of dolls
before receiving their eyes. In the final image (see figure 0.12), the dolls, now with eyes, take on
a vitality not possible in the earlier images, looking about the room and gesturing as if in
conversation with each other.
The doll’s ability to open and close her eyes garnered even more attention in the
nineteenth century. Early designs were relatively simple, involving a weight that rolled the pupil
back (showing a flesh-toned surface) when the doll was reclined (see figure 0.13). A range of
patents for improved doll’s eye mechanisms suggests that achieving more realistic eye
movement was highly desired by dollmakers (and presumably children and parents). Dollmakers
created eyelids, side-to-side eye movements, and mechanisms which even allowed dolls “to have
the appearance of winking” (see figure 0.14) (Purvis). By giving their dolls such gestures,
dollmakers ascribed particular personalities to their designs, imagining possible interactions
between dolls and children as the doll’s eye, already so humanlike, became increasingly deft in
its movements and expressions.
18
Along with these improved designs and material constructions, dolls began to take on
different shapes. Von Boehn notes that “[u]p to the nineteenth century all dolls were made to
represent grown women,” but this quickly changed (156). No longer tied to functioning as
miniature mannequins for the fashion industry, dolls could assume different ages. Baby dolls in
particular came into vogue and took the stage for a broad general audience in 1855, when they
were displayed at the Paris world exhibition (156). F. H. Holms notes that dolls that looked like
babies were also able to sound and act like them, due to mechanical developments: “Dolls that
lie on their backs and kick, throw up their arms, move their heads and occasionally call for their
fond parents in most approved doll fashion” (qtd. in Starr 172). From then on, baby dolls in
different forms and from varying materials were a common sight across Europe.

The Doll in Play
The emergence and popularity of baby dolls highlighted how these mass-produced and
newly designed dolls were produced for children as playthings, instructional figures, or both. As
Sarah Anne Carter points out, “To regulate the ways in which girls played was to control the
women girls would become,” and for many dollmakers the intention was to form ideal future
mothers (24). Vanessa Rutherford argues that in nineteenth-century discourses motherhood
became “glorified as a woman’s chief vocation and central definition” and that toymakers drew
on these discourses when constructing dolls (106). As a result, Rutherford concludes, the doll’s
role became that of shaping young mothers as the nineteenth century saw an increasing reverence
for motherhood (107). Baby dolls were particularly intended to teach maternal skills, such as
nursing and dressing, which readers witness in Margaret Gatti’s Florence and Her Doll (1865),
when Florence’s mother chides her daughter for changing her doll too slowly, telling her “if you
19
were dressing a real baby, it would be likely to take cold” (116). These and similar statements
remind young girls that their dolls are intended to train them in proper maternal care.
But not all dolls were designed to merely teach girls how to become comforting and
capable mothers. Gussie Louisa Wilson, in her 1894 patent application for “A Hot Water Doll,”
claims that her “invention relates to a construction of hot water vessel in the form of a doll to be
nursed by a child or laid beside the child so as to give warmth and comfort as well as amuse”
(lines 4-6). By the end of the century, dollmakers, children, and parents perceived that dolls
could be both educational and their own sources of comfort. Forman-Brunell is particularly
suggestive in tracing out how the values dolls embody changed over the course of the nineteenth
century in the United States. Forman-Brunell argues that at the beginning of the nineteenth
century dolls served as training for physical skills (such as dressing and sewing) in place of
emotion or imaginative ones and that it was not until after the Civil War that the doll took on a
more symbolic, modern function, shedding its purely utilitarian one. In this postwar era, which
saw a rise in family spending money, parents began buying more expensive European dolls for
their daughters. These dolls, unlike their less expensive and more practical forbears, emphasized
bourgeois skills, such as an appreciation of beauty, fashion, and hosting tea parties.
Complicating this narrative of the doll’s transition from the utilitarian to the symbolic,
Forman-Brunell then argues that gender further influenced the particular interests of dollmakers.
Male dollmakers, Forman-Brunell argues, tended to describe their dolls in patent applications as
toys that would “entertain” or “amuse” (4). Female dollmakers, on the other hand, were more
likely to claim in their patents the need for “safe, portable, and durable” dolls that would teach
children about relationships, particularly those of a domestic, maternal nature (such as proper
hygiene) (4). According to Forman-Brunell’s argument, both businessmen and businesswomen
20
encouraged young girls to “play house” with their dolls, but by constructing radically different-
looking dolls they did so in contrasting ways. Businessmen urged consumerism (girls could
“shop” for their dolls in the same way that mothers shop for their families) while female
dollmakers focused on more domestic activities, such as cleaning and dressing (5).
9

Compelling as Forman-Brunell’s breakdown of how gender affected the motivations
behind doll design is, it fails to consider how race significantly affected doll design and play.
Robin Bernstein’s study of dolls in the United States during the nineteenth century focuses on
how dolls are racialized and how their material construction fosters and enables racial violence
(for instance, Black dolls were more likely to be made from a material that could withstand
rough treatment, unlike a delicate white china doll).
10
Black dolls were built, Bernstein writes, to

9
While dividing up dollmakers––and their perceptions of the dolls they create––in this way
creates a clear narrative on the history of the doll, it also simplifies both the workings of the doll
industry and the figure of the doll itself. As the previous section of this chapter notes, nineteenth-
century doll production was often divided amongst many workers––including men, women, and
children––and this division carried into the twentieth century. As Forman-Brunell herself later
notes, male entrepreneurs often relied on their wives to sew dresses for their dolls, but also
claims that these tasks were considered “ancillary and feminine” by male dollmakers (48). Since
dressing dolls was considered an important part of dollplay, Forman-Brunell’s insistence on
separate spheres within the dollmaking industry risks undervaluing the contribution made by
wives and other female family members to male dollmakers’ businesses (and vice versa, for as
Forman-Brunell notes in the case of late-nineteenth century doll entrepreneur Ella Smith,
husbands were also known to provide financial support and access to factories) (77).
10
For excellent recent work that expands discussions of dolls and race beyond a Black-white
paradigm at the turn of the century, see Erica Kanesaka Kalnay’s essay, “Yellow Peril, Oriental
Plaything: Asian Exclusion and the 1927 U.S.-Japan Doll Exchange,” and her work on dolls and
Oriental attachments more broadly. Contemporary doll studies have also recently taken more
nuanced approaches to the racial politics of dolls. Aria Halliday’s recent work on Black women’s
cultural production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in her 2017 dissertation,
“Fashioning Black Barbies, Princesses, and Sexual Exppresion for Black Girls: The
Multivisuality of Nicki Minaj,” also significantly adds to work on dolls and race by interrogating
the role of Black women in Mattel’s history of Black Barbie dolls and Lisa Kay Palmer’s
dissertation, “(Re)Visioning the Female Body: The Doll in Contemporary Latin American
Narrative,” compellingly considers the role of dolls in the works of well-known Latin American
authors including Carlos Fuentes and Rosario Ferré.
21
endure: “soft [B]lack dolls persisted, told stories about endurance, and conjured a Lost Cause
wonderland” (157). Made by white dollmakers for white children, soft Black dolls suffered
violent racial fantasies in which white children practiced aggressively cuddling, lynching, and
whipping their dolls. Bernstein notes that the narrative changes when Black women sewed
racially complex topsy-turvy dolls (dolls that featured a Black character on one end and a white
one on the other), which both alienated the Black and white characters from each other (they can
“never interact”) and gave them a sense of equality (“the hierarchy could––and should––flip” if
played with as intended) (87; 88). These dolls bore different meanings for the children who
played with them: Black children, Bernstein argues, were offered “an opportunity to own and to
have complete power over a representation of a white girl” while white children were sent “to
bed with a sign of systematic rapes committed by members of that child’s race” (88-9; 89).
Bernstein’s study of the racial politics of dolls brings to the forefront how many
European dollmakers were also invested in inculcating children to value and care for whiteness.
11

Great lengths were taken in doll production to create dolls that celebrated European whiteness,
even as they imported materials from abroad. Starr notes, “Most of [the human hair] comes from
China, but it is so black that it cannot be used until the color is extracted, which is done by a
secret process that turns it into beautiful blond hair” (168). Clara Bradford’s children’s story
Ethel’s Adventures in Doll Country (1880) illustrates the white British child’s socially

11
This is not to suggest that Black dolls could not be found in Britain. In fact, one of the most
recognizable dolls from the late 19
th
and 20
th
centuries in the UK is “Golliwogg,” a doll whose
appearance carries minstrel references and that is based on the Golliwogg doll character from
illustrator Florence Kate Upton and author Bertha Upton’s series of children’s books. The first,
The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwogg” appeared in 1895 and quickly inspired
spin-off dolls, advertisements, and other collectibles (see Bernstein 158-9 for more on the links
between Golliwogg’s appearance and minstrel sources and the large role Golliwogg has played
in British consumer culture in the twentieth century).
22
constructed preference for white dolls when the eponymous character attends a circus filled with
broken toys and partakes in a minstrel show. While the Black children who perform are not
directly identified as dolls, the story presents them as extremely doll-like due to their
unrealistically small stature that aligns them with the other toys that surround the scene while
Ethel towers over them (see figure 0.15). The Black children are further aligned with dolls by
Ethel’s dehumanizing reaction to their appearance, in which she thinks of them as dirty dolls in
need of cleaning (“why can’t they scrub themselves white!”) (55). Ethel’s racist assumptions
about whiteness as synonymous with attractiveness and cleanliness echo those of Starr and the
dollmakers whose work she describes, although she presumes that whiteness lies beneath the
surface, rather than that it is, in some cases, carefully applied and created through a “secret
process” (Starr 168).
Despite Ethel’s assimilation of dollmakers’ racial messaging, both Forman-Brunell and
Bernstein conclude that children did not always readily accept socially determined lessons, and
other nineteenth-century doll scholars have pursued the theory that children often had their own
ideas, subverting dollmaker and parental expectations. Valérie Lastinger argues that violence
against dolls in nineteenth-century French literature is, in fact, violence against the ideal
femininity that the doll is understood to embody (22), while in Between Women, Marcus
compellingly argues that beneath this violence lies not a rejection of femininity, but rather a
desire for the female body that Victorian commodity culture rendered “proper” (113). For
Marcus, the aggressive feelings exhibited by girls who beat, whipped, and destroyed their dolls
were also deeply eroticized, “prompt[ing] women’s fantasies about dominating a woman” as
well as “submitting to one” (32). Eschewing discussions of violence, Mary Clai Jones suggests
that one story’s heroine successfully “repurposes her doll as a tactic to access play spaces outside
23
the circumference of domesticity and supervision” (para. 4). Gonzalez even argues that
children’s literature suggests that these acts of subversion were themselves encouraged by
Victorians who valued dolls for their ability to “nurture little girls’ imaginative powers”
(“Galatea’s Daughters” 13). What these critics all have in common, however, is a focus on play
as a transformative space where children redefine their relationship to both the doll as cultural
object and the ideologies, behaviors, and identities that they are supposed to elicit and form.
The turn to play changes the way dolls have been traditionally treated as tools of
oppression and training, for the experimentation inherent in play undoes dollmakers and other
adults’ prescribed narratives. Children imagine new narratives for themselves, sometimes
purposefully and other times incidentally. Play, in its association with the not serious, further
allows for children to engage in actions that would otherwise be considered unacceptable,
irreverent, or even taboo. Play often goes unnoticed, taking place in corners, nurseries, and the
margins of yard spaces, and, at other times, it brings to the surface that which is otherwise
unspoken and unseen. To play is to engage in a form of amusement as well as representation: one
can play a game and a character, and dolls in particular do both at once. Dolls thus function as a
circuit between play and narration, linking them together.
In “Dollplay,” I refer to repeated instances of dollplay that perform important cultural and
ideological work (often at odds with the intentions of dollmakers) as “cultural practices.”
12

“Dollplay” differentiates itself from previous nineteenth-century doll studies in its focus on how

12
This notion of a cultural “practice” I take in part from the title of Maria Edgeworth’s Practical
Education (1798). Edgeworth chose the title of her work to emphasize her manual as part of a
practice, a set of actions that were developed through observation and which could then be
embodied through repetition. Futhermore, in allowing that cultural practices are defined by play
(rather than the reverse), my approach dovetails with Bernstein’s idea of a “scriptive thing,”
which “like a playscript, broadly structures a performance while allowing for agency and
unleashing original, live variations that may not be individually predictable” (12).
24
dollplay inspired cultural practices that led to narrative experimentation. Dolls and their cultural
production most directly led to the popularity of doll narratives (stories narrated by dolls) in the
mid-nineteenth century. A subgenre of the “it-narrative,” doll narratives often appeared under the
guise of memoir, such as is the case in Julia Maitland’s The Doll and Her Friends; Or, Memoirs
of the Lady Seraphina (1862), which features a first-person doll narrator who begins her story by
confiding that she “belong[s] to a race the sole end of whose existence is to bring pleasure to
others” (1). Admitting that she can move neither hand nor foot, nor experience pain, fatigue, nor
sickness, she even implies that she cannot speak as none of her kind can “lay claim to brilliant
powers either in word or deed” (2).
13
And yet, the reader follows her story which, we discover in
the end, has been related to a pen that writes it for her. This genre appears to invert dollplay,
where the doll is the child’s confidante, making readers the confidante of the doll.
But of most interest to this project is not stories about dolls or by them, but rather formal
narrative innovations that evolved from dollplay. As children developed narrative practices in
dollplay, dollplay shaped narrative form. The best way to illustrate the relationship between
dollplay and narrative form is by taking a close look at an example from the early nineteenth
century: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Maria Edgeworth wrote in Practical Education
(1798) that the best use of a doll was to destroy it, to open it up, and experience surprise at the
secrets within: “As long as a child has sense and courage to destroy the toys,” she concludes,
“there is no real harm done” (3). The object’s destruction, Edgeworth implies, is its most
educational purpose, for by opening up the toy, children may search for further knowledge of the

13
This is not always the case in doll narratives. In Julia Pardoe’s Lady Arabella; or the
Adventures of a Doll (1856), the Lady Arabella speaks to a young girl who finds her in a trash
heap: “What, however, would be your grief could you know all that I have endured! [...] I will,
should you wish to hear it, tell you the sad story of my life” (4). Of course, the Lady Arabella’s
story is the secrets of others.
25
object’s workings, production, and material history. If the doll’s intended purpose is to be
passive, a mere on-looker and indulger in vanity, Edgeworth certainly encourages children to
follow in a different path; however, children (and, eventually, authors) do so to far more
interesting ends than Edgeworth herself seems to have imagined.
Mary Shelley, whose fantastic story about a creature who comes to life in the city of
Ingolstadt, a city lying approximately 220 kilometers south of the great toy city, Sonneberg,
created a frame narrative that mirrors children’s attempts at doll destruction. As Anna E. Clark
notes, the novel’s narrative frames have given it a structure that others have likened to “Russian
nesting dolls” with a “core of truth” at its center (253).
14
The reader, in slowly opening the
progressively smaller “dolls,” makes her way towards the novel’s “core of truth”: the voice of
Frankenstein’s creature, the novel’s final doll.
15
The reader’s inward movement affirms
Edgeworth’s call for doll destruction and reflects what Charles Baudelaire describes as the
“overriding desire of most children to get at and see the soul of their toys” (original emphasis
202). The reader, like the curious child, seeks out the soul that animates the novel.
16
As readers

14
The monster’s voice is the story that lies at the center of this framing device, which begins
with letters from the arctic explorer, Robert Walton, to his sister. Within these letters, he
encloses a manuscript documenting the narrative of Victor Frankenstein, and within that the
story of the creature he brings to life. Of course, within this is the story of Safie, and ostensibly
of her letters, but the reader is never given first-hand access to these letters––they are
summarized by the creature and so we never hear her voice.
15
Gonzalez argues that doll production articles cast the doll as a “Frankensteinian creation, made,
in the worlds of one journalist, from ‘various parts,’ which are gathered ‘from different quarters’
to ‘make the perfect doll’” (“what remains?” 341). I reverse this association, asking that we
consider Frankenstein’s creature as a doll that the young scientist builds from “bodies deprived
of life” found in churchyards (30). Frankenstein’s desire to know “Whence [...] did the principle
of life proceed?” is shared by nineteenth-century girls who “urged by that fatal curiosity which
lost the whole human race in the person of the first woman” unsewed their companions to see
what secrets lay inside (Shelley 30; Gouraud vi-vii).
16
Others have noted a connection between the text and play. Percy Shelley writes in the original
preface that the story’s genesis was founded on a “playful desire of imitation” when Mary
Shelley, Lord Byron, and himself found themselves holed up inside on a rainy evening in the
26
pull back layers of the story, they may ask themselves questions not unlike those that once
troubled the minds of young girls: If I look inside, will I find a heart––or something else? What
animates this thing that to me seems full of life and feeling? And, most hauntingly, if I were to
look inside myself, would it resemble the interior of my doll?
This curiosity is one that the novel ultimately thwarts as the creature’s last act of violence
is against no one other than himself, the final doll, erasing his “remains” to keep them from
providing any “light” to future curious generations (Shelley 155). Aware that others will pursue
him and seek out the secrets of his creation, the creature realizes that the only means of
preventing further penetration into the interior of his frame is through self-destruction. As the
creature says, “I shall quit your vessel on the ice raft which brought me hither, and shall seek the
most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this
miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch who
would create such another as I have been” (155). This prospect does not bring the creature
sadness; rather, he declares that he will “ascend [his] funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the
agony of the torturing flames” (156). The final two sentences of the novel belong to Walton, but
since they detail very little (he says only that the creature “sprang from the cabin window” and
“was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance”), the creature effectively
has the novel’s last words as well as enacts the novel’s concluding act of violence (156). But

summer of 1816 (6). Mary Shelley’s 1831 introduction not only adds a fourth person to their
group, but also expands upon the challenge proposed by Lord Byron after the group read some
volumes of German ghost stories. His suggestion that they each “write a ghost story,” is what
inspires Shelley’s own so-called “hideous progeny” (170; 173). Shelley’s emphasis on children
and offspring in her references to the book lead Marshall Brown to conclude that Shelley’s novel
is, in fact, a “child’s game” that “embodies the monstrosity that her novel intuits at the core of
childhood” (164).
27
while he may be able to erase his remains, he cannot eradicate the curiosity of future generations,
nor prevent their own endeavors to seek out and discover the “principle of life” (30).
At first, the creature’s act appears to chide readers for their curiosity, but what it in fact
does is confirm the justification for their curiosity in the first place. Gouraud argues that children
should not unstitch their dolls in search of their origins and workings, because trying to discover
what is inside the doll leads to nothing more, she claims, than vanished illusions and an “empty-
dollcase” (vii). One girl finds this to be the case when she reports, “When my brother proved my
doll had no brains by slicing off her head, I felt I had been deluded; I watched him with stoicism
and took no more interest in dolls” (Ellis and Hall 147). But Frankenstein’s creature both
tantalizingly keeps his secrets and suggests that to open him up would reveal far more than an
empty case that would leave one feeling deluded. His final act confirms that the doll contains a
secret worth discovering.

Taking up the Doll
Through considering the work of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and
Alice and Henry James, I trace out a new history of the novel as well as of women, children, and
the objects that resembled them. The following chapters each connect a particular practice that
evolved around and through dollplay to a novelist whose work invoked those practices to
reimagine the novel’s form. My first chapter, “Charlotte Brontë’s Paper Dolls” begins in a
somewhat unintuitive place: death. This chapter shows how dollplay inspired stories where the
dead return to the living and a book could stand in for a body. By examining the widespread
cultural practice of doll funerals, which parents encouraged for their children to practice the rites
and rituals of mourning, this chapter reveals that children instead discovered that doll funerals
28
allowed them to imagine the possibility of resurrection (the “dead” doll can always be retrieved).
This fiction of death’s reversibility is most clearly seen in the work of Charlotte Brontë, who
began her authorial career by writing stories with her siblings about twelve wooden soldiers
where the dead are repeatedly brought back to life, and who later sought to reanimate her
deceased sisters in her only historical novel, Shirley (1849). The novel ultimately acts as a “paper
doll,” a simultaneously material and fictional substitute for those who are gone.
Brontë imagines the book itself as a material substitute for those who are gone, but
narrative techniques within novels also sought to replace absent persons. My second chapter,
“Charles Dickens, Ventriloquist,” demonstrates how the early conversations that the first-person
narrator, Esther Summerson, engages in with her doll leads into a new reading of the split
narrative in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. In my reading, Esther Summerson is in fact the
narrator of both her own section and that of the all-knowing, apparently male, third-person
narrator with whom she shares the novel’s pages and that she uses the third-person narrator to
ventriloquize her mother’s voice, providing herself with a comfort otherwise denied her. Linking
this reading to moments in Dickens’s other writing, I argue that Dickens was thus invested in a
personal project of narrative ventriloquism that sought to recreate and redefine moments of
childhood suffering.
The limitations of this care are further drawn out in my third chapter, “George Eliot
Practices Throwing,” which considers how in dollplay children throw consciousness between
dolls (and people), creating a cycle of empathy and rejection, animating one doll while
discarding another. The vacillation between nursing, beating, and abandonment begins with
Maggie Tulliver’s dollplay in The Mill on the Floss (1860), and is eventually disrupted in Eliot’s
final novel Daniel Deronda (1876), in which readers see the abandoned doll, Gwendolen
29
Harleth, retain her hold on consciousness even as she is “put away on the shelf” by both Eliot
and Daniel Deronda. Eliot’s investment in reanimating Gwendolen at the novel’s conclusion is in
part due to her desire to reanimate another abandoned doll: Mary Ann Evans, Eliot’s childhood
self, who was put aside years earlier by her beloved brother Isaac.
If dolls can “tell” us much they can also be withholding. As dolls at the end of the
nineteenth century gained the ability for more complex speech, and even began to solicit
children’s secrets, children became adept at keeping their secrets to themselves, imagining a
form of play that became ever more internal, evasive, and private. Taking Alice James’s diary as
a model of what a text that acts like a doll (we tell a diary our secrets) can do, my final chapter,
“Keeping Secrets with Alice and Henry James,” argues that Alice’s powerful acts of narrative
refusal inform our understanding of Henry James’s late elusive novelistic style. Following this
thought a bit further, the conclusion, “Unstitching,” considers how if at the turn of the century
dolls became the method through which secrets were created (and withheld), in twentieth and
twenty-first century literature they become synonymous with the secret that lies at the heart of
narrative itself. From the dolls that contain hidden letters in A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) and
Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018) to the one who narrates Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun
(2021), dolls continue to enfold, elicit, produce, and transform narratives and the various secrets
buried within.

30
Chapter One:
Charlotte Brontë’s Paper Dolls
In dolls we find a lasting companionship that, unlike connections with people and
animals, cannot be taken from us by that cruelest of takers, for dolls, unlike living things, never
die. They may be maimed and broken, or otherwise rendered unrecognizable, and yet, they
persist as long as some part of them is still present, reassuring us that they are not gone. A doll
may be lost, stolen, or abandoned, but she still materially exists, and that unceasing existence
remains important to former doll-players, who see some part of themselves in their cherished toy.
This chapter grounds the theme of the doll as a constant friend in literary and material history,
wondering why, if dolls cannot truly die, seemingly guaranteeing the continuous presence of a
loved one, so many nineteenth-century children imagined that they did.
Indeed, the child narrator in Will Allen Dromgoole’s poem, “The Doll’s Funeral” (1897),
describes a widespread cultural practice when she recounts her own personal tragedy. She tells
us that “[w]hen my dolly died, when my dolly died / I sat on the step and I cried, and I cried,”
but after an elaborate funeral, complete with neighboring dolls “all dressed in black” and many
more tears, she confesses that she later “went out and dug up my doll again” (22). Despite her
insistence that her doll’s death “truly hurt,” the narrator reveals that neither death nor mourning
was irreversible (22). Dromgoole’s resourceful child is hardly alone in her game of funeral
dollplay: nineteenth-century literature and autobiographical accounts repeatedly report tales of
doll burials, and, even more intriguingly, resurrections. For according to the child’s logic, if it
can be buried, it can be dug back up again.
These instances of funerary dollplay are less about practicing mourning and much more
about imagining death as an impermanent state. Dolls, in their resemblance to the girls who
31
played with them as well as to others, become a means of practicing the reanimation not only of
the dolls, but also that of the players themselves and their loved ones. As the girl in Dromgoole’s
poem notes, this “funeral belonged to me” (22). This form of dollplay, I will argue, inspired
narrative practices as well, where a book, like the doll in Dromgoole’s poem, attempts to undo
loss and return the dead. This is possible for several reasons. The difference between dolls as
surrogates for adults on the one hand, and as playthings for children on the other, had only
recently emerged along with evolving nineteenth-century ideas about childhood and play; dolls
have had the aura of the funereal since their role in ancient burial practices; and doll funerals had
already become a training ground for cultural forms of femininity. But most relevant here is the
material slippage between book and doll; many dolls, even those that do not appear so, are made
from the same material as books.
1
In her article, “How Dolls are Made,” in St. Nicholas:
Scribner’s Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys, Olive Thorne speculates on the past life of a
doll in paper form, suggesting she may once have been “beautiful note-paper and carried loving
messages from one friend to another” or even, perhaps, “a book” (228). A doll made from paper
is something lodged in-between the book from which it was made and the person whom it
resembles.
No one understood this better than the Brontë siblings––Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and
Anne––whose early collaborative writings (carefully handwritten in the form of miniature books)
drew upon their play with a set of twelve wooden soldiers and featured frequent resurrections.
The Brontë siblings’ investment in reversing death is unsurprising when considering the deaths

1
A child emphasizes the interchangeability and importance of dolls and books in Mrs. Alfred
Gatty’s story, “Aunt Sally’s Life” (1862), when she asks her nurse “what she thought would
become of everything at the end of the world; whether dolls, and books, and all the pretty things
she liked so much, would be destroyed” (85). The girl’s anxiety suggests that dolls and books
become synonymous with the preservation of memory and promise life after death.
32
that they endured, particularly Charlotte, who by the age of 33 had outlived her mother and all
five of her siblings.
2
Kate E. Brown persuasively argues that the four Brontë siblings began their
early writing in “respon[se] to the deaths” of their two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, and
that the miniature books act as “beloved objects,” “function[ing] as a form of disavowal, at once
memorializing a lost love and denying its loss” (399; 398).
3
At the time of her greatest loss,
Charlotte expressed deep skepticism about the ability of written language to convey true sorrow
or memorialize the dead. As she informs Elizabeth Gaskell, she closed Alfred Tennyson’s In
Memoriam (1850) without finishing it because she “distrusted this rhymed and measured and
printed monument of grief” (LCB 2: 457).
4
Charlotte’s skepticism about In Memoriam suggests
that she hopes not for a “monument” that confirms or denies a person’s absence, but rather a
form of resurrection through fictional performance.

2
Maria Branwell Brontë died September 15, 1821 and was followed a few years later by her
eldest daughters, Maria (May 6, 1825) and Elizabeth (June 15, 1825), who contracted
tuberculosis at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge. Branwell, Emily, and Anne later
died in quick succession: on September 24, 1848, December 19, 1848, and May 28, 1849,
respectively. Charlotte lived another six years before dying on March 31, 1855 from what
biographers now consider complications with the early stages of pregnancy. Her father, Patrick,
survived his wife and all his children, passing away in 1861.
3
Critics have also noted the ways in which material objects became important signifiers for
absent relations, ones that suggest the deceased’s continued presence elsewhere. In Relics of
Death in Victorian Literature and Culture, Deborah Lutz argues that “[m]aterial things hold a
fragment of that selfhood […] and seem to ‘prove’ that this self still exists in some sort of
afterworld” (61). Susan Stewart suggestively links this phenomenon to the world of toys
specifically: “just as the world of objects is always a kind of ‘dead among us,’ the toy ensures the
continuation, in miniature, of the world of life ‘on the other side’” (57).
4
Brontë’s dislike of Tennyson is a recurring theme amongst her biographers. Juliet Barker
claims that Brontë “loathed” Tennyson (652) and Lyndall Gordon similarly concludes that she
“did not care for Tennyson” (174). Alison Hoddinott compellingly argues that much of this
perceived sentiment is due to Brontë’s first biographer, Gaskell herself, to whom the letter
referring to In Memoriam is addressed, and does not take into account Brontë’s other gestures
regarding the poet and his writing––Brontë sent a copy of the sisters’ Poems (1846) to the great
poet and also purchased a copy of The Princess (1847) as a gift for Emily during a visit to
London in 1848––nor the ways in which their work is in conversation (47-55).
33
Reanimating the dead was thus a life-long fictional practice for Charlotte, one that began
with the siblings’ early dollplay and took form in the miniature texts they wrote and constructed.
These early writings, I argue, act as “paper dolls”––that is, simultaneously material and fictional
substitutes for a body. The effort to resurrect those who are gone continues into Charlotte’s later
fiction, particularly her critically neglected novel, Shirley (1849), which, unlike the early
collaborative writings, she completed alone.
5
Charlotte began Shirley as one of four siblings, but
by the time she finished, she was the only one still living––Branwell, Emily, and Anne all died
within nine months of each other. In a letter to her editor, W.S. Williams about a “decidedly bad”
review of Shirley, she writes, “Were my Sisters now alive they and I would laugh over this
notice––but they sleep––they will wake no more for me––” (LCB 2: 272).
6
Charlotte’s letter was
written only five months after burying Anne, the last sibling that she would lose, and so she is
still mourning the loss of her sisters even as she imagines their laughter. Yet, despite her claim
that her sisters “wake no more for me,” reanimating these absent sisters is exactly what Charlotte
attempts to do through Shirley.

5
Even after the Brontës reached adulthood, they continued to plot out their novels together.
Elizabeth Gaskell notes that at the Parsonage in the evenings the sisters “put away their work,
and began to pace the room backwards and forwards, up and down […] In after years this was
the time for discussing together the plots of their novels. And again, still later, this was the time
for the last surviving sister to walk alone, from old accustomed habit, round and round the
desolate room, thinking sadly upon the ‘days that were no more’” (117).
6
In an article published on October 31, 1849, the anonymous reviewer, “Like people who put
dwarfs and monsters to keep their gates, or ugly dogs to deter idle folk from entering, so doth
this writer manage to have an opening chapter or two of the most deterring kind. What so
disgusting as the family in the midst of whom Jane Eyre is first discovered? The three curates
and their junketting, with whom “Shirley” commences, is quite as vulgar, as unnecessary, and as
disgusting […] The merit of the work lies in the variety, beauty, and truth of its female
characters. Not one of its men are genuine. There are no such men. There are no Mr. Helstones,
Mr. Yorkes, or Mr. Moores. They are as unreal as Madame Tussaud’s waxworks” (Daily News,
2).
34
Through its reanimation of Charlotte’s lost sisters, Shirley acts, then, as her final “paper
doll.” In invoking her sisters in the novels’ two heroines, Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone,
no less than in imagining their laughter over the review, Charlotte does awaken them, bringing
Emily and Anne back to life through the act of writing.
7
In the act of writing fiction, the dead are
reanimated, and that act of reanimation always was and remains to the end central to the Brontë
family narrative play. This practice began with the toy soldiers, but it is also linked with the
much larger nineteenth-century cultural practice that connects dollplay, death, and mourning. If
in the nineteenth century dollplay acted as a means of training children in the rites of death and
mourning, which also offered children a way to deny the permanence of death, for nineteenth-
century authors this dollplay, and the fiction of death’s reversibility that it inspired, extended into
the act of writing fiction itself. To understand Charlotte Brontë’s efforts to reanimate her
siblings, we must map the wider cultural practice of dolls and funeral dollplay as a means of
exploring the reversibility of death. Following this dollplay from the Brontë juvenilia to their
later novels makes clear Charlotte’s theory of how a book––a paper doll––might take the place
of a body and how fiction returns what is lost.

7
See Patsy Stoneman (24) for connections between Shirley Keeldar and Emily Brontë, and
Elizabeth Langland (127) for links between Caroline Helstone and Anne. Gaskell writes that
Brontë herself claimed of Shirley that she had “tried to depict her character, as what Emily
Brontë would have been” (277). Stoneman modifies this view, suggesting that Emily is more
successfully preserved in the novel’s elegiac descriptions of the natural world (24-5).
Biographical criticism has relied heavily on the descriptions of illness in the two chapters which
open the novel’s third volume for connecting the novel’s protagonists with Charlotte’s sisters.
Janis Caldwell argues that the “autobiographical overwhelms the fictional” during Charlotte’s
representation of Caroline’s illness, although Caroline, unlike Anne who became ill and died
shortly before the chapters were written, survives (489). Lyndall Gordon writes even more
emphatically, “Giving words to mourning, [Charlotte] often appears to be thinking of her sisters
and only obliquely of her heroine” (193).
35
Burying the Doll, Unburying the Dead
Dolls, an emblem from Sigmund Freud onward of the joys and terrors of the inanimate
come to uncanny life, have always had an intimate relationship with death. Susan Stewart
suggests that the “the actual place of toys [is] in the world of the dead,” and that toys are “always
a kind of ‘dead among us’” (57). While Stewart focuses on the doll and other toys primarily
through the lens of nostalgia, she spends less time considering these figures as a means of
exploring the “theme of death and [its] reversibility” that she briefly touches on (57). In this way,
my argument dovetails with Joseph Roach’s theory of the preservation of cultural memory
through surrogation. Roach posits that survivors find “satisfactory alternatives” to fill “the
cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure” (2). He focuses on the way
living bodies act as these “satisfactory alternatives”; my interest lies in understanding how non-
living bodies, whether material, fictional, or both, could also (and perhaps more deeply) fulfill
this need.
This is not a uniquely modern function: dolls have long been associated with both death
and an afterlife. Max Von Boehn notes that dolls (in place of living persons) were buried in
ancient Egyptian graves (78). In China, Confucius (551-479 B.C.E.) eliminated human sacrifice
by substituting “a wooden doll with movable limbs, which was placed in the grave of the
deceased” (Von Boehn 83). In England, effigies replaced the dead, rather than the living; Von
Boehn describes the use of effigies, or “funeral sculpture[s],” beginning with that made of King
Edward III who died in 1377 (90). These “life-size” figures were treated like the living version
of the deceased until the funeral, dressed in the dead person’s clothing and publicly displayed
(90). Roach provocatively notes that “effigy” as a noun refers to a “sculpted or pictured
likeness,” but as a verb “it means to evoke an absence, to body something forth [...] producing,
36
bringing forth, bringing out, and making” (36). These figures, which replaced both the living in
the world of the dead and the dead in the world of the living, performed the complicated task of
marking an absence while also bridging the distance between life and death.
By the nineteenth century, these figures had become commercial and portable as
dollmakers adapted the materials used to manufacture life-sized models for nineteenth-century
playthings (“Poured-wax dolls”). Some of these playthings took on an even closer material
relationship to the individual human form. European dolls were commonly made with human
hair in the nineteenth century and were even sometimes more specifically made with the child’s
own hair, as was the case with those from the doll-maker Armand Marseille, a producer in the
major toy-making town of Sonneberg, Germany. For example, an 1896 Marseille doll named
“Emma” was intended to serve as a reminder of her former owner’s childhood, soon to be lost to
her in her living form, but forever memorialized in her doll (see figure 1.1). By 1897, this was a
common practice, as a dollmaker in the British magazine, Home Chat, reports that “Sometimes a
doll is ordered whose wig is to be specially made of a bunch of the child’s curls to whom it is to
be given. It is a strange fancy and yet it is one that often occurs (“Stories of Successful Business
Women” 666). Even dollmakers were struck by the popularity of this desire to have a doll with a
wig from a child’s own hair.
What is new, then, to the nineteenth century is not the association of dolls with death, but
with children. As children began playing with dolls, the doll’s uncanny familiarity with death
and funerary practices became a common aspect of children’s play. Miriam Forman-Brunell
argues that doll funerals came fully into vogue in the late-nineteenth century, as young women
and girls followed Queen Victoria’s lead in mourning practices (20). Parents could purchase
mourning attire for their daughters’ dolls and fathers constructed doll-sized coffins for miniature
37
burials (22).
8
According to Forman-Brunell, the presence and production of mourning dresses
and coffins for dolls suggests that “parents encouraged funeral ceremonies meant to properly
sanctify the ‘bodies’ and protect the ‘souls’ of those poor, deceased dolls” (23). Play funerals
became popular in the nineteenth century, but the sight of dolls in mourning dress are actually
recorded as early as the sixteenth century––Catherine de Medici listed eight fashion dolls decked
in deep mourning in the inventory of her belongings after her husband’s death––showing that
evolving ideas about play, rather than a shift in material culture, was what drove this practice
(Jackson, Toys 19). Furthermore, the presence of doll funerals in nineteenth-century literature
suggests that they were happening well before Queen Victoria popularized mourning attire for
the “deceased.” Esther Summerson buries her beloved Dolly in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House
(1852-3) after leaving her childhood home, and Sophie from the Countess of Ségur’s Sophie’s
Misfortunes (Les Malheurs de Sophie) (1858) holds a funeral party for the ugly doll “that nobody
loved or regretted” (que personne ne l’aimait ni ne la regrettait) (my translation 14).
However, Forman-Brunell is correct in concluding that nineteenth-century parents
became particularly invested in training children about death and mourning and they turned to
dolls to do so. Even as adults, some women found their access barred to social forms of
mourning: according to Pat Jalland, upper- and middle-class women did not typically attend
funeral processions in the early and mid-Victorian periods on the “grounds that they allegedly
could not control their feelings” (221).
9
Doll funerals may have been a means for children of

8
See Sarah Anne Carter on the construction of toy coffins in late-nineteenth- and early-
twentieth-century America (35-7).
9
Ruth Richardson persuasively argues that in less affluent families, women actually played
critical roles in preparing bodies for burial and that women of all social classes were frequently
present at corpse viewings until the beginning of the twentieth century (17-24). Both women and
children appear at funerals in Frank Holl’s paintings I am the Resurrection and the Life (The
Village Funeral) (1872) and Her Firstborn, Horsham Churchyard (1876), and burial services are
38
participating in a ritual from which they were otherwise denied access. However, eventual access
to these burial rituals did not lessen the practice of doll funerals; indeed, records of play funerals
only increased towards the end of the century as social restrictions barring women from funeral
ceremonies relaxed.
If parents hoped that doll funerals would instruct their children in somber rites, they
might have been disappointed in the comical turns these events often took. Annie M. Preston’s
short story, “How Snip Broke Up a Doll’s Funeral” (1882), tells of a disrupted “foonal,” in
which a sly pup steals the broken doll and buries her while the children’s funeral preparations are
underway (440). In the anonymously published story, “The Dolls of the Grown-Ups” (1899), we
are encouraged to participate in a mother’s amusement as she smiles at her children “weeping
bitterly over the funeral of a doll,” but fails to make the connection to the tears she similarly shed
during a performance of Romeo and Juliet earlier that evening (97). In other stories, there are
slightly more serious, yet still humorous, consequences to the doll funerals. In “The Doll’s
Funeral: Upsetting the Village” (1895), the black crape left behind from two girls’ play leads the
whole village to assume that a sick neighbor has died. The girls, deciding to “play funeral” with
their dolls, steal their mother’s black veil and tie it to a neighbor’s doorknob (484). After doing
so, they “wailed and wept so vigorously” that the neighbor, Mrs. Stoner, asks them to leave so as
not to disturb her ailing husband (484). Unbeknownst to her, the news of the black crape on the
door spreads so quickly throughout the town that the unfortunate Mr. Stoner later picks up the
village newspaper only to learn of his own “unexpected death” (484).

even represented as beneficial to the young in George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life (1858),
where the character Amos Barton hopes “that some dim memory of that sacred moment might
remain even with little Walter, and link itself with what he would hear of his sweet mother in
after years” (70).
39
Doll funerals are often interrupted in these stories, whether by a dog, a mother, or an
irritated neighbor. These interruptions consistently highlight how resilient the children are; they
may express deep grief––weeping, wailing, and sobbing––but as soon as a new character enters
or the play is called to a halt (perhaps by the loss of the “corpse”), the children very quickly
move on to a new game. Even more strange is when the doll comes back to life, as is the case of
the eponymous doll in Mrs. Alfred Gatty’s “Aunt Sally’s Life” (1862), who has “been buried and
dug up again three times at least” (81).
10
After one burial, the youngest boy of the family digs her
back up expecting to find a “skull,” but finding only the doll’s “poor old head,” he pulls her out
and makes her a “sort of nest” in the barn for her to repose in (104). While the children take great
care to reenact burial rituals in detail, these fictional burials for “deceased” dolls remain distinct
from the somber affairs for the once-living in that we are reminded explicitly that they are, after
all, play, and we are encouraged to read them purely as entertainment for the children who
perform them.
11
In the image that accompanied Dromgoole’s poem, the grieving girl’s arm is

10
Conversely, some children refused to believe that their doll could come back to life, as is the
case with the speaker in Margaret Vandegrift’s “The Dead Doll” (1889), who tells her nurse,
“You needn’t be trying to comfort me––I tell you my dolly is dead! / There’s no use in saying
she isn’t, with a crack like that in her head” (9). Instead, the child insists on both the doll’s death
and demands a funeral where she will perform her grief: “But since the darling is dead, we must
bury her, of course; / We will take my little wagon, Nurse, and you shall be the horse; / And I’ll
walk behind and cry; and we’ll put her in this, you see –– / This dear little box –– and we’ll bury
her under the maple tree” (original emphasis 11).
11
One stunning counterexample occurs in Bernard Capes’s short story “A Doll and a Moral”
which ran in the November 1899 issue of The Pall Mall Magazine. In this story, an orphaned girl
is treated poorly by her guardian, a botanist that wishes for his ward to learn about plants rather
than attend to her doll, Eunice. In a fit of rage, he tears off the doll’s head and refuses to return
the doll to the girl. Later, the girl steals into her guardian’s rooms, takes back her doll, holds a
funeral, and then eats some of the botanist’s poisonous plants in a suicide attempt. As the girl
explains to her guardian, “It was when I came back from burying Eunice, guardian; and there
was nobody left; and then I remembered the paper that you wrote about the Cittishine; and that
you––you wouldn’t––” (412). Unable to imagine reversing the funeral and feeling utterly
unloved and alone, the girl instead attempts to take her own life.
40
flung over her face in an affected position while the other children look on passively, suggesting
that the mourning is mere show (see figure 1.2).
Yet the burials remain at once amusing and touching, and autobiographical accounts of
nineteenth-century doll funerals are similarly ambivalent about the nature of reanimation through
play. In their foundational 1896 research paper, “A Study of Dolls,” A. Caswell Ellis and G.
Stanley Hall describe how one doll-player seriously remembers her doll’s burial as a
“melancholy process” complete with a “touching eulogy,” after which they lay the doll to rest
“beside the late rooster” (147). As in Dromgoole’s poem and in Gatty’s story, dolls often manage
to find their way back to the living. One doll-player confides, “We read a chapter in the Bible,
said a prayer and buried the doll in a box. I went into the house crying and could not be
comforted but dug her up in an hour or two” (147). This habit of “resurrecting” dead dolls leads
in at least one case to a rebirth into a new identity: “We had a regular graveyard at the end of the
garden where we buried pets and dolls. When dolly had lain there a few days we dug her up and
played she was a new baby” (147). The doll-players often grieve, and deeply so, but they may
also choose to cut short their mourning at any time.
12

But as we all know, and Esther Summerson reminds us, not all dolls come back to life.
Esther abandons her doll when she departs and while it returns in her thoughts readers never
encounter it again in body; similarly, the artist Elizabeth Blair Barber claims that before her
family left Australia for England, “I buried my dolls in the garden” (Mills 18). Barber’s
biographer, Jenny Mills, suggests that even at the age of five in 1914, Barber’s doll burial
signified an ability to “leave her possessions behind––however valuable––and move forward to

12
Perhaps no one better embodies this fluid relationship between dollplay and death than Jenny
Wren, the Doll’s Dressmaker from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865): “Come up and
be dead! Come up and be dead!” she cries from the rooftop, as if unburying the living (280).
41
meet the unknown” (16). Jane Welsh Carlyle, writer and wife of Thomas Carlyle, records
performing a similar ceremony as a result of an “intimat[ion]” that she had grown too old for
dollplay: she reenacts the death of Dido with her doll by building a “funeral pyre,” and then
burning her after the doll “stab[s] herself with a penknife by way of Tyrian sword” (Froude 123;
124). Carlyle regrets her action as soon as the doll goes up in flames, but her choice of
irrevocable funeral suggests that the only way for her to move on into adulthood (and perhaps
become a writer, as the penknife implies) is to permanently resign her doll to death.
In these cases, where former doll-players actively abandon their dolls, the children and
young women declare a new life for themselves at the same time that their doll finds a final
resting place. Significantly, both Esther and Barber bury their dolls before embarking on a new
life––or even, in Barber’s case, a new world––filled with the unfamiliar and undiscovered. These
burials act in direct opposition to John Plotz’s notion of “portable property,” objects that contain,
transmit, and replicate “cultural properties” (15). Rather than transporting easily portable objects
(their dolls), nineteenth-century women and children sometimes preferred to “kill off” these
objects, an act that at once suggests that the dolls carried great cultural significance and that the
former doll-players desired to leave that cluster of associations behind them.
These doll-players choose to leave their dolls behind so that they may move on––indeed,
these dolls must be buried and left far behind out of the very fear that they might come back to
“life.” For, even when buried, dolls could always be brought back to “life,” if desired.
Discovering that the doll may not have been formerly living does not preclude the child’s ability
to imagine its animation, as is the case with one doll-player, who, on taking apart her doll, finds
that it has no heart “and so put in a small ball so it could live,” she said, “and love us” (147). As
disturbing as it might seem to hold a funeral for an object so closely aligned with oneself,
42
nineteenth-century children in fact found that destruction and burial brought about equal
promises of reanimation.
13
In this way, doll funerals often helped fulfill the promise of
resurrection: the doll, which never really “dies” can always come back to “life.”

Making it Out
For the Brontë siblings, a doll’s ability to come back to life was useful in their elaborate
war games that included, as Christine Alexander notes, “frequent battles with limited forces”
(EW 34). After one wooden soldier, named the Duke of York by the siblings and assigned the
position of king amongst the other toy soldiers, dies, he is replaced by a character named Stumps
(earlier killed, but now returned from the dead). Branwell notes that “[t]he reason why we realy
[sic] let Stumps be king was he was the same wooden soldier which the Duke of York had been”
(WPBB 161). Every time this particular wooden soldier dies, he is brought back as an alternating
personality, but the wooden soldier’s ability to reclaim his position from a previous life implies a
continuity between his existence as the Duke of York and that of Stumps. The Duke of York is
not simply replaced, but rather resurrected in the same position of power––albeit with a new
personality. The old king is never really gone.
Acting out the possible reversibility of death, dismemberment, and burial, and, indeed,
the ease with which doll-players perform this reversibility became a powerful source of narrative
potential for the Brontës, who began writing stories based on their dollplay. From the moment

13
The connection between the doll’s death and their own did not entirely escape nineteenth-
century children. A dying girl in “Aunt Sally’s Life” writes an origin story that makes the doll’s
connection to the child’s own death explicit: “Then came carpenters and cut [the tree] down, and
made it into a doll, and (perhaps) a coffin as well. So when the doll’s mistress is grown old
enough to die, there will be the coffin ready for both” (34). While the girl is eventually buried
without her doll (who is forgotten in the nursery), the girl’s fancy implies that when she looks at
her doll, she imagines her own death.
43
they began playing with a set of twelve wooden soldiers, the children saw themselves as
animators, and their invocation of fiction was a world of “making out” (Gaskell 84). Charlotte’s
childhood friend Mary Taylor recounts in a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell that the whole family
would “‘make out’ histories, and invent characters and events” (84). Once, when Charlotte was
remembering a dream about her deceased elder sisters, she stopped short and Mary adopted the
family phraseology urging her on by saying “Well! but go on! Make it out! I know you can,”
encouraging her to bring her sisters back through fiction-making (83).
The link between fiction-making and returning those who are gone is most explicit in the
Brontë children’s juvenilia, which took the form of miniature, handmade books. In these small
texts, the siblings found turning bodies into books to be both a theoretical position and a literary
practice. Charlotte demonstrates this theory in her childhood tale of Doctor Hume Badey, who,
with two fellow grave robbers, breaks into a cemetery and exhumes a coffin only to discover
stolen library books––rather than bodies––inside. “But look at this coffin!,” one of the surprised
resurrectionists cries, “If I don’t declare, it’s full of books instead of bones” (Glass Town 35).
The term “resurrectionist” plays a two-fold role here: first, in its reference to the grave robbers’
profession as “[a] person who illegally exhumes bodies in order to sell them to anatomists,” and,
secondly, as evidence of Brontë’s larger project of seeking a way to return the dead to life
(“resurrectionist, n.”). Deborah Lutz has suggested that in this story Brontë “ponders the
possibility of one transforming into the other: book into body, or body into book,” a possibility
that I take seriously here (Cabinet 26). This tale of Dr. Badey makes literal the conceptual
fluidity between text and corpse for the Brontë children: a body, once buried, is transformed into
a book, and, in this way, once again enters the world of the living.

44
The Brontë children lived in a world of resurrected books, and this evolution begins not
with the Brontë children’s own books, but with their mothers’. When Maria Branwell first
became engaged to Patrick Brontë in Yorkshire, she sent for her things back in Penzance, setting
off a series of events that would eventually become Brontë family legend. When the boat
carrying her belongings was stranded on the coast of Devonshire, almost all of her possessions
were lost to the sea. As Maria later wrote to Patrick, the box was “dashed to pieces” and “all
[her] little property, with the exception of a very few articles, swallowed up in the mighty deep”
(qtd in Barker 55-6). Among those few rescued articles were some of Maria’s books, including
issues of The Lady’s Magazine and her copy of The Remains of Henry Kirke White (1807). These
remaining artifacts from their mother’s previous life were treasured by her children; in reference
to the Lady’s Magazine issues, Charlotte later wrote that she “shall never see anything which will
interest [her] so much again” as the “old books” that “had suffered ship-wreck and were
discoloured with brine” (LCB 1: 240).
14
Unfortunately, her enthusiasm was not shared by the
entire household and one “black day [her] father burnt them because they contained foolish love-
stories” (LCB 1: 240).
Thankfully, not all of Maria Brontë’s books suffered such an ill fate. Maria’s edition of
The Remains of Henry Kirke White took on a special significance for the family she left behind.
15

14
These magazines reappear in Caroline’s library in Shirley as “some venerable Lady’s
Magazines, that had once performed a sea-voyage with their owner, and undergone a storm, and
whose pages were stained with salt water” (327-8).
15
The Brontë family treated Maria’s personal copy of the Remains as a monument to the woman
to whom the book initially belonged, but this book tellingly began its life as a memorial to its
author. The Remains was published a year after White died from tuberculosis at the age of 21,
mostly through the work of Robert Southey, who edited the papers and wrote an account of
White’s life to accompany them. Subsequent editions further emphasized the book as a
memorial, with such additions as “HIS MONUMENT SHALL BE HIS NAME ALONE” to the
half title page as well as poems written by others who read his work or visited his grave (original
emphasis Heritage 38). The accumulation of materials transformed the book into a living
45
Rather than burning this book, Patrick Brontë inked in a Latin inscription the day after his wife’s
death in 1821, stating that the book had been “saved from the waves––Therefore, it must always
be preserved” (Heritage 45). Their mother’s book, itself returned from destruction, implies her
continued presence among them after her death. That Patrick chooses to call for the book’s
eternal preservation immediately after his wife’s passing belies his claim that the book must be
saved simply because it escaped shipwreck. Rather, Maria’s absent body becomes synonymous
with the book that once returned from the brink of extinction, and in that way returns to the arms
of her grieving family.
16

That stories, and the books whose form they took, served as substitutes for an absent
body and shaped the Brontë siblings’ early writing, is an understanding that initially eluded
critics who were confounded by the small size and strange content of these early narratives (see
figure 1.3). Elizabeth Gaskell records a “curious packet” made up of tiny manuscripts in her Life
of Charlotte Brontë (1857) that are “almost impossible to decipher without the aid of a
magnifying glass” (50). The doll-sized books themselves were no larger than “postage stamps,”
scaled to the wooden soldiers (EW 3). Gaskell describes the content as “wild weird writing,”
with language and fancy “alike run riot, sometimes to the very borders of apparent delirium”

monument for White, not only preserving his name and poetry for posterity, but also allowing for
further engagements between the living and the deceased. The Brontë family continued this
practice in their own way with Maria’s copy. In addition to Patrick’s prefatory wish that the book
be always “preserved,” the Remains contains marginalia by the Brontë children, including
doodled portraits, corrections, and sums (Heritage 45). Their mother may be gone, but her book
allows for her continued presence in the day-to-day lives of her family.
16
Given Brontë’s positive associations with books taking the place of the dead, she may have
been surprised by the disdainful remarks of John Blackwood, George Eliot’s publisher, regarding
Gaskell’s biography of herself. In an April 28, 1857 letter to George Henry Lewes, Blackwood
writes that “There is execrable taste in the book, and I detest this bookmaking out of the remains
of the dead which must be so grating to the feelings of all whom the dead cared for” (GEL 2:
322-3). Eliot’s reaction was different, replying that both she and George Henry Lewes found it
“admirable––cried over it––and felt better for it” (qtd. in Henry 4).
46
(57). To Gaskell, the experimental forms and narratives of the tiny books posed more problems
than answers when it came to Brontë’s corpus.
However, by looking at these early writings, readers may see how dollplay was the spark
for the Brontës’ turn to narrative. In an account of their early “plays,” “The History of the Year”
(1829), Charlotte makes the connection between dolls and fiction explicit: “The Young Men play
took its rise from some wooden soldiers Branwell had” (Glass Town 3). This set of toy soldiers
was given to Branwell on June 5, 1826 by his father on his return from a conference in Leeds,
and, according to Charlotte, immediately sparked their imaginations. Upon seeing the box of
soldiers for the first time, she and Emily “jumped out of bed” and then she “snatched up one and
exclaimed, ‘This is the Duke of Wellington! It shall be mine!’” (3). As soon as the soldiers
appeared, they were given characters to play and narratives to act out.
Despite the joy that Charlotte depicts in this scene, an unspoken loss shadows this event.
The toy soldiers were given to Branwell one year after the deaths of the two eldest sisters, Maria
and Elizabeth, and were most likely, as Brown notes, meant “to mark the end of the mourning
year” (395).
17
Neither Charlotte nor Branwell makes a connection between the toy soldiers and
their lost siblings, but they both record how these toy soldiers became key characters in their
play, leading them seemingly inevitably to write fiction and discover their new-found power over
life and death. In his own account of that important day, Branwell states that “this History is a

17
Alexander notes that each of the Brontë siblings received a gift that day: “a set of ninepins for
Charlotte, a toy village for Emily, a dancing doll for Anne and a set of toy soldiers for Branwell”
(EW 27). The significance of the date and the presence of a gift for each child supports Brown’s
theory. Lutz also notes the proximity of the sisters’ death with the Brontës’ assumption of
authorial roles: “[n]ot long after their sisters’ deaths, the remaining children began obsessively
crafting their books […] [d]eath led them to tap a deep well of invention” (Cabinet 27). Juliet
Barker further notes that “[t]he power of restoring to life may reflect the Brontë children’s deep-
seated need to be able to give life back to their creations after the irreversible deaths of their
sisters” (161).
47
statement of what Myself Charlotte Emily and Ann[e] realy [sic] pretended did happen among
the ‘Young men’ (that being the name we gave [the toy soldiers]) during the period of nearly 6
years” (WPBB 139). The first of these Young Men stories is Charlotte’s A Romantic Tale (1829),
also later listed as “The Twelve Adventurers” in her Catalogue of My Books (1830), in which she
describes their journey to a fictionalized Africa and establishment of the Glass Town settlement,
later called Angria. Immediately after colonizing the native Ashantee, the “twelve men” begin
building a great city with the help of gigantic Genii, whom they then implore to aid in bringing
more of their countryman to defend against the indigenous population (Glass Town 8). In this
encounter, Brontë reenacts the scene in which she selects her toy soldier, reappearing as one of
the all-powerful Genii: “As soon as their chiefs saw us they sprang up from their thrones, and
one of them seizing A W and exclaimed, ‘This is the Duke of Wellington!’” (11). In her assumed
role as a Genius––whom the narrator describes as “larger than any of the giants”––Brontë both
prophesizes about future historical events (who A W will become) and alters past ones (her
memory of first selecting her toy soldier), and, temporarily at least, buries the memories of her
sisters’ loss (10).
But like the children who unbury their dolls, the omnipotent Genii regularly engage in
magical resurrections in addition to building cities and making prophecies. With the help of
“fairy remedie[s],” flying “giant[s],” and “incantation[s],” beloved characters are frequently
returned from the dead and placed back within the narrative (Glass Town 22; 24; 43). In
Charlotte’s grave-robbing tale, for instance, one character is knocked dead, but then is brought
back to life after spending two days and nights in Doctor Hume Badey’s “macerating tub” (36).
Other characters are returned in equally extraordinary ways; in fact, this event was recorded as so
common an occurrence that resurrected characters were referred to in Branwell’s The History of
48
the Young Men (1830-1) as being “made alive by the usual means” (WPBB 146). These
experiments in bringing back the dead were closely tied to the Brontë siblings’ play with the toy
soldiers, where deceased characters were returned once a body became available.
By the time she brings back Mary Percy, whom Branwell has “killed,” Charlotte is a
skilled resurrectionist. Her initial distress at learning of the Duchess’s fate suggested an
irrevocability, and she grieved the loss of a favorite Angrian character: “I wonder if Branwell has
really killed the Duchess –– Is she dead, is she buried is she alone in the cold earth on this dreary
night [...] I can’t abide to think how hopelessly & cheerlessly she must have died” (Angria 456-
7). She remarks as well on the grief felt by other characters, particularly Mary’s father
Northangerland, who would feel her loss “like the quenching of the last spark that averted utter
darkness” (457). But after dwelling in this grief, Charlotte simply brings the Duchess back. Her
preferred narrator, Charles Townshend, writes a book whose goal is to “refute a recent book by
Lord Richton (Branwell) and to relate instead his own version of events” (EW 156). This
“refutation” is The Return of Zamorna (1836), in which readers learn that Mary is not, as
reported, dead, but actually living in miserable seclusion after the false report of her husband’s
death.
In addition to experimenting with bringing characters back from the dead, this early
fiction contains Brontë first attempts to create fictional surrogates for her siblings. In particular,
the relationship between a brother and sister in Henry Hastings, written in two parts with the first
completed on February 24, 1839 and the second on March 26th, 1839, is, as Heather Glen writes,
“hard not to see [...] as redolent of the situation in the Brontë family” (“Introductory Note” 200).
Henry Hastings, formerly a well-known poet and historian, falls into drunkenness and disgrace
after murdering a superior officer, deserting, and then making an attempt on the Duke of
49
Zamorna’s life. His sister, Elizabeth, is an “unattractive young woman” of “quick perceptions”
who faces her father’s wrath in order to defend her brother (Angria 234). Elizabeth, who works
as a sort of governess to the beautiful and aristocratic Jane Moore, appears as a “a pale, under-
sized woman” at Jane’s side (239). Two months before finishing the first part of Henry Hastings,
Charlotte left her unhappy post as a teacher as Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, giving her the
time to write and to witness the early signs of Branwell’s decline after his own return to Haworth
following a failed attempt to support himself as a portrait painter.
18
As Glen notes, Branwell
associated himself with Hastings, using him as one of his favorite narrators from late 1834
onwards, and his own writings give further details of Hastings’ descent into drunkenness
(“Introductory Note” 200).
The presence of fictional surrogates for Brontë’s siblings blurs with the tale’s persistent
yearning for the dead to return to life. When out on a walk with Sir William, Elizabeth discovers
a grave marked with a single word, “RESURGAM,” or “I shall rise again” (Angria 299). In
response to Elizabeth’s query about who is buried there, Sir William mysteriously says, “I’ve
stood by this grave many a time […] and pondered over the mystery it seemed to involve till I
could have wished the dead corpse underneath would rise and answer my unavailing questions”
(299). Despite this statement, readers later learn that Sir William has, in fact, already uncovered
the grave’s secret––the monument marks the resting spot of Zamorna’s cousin and mistress,
Rosamund Wellesley, who is rumored to have committed suicide. Later, after Elizabeth rejects
him, Sir William sits alone in the churchyard, where all is “mute as death, Lady Rosamund’s
tomb alone proclaiming in the moonlight, ‘I shall rise!’” (305). Rosamund may never return in

18
See Barker (303-306).
50
body, but the story evokes a strong desire for the dead to return and answer the “unavailing
questions” of the living.
This desire only becomes amplified in Charlotte’s later writing. In Jane Eyre (1847),
young Helen Burns’s tombstone invokes Lady Rosamund’s lonely grave: “Her grave is in
Brocklebridge churchyard [...] a grey marble tablet marks the spot, inscribed with her name, and
the word ‘Resurgam’” (JE 80). Helen is the narrator Jane’s beloved friend, but she also recalls
Charlotte’s eldest sister, Maria. Gaskell writes that “Helen Burns is as exact a transcript of Maria
Brontë as Charlotte’s wonderful power of reproducing character could give” (44). The desire for
characters––and people––to return is a longstanding motivation behind Charlotte’s work, and the
passage of time does not lessen her desire for reanimating her departed siblings. All she can do is
mark the grave with a promise of return.
19

Writing becomes, then, a new form of magical resurrection. In her Roe Head Journal
fragments, written in 1836-7 while Charlotte was an assistant teacher at Miss Wooler’s school
for young ladies in Roe Head, she expresses deep irritation at constant interruptions, wearying
duties, and a lack of time to write and dwell in familiar fictional scenes. The brief fragments
contain novel scenes of familiar Angrian characters, so that in taking time to write something
new, Charlotte is also recalling her past: “I’ve sat down for the purpose of calling up spirits from
the vasty deep and holding half an hour’s converse with them. Hush! There’s a knock at the gates
of thought and Memory ushers in the visitors” (Angria 457). While she writes playfully, the

19
Graves are reminiscent of the Haworth Parsonage and the scenes of the Brontë children’s early
play. Gaskell writes that the Parsonage abuts a “crowded churchyard” and that “[t]he graveyard
lies on two sides of the house and garden” (11). Living in close proximity to both the church and
graveyard the Brontës were familiar with the sights and sounds of death, Gaskell notes, with
“funeral bells so frequently tolling, and filling the heavy air with their mournful sound––and,
when they were still, the ‘chip, chip’ of the mason, as he cut the grave-stones in a shed close by”
(99).
51
feelings she expresses a fortnight later when she is finally able to return to her writing (having
been called away) reveal a yearning for returning to her fictional world and to “that little room
with the low narrow bed & bare white-washed walls” (459). In referring to her room at Haworth
Parsonage, she suggests that to write of Angria is to return to familiar fictional scenes as well as
her home and her childhood. But, in doing so, she also implies that writing is her only means of
returning to the realms of fiction and childhood. She claims that she writes not of future events,
but of “incidents long departed of feelings, of pleasures, whose exquisite relish I sometimes fear
it will never be my lot again to taste” (459). Through writing, Brontë reanimates the characters
and scenes of her departed childhood, keeping them alive even as she fears that they are gone
forever.
In her “Farewell to Angria,” however, Brontë apparently says goodbye to her childhood
characters. “I have now written a great many books,” she writes, “& for a long time I have dwelt
on the same characters & scenes & subjects [...] But we must change, for the eye is tired of the
picture so oft recurring & now so familiar” (314). Brontë refers to these characters in the same
terms as she would use for close family members: “When I depart from these I feel almost as if I
stood on the threshold of a home & were bidding farewell to its inmates, I feel as if I had got into
a distant country where every face was unknown & the character of all the population an enigma
which it would take much study to comprehend & much talent to expound” (314). But, as Lutz
notes, Brontë puts down one persona only to adopt another. In fact, Lutz suggests that the toy
soldiers were a kind of audition for the Brontës’ later authorial personas: “Such pen names were
nothing new to the three, who had been writing under similar ones, about the lands of Gondal
and Angria, since they were children. They started with those toy soldiers, which they snatched
up, made into their alter egos, then further transformed into writing personas” (Cabinet 170-1).
52
The Brontës may have put away their toy soldiers, but they continued to imagine, create fictional
worlds, and write.

A Final Paper Doll

In her final novel, Villette (1853), Brontë makes an evocative reference to a “corpse” that
the novel’s narrator, Lucy Snowe, eventually exhumes. After her superior, Madame Beck, briefly
steals away with her letters, Lucy realizes that Dr. John will never love her (and indeed never
has): “The Hope I am bemoaning suffered and made me suffer much: it did not die till it was full
time: following an agony so lingering, death ought to be welcome” (Villette 294). Hope takes on
a material form through the letters as Lucy prepares them for burial: “In the end I closed the eyes
of my dead, covered its face, and composed its limbs with great calm” (294). The letters, at once
a “treasure” and a “grief” must be wrapped in a “winding-sheet, must be interred” (296). When
finished with her task, she lingered, “like any other mourner, beside a newly-sodded grave” for
her “deceased” paper corpse (296).
Despite the great lengths she goes to bury this dead hope (traveling to a broker’s shop to
find a bottle she can seal; burying the bottled letters in a hole; and covering this hole with slate,
mortar, and cement), readers learn in the first mention of the letters that by the time she
composes her narrative she has gone back and recovered them: “I read them in after years”
(emphasis added Villette 253). This later reading reveals to her what her earlier readings could
not: that the “vital comfort” she found in them then was based on the expression of a feeling
much more subdued (253). The elaborate funeral with its performed rites and grieving is
reminiscent of the doll funerals, in which the “body” is carefully arranged and laid to rest, only
to be dug up again at a later date and re-inscribed with a new meaning or identity. The paper
53
form of these letters further suggests that Brontë imagines manuscripts as potential substitutes
for a “body” that can be buried and resurrected as one chooses.
Lucy’s imaginative act makes explicit Brontë’s theory of the “paper doll,” in which a text
becomes a material and fictional substitute for a lost love. In opening the novel published before
Villette, readers find that Brontë returns to the “paper dolls” she once made with her siblings at
the time when she needs them most. Brontë completed the first volume of Shirley when her
remaining three siblings were still alive; but, by the time she was nearing the end of the second
volume Branwell, and then Emily, died (Cabinet 184). She did return to her manuscript, albeit
with great difficulty. On April 16, 1849, she writes to her publishers, “I try to write now and
then. The effort was a hard one at first. It renewed the terrible loss of last December strangely––
Worse than useless did it seem to attempt to write what there no longer lived an ‘Ellis Bell’ to
read” (LCB 2: 203). Anne’s death a little more than a month after Charlotte composed this letter
only magnified this loss. Charlotte works through this “terrible loss” and eventually undoes it:
through writing Shirley she creates an “Acton” as well as an “Ellis Bell” for herself to read,
reanimating her sisters as the novel’s two protagonists, Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone.
In this way, the novel Shirley, I argue, fulfills the promise of Charlotte’s tale of the
resurrectionist in which a corpse reenters the world of the living as a book. But it also does
something more: by evoking Emily’s fiction as well as her person in Shirley, Charlotte
reanimates the collaborative writing practice she once shared with her siblings, where their
stories were as interwoven as their lives.
The idea of reanimating a departed form is not something new to historical fiction, which
turns backward in order to recreate the past. However, critics have largely ignored the idea of
Shirley as a historical novel, instead largely engaging with it as a social problem novel. Terry
54
Eagleton claims that when Brontë wrote in 1848-9, she “backdated [the] subject matter,” the
1811-1812 Luddite rebellions, as a means of distancing the novel from fraught issues that might
threaten its success, and that “there can be no doubt that Chartism is the unspoken subject of
Shirley” (45). Eagleton’s claim that Shirley is undoubtably about the contemporary moment has
been echoed by other critics. In Reading the Brontë Body: Disease, Desire and the Constraints of
Culture, Beth Torgerson calls Shirley “a novel of displacements,” one level of which is reading
Shirley less as a critique of the moment in which the narrative takes place, and more as a
commentary upon the moment in which Brontë was writing (39), and Jo Waugh takes Eagleton’s
claim as a premise for her compelling reading of the connection between the fear of rebellious
Chartist forces and the threat of rabies in the 1840s in Shirley (149–51). But in considering the
novel’s backdated content as merely a mask for discussing contemporary class struggles, he and
other critics have not fully considered the ways in which this novel not only recreates but also
desires the past much more than it comments on the present.
While the historical novel is invested in bringing something that no longer exists back
into existence, Shirley goes one step further: Shirley not only reanimates, but also idealizes the
past from the narrative’s beginning. The narrator opens the novel with a nostalgic yearning for an
earlier time: “But not of late years are we about to speak; we are going back to the beginning of
this century; late years––present years are dusty, sun-burnt, hot, arid” (Shirley 5). The “dream”
of the past is clearer, more vivid, and thus more “real” than the present day within this novel.
Ironically, the “dusty,” “sun-burnt,” “hot,” and “arid” present is the future time towards which
the mill-owner Robert Moore, the man Caroline Helstone loves and eventually marries, is
constantly looking, but it is also the one from which the end of the novel eventually wistfully
looks away.
55
The novel’s desire for a return to the past becomes intimately connected to Charlotte’s
personal life, especially in light of her deep and sudden sibling losses. Smith argues, “Shirley is,
above all, a defense against time. It expresses a deep longing for an earlier state of things that it
is hard not to connect to Brontë’s bereavement” (xx). So much of what the novel longs for––and
grieves for––is associated with the Brontës’ childhood: the Yorkshire landscape, the fairies, and
the young women who live and laugh and breathe rather than lie cold, coffined, and solitary
beneath the earth. Smith notes that “Shirley doses its readers with more material reality
(epidemics, trade sanctions, famine, and life-threatening bodily injury) than Jane Eyre, but it also
comforts them with more fantasy than any of Bronte’s other novels. In this respect as in its
narrative method––third-person rather than first-person––Shirley is more closely tied to Bronte’s
early writings about Angria and Glasstown than either Jane Eyre or Villette” (viii-ix). These
Angrian references are most often linked to wild Yorkshire scenery. After refusing to enter the
church in favor of admiring the sunset over the hills, Shirley describes the landscape to Caroline
in a vision that closely resembles the Angrian tales: “I saw––I now see––a woman-Titan: her
robe of blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil white
as an avalanche sweeps from her head to her feet, and arabesques of lightning flame on its
borders” (Shirley 270). Shirley recognizes the Yorkshire heath as her “mother Eve, in these days
called Nature” (271).
Caroline and Shirley show a particular and perpetual yearning for the past that is
conveyed through their preference for open, wild spaces over confined, “civilized” ones.
Caroline says to Shirley, “We were going simply to see the old trees, the old ruins; to pass a day
in old times, surrounded by olden silence, and above all by quietude” (Shirley 179). Shirley, for
her part, by the end of the novel, fears any change and the closure the narrative has been working
56
towards. When Louis Moore, the man she will marry, presses her for a wedding date, a relief
from what he describes as his “present uncertain, unsettled state,” she responds: “Oh, yes; you
are happy! [...] you don’t know how happy you are!––any change will be for the worse!” (529).
If Shirley cannot return to the past, she can at least try to keep everything as it is, constantly
working to delay narrative progress and the passage of time. The narrator notes of Shirley that
she was prone to sitting for long periods, with the “dim chronicle of memory” as her sole book,
as if the best narrative is one that she has already lived (195).
20

The final paragraphs of the novel dwell on this incongruity between desire for the past
and inevitable change, presenting the fulfillment of Moore’s ambitions as perhaps a necessary
step towards progress, but also as an unambiguous loss. His dreams are “embodied in substantial
stone and brick and ashes” that replace what was once “green” and “wild” (Shirley 541). This
ending is a confusing one for readers, who have learned alongside Caroline and Shirley to value
the wild Yorkshire, and the novel itself hardly seems to rejoice in the fulfillment of Moore’s
prophecies. When the unnamed narrator who closes the novel asks his housekeeper what the
surrounding area was formerly like, she gives a lengthy and colorful description of the now-

20
Readers can only ever speculate on Shirley’s thoughts because despite all of the insights
Shirley shares about her preference for past times and her stalling of narrative and matrimonial
progress, readers are given less access to her perspective than the novel’s other major characters.
While Shirley offers long descriptive passages in which she narrates scenes and visions to other
characters, readers never directly see anything from her point of view. In fact, the state of
Shirley’s manuscript attests to Brontë’s difficulty in representing both Shirley’s perspective and
Shirley herself. Brontë edited her manuscripts through two particular ways: cancellations
(crossing out) and excisions. Compared to the manuscript of Jane Eyre, in which Brontë made
one excision, Shirley’s manuscript has twenty-eight (Heron 24). In fact, this was an editing
method that she used with increasing frequency in each of her novels and Villette has by far the
most excisions at seventy-one (Busy Scissors 42). Ileana Marin notes that many of these
excisions occur in Shirley during passages that refer to the novel’s eponymous character, as if,
Marin suggests, Brontë wished to pay particular care to emotional moments in which Shirley’s
character appears (Heron 24).
57
absent fairy folk. Her final sentence––“[i]t is altered now”––sounds heartbroken, a mournful
meditation that echoes her earlier comment upon Shirley: “there is no such ladies now-a-days”
(542, 541).
Brontë’s erasure of what she so deeply values reveals her theory of how Shirley is also
able to reanimate that which is lost within its pages, a reanimation that negates a later loss. Given
the loss that occurred during Shirley’s composition, it is also not surprising that returning from
the brink of death is a common event amongst the main characters in Shirley. Caroline becomes
gravely ill, but also revives; Robert Moore is shot and lies wounded for weeks before recovering;
and Shirley fears that she has contracted rabies, which turns out to be a mere scare. Nowhere is
this clearer than in the case of young Jessy Yorke, whom the narrator refers to as “the doll,” and
who we learn will die young (Shirley 128).
21
This death happens beyond the novel’s pages, but
the narrator comments twice, both times at length, on the impending tragedy. Early in the novel,
even before the entrance of the eponymous heroine, readers learn that Jessy, her father’s “pet,”
will die young, alone with her sister, Rose, in a foreign country, “tranquil and happy” in her
sister’s arms (128; 129). Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith read the sisters as Charlotte’s
“fictionalized portraits” of her friends Mary Taylor and her sister Martha (Rosengarten and
Smith 554). Martha died on Oct. 12, 1842, while at school in Belgium with her sister, and Jessy’s
fate, which has yet to occur, seems poised to recreate this loss (554).
And yet, even if the novel does not grant Jessy (and so, Martha) a happier fate, the
narrator temporarily reanimates her by lingering on happier times. In fact, mentioning her
impending death actually emphasizes her vivacity within the novel’s pages. In a second allusion

21
With no explanation, Brontë changes the spelling of Jessy’s name to “Jessie” at the end of
Volume II in Chapter XII: An Evening Out. For the sake of consistency, I exclusively use the
initial version.
58
to Jessy’s nearing death, the narrator dwells at length on the site of Jessy’s grave where the
“doll” now lies buried––“cold, coffined, solitary”––unable to rise again (Shirley 128; 343). The
narrator emphasizes the vacancy that Jessy leaves behind: a “gap, never to be filled,” whether by
herself or another (343). In doing so, the novel claims that she cannot be replaced, and yet,
because this tale is told retrospectively, the narrative brings Jessy to life once again. The novel
thus acts as a surrogate for the “lost darling”––even as the novel claims that no surrogate is
possible (343).
Yet, the novel’s dwelling on past scenes––like Brontë’s letter to her editor about her
absent sisters––suggests that the past can, to some extent, be reanimated. Even if it can never be
fully brought back to “life”––like the doll that always occupies a place of ambiguity, neither
alive nor dead, yet endowed with “feeling” and sensation––it can begin to be paradoxically both
present and beyond reach. Brown argues that Brontë’s turn to realism and the novel form
demonstrates how “sustaining the presence of the dead finally fails to invigorate the living”
(415). The turn to “the real,” then, is ultimately a “rupture” signifying how “keeping ‘the dead
among us’ loses its satisfactions when the living experience themselves as buried alive, as
Charlotte recurrently described the life of a governess” (Brown 415). The realist novel, Brown
argues, is Charlotte’s attempt to create a different space for herself and her siblings where they
may find fulfillment. If Brown argues that Charlotte disavows the material objects of their
Angrian legends, though, I suggest that it is not that she develops a new project of sustaining the
dead, but rather that this project evolves into a purely fictional one.
The confusion between spiritual and material, past and present, present and future, recurs
in Caroline’s narration. Caroline, thinking of Shirley and Robert as “two great happy spirits,”
appears to look both backward and forward to what lies “beyond the death-flood” (Shirley 197).
59
Caroline speaks like one who has already been left behind, a “poor, doomed mortal” among
shadows (197). However, this is hardly true; Shirley and Robert may appear ghostly, but they
are still present before her. As Caroline says, “They look to me like two great happy spirits”
(emphasis added 197). The reader is aware that they have been set apart, but also equally so of
the fact that this is only in appearance––and only to Caroline––who regularly fails to understand
her relationship with Robert and his to others. After confessing to Shirley that she has kept and
valued a lock of Robert’s hair, she insists that she is a “fool”; Shirley, however, responds,
“Weak, certainly; but not in the sense you think” (194). Later, the narrator suggests that
Caroline’s perceptions of the relationship between Robert and Shirley are at least slightly
misconstrued. When the three are gathered at Fieldhead, the narrator describes Shirley as “all
interest, life, and earnestness” before Moore, while he is likewise “serious” in his feelings and
“settled” in his views (211-2). Shortly after, however, the narrator admits that the representation
of the pair was actually “Caroline’s ideas of the pair: she felt what has just been described”
(emphasis added 212). The narrative thus gives the reader a large amount of access to her
perceptions, but then also undercuts the validity of those impressions.
This doubled feeling that the reader experiences (something that simultaneously is and is
not) mirrors Caroline’s conceptions and visions of Robert. She perceives Robert as a spirit where
he is and in spirit form where he is not. Indeed, she finds that Robert’s absence takes on a
material presence for her: “When she returned to her chamber, it was to meet the memory of
Robert [...] she was with Moore, in spirit, the whole time: she was at his side: she heard his
voice: she gave her hand into his hand, it rested warm in his fingers” (Shirley 218). Robert’s
body initially proves an obstacle to intimacy. As soon as he is physically absent, Caroline is able
60
to conjure his spirit. This spirit then takes on a material form that allows her to experience his
physicality even in his apparent absence, making her memory of him very much alive.
Caroline is not alone in her doubled and intertwined perceptions of past and present,
material and spiritual; Moore, too, describes Caroline as a spirit (despite her insistence that she is
none): “I seemed to see a figure resembling yours [...] I walked up to this group; what I sought
had glided away” (Shirley 215). Later, he professes that her spirit form lingers longer, allowing
him to imagine that he could reach out and touch her: “For half a second, your fresh, living face
seemed turned towards me, looking at me; for half a second, my idea was to go and take your
hand, to chide you for your long absence, and welcome your present visit” (215). Despite
beginning with an acknowledgement that he saw only a “figure” resembling Caroline, by the end
of their conversation, he emphasizes her “fresh, living face” and a desire to take her hand in his.
The longer he dwells on the image, the more tangible it becomes. The temporal and formal
layering in which both Caroline and Robert indulge has the effect of materializing the absent
form. Both Caroline and Robert express a desire to materialize spirit forms, somehow to “touch
the actual past,” bringing a memory into the living present and, perhaps, preserving it for the
future (original emphasis Schneider 9).
And yet, the novel seems to reject surrogate companionship, scornfully dismissing dolls
as childish things. Young Martin Yorke claims that he means “always to hate women” as they’re
“such dolls” while Caroline’s uncle, Mr. Helstone, prefers to think of women as “toys to play
with,” and so the neighboring Harriet Sykes who refuses to “be treated quite as a doll, a child, a
plaything” cannot be a favorite with him (Shirley 136; 100). Charlotte, like Harriet, expresses
disdain with dolls and any association with them in a letter to Emily. After taking a post as a
governess for John Benson Sidgwick, she writes that she is disheartened “with oceans of
61
needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslin nightcaps to make, and, above all things, dolls to
dress” (LCB 1: 191). Despite her dislike for this chore, Charlotte’s own dresses were later reused
for dolls’ clothing after her death. Lutz notes that unlike relics left behind by Dickens or Shelley,
Brontë artifacts were refashioned into household items such as aprons as well as dolls’ dresses
before being sold to collectors (Cabinet 247).
If Charlotte perceives dolls as the signs of insignificance and tedium, then it is not
surprising that the novel’s heroines, Caroline and Shirley, also distance themselves from such an
association. Speaking of men, Shirley tells Caroline, “their good woman is a queer thing, half
doll, half angel” and “often quite artificial” (Shirley 296). Shirley’s “half doll” represents
something that does not exist and that the female characters do not find desirable––that is, the
male idea of a “good woman” that is constructed from various “artificial” ideals. Caroline herself
scorns being read as a doll––or a child still interested in playing with one––after her uncle
dismisses her notion of becoming a governess with “Put all crotchets out of your head, and run
away and amuse yourself” (163). “What with?” asks Caroline, “My doll?” (164).
In answer, we might ask: “why not?” The novel’s representation of dollplay as childish,
trivial, and short-lived both disavows and thematizes its own origins in dollplay, and while
Shirley and Caroline may very reasonably desire not to be treated as dolls, their incarnation of
Emily and Anne means that they do in fact act as dolls, reanimating those who are gone. Shirley
returns much that is personally familiar and meaningful to Charlotte: in addition to the Yorkshire
landscape and characters, the Brontë Parsonage and personal events from Charlotte’s life
similarly find their way into the novel.
22
Caroline tells Shirley and Mrs. Pryor that “graves” are

22
It is also significant that Shirley is Charlotte’s only novel that explicitly locates itself in
Yorkshire (while Jane Eyre describes what is almost certainly Yorkshire when she arrives in
62
rumored to lie beneath the out-kitchens, echoing rumors surrounding the Brontë home (Shirley
202).
23
Shirley also repeats specific episodes from Emily Brontë’s experience, in addition to
embodying her gestures and habits. The rabies scare Shirley endures recalls an instance with
Emily. Shirley, frightened after learning that a neighboring dog who has just snapped at her arm
is “raging mad,” quickly and silently walks into the laundry, and, while no one is looking, picks
up the iron and cauterizes the wound in her arm (426). Emily acted likewise during a similar
incident: worried about rabies after being bitten by a strange dog, she walked into the kitchen,
picked up a hot iron, and bore it into the wound to burn away any infection. Both Shirley and
Emily then wait until later to tell anyone of the incident, so as not to trouble those with less
presence of mind or strength of spirit.
24

The novel may make a show of Shirley’s self-possession in the face of a rabies scare, but
the threat of death constantly runs through it. This anxiety about what happens to a person after
death becomes most pronounced at the beginning of volume three, written shortly after Charlotte
lost Anne, her sole remaining sibling. This final volume begins with the chapter, “The Valley of
the Shadow of Death,” in which Caroline suffers from a dangerous fever (Shirley 351).
Caroline’s sudden change in eye color from “brown” to “blue” in the previous chapter suggests
the extent to which Charlotte was thinking of her sister, for Anne’s eyes were, according to their
friend, Ellen Nussey, “violet-blue” (Shirley 162, 340; Nussey 112)
25
In the midst of her illness,

Whitcross, a “north-midland shire” surrounded by “great moors” and “waves of mountains,” she
does not name it as such) (JE 275).
23
C. Mabel Edgerley writes that “Charlotte Brontë told Mrs. Gaskell that she believed the
Parsonage was built over part of the churchyard, and that there were graves below it” (29).
24
For a full account of this event, see Gaskell (214).
25
See J.M.S. Tompkins for an extended and detailed discussion of how Caroline’s change in eye
color at such a “significant point of the tale” suggests that “when Caroline lies down on her bed
of sickness the identification with Anne takes place” (22). Tompkins suggests that Caroline’s
opening of her “blue orbs” in the concluding chapter of Volume II indicates that Charlotte went
63
Caroline ventriloquizes Charlotte’s thoughts when she thinks to herself, “Can the dead at all
revisit those they leave?” (Shirley 356). For Caroline, the answer to this question lies in the
Yorkshire landscape. She wonders, “Is it for nothing that the wind sounds almost articulately
sometimes […] Does nothing, then, haunt it––nothing inspire it?” (356). Caroline is torn between
believing that the wind carries the voices and sorrows of those who are gone and (the far worse
alternative) that the wind is not haunted, that it is empty and that the dead remain dead.
Caroline’s desperate questions haunt Shirley at the same time they resurrect Emily’s
novel, Wuthering Heights (1847). When the novel’s frame narrator, Mr. Lockwood, visits
Wuthering Heights during a windy night, he wakes from a nightmare visitation from Catherine
Earnshaw’s childhood ghost whose “ice-cold hand” scratches outside his window (WH 20). After
learning of the episode, Heathcliff desperately calls “Come in! come in!” out into the wind and
snow, urging the ghost to visit him (23). For Heathcliff, the angry and elusive wind is
synonymous with Catherine’s immaterial form. But unlike Lockwood, Heathcliff receives no
such visitation. He digs up her grave twice in the attempt to reach her: the first time he stops
because he believes that she was “not under [him], but on the earth,” and the second time he
knocks “one side of the coffin loose” and bribes the sexton to pull the side away, along with that
of his own when he is laid to rest, so that their remains may mingle together (221, 220).
Heathcliff fails because her spirit is no longer tied to her body, nor even fully to the
landscape that she loved, but, as Ann-Marie Richardson compellingly notes, to her “library” that
takes the place of her corpse in the “oak closet” where Lockwood lies (Richardson 137; WH

back and rewrote this chapter after the identification between Caroline and Anne became
complete in the opening of Volume III (Shirley 340; Tompkins 22). Whether or not Charlotte
revised this chapter after losing Anne and composing “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” the
change in eye color implies that Charlotte began to associate Caroline with Anne at this point in
her narrative.
64
20).
26
Before Catherine’s ghostly visitation, Lockwood discovers a shelf inside her box bed,
filled with “mildewed books” and “writing scratched on the paint” (WH 15). The writing is her
name, which “swarms” through the air when Lockwood doses off, “all vivid as spectres” (16).
Her books and writing become a tangible reminder of name and presence, and when they are
disturbed, so is her spirit. These reminders are important because nothing, as Catherine tells
Heathcliff, is worse than being forgotten: “I wish I could hold you,” she says, “till we were both
dead! […] Will you forget me––will you be happy when I am in the earth?” (124). Charlotte
writes to remember, to disturb the spirit and have her sisters return to be with––and to write
with––her once again.

Charlotte, Unfrozen
There is one doll with whom it is tempting to imagine Charlotte Brontë playing: one of
the nineteenth century’s most popular dolls, the Frozen Charlotte, who tellingly shares Brontë’s
name (see figure 1.4).
27
These dolls were miniature china or bisque figures (so their limbs could

26
Lutz further notes how Heathcliff climbing into Catherine’s bed echoes his climbing into her
grave, implying a connection between coffin and box bed (Cabinet xx).
27
Bonnie Taylor-Blake notes that these dolls may not have commonly been referred to as Frozen
Charlottes until the mid-twentieth century as “the so-far earliest mentions of a doll called Frozen
Charlotte and couplings of the doll with the legend appear in American newspapers in the mid-
1940s.” This view is supported by doll collectors who claim that the name “Frozen Charlotte” is
a modern invention. Nina B. Shepard complains, “I cannot but feel we collectors probably
prompted by dealers are making a serious and misleading mistake in coining names for various
dolls. If the trade mark is on the doll, well and good, then it is a Jumeau, a Brue, a Lerch and
Klagg etc. But when we speak of Frozen Charlottes (which really gives me the chills regardless
of the legend) Jenny Linds, Mary Todd Lincolns and numerous other names we are not carrying
out an original idea (although we may be initiating one) or a patent title but using our own
ingenuity to tag certain dolls with definite names and cheapening the doll by so using modern
ideas or sellable names” (305).
65
not be articulated, hence “frozen”) that were produced in Germany in the 1850s (Davis 78).
28
But
their manufactured stasis carries metaphorical weight as well: these “frozen” dolls were
associated with Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith’s 1841 ballad poem, “A Corpse Going to a Ball: A
Ballad,” in which a young girl named Charlotte freezes to death.
29
The poem was supposedly
based on an actual event first reported in the New-York Observer, during which a young woman,
too vain to cover herself with a blanket en route to a New Year’s ball, arrives as a frozen
corpse.
30
The story was popular, running in several newspapers as a commentary on society’s
scandals: as the New-York Observer exclaims, “the most shocking part of the tale” is not that the
woman arrived “dead––stone dead––frozen stiff––a corpse on the way to a ball,” but that “THE
BALL WENT ON!!!” (1). Smith’s poem appeared after the story’s circulation, focusing attention
on the woman at the episode’s center rather than the callous living ball-goers. Enacting Brontë’s
fears, the woman, who begins with a “laughing eye” and heart that is “warm and light,” is
quickly transformed into “a monument / That hath no power to stir” (Neapolitan 1). Despite her
escort’s attempts to rouse her, she answers with “not a word” and her limbs remain “cold and

28
Laura Mager Davis also notes that a Frozen Charlotte was also commonly referred to as a
badekinder or “bathing child” (78). This name derives from the popularity of the dolls as bath
toys, due to their ability to float.
29
Smith’s poem originally appeared in The Neapolitan (Naples, NY) on January 27, 1841 under
the name “Mrs. Seba Smith.” It reappeared in The Rover, a Maine newspaper, on December 9,
1843 as by “Seba Smith” (the name of Elizabeth’s husband) and was then reprinted widely. The
ballad was set to music around this time and became a well-known American folk song (See
Agugliaro).
30
More likely, as Agugliaro notes, this account was inspired by an account called “Death at the
Toilet” from Samuel Warren’s Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician that was published
serially in Blackwood’s Magazine from 1830 to 1837, and which the writer of the New-York
Observer directly mentions. The stories are remarkably similar, but the New-York Observer
distinguishes its tale by claiming that unlike Warren’s story, which has too much “romantic
interest” to be factual, its story is “a sad and solemn tale of truth” (original emphasis 1).
66
hard as stone” (1). The small china dolls that gained in popularity a few years later were likewise
silent and immovable.
Brontë would have liked these dolls for she, too, dwells at length on the frozen fate of
others.
31
From her musings about the death of the Duchess of Zamorna lying buried “alone in the
cold earth on this dreary night” to Jessy lying “cold, coffined, solitary” to her thoughts of Emily
shortly after her death, lying in the earth while Charlotte hears “the wind blow and feel[s] the
cutting keenness of the frost,” she cannot stop from imagining her loved ones cold and alone
(Angria 456-7; Shirley 343; LCB 2: 159). Emily may no longer feel the cold in her final resting
place, but Charlotte does, and while the wind blows and she comforts herself that her sister no
longer suffers from it, she still pictures her, unfeeling, out in the unwelcome elements. Whether
it is the cold or the isolation that instills the most fear in Charlotte, the image of icy bodies
enclosed in their coffins haunts her for the entirety of her writing life.
32

But, despite these musings on chilly, lonely graves, Charlotte brings warmth to these now
absent bodies, thawing their forms and bringing them to life in her writing. In doing so, she
reanimates loved ones and brings them back into her embrace. It is as if one of the Frozen
Charlottes comes to life in the palm of her hand, its limbs coming free from their paralyzed state.
Charlotte makes explicit this desire to bring the cold, frozen form to life and feel the living body
with her own hands in a letter to Williams: “I could hardly let Emily go––I wanted to hold her

31
Charlotte shared this impulse with Emily, who penned the lines, “Cold in the earth, and the
deep snow piled above thee! / Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!” (Davies, Selected
Poems 82).
32
Considering Charlotte’s fixation on cold and lonely women, it is not surprising that when
imagining a lonely child, the young Jane Eyre, Brontë gives her a doll to keep “safe and warm”
(JE 23). In Brontë’s 1847 novel, Jane Eyre, the eponymous narrator opens with tales of her
childhood unhappiness, telling us that her doll alone stayed with her as she “sought shelter from
cold and darkness in [her] crib” and that she “could not sleep unless it was folded into [her]
nightgown” (JE 23).
67
back then––and I want her back hourly now” (LCB 2: 216). If only, like the girls who went back
and dug up their dolls, Charlotte could seek out her sisters and reverse the funeral, returning
them to the world of the living. To some extent she does exactly this, for, in Shirley, Emily and
Anne finally find their way back into Charlotte’s hands as a book––a paper doll instead of a
living body––folds into her grasp.

68
Chapter Two:

Charles Dickens, Ventriloquist

Charles Dickens may not have had a doll as a child, but in adulthood he became adept in
the art of dollplay, regularly performing a magic trick in which “he cause[d] a tiny doll to
disappear and then to reappear with little messages and pieces of news for different children”
(Rose 160).
1
In this act, the tiny vanishing doll supposedly travels a great distance to obtain
information and then reappears with a message, making explicit the doll’s role as a conduit of
information. Before the doll would disappear, she would “request” a traveling fee, and Dickens
would give her a coin. The exchange of a coin for a message thus allowed Dickens to engage in a
form of silent ventriloquism, “speaking” through the doll, an act that he would recreate in his
fiction to powerful effect. This chapter connects the nineteenth century practices of public
ventriloquism and of children speaking both to and through their dolls to Dickens’s narrative
experimentation in Little Dorrit (1855-7), Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), and, most especially,
Bleak House (1852-3). In these works, Dickens’s dollplay becomes invested in the fantasy of a
connection to a doll that “speaks back,” using acts of ventriloquism to create an exchange of
stories that provide imaginary companionship.
Dickens’s novels are filled with lonely children and it not surprising that they would be in
need of imaginary companions with whom they can share their troubles. Dickens’s last
completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, invokes acts of silent ventriloquism when the dolls’

1
For a particularly sensitive description of this routine, known as “The Travelling Doll Wonder,”
and the relationship between Dickens’s secular magic and fiction, see Pittard, “The Travelling
Doll Wonder” (283-85). Pittard also connects this conjuring act to Mark Lemon’s The Enchanted
Doll: A Fairy Tale for Little People (1849), a tale about a jealous dollmaker who finds his ill will
embodied in a Black doll given to him by a fairy called Malice. As Pittard notes, this tale is
further tied to the Dickens family through its dedication to Mary and Kate Dickens (“Travelling
Doll” 298).
69
dressmaker, Jenny Wren, acts out a conversation with Mrs. Truth, a doll that formally observes
Jenny’s meeting with the school master, Bradley Headstone. The doll does not speak, but she
does not have to do so. Her role as a “witness,” the mere suggestion that she might speak, or
rather, that Jenny might speak through as well as to her, threatens and provokes Bradley, even as
she provides support to Jenny (337). Each time Bradley makes a false claim about his motives,
Jenny appeals to Mrs. Truth––“Oh Mrs. T!”––until finally, in disgust, she turns the doll with her
face to the wall so as not to force her to witness any further degradations (338). Unlike herself,
Jenny implies, Bradley is incapable of the narrative mastery necessary for such tricks of
projection and deception (“I know your tricks and manners, my friend!”) (337).
For Dickens, his characters are his dolls through which he regularly speaks, playing the
part of master ventriloquist. Since he is pulling the strings behind each character, he also speaks
to them, through the form of one character to another. In this chapter, ventriloquism is defined as
whenever a “voice” (I interpret “voice” broadly here as including knowledge position, tone, and
other identifying factors) of one person or character appears in a place where that person or
character is not. Critics have previously referred to the voices in Dickens’s novels as acts of
skillful ventriloquism; as Patrick O’Donnell muses, “Dickens, no doubt, delighted himself and
his readers with the early discovery that he was capable of ventriloquizing a capacious
assortment of ‘typical voices’” (247-8). This chapter expands upon O’Donnell’s attentive reading
of ventriloquism in Our Mutual Friend by aligning Dickens’s ventriloquism not only with
professional public spectacles, but also with children’s private acts with their dolls, showing that
for Dickens, ventriloquism was not about mockery and trickery, but rather about creating
imaginary companions who replaced absent and insufficient others. This approach plays the two-
fold part of acknowledging the narrative significance of children’s dollplay and of uncovering
70
new ways of reading Dickens’s novels that are far more intimate than public spectacle would
typically allow. Rather than simply attempting to capture the voices of the strangers and world
around him, Dickens was invested in a personal project of narrative ventriloquism that sought to
recreate––and, in the case of Bleak House, redefine––moments of childhood suffering.

I. Imaginary Companions
In the nineteenth century, Pittard argues, “ventriloquist acts reached new heights of
popularity” (“Ventriloquism” 1). Performers such as Monsieur Alexandre performed
complicated one-man shows at the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand, changing costumes along with
voices, creating a popular fascination with vocal play where voices are sent into other bodies and
spaces, appearing to emanate from them. As George Smith writes in his biography of the
accomplished ventriloquist, William Love, nineteenth-century ventriloquists, or polyphonists,
not only achieved new heights of popularity, but also of ability: “The ventriloquists of the
nineteenth century made great additions to their art […] Besides the art of speaking by the
muscles of the throat and abdomen, without moving those of the face, these artists […] [were]
able to carry on a dialogue in which the dramatis voces, as they may be called, were numerous”
(21-2). These complicated public spectacles were a far cry from those of the late eighteenth
century, in which “the simple Ventriloquist, with his thin, solitary, fictitious voice, usually given
to the insignificant automaton he carried in his knapsack,” was the height of ventriloqual
performance (Smith 3). Ventriloquist acts were an increasingly cultivated art form,
experimenting with ever more voices, sounds, and effects.
These new performances captured the public imagination, reshaping perceptions of the
voice and its origin, often with comic results. Henry Cockton’s novel, The Life and Adventures of
71
Valentine Vox, Ventriloquist (1839-40) captures the potentially humorous consequences
following the confusion between speaking voice and its point of origin as the eponymous
protagonist causes a series of public disruptions for his own amusement. Valentine uses
ventriloquism to provoke others, as when he speaks through a waxwork at a public exhibition,
fooling a vain young man into thinking that he has affronted the wax representation of an old
man. When the young man realizes his deception, he is amazed (“And yet, whence could the
voice have proceeded? The thing was inanimate!” he wonders), and Valentine leaves him to his
befuddlement, pleased to have played a joke on a “decided Narcissus” (230; 229). Cockton’s
examples of ventriloqual tricks mirror those played by real-life polyphonists, who were similarly
delighted to deceive those that they found ridiculous. As a boy, Love visited “an elderly lady”
who possessed a much-loved and spoiled pug dog (Smith 4). Observing the pug wander out of
the room, Love went into a passage and imitated the sounds of a mastiff attacking the beloved
pet, terrifying the elderly lady who believed that the pug had been torn apart by the guard dog
and who ran to the passage only to be met by “the laughing countenance of our hero” (4).
Nineteenth-century ventriloquism was defined by acts of public spectacle at someone’s expense,
finding humor in discourses that confused, frustrated, and frightened the subject of the
ventriloquist’s play.
But there was another kind of popular ventriloquism that also occurred in the nineteenth
century to very different effect: that between a child and her doll.
2
Children were not as

2
Critics of nineteenth-century ventriloquism and ventriloqual metaphor have relied on modern
understandings of ventriloquism that feature a ventriloquist and dummy: Helen Davies’s study of
ventriloquial metaphor between Victorian and Neo-Victorian texts relies on the fact that “the
word ‘ventriloquism’ conjures up the image of a person making a dummy appear to speak” and
David Goldblatt similarly finds that artistic interpretation asks that artworks act “[l]ike
ventriloqual dummies” (Davies 6; Goldblatt xi). However, Pittard notes that “The more familiar
model of dummy ventriloquism, with the performer in close relation with a single externalized
72
successful in their illusion of vocal distance and tone, but the speaking abilities of their dolls
frequently seemed just as real to the very children who performed the act. Just as ventriloquists
are said to “throw” their voices, appearing to send them through the body of the puppet poised on
their knee, so did children create the impression of tossing their voices back and forth,
alternating between the one who speaks, and the one who listens. Often private and sometimes
silent (the doll’s voices are only “heard” or spoken by the child), these acts of projection do more
than merely entertain an audience. In their 1896 survey of dollplay, Ellis and Hall asked children
if a favorite way of playing with dolls included “Making imaginary companions of your dolls to
talk with and tell your secrets, or to build air castles with?” (131). The emphasis on “companion”
suggests that a child’s acts of ventriloquism with their dolls are meant to provide comfort that is
otherwise denied them, and Ellis and Hall’s interest in the contents of these conversations as
containing “secrets” further implies that the doll takes on a role of vital importance. But the doll
is not merely a receptacle for a child’s secrets. Ellis and Hall ask not only about the doll as a
companion to which a child can “tell [her] secrets,” but also about how a child “talk[s] with” and
“build[s] air castles with” the doll, stressing the doll as a vehicle through which children engage
in full two-sided conversations.
And converse they did––several doll-players in Ellis and Hall’s study describe their dolls
as “talkative” (137). One doll-player admits, “I supposed [my dolls] were real children and
would talk to them and laugh” and Julie Gouraud writes in Memoirs of a Doll (1856) that with
her doll a child could “carry on a conversation; she is one of the family, a part of the household”

persona, was first devised in the eighteenth century but fell out of fashion in the nineteenth and
was not resurrected until the 1880s” (“Ventriloquism” 4). While the dummy may have been
missing in public performances of ventriloquism, the doll was still very much present children’s
private ventriloqual acts.
73
(Ellis and Hall 138; Gouraud vi). These players, proficient in the ways of ventriloquism, engage
in self-authored dramas with their inanimate companions. Unfortunately, the fact that children
are responsible for speaking the doll’s voice was not always apparent to all doll-players. As one
sadly reflects, “My cousins would get and talk to my doll and report her answers. It hurt me that
she should talk to them while she never would to me, and I would gaze at her expectantly when I
got her back, hoping she would some day open that rigid mouth and talk to me” (Ellis and Hall
139). To hear the doll’s answers, the child must be willing to take on an active role rather than
fruitlessly hoping and waiting for the doll to open her “rigid mouth.”
To what ends doll-players took on this active speaking role varied widely. For some,
dolls performed the task of confidante that Ellis and Hall imagined. In an interview about a Paris
doll exhibition, an “old lady” tells The Ladies’ Treasury [n.d.], “I used to love my doll merely
because I wanted to love something and because it was a doll. I learned how to talk in speaking
to it” (592). The elderly woman’s conversation with her inanimate plaything doubled as an
expression of love and as a means of practicing future conversations with others. Children were
similarly comforted by speaking to their dolls: one claimed that “I went to dolls with all my
childish trials and felt relieved when I had poured out my heart to them,” while another insists on
telling her dolls not just her stories, but those of others, admitting that “[a]ll stories that [she]
heard were told over to [her] dolls” (Ellis and Hall 138). These dolls brought comfort to lonely
girls, as is the case with Athénaïs Michelet, who writes in her 1867 autobiography, The Story of
My Childhood, that driven by “extreme loneliness” she made herself a doll that she kept hidden
in a shed, and with which she would hold “endless dialogues” when alone (28). These
conversations forged a treasured bond: “I was her mother,” Michelet explains, “and she loved
me” (27).
74
Other doll-players used their ability to ventriloquize their doll’s words for more
mischievous purposes: one child, “[i]if reproved, would say, Rosa [her doll] told me I might, or
Rosa broke it,” while one parent reports of another child that when she is “corrected for bad
language, [she says] her dolls use it” (Ellis and Hall 139; 140). Dolls were scapegoats from
whom children could easily elicit confessions or make into ready accomplices, but they were not
always afterwards rewarded for their support. In his 1899 article on “Dollatry” in The
Contemporary Review, James Sully writes, citing Ellis and Hall’s study, that one child claims, “I
often give my dolls a good moral talk which helps them” (65). Dolls were likely to be punished
and blamed for crimes committed by their accusers.
Regardless of the content of the child’s conversations with her doll, nineteenth-century
critics of dollplay agree that the conversations are both precious to the child and revealing of her
psychology. Sully concludes that a girl’s discussions with her doll are “an outpouring of her
heart in sacred confidence” where “[t]he doll is a refuge in the hour of trouble, of blank childish
despair, when no grown-up ears are of any use” (66). According to Sully, the doll is not merely a
substitute for absent adults, but rather an ideal confidante who engenders dialogues otherwise not
possible. Ellis and Hall likewise surmise that “Whispered confidences with the doll are often
more intimate and sacred than with any human being” (162). Due to the secret nature of these
discourses, the child’s confidences to her doll have the potential to provide unprecedented insight
into the child’s thoughts and desires. Sully muses that “Perhaps, indeed, if dolls could tell us
what they are supposed, as confidantes and confessors, to hear from the lips of their small
devotees, they might throw more light on the nature of ‘the child’s mind’ than all the
psychologists” (58). But the doll speaks only when the child gives her a voice, remaining mute to
prying adults.
75
In looking at dollplay, readers may see that Dickens’s acts of ventriloquism are not
merely for entertainment or comedic effect. Although readers may feel, as audience members did
about the ventriloquist Monsieur Alexandre, that it is “almost impossible […] that so great a
variety of voices, in tone and apparent distances, should all proceed from one and the same
person,” Dickens was doing more with his ventriloquism them conjuring up a diverse world of
voices (Alexandre 4). He was, in fact, using his characters as dolls, speaking through them and
bringing them to life.
3
Like the children who whispered treasured confidences and found comfort
in the presence of their dolls’ voices, Dickens engaged with ventriloquism to work through
feelings of abandonment and suffering, finding that such dialogues allowed him to speak what
was too secret to be shared with other ears, and to provide himself with a comfort otherwise
denied him.
And so, in Dickens’s fiction, dolls repeatedly appear in moments where he is
ventriloquizing childhood suffering. Thus, one of his most astute doll-players is Jenny Wren, the
girl perceived by Charlie Hexam and his schoolmaster, Bradley Headstone, as “a child––a
dwarf––a girl––a something” (222). As Jenny sits at her “little working bench,” she appears
more like the inanimate figures she works for than a living person, assuming the appearance of
an “it” to her unexpected visitors (222). Jenny’s hard labor for small pay echoes the dollmaker

3
This dollplay is mirrored within the novel’s narratives, in which characters in turn treat other
characters as their own dolls, manipulating and abusing them. James Steerforth is particularly
adept at manipulating those around them, a power that is especially felt by female characters. No
one expresses this feeling more intensely than Rosa Dartle, who accuses Emily of being a
discarded toy after Steerforth abandons her. “I thought you a broken toy that had lasted its time,”
Rosa mocks her, “a worthless spangle that was tarnished, and thrown away” (DC 726). Rosa’s
rage against Emily is the same that she feels towards herself. As she later tells Steerforth’s
mother, she, too, is a rejected plaything: “When he was freshest and truest, he loved me […] I
descended––as I might have known I should, but that he fascinated me with his boyish
courtship––into a doll, a trifle for the occupation of an idle hour, to be dropped, and taken up,
and trifled with, as the inconstant humour took him” (806).
76
experiences documented by the contemporary social critics who noted the squalid conditions
young workers endured for small wages. When Bradley Headstone inquires as to her line of
work and its pay, Jenny responds that she works for “Fine ladies” and that the work is “Poorly
paid,” yet demanding, requiring her at times to work through the night, which is “not good for
[her], on account of [her] back being so bad and [her] legs so queer” (223). As the dolls take on
life, receiving dresses that allow them to attend weddings and other social events (Jenny tells
Headstone that one of her doll clients was “married last week”), Jenny works under increasingly
difficult and painful conditions (223).
Jenny’s most telling “doll” is her father, whom Eugene Wrayburn associatively names
“Mr. Dolls” when introducing him to his friend Mortimer Lightwood (OMF 527). Mr. Dolls’s
vices are disguised through the language of dolls: when he needs a drink to become articulate,
Eugene––mimicking Jenny’s language––says that they need “to wind up Mr. Dolls,” as if he
were a mechanized toy, and Jenny refers to his wanderings about town as “play” (527; 713). He
is also the largest source of Jenny’s hardship, forcing her to take on the role of a parent for her
“bad child,” who stays out late and comes home in a drunken state (343). The relationship
between Jenny’s father and the dolls she dresses is fully realized after Mr. Doll’s death when he
is brought to rest in Jenny’s work room, where, “in the midst of the dolls with no speculation in
their eyes, lay Mr. Dolls with no speculation in his” (712). The dolls in the work room may not
have speculation in their eyes, but they do move through the city, and Jenny must continue to
work for their pleasures so that she may properly grieve for her father, finding that “Many
flaunting dolls had to be gaily dressed, before the money was in the dressmaker’s pocket to get
mourning for Mr. Dolls” (712). Unlike the dolls (and the children who own them), Jenny must
“work, work, work, all day,” with a dead drunken father in place of a doll to love (712).
77
For Dickens, dolls mark not just childhood hardship more generally, providing an
imaginary companion where comfort is needed, but also his own, personal, childhood suffering.
This correlation between dolls and personal childhood suffering appears most explicitly in
Dickens’s earlier novel, Little Dorrit. In Little Dorrit, the turnkey who looks upon little Amy
Dorrit in the Marshalsea Prison and realizes the extent to which she will be put upon by her
insolvent family, bribes her with “cheap toys to come and talk to him,” so that toys become a
sign of affection amidst neglect (79). Amy’s doll specifically, through excessive love, comes to
embody the poverty she experiences within debtor’s prison, and the turnkey’s desire to provide
care for a child who otherwise receives none: “when she fell asleep in the little armchair by the
high fender, the turnkey would cover her with his pocket-handkerchief; and when she sat in it
dressing and undressing a doll which soon came to be unlike dolls on the other side of the lock,
and to bear a horrible family resemblance to Mrs. Bangham––he would contemplate her from the
top of his stool with exceeding gentleness” (79). Amy’s doll, worn away until practically
unrecognizable as a doll, comes to recall a woman who is more likely intoxicated than not, being
“found oftener than usual comatose on pavements, with her basket of purchases spilt, and the
change of her clients ninepence short” (76). The doll thus signifies both the inebriety and poverty
that surround Amy and the care that fails her. The turnkey may be able to buy Amy a doll,
however banged-at, but he cannot, in the end, provide for her. Unable to discover a means of
leaving his property to her so that no one could take it from her, he “died intestate” without
leaving her anything at all (81).
Amy Dorrit’s experience of childhood neglect evokes Dickens’s own from the time when
he, too, had a father imprisoned within the walls of the Marshalsea. John Forster, Dickens’s
friend and first biographer, writes in his biography, The Life of Charles Dickens (1872), that
78
when Dickens was working in the blacking warehouse as a young boy, he changed lodgings so
as to be closer to his family from which time “he used to breakfast ‘at home,’ in other words in
the Marshalsea; going to it as early as the gates were open, and for the most part much earlier”
(39).
4
This time of separation was a period of intense suffering for Dickens who reflected in his
autobiographical fragment that the sense of “being utterly neglected and hopeless,” compressed
with feelings of “shame,” “misery,” “grief and humiliation,” oppressed him long into adulthood
(Forster 33). In fact, he was so haunted by this time in his life that even as a successful author he
confessed to imagining that he was back to working in the warehouse, with his family in the
debtor’s prison: “even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I
have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of
my life” (33). In Little Dorrit, Dickens does just that, finding himself wandering back to the very
gates inside which he once stood, waiting for them to open, creating a companion with whom he
can converse.
The very secrecy with which Dickens regards this early period of his life––as he admits,
“That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but I”––suggests its
importance in his life and, consequently, writing (Forster 37-8). This secret is one that he never
relays to another person, reserving his confidences for the page, which takes the place of a doll:
“I have never, until I now impart it to this paper, in any burst of confidence with any one, my
own wife not excepted, raised the curtain I then dropped, thank God” (49). The raising of the
“curtain” suggests a stage where past scenes are brought to life, evoking the image of a puppet

4
Brian Cheadle writes that Dickens’s father, John Dickens, was imprisoned in the Marshalsea on
February 20, 1824, and Dickens’s mother and younger siblings joined him there near the end of
March; John Dickens was released from the Marshalsea on May 28, 1824 (207-8).
79
theater. Dickens’s written confidences ventriloquize voices from the past as they speak through
the characters Dickens animates on the page.
As much as the loneliness and shame of this period oppressed Dickens throughout his
life, what remains even more impressed upon him is his bitterness at the adults who failed to care
for him during this period of neglect. As he notes, “I might easily have been, for any care that
was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond” (Forster 37). While he later claims that “I do
not write resentfully or angrily: for I know how all these things have worked together to make
me what I am,” his horror at what might have become of him suggests that he does indeed harbor
some residual resentment and anger (49). The brunt of this resentment is directed at his mother,
by whom he feels most betrayed. At the close of his reflections, Dickens particularly notes that
his mother went and negotiated for his job back after he was dismissed from the warehouse, an
act about which he claimed, “I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget”
(49). His mother’s failure to fight for Dickens’s future is the act that torments him the most,
many years afterward.
In Dickens’s work, the presence of dolls often signifies moments where he is performing
an act of narrative ventriloquism, pointing readers to moments where his personal childhood
suffering is being conveyed and transformed through the creation of an imaginary companion
with whom he exchanges stories. In doing so, he creates intricate narrative experiments where
voices are projected and then interwoven, so that he not only seeks to reimagine the suffering
that still haunts him––particularly what he perceives to have been his mother’s abandonment of
him––but he also plays with the novel’s form. The full complexity of this is seen in Bleak House,
a novel that begins with a lonely child and her doll and ends with a yearned-for embrace.

80

II. Ventriloquizing Bleak House
Esther Summerson begins her pages in Dickens’s Bleak House with a story of narration,
relating how in her childhood she would rush home to her “dear old doll,” eager to recite the
day’s events: “[the doll] used to sit propped up in a great arm-chair, with her beautiful
complexion and rosy lips, staring at me––or not so much at me, I think, as at nothing––while I
busily stitched away, and told her every one of my secrets (17).”

Esther’s “portion” thus
interrupts an unnamed, supposedly male, omniscient narrator, launching an experiment in which
these two apparently distinct voices divide the novel’s pages (17).
5
Previous critics, even those
most favorably disposed toward Esther’s interference in the text, have primarily focused on the
unequal knowledge and authority positions of the all-knowing third-person narrator and the
unknowing Esther (who, as she tells both her doll and her reader, is “not clever” (17).
6
In this

5
This narrative structure was a radical departure from Dickens’s earlier work. His early novels––
from The Pickwick Papers (1836-7) to Dombey and Son (1846-8)––featured third-person
narrators and Dickens did not deviate from this narrative approach until the publication of David
Copperfield (1849-50), which, unlike the earlier novels, is narrated by its eponymous
protagonist. Bleak House takes this experimentation one step further, dividing the novel between
two very different narrators.
6
Dickens’s narrative experiment was not initially considered a success; W.J. Harvey was neither
the first nor the last to read the novel’s unnamed, third-person narrator as a powerful mouthpiece
for Dickens himself and Esther as a “static,” “passive,” “coy,” and “repellent” character (94).
Dickens’s contemporaries took particular issue with the character-narrator Esther. Charlotte
Brontë dismissed Esther’s character as “weak and twaddling” (LCB 3:28) and George Brimley
deemed her a “coarse portraiture” in his Sept. 24, 1853 review for the Spectator (924). This
negative reading of Esther’s character remained in vogue until psychological reinterpretations of
Esther’s “coyness” as inner conflict (see William Axton [546]) and childhood trauma (see Alex
Zwerdling [430]) redeemed her narration. Recent criticism has variously interpreted the
relationship between the novel’s two voices as a binary opposition: harshness to fairness (see
Linda Lewis [123]), bleak to aspirational (see Amanda Anderson [111]), and skepticism to trust
(see Supritha Rajan [64-5]). My reading thus runs counter to criticism that has stressed the
novel’s divisions of authority and barriers to knowledge (See also Elaine Auyoung [182]).
81
section I suggest a different theory: that the seemingly unrelated narrators in fact share
knowledge as well as narrative space. A doll, as an object that is spoken both to and through,
offers an alternative way of understanding these narrative exchanges, and the daily ritual that
Esther performs with her doll reveals the transmission of knowledge that Dickens uses to “busily
stitch” together the two narratives composing Bleak House.
7
Acting as a stand-in for Esther’s
doll, the third-person narrator enacts a series of gift-exchanges that structure the novel and the
reader’s role within it.
If this relationship between the novel’s two narrators seems surprising, it is because
critics have largely attributed those moments in which one narrator takes on the knowledge
position or voice of the other to a failure in Dickens’s ability to maintain a consistent narrative
structure.
8
However, this interpretation does not fully explain the complex narrative
experimentation of Bleak House; rather, I argue that the novel’s two narrators not only slip into
each other’s respective knowledge positions, but also pass information between each other. The
third-person narrator both tells Esther secrets and lets Esther choose if and when to reveal those
secrets. Readers witness this transaction in the case of the introduction of Allan Woodcourt,
Esther’s eventual husband, into the novel. When Woodcourt is first mentioned, the third-person

7
Critics have become increasingly interested in Esther’s doll and dolls in general within Bleak
House. Robyn L. Schiffman notes that the doll’s reappearance at key plot moments in Esther’s
adult life signifies that the uncanny is brought about by her adult sexual life while also being
rooted in her childhood unconscious (163). In an intriguing postcolonial reading of the novel,
Emily Madsen focuses primarily on the dolls within the illustrations as signs of Britain’s
involvement in commerce driven by the American slave trade (413). Pittard then returns to
Esther’s doll specifically, linking this figure with Dickens’s experiments with secular magic
(“Travelling Doll” 279).
8
See Harvey (91-92). Other critics have noted the blurrings between the two narrators in
suggestive ways: Justine Pizzo argues that Esther adopts an “‘uneasy’ omniscience” (92); and
Audrey Jaffe notes that the very presence of Esther’s narration makes the third-person narrator’s
omniscience “paradoxically proscribed” (128).
82
narrator sets up a mystery of identity: he first appears as the “dark young man” at the deathbed of
Esther’s father, the law-writer Nemo, but no other explanation is given (126). Esther then delays
resolving the “dark young man” mystery for nearly fifty pages. At the Badgers’ household when
Esther first meets Woodcourt, she fails to mention his presence in her initial description: “We
were to be ‘merely a family party,’ Mrs. Badger’s note said; and we found no lady there but Mrs.
Badger herself” (156). Esther’s assertion that there was “no lady” present emphasizes
Woodcourt’s masculinity by denying any femininity (emphasis added). In so doing, Esther hints
at both her attraction to him and her own femininity, setting up the possibility of their future
marriage even as she conceals Woodcourt’s presence from the reader. Furthermore, when Esther
finally does reveal Woodcourt’s presence, she echoes the third-person narrator’s description of
him as “dark,” “young,” and a “surgeon” (163). This repetition hints that Esther knows what the
third-person narrator has already disclosed to the reader, and that she is revealing this privileged
position to the reader.
Esther’s delays are not merely coy acts, as scholars have often suggested; rather, they
point to the larger purpose of the narrative exchange. Roland Barthes argues that in moving
toward the revelation of an enigma, readers must progress through a “rite of initiation” in which
they encounter obstacles that impede or delay the mystery’s resolution (76). In the case of
Woodcourt’s identity, Esther uses the rite of initiation simultaneously to produce and to conceal
hidden truths to the reader. By hinting that she knows the “dark young man” introduced in the
third-person narration while also refusing to immediately solve the mystery, she provides
information about a different enigma: the novel’s larger structure. Esther indicates her awareness
that there are pages outside her own in the first sentence of her first section (as Robert Newsom
notes, she begins by calling her narrative “my portion”), but only through the rite of initiation
83
does she slowly acknowledge the extent of her consciousness of what those other pages contain
(14).
9

So, how might we reconcile Bleak House’s moments of knowledge and narrative
exchange with the ostensibly divided narrative structure? One answer, Newsom suggests, is that
Esther is both narrators. Newsom persuasively argues that the “slips” and similarities between
the two voices mean that the rules of realism can only be satisfied if Esther is the author of both
narrations; however, this justification does not explain why Esther (or Dickens) would choose to
divide the novel in this way, nor what implications for narrative form there are in doing so (87).
10

To answer these questions, readers must turn to Esther’s great scene of listening, when the doll
comes to life and when Lady Dedlock, Esther’s mother, tells her story. Following her confession,
Lady Dedlock grants Esther permission to pass on the narrative to her guardian, Mr. Jarndyce:
“Confide fully in him… You have my free consent––a small gift from such a mother to her
injured child!––but do not tell me of it” (Bleak House 451; emphasis added). In this way, Lady
Dedlock authorizes Esther’s role as narrator even as she denies her a future audience. Reading
Bleak House through the doll allows us to see knowledge shared so that, eventually, Esther may
gain authority and consolation by disclosing it to a new audience.

9
It is also significant that the third-person narrator is equally aware of Esther. Hilary Schor notes
that “‘While Esther sleeps,’ begins Chapter VII, following Esther’s going ‘hopefully to bed’ at
the end [of] Chapter VI” (Daughter 117).
10
John O. Jordan has compellingly considered how Esther writes her pages to know “not the
facts of her life but their meaning,” and, in Jordan’s study, the meaning lies in Esther’s
relationship with her mother (5). However, in focusing exclusively on Esther’s first-person
narration, Jordan fails to see the extent of Esther’s narrative experimentation. Schor persuasively
takes up Newsom’s reading to claim that Esther writes the third-person narration to investigate
her mother’s death (Daughter 117). More recently, Pittard also builds on Newsom’s argument to
suggest that readers may see Esther’s narrative experiment as an act of conjuring, making her
own body as well as her doll’s appear and disappear before their eyes (“Travelling Doll” 296).
84
As the author of both narratives, Dickens is of course the master ventriloquist, speaking
through both narrative positions at once; however, the presence of Esther’s doll at the beginning
of her portion signifies that a more complex relationship is at work within the pages of Bleak
House than that of a shared author.
11
Returning to Dickens’s conjuring doll trick, readers may
see that the exchange of a coin for a message becomes a model for a series of narrative
exchanges within Bleak House. Like Dickens when entertaining the children, Esther will perform
an act of silent ventriloquism, disseminating a message through the doll to her audience. In
speaking through the omniscient narrator’s invisible body, Esther further assumes the role and
voice of the doll/mother.
12
As in her conversations with her doll, conversations in which she
would have been responsible for both roles, flipping back and forth and assuming the voice
necessary for that part of the story, so Esther’s playing the third-person narrator allows her to
pose as her mother in a dialogue that offers her an opportunity for emotional support and
exchange. The narrative structure of Bleak House becomes, then, a final effort for Esther to come
to terms with her relationship with her mother.
In this section I engage with gift and object relations theory to lay bare the narratological
and psychological workings of Bleak House. While critics have noted the various gifts of people

11
Ventriloquism, despite being a practice dominated by male practitioners in the nineteenth
century, has historical associations with the female voice. Steven Connor writes that the Delphic
oracle in classical Greece combined prophecy and ventriloquism; the priestess’s body was seen
as a “cleft” through which the voice could enter, providing a home for the disembodied voice
(54). Furthermore, ventriloquism, as “the fact or practice of speaking or appearing to speak from
the abdomen,” suggests that the ventriloquized voice is also the mother’s through the proximity
of the abdomen to the womb (“ventriloquism, n.”). The similarity in voices between mother and
daughter in Dickens’s novel makes this ventriloquism all the more plausible. When Lady
Dedlock asks a question from behind Esther, Ada, and John Jarndyce, Ada mistakes the voice as
Esther’s, but, as Esther says, “I had not spoken” (Bleak House 228; emphasis in original).
12
This claim is not the first time that the third-person narrator has been read as having a female
and familial relationship to Esther. Judith Wilt suggestively argues that the third-person narrator
is a “sister voice” to Esther’s (285).
85
and things within Dickens’s novel, the most precious gift (Lady Dedlock’s consent) has been
critically overlooked. Esther’s doll shows that the novel’s narrative slips and exchanges are
purposeful revelations about the relationship that Dickens constructs between the two narratives.
Indeed, they are Esther’s attempt to re-create not only the exchange of stories she once had with
her childhood doll, but also those she had with the ultimate living doll: her mother, Lady
Dedlock. Imagining the third-person narrator as capable of giving her that which her mother
ultimately could not (the “gift” of her own lost narrative), Esther tells stories in hopes of
animating the inanimate. In the trading and withholding of secrets, the third-person narrator
becomes a conduit for the mother’s voice, as “it” (like the doll come to imaginary life) trusts
Esther with the gift of sharing secrets. The doll may have provided the initial model for the ways
in which narrative transmission occurs, but when the physical doll disappears––is literally
buried––we will see this act of narrative transmission reoccur between characters, narrators, and,
eventually, readers.

The Mother’s “Small Gift”
The key to the relationship between the two narratives appears in the middle of the novel,
when Esther and her mother meet alone for the first time. Encountering her daughter in the
woods, Lady Dedlock begs for forgiveness, reveals that she is Esther’s mother, and hands Esther
a letter for “[her] reading only” that she entreats her afterward to destroy, initiating the novel’s
pattern of narrative gifts (Bleak House 450). This letter, handed from mother to daughter,
narrates the story of Esther’s birth, ostensibly confirming the secret of Esther’s identity and
giving her that story for which she once begged from her stern aunt, asking “What did I do to
[my mother]? How did I lose her?” (19). In response to this earnest supplication, Esther’s aunt
86
had alluded to an unmentionable secret. As she told the young Esther, “Your mother, Esther, is
your disgrace, and you were hers. The time will come––and soon enough––when you will
understand this better, and will feel it too, as no one save a woman can” (19). Her aunt’s
withholding of this narrative, as well as her hints at its inevitable and disgraceful revelation,
prepare Esther for the painfully short meeting in the woods where she finally receives the
answers to her questions.
Her aunt’s anticipations suggest that Esther’s mother will feel only shame upon
confessing her secret, and cause Esther pain on learning it, but her aunt’s premonitions turn out
to be only partly true. For her part, Lady Dedlock fulfills her sister’s prediction, finding little
comfort in sharing her story. Her confession that she is Esther’s “wicked and unhappy mother”
fails to provide Lady Dedlock with cathartic release, and she continues to suffer after her
revelation (Bleak House 449). Lady Dedlock even rejects Esther’s offers of companionship,
claiming that “no affection could come near her” (450). Esther, however, initially finds that
receiving this narrative provides some consolation. The letter imparts this feeling even though
the story of Esther’s first birthday is not a happy one, and it adds little that is good to what Esther
and her reader already know. Esther tells her reader that the letter explains how she, mistaken as
stillborn, was taken from her mother, and how she was discovered still living by her unforgiving
aunt, who “with no desire or willingness that [Esther] should live, reared [her] in rigid secrecy”
(452). In recounting her reading of the letter, however, Esther asserts to her reader that the little
new information she gathered “was much then” to her (452). She receives comfort not so much
from the details of the story, but from what she derives from it: that having been taken by her
aunt without her mother’s permission or knowledge she “had not been abandoned by [her]
mother” (452).
87
Unfortunately, this gift of origin doubles as one of erasure, for, as Carolyn Dever notes,
“The letter describing Esther’s birth, in fact, describes nothing but her death” (84). Esther muses
on the letter’s contents, which reveal that until “a short time back, [she] had never, to [her] own
mother’s knowledge, breathed” (Bleak House 452). The letter confirms that Esther was never
even given the opportunity to be abandoned, revealing that for her mother she had never lived,
“had been buried––had never been endowed with life––had never borne a name” (452). Having
imagined her mother’s love since she was a child, learning that her mother did not consciously
abandon her hardly fulfills her childhood’s yearnings. The letter ultimately fails to give Esther
the complete story of origin and the narrative construction of identity that she desires: the gift of
her story, which would bring her into life and narrative, not out of them. The reader, then, can
only sympathize with Esther’s disappointment in finally reaching her mother, receiving the story
she has so long desired, and extracting some small comfort only to reexperience loss.
This loss is transformed as Esther burns her mother’s letter, being careful to “consume
even its ashes” (Bleak House 453). This erasure (the burning of the letter) of her erasure (“had
never borne a name”) acts as a silent rejection of her fictive death and now real abandonment
(since, after telling Esther that she was never abandoned as an infant, her mother forsakes her).
The authority that Lady Dedlock’s “small gift” grants Esther is what unexpectedly allows her to
find comfort through recovering her story and body (451). Esther chooses not to pass on her
mother’s words (she never discloses the exact contents of Lady Dedlock’s letter, even after
telling her reader that the letter will have “its own times and places” in her story), but rather to
assume her mother’s voice (453).
13
For, despite Esther’s assertion that her “little body will soon

13
Critics have not failed to note the novel’s omission of the letter’s exact contents. As Kelly A.
Marsh notes, it is “a tantalizing absence in the text” (84).
88
fall into the background” of the narrative she writes, what she really desires and, in fact, creates
is a narrative that will bring back the “little body” once set aside as dead and place that same
form under the mother’s eye and care (27).

Tracing the Gift
Gift-giving, while typically associated with material objects (e.g., the letter), also
becomes a way into a narratological process. In doing so, it creates bonds between characters and
narrators. This reasoning follows Marcel Mauss’s theory that every gift produces profound
connections, because to give a gift is “to make a present of some part of oneself” and to accept
one is “to accept some part of [the giver’s] spiritual essence, of his soul” (12). For Mauss, “the
thing given is not inactive”; it demands an equivalent present in return (13). Both giving and
receiving create “obligation[s],” or bonds, between persons; in these actions, Mauss claims, a gift
is invested with “life” and “individuality,” taking on a role of its own (13). So, too, in Bleak
House, the reader may trace the circulation of narrative gifts, which are hardly “inactive” in this
novel, to discover an intimate relationship between characters and narrators, authors and readers.
Despite the powerful connections that come with gift exchange, Lady Dedlock makes a
concerted effort to undo any bonds, quickly following her gift with an appeal to Esther: “but do
not tell me of it” (Bleak House 451). Jacques Derrida offers insight as to why Lady Dedlock
might make this stipulation. In his reading of Mauss’s theory, he suggests that there are
paradoxical limits to the gift, claiming that, for either giver or receiver, to acknowledge the gift is
to render it a transaction: “It cannot be gift as gift except by not being present as gift” (Derrida
14). Lady Dedlock’s renunciation of any return or further knowledge of her gift strives to remove
it from the system of exchange, but it in fact binds her more closely to the novel’s other narrative
89
exchanges. If gift theory suggests that the gift is “alive” and retains a part of the giver’s “nature”
after it is received, then the gift of narrative authority becomes bound with Lady Dedlock (Mauss
12). When Esther begins her retrospective narration seven years later, readers may see that her
narration of her childhood conversations with her doll takes on new meaning.
14
Having been
granted the mother’s “small gift” of telling her story, Esther the narrator imagines little Esther
not just as the mother who finally finds solace in telling her story, but also as the daughter who is
given the mother’s sanction to speak. The doll becomes the mother’s emblem as well as the
agent of Bleak House’s narrative transmissions.
The doll’s association with the mother figure is well established; object relations theory
has reflected deeply on the doll’s position in relation to the maternal. D. W. Winnicott reads
dolls as “transitional objects,” which act as an intermediary between infants and their mothers as
they begin to differentiate themselves as individuals (4). Critics have previously applied
Winnicott’s theory to Bleak House to theorize Esther’s individual progress: Dever engages with
Winnicott to argue that the doll functions as a stand-in for the mother and, as such, is necessary
to Esther’s development as a speaking subject, and Pittard returns to Dever’s application of
Winnicott to argue that the infant’s experience with the doll teaches her the limits of reality and
inspires an interest in secular magic.
15
But in my reading, the central experience of the doll is to
shape our understanding of the divided narrative form in Bleak House, in which Esther authors
both sections to examine and re-create a maternal relationship.

14
As Schor claims, “Esther, seemingly trapped in the past, is the narrator who has the possibility
of seeing what is before her” (Curious 145).
15
See Dever (88); and Pittard (“Travelling Doll” 286).
90
For, to the extent that Esther’s dollplay reenacts the return and disappearance of the
mother’s voice, the novel’s structure recalls the Freudian fort-da phenomenon.
16
Watching his
grandson playing, Sigmund Freud noticed that the child would throw his toy away, saying fort or
“gone,” and then reel it back in again, crying da or “there” (168-9). This game is one of
“disappearance and return,” in which the child re-creates the experience of being left behind by
his mother and transforms a “passive situation” into one where he plays an “active part” (169).
As Pittard notes, “Fort-da is also the narrative model of Bleak House, both structurally (in its
there-gone doubled narrations) and diegetically” (“Travelling Doll” 289). For Pittard, Esther
exerts her narrative control in making characters (such as Woodcourt and even herself) appear
and disappear, replicating conjuring acts. Pittard’s analysis is compelling, but it deemphasizes
the primacy of the mother in Freud’s initial analysis of fort-da.
17
Esther begins her games of
abandonment and return with her doll, an object that is synonymous with her mother. The doll,
like Lady Dedlock, will “abandon” Esther when Esther buries Dolly “in the garden-earth, under
the tree that shaded [her] old window” (Bleak House 24). Robyn Schiffman notes that Esther’s
doll does not entirely disappear after her burial, returning in Esther’s thoughts after Guppy’s
proposal and during her first encounter with Lady Dedlock (167-8). That we see this engagement
repeated within the novel’s structure signifies Esther once again attempting to come to terms
with maternal abandonment.

16
See Sigmund Freud (168-174).
17
See Pittard (“Travelling Doll” 289-96). In Freud’s first example, the child’s game is related to
“the child’s great cultural achievement––the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of
instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without
protesting” (169). Even when the child later performs a similar game where the object takes the
place of his “absent father,” Freud connects this new version of the game to the child’s desire to
have “sole possession of his mother” (169).
91
But it is not only in the transmission of knowledge between narratives that the third-
person narrator indicates a maternal presence. More explicitly drawing this connection between
the third-person narrator and the maternal, the novel calls attention to the role of the third-person
narrator as a parent-figure during Mr. Jarndyce and Mr. Skimpole’s discussion of orphans.
Speaking of Ada to Esther, Mr. Skimpole declares, “We will not call such a lovely young
creature as that, who is a joy to all mankind, an orphan. She is the child of the universe” (Bleak
House 68). Mr. Jarndyce muses in response that the universe “makes rather an indifferent parent”
(68). The third-person narrator at times plays with the universal view, “pass[ing] from the one
scene to the other, as the crow flies” (10). This powerful narrator in a sense comes to represent
the voice of the “universe” that watches over the Adas, Richards, Jos, and Esthers of Bleak
House. The third-person narrator is more than merely “indifferent”: it attends the death of Jo (the
orphan with the smallest name) and urgently calls on the “Heavenly compassion” in the hearts of
those in positions of influence (572). The third-person narrator may not be completely
“indifferent,” but it certainly cannot be said to remove the “brambles of sordid realities,” as Mr.
Skimpole would have it (68). Indifferent or no, the third-person narrator does assume the role of
a “parent”––a rather cold, distant, and Lady Dedlock-like one that watches, if not quite watches
over, the orphans and wards of the novel.
18

The idea that Esther adopts a mother’s role in the third-person narration gains resonance
from the many instances in which Esther associates herself with the role of the mother.
Whenever there is a hurt or lonely child, Esther will be there to offer her comfort: at Greenleaf,

18
Cristina Richieri Griffin argues that omniscience can only fully embody sympathy when it
“becomes corporeal” (483). This sympathetic omniscient narrator is partially what Esther
attempts to create by ventriloquizing her mother through the third-person omniscient narration
and metaphorically embodying the third-person narration within her mother’s form.

92
all “downcast and unhappy” newcomers are entrusted to her care, and when she first goes to the
Jellybys’ home, Esther nurses the ignored Peepy, who quickly falls “fast asleep in [her] arms,
sobbing” (Bleak House 26, 39). While this comforting of others stops short of offering Esther the
emotional release that she felt when confiding in her doll, it does allow her, as John Jordan
argues, to do “for them what she wishes a mother had done for her” (10).
For, of course, Esther is the unhappiest child of all, “orphaned and degraded” from her
first birthday (Bleak House 19). No mother or mothering figure attends her during her early years
with her cold aunt and the equally cold Mrs. Rachael (later known as Mrs. Chadband), a fact that
little Esther realizes all too well, knowing that she “had brought no joy, at any time, to anybody’s
heart” (19). Later, at Greenleaf, no gentle Esther-like character takes little Esther into her care as
Esther later does to all despondent newcomers, or puts her upon a knee to nurse as she does for
the unfortunately bruised Peepy, or––like Esther with Jenny’s dead baby in the brickmaker’s
house––into her arms to cover “with [her] own handkerchief,” whispering “what Our Saviour
said of children” (100). Instead, returning to life after being “laid aside as dead,” infant Esther
begins her life under “a shadow” instead of a handkerchief, “set apart,” as her aunt tells her, from
children “born… in common sinfulness and wrath,” and subsequently she is doomed to pass
through life without a mother’s love or care (452, 19). And so, in the absence of a sufficient
mother figure, Esther adopts a mother’s (or, more specifically, her mother Lady Dedlock’s) voice
in the guise of the third-person narrator to comfort herself.

Esther’s Unknown Friends
In ventriloquizing the pages of the third-person narrator, Esther is performing the voice
and emotion of her mother, using the relationship between the two narratives to reconsider the
93
relationship she had with Lady Dedlock. But the third-person narration also allows Esther
another opportunity for finding some small comfort by allowing her to imagine parts of her
mother’s story, movements, and even thoughts that she does not experience in her first-person
narration. The third-person narrator’s picture of Lady Dedlock (who does not yet know that her
daughter is living) unhappily gazing at the domestic happiness in the keeper’s lodge that she is
withheld from, is actually Esther’s attempt to understand how the scene affects the “childless”
Lady Dedlock (Bleak House 11). Esther brings herself some small comfort by imagining her
mother longing for the same familial comforts for which her younger self yearned (“the light of a
fire . . ., and smoke rising from the chimney, and a child, chased by a woman”) and being “put
quite out of temper” by the distant sight of them (11).
Esther might naturally find comfort in picturing her mother longing for domestic scenes,
but the focus of the third-person narration on topics and characters less apparently relevant to her
is less immediately explicable. Esther desires to be comforted by her absent mother, but that does
not prevent her from also critiquing the novel’s many other negligent mothers and admiring the
conscientious ones. Through the third-person narration, Esther channels her disdain for
characters who fail to feel maternal affection for the orphans that cross their paths. According to
the third-person narrator, Bucket “see[s] through” Mrs. Snagsby, who suspects that the innocent
Jo is Mr. Snagsby’s son but fails to mourn his death or perceive why her husband would
otherwise take pity on the lonely child (“if [Jo] was not his son why did he go?” [Bleak House
645]). Bucket similarly mocks the hypocritical Mrs. Chadband for describing how she “helped to
bring up Miss Hawdon” in exchange for payment (644). Conversely, Esther often uses the third-
person narrator to affirm positive examples of maternal love. She appreciatively witnesses “Mrs.
Rouncewell’s calm hands lose their composure when she speaks of” her youngest son, George,
94
who became a soldier and never returned, and likewise expresses approval for the matriarch Mrs.
Bagnet, whose children are happy and healthy and whose home lacks even “a visible speck of
dirt” (78-79, 343). As the third-person narrator, Esther observes the brickmakers’ wives move
Bucket and Mr. Snagsby deeply with their maternal love. Liz’s claim that she would “stand
between [her baby] and death” and Jenny’s speculation of “what fortune would [she] give to
have [her] darling back” are expressions that Esther would have desired to hear made on her
behalf (279, 280).
Esther employs the third-person narration to consider both the lives of those who are
orphans like her (Jo, Charley, Phil Squod) and those who either provide or fail to provide the
care that she desires for herself. All people have some form of familial relationship, even if it is
the absence of such a relationship––a logic that carries over to fictional characters. Readers may
thus see that the third-person narration’s familial structures are permutations of Esther’s, just as
hers are to theirs, and each can provide a means of analyzing the other. Critics and readers have
consistently noticed the different forms of family in this novel, but when we realize that it is
Esther drawing these comparisons, rather than ourselves, we become aware of the extent to
which she is invested in fully understanding her own familial relationship.
19
Characters and
events within the third-person narration that may appear distant from Esther’s concerns are
actually meditations on a central relationship that greatly preoccupies her, and that she is
rethinking from every angle. Esther, as the third-person narrator, imagines other lives and
possible life paths for herself. Like “the unknown friend to whom” Esther directs her first-person

19
For examinations of family structures within Bleak House, see D. A. Miller (104-5); and Dever
(81-82).
95
portions, the third-person narrative sections are part of her project to imagine other subjectivities
as an attempt to better understand her own story (Bleak House 767).
Take, for instance, Judy Smallweed, whom the third-person narrator considers as an
example of what it would be like to be both motherless and to have “never owned a doll” (Bleak
House 259). Judy’s story is in many ways very similar to Esther’s. Esther’s aunt withholds
information about her mother, and the third-person narration likewise buries the first mention of
Judy and her twin brother Bart’s mother in their father’s history. The third-person narrator
notices the adverse effect this absence has on Judy and Bart. Judy, who was never mothered and
who even as a child held an “instinctive repugnance” for other children, carefully provides only
the bare minimum for her servant girl, Charley (who Esther will later take under her own wing),
scraping butter on bread with “every precaution against waste” (259, 260). The third-person
narration’s examination of the Smallweed home reveals Esther’s aversion for the fate that she––
with her own unyielding childhood guardian and absent mother––very nearly had, but did not.
Esther uses the third-person sections to examine a very different case with George
Rouncewell, who allows her to think through the consequences of radically different choices and
circumstances. George has a mother, but he abandoned her and vaguely allows others to imagine
her as dead (“Let her rest in peace, God Bless her!”), performing the reverse of Esther’s own
experience (Bleak House 326). The deep affection he shows for other orphans, particularly Phil
Squod, who was found in a gutter when a “Watchman tumbled over [him],” partially redeems
this abandonment (272). To fully redeem himself, George must return to the place where he
reminds Sir Leicester of “something of a boy at Chesney Wold,” resuming his place in his
mother’s world (696). There, he will care for the sick man with a “mother’s gentleness,” tending
96
to him and accompanying him on his daily visits to “a certain spot before the mausoleum door”
(696, 764).
George must first, however, restore his relations with his mother, and it is this meeting
that most tellingly differs from Esther’s experience. When George is finally reunited with his
mother through the work of Mrs. Bagnet, he begs forgiveness––like Lady Dedlock does of
Esther––but rather than granting his mother permission to share his story with his younger
brother, he asks her to refrain from telling it: “do me a greater kindness than I deserve,” he asks
her, “and keep my secret from my brother, of all men” (Bleak House 660). While George
initially resists sharing his story, when he finally does so it leads to the happiness and acceptance
for which Esther yearns. George’s eventual revelation of this secret leads to him being welcomed
and loved by the family he has avoided and finally housed along with Phil Squod in the lodge
where “my Lady used to see the Keeper’s child” (764). In finally settling in the keeper’s lodge,
George––rather than Esther––fulfills Lady Dedlock’s early desire to see a lost child returned.
Esther follows characters like the Smallweeds and the Rouncewells to scrutinize her
relationship with her mother, and, additionally, she adopts Lady Dedlock’s voice and emotions to
see her mother’s world from her perspective. The third-person narration’s derision for the world
of fashion, for the “Dandyism” of the Lord Boodles and Coodles who descend upon Chesney
Wold, echoes Lady Dedlock’s contempt for the social world within which she has become a
feature (Bleak House 146). Lady Dedlock, who is “bored to death” by society and even the
Chancery suit in which she has a part (“It would be useless to ask…,” she says to Mr.
Tulkinghorn, “whether anything has been done”), is both knowledgeable of these social
structures and, unlike her husband, deeply skeptical of their efficacy (11, 15). Like the third-
person narrator who moves “as the crow flies,” Lady Dedlock, too, finds that for her weariness
97
“the imperfect remedy is always to fly” from one scene to the next (10, 139). In her constant
lifelong movement, she notices and knows much more about societal movements and structures
than she lets on, keeping her knowledge and desires “hidden, for the time, in [her] own [heart]”
(150).
Esther adopts Lady Dedlock’s voice to explore social structures and institutions that are
distant from her realms of experience, but familiar to her mother’s. As strange as it may seem for
Esther to so frequently change voices, objectives, and perspectives within the third-person
narration, the very degree to which these characters and voices occur is what aligns it most with
dollplay. William Makepeace Thackeray introduces Vanity Fair (1847-48) with a similar theory,
referring to the novel’s characters as his “Puppets”––particularly the “little Becky Puppet,” who
is “lively on the wire,” and the “Amelia Doll,” which the author has “carved and dressed” with
great care (2). In Bleak House, each of the third-person sections is an opportunity for Esther to
consider alternative maternal relationships and social positions and spaces to which she is
otherwise denied access.

A Final Embrace
The third-person narration may allow Esther a cathartic means of assessing alternative
maternal relationships, but, as Esther’s opening confidences to her “dear old doll” suggest,
nothing comforts her more than being given the opportunity to disclose her secrets to a faithful
listener (Bleak House 17). To provide comfort, then, the third-person narrator must allow Esther
to share her story, must give her the mother’s “small gift” of permission to confide fully, of
having the last word while the mother disappears, not staying to witness the daughter’s
revelations (451). This mother-daughter relationship between the two narratives mirrors that
98
between Esther and her mother, Lady Dedlock, as well as Esther and her doll, which, after
confessing that “[she] was to no one upon earth what Dolly was to [her],” she buries beneath the
tree outside her window (19). It also explains the strangely opposing beginning and end of the
novel, in which the cold, distant, and apparently masculine narrator who opens Bleak House gifts
the orphan daughter with the final “portion.” In my reading, it is the mother who makes way for
the daughter, moving from passing secrets to a complete renouncement of narrative authority.
20

Esther’s seemingly self-effacing statement that concludes the novel (“they can very well
do without much beauty in me––even supposing––”) is thus arguably an empowering one (Bleak
House 770). Critics have pointed to the significance of Esther’s role in closing the narrative as
well as of the open-endedness of her final, self-reflective sentence.
21
In a strange exchange of
positions as well as of power, Esther, as a narrator, does the receiving from her maternal stand-
in, moving from the given to giver and receiver. The narrative itself seems concerned with a
patriarchal system of gifting and reunion; as Helena Michie points out, “at the end of the novel,
Esther is reunited with a father-figure, not a maternal one” (202). This reunion occurs when
Jarndyce releases Esther from their engagement, telling her that once again he is her “guardian
and [her] father,” rather than her lover (Bleak House 752). At this moment, Jarndyce transforms
Esther herself into a gift, telling Woodcourt, “take from me, a willing gift, the best wife that ever
a man had” (753). Jill Rappoport reads this interaction as one that initially serves male interests
(“Dickens makes Esther the gift between men that secures their connection”), but she is also
quick to point out that Esther’s private acts of kindness establish her as the novel’s “most

20
My line of reasoning about this relationship between the two narrations is indebted to Dever’s
claim that “there is a direct relationship between abandonment and articulation, and specifically,
between the death of a mother and the birth of an authorial subject” (81).
21
For readings of Esther’s position as the final speaker as one of narrative empowerment, see
Joseph Sawicki (221); Dever (119).
99
competent giver” (4, 5). Indeed, Esther proves herself to be an able giver, participating in a quite
different gift system within the novel’s narrative structure, in which mothers freely grant
daughters with secrets and the permission to tell them. In this way, through assuming the
position of the third-person narrator, Esther gifts herself with a narrative authority denied to her
within her own story, creating her own system of exchange.
However, Esther’s final em dash in fact betrays her apparently victorious closure of these
pages with a desire to be put back in her place. Remembering the happy child whom Lady
Dedlock views from her dreary “lead-coloured” window, Esther too wants to be chased by a
caring woman’s figure as she runs forth from the brightly lit home into the rain, wants to be
stopped, pulled back in, corrected, and embraced (Bleak House 11). Esther often chides herself in
a way that she never directly does others––for instance, after she expresses her gratitude to Mr.
Jarndyce, she checks her behavior, thinking, “Esther, my dear, you surprise me! This really is not
what I expected of you!” (87). Later, when Esther learns of Ada and Richard’s ill-fated marriage,
she again only comes to herself after “a little scolding” (615). In her most trying moments,
Esther finds consolation in her remonstrations with herself rather than in her emotional outbursts.
She cannot even recall what passed during her show of gratitude to Mr. Jarndyce, claiming that
she does not “know what [she] said, or even that [she] spoke,” and, as she admits after leaving
Ada, she “could get no comfort for a little while, as [she] walked up and down in a dim corner,
sobbing and crying” (87, 615). Esther is accustomed to playing the maternal role toward others
as well as herself, and her self-corrections show that she views these small scoldings as signs of
100
affection and care; to be checked––recalled to the present with its prescribed behaviors and
expectations––is to be loved.
22

In addition to helping readers understand why Esther finds comfort in a little scolding
(for scolding tells her that someone is watching over her), the scene of the keeper’s child running
out into the rain closely followed by a woman creates an important link between Esther and her
own mother, Lady Dedlock. The moment in which Esther’s mother gazes, bored and
disconsolate, out into the twilight drizzle is also the one in which readers first learn of the
Ghost’s Walk, Chesney Wold’s haunted terrace where a dying seventeenth-century Lady
Dedlock foretold the family’s disgrace. As the current Lady Dedlock observes a warm domestic
scene at the keeper’s lodge, heavy raindrops make a constant “drip, drip, drip” upon the
pavement of the Ghost’s Walk, ominously recalling that earlier proud Lady Dedlock’s footsteps
as well as foreshadowing those that Esther’s mother, the current Lady Dedlock, will eventually
make toward her daughter (Bleak House 11).
For it is from this same Ghost’s Walk that Lady Dedlock emerges into Esther’s line of
vision, eerily tying Dedlock family legend with their unhappy reunion in the woods. Lady
Dedlock’s drawing back from Esther’s embrace echoes the earlier Lady Dedlock’s refusal of her
husband, “repuls[ing] him as he bent over her” (Bleak House 84). For Esther, these tangled
moments and stories visually blend together as she looks toward the haunted walk: “I had been
looking at the Ghost’s Walk lying in a deep shade of masonry afar off, and picturing to myself
the female shape that was said to haunt it, when I became aware of a figure approaching through
the wood… By little and little, it revealed itself to be a woman’s––a lady’s––Lady Dedlock’s”

22
This reading runs counter to D. A. Miller’s foundational reading of the nineteenth-century
novel’s “policing function” and the fear that it inspires (2).
101
(448). Three figures blend into one here––that of the woman chasing after her child (“a
woman’s”); the first angry and doomed Lady Dedlock (“a lady’s”); and Honoria, Esther’s
unhappy mother (“Lady Dedlock’s”).
In this scene of reconciliation, a separation, too, appears. The Ghost’s Walk creates a
bridge across time between Lady Dedlock’s past thoughts of her lost child and Esther’s current
vision of the woman with an expression that she “had pined for and dreamed of when [she] was a
little child” yet “never seen in any face” (Bleak House 448). But the overlapping of these
moments points to the impossibility of a final shared space in which both mother and daughter
can peacefully exist––in fact, there is only ever space for one of the two women, where the
presence of one demands the death, or complete erasure, of the other. In the first mention of the
Ghost’s Walk, Esther takes the form of the dead infant that “had never borne a name,” since her
mother, Lady Dedlock, “is childless” (452, 11). Later, in the wood, when Lady Dedlock hands
her letter to Esther, it is Lady Dedlock who must die since Esther “must evermore consider [her
mother] as dead” (450). Looking toward the approaching figure with outstretched arms, Esther
hopes for the union she so much desires, not realizing that in embracing her mother she learns of
her death (“had been buried”), not her life, and having her mother acknowledge her living
necessitates her mother’s disappearance.
In enveloping her narration within the “embrace” of the third-person narrator, then,
Esther metaphorically relives the moment of fragile peace before her mother announces their
separation. During her brief reunion with Lady Dedlock, Esther cries, “I held my mother in my
embrace, and she held me in hers; and among the still woods in the silence of the summer day,
there seemed to be nothing but our two troubled minds that was not at peace” (Bleak House 449).
The narrative structure of Bleak House eventually re-creates the abandonment that Esther
102
immediately experiences after this shared peace. The novel’s ending––with Esther’s unframed
closing “portion” and her final em dash––echoes the mother’s broken embrace. The em dash
(“even supposing––”) extends out, asking for the mother’s return, for the resurrection of the one
character that can convince Esther that she is indeed as beautiful as ever. Lady Dedlock is the
missing name in Esther’s list: she remembers her “dearest little pets,” her “darling,” her
“husband,” and her “guardian,” but she does not name her mother (770). Esther does not speak
the final word, then, because she is desperately––and hopelessly––waiting for the last word to
come from Lady Dedlock.
Esther is hopeless indeed, because despite her narrative power, the final gift of the
closing portion and the mother’s death, figurative or literal, precludes the mother’s return. For in
Bleak House, the mother’s gift of a story and the authority to share this story necessitates, as
Dever notes, the daughter’s “status as a mourner” (81). During that desperate meeting in the
woods, Lady Dedlock passes Esther the letter in which she tells the story of Esther’s birth and
supposed death, saying, in the same breath, that Esther must consider her as gone forever. In
receiving the gift of narrative power, then, the daughter acknowledges and accepts the mother’s
death, no matter how much it may also grieve her and cause her regret (Esther feels afterward
that “it would have been better and happier for many people, if indeed [she] had never breathed”
[Bleak House 453]). Despite the seeming finality of the mother’s passing, the daughter must and
will repeatedly act out this exchange, accepting the “small gift” of narrative authority only to
lose the gift-giving mother every time.
The most significant disappearances and returns in Bleak House are always those of Lady
Dedlock. Not long after the parting in the woods, Esther again finds herself rushing towards her
mother, who, having left Chesney Wold, her husband, and her position, as well as a final letter to
103
Esther, finds her way to the melancholy burying ground where Esther’s father, the law writer
known as Nemo, lies buried. Having earlier firmly removed Esther’s hands from around her
person, Lady Dedlock lies on the cold step in a now lifeless clasp, “with one arm creeping round
a bar of the iron gate, and seeming to embrace it” (Bleak House 713). Esther mistakenly refers to
her mother’s still form as “the mother of the dead child” (713), thinking that her mother is the
bricklayer’s wife, Jenny, but also correctly since, as Dever notes, her mother has finally become,
through putting on Jenny’s clothes, what “she thought she was for so long” (101). Esther, after
realizing the corpse’s true identity, tells her reader that once more she meets with Lady Dedlock
only to find that her attempts to comfort will not be accepted: “it was my mother, cold and dead”
(Bleak House 714).
The eighteenth number of the serial publication of Bleak House ends with these words,
setting up the final double-number installment to be a failed attempt to raise the mother from the
dead once again. This moment repeats within both the narrative and the narrative’s structure as
Esther is abandoned not just three times (at birth, in the woods, and at the burying ground), but
four, with the last disguised as an instance of narrative triumph when it is, rather, the orphan
daughter’s cry for her absent mother. That the mother has already twice returned (Lady
Dedlock’s first “death” being that of Esther’s young imagination and her second in the woods a
metaphorical one) suggests that the daughter’s cry is not without effect. The novel’s final hope––
and sorrow––is that the mother will return, will once again grant narrative authority and
permission to take comfort in confiding one’s story, and so will, inevitably, reenact the
daughter’s abandonment within the same dying breath. Esther, who in each encounter with her
mother makes clear that she wants nothing more than to find solace in embracing and
exchanging stories, finds her transient periods of peace within the mother’s protecting arms to be
104
too quickly ripped away––and the ending of Bleak House is no exception. Here, Esther’s final
em dash evokes her extended arms reaching out for the mother’s voice and reassurance and
finding nothing there. Like the doll once again inanimate, the third-person narrator remains mute,
buried––“cold and dead.”
The third-person narrator may not speak again, but Esther is not alone. Before she closes
her narrative, Esther addresses the novel’s final doll: the “unknown friend” from whom she will
soon “part for ever” with “dear remembrance” (Bleak House 767). Esther thinks of her reader in
the same terms as she does of Dolly, whose patience she enlisted for her daily storytelling and
who, like her reader, remains “dear” in her memory (17). At this point, Esther signals that the
third-person narrator will not return (despite her desires to the contrary), by no longer speaking
to the third-person narrator, or even to herself, but to her reader. The reader-as-doll must fill the
place left by the third-person narrator, assuming a position that is at once feminine, intimate, and
associated with childhood. These associations have traditionally rendered the doll an overlooked
figure, yet the very characters who scorn dolls (Judy Smallweed and the brickmaker who tells
Mrs. Pardiggle, “If you was to leave me a doll, I shouldn’t nuss it”) mark their importance in this
novel (99).
23
Both Judy and the brickmaker prove that they lack compassion for others, treating
Charley and Jenny without care or affection.
In this way, the doll serves not only as a model for the narrative structure, but also as a
transitional object for Esther from the third-person narrator to the reader. Winnicott says of the
transitional object that it “goes on being important” even after its supposed use is no longer
apparent (4). Like the dear old doll that Esther remembers at key moments in her adult life, the
transitional object “is not forgotten and it is not mourned. It loses meaning, and this is because

23
See Miriam Forman-Brunell (1); and Juliette Peers (4).
105
the transitional phenomena have become diffused” (5). The reader, like Dolly, Lady Dedlock,
and the third-person narrator, gives Esther the comfort of listening to (or allowing her to tell) her
story. The doll acts as a model of narrative transmission, informing readers of the complicated
ways in which narrative moves, but when the doll as a material object disappears––is buried––
we see this act of narrative transmission reoccur between characters, narrator and character,
reader and novel.
Readers eventually engage in a transaction similar to that between Esther and Dolly (and
Esther and Lady Dedlock), for as soon as we learn that Esther has become a mother (“I have two
little daughters”), she abandons us, leaving us with an obligation that we cannot fulfill (Bleak
House 767). We might then imagine that we are now engaged in a bond or narrative exchange
that we cannot undo. The new Bleak House that Mr. Jarndyce gives Esther is, of course, a doll’s
house: Esther describes it as “a rustic cottage of doll’s rooms” (751). If Bleak House is a doll’s
house, then its inhabitants are dolls, and the readers who inhabit the novel, Bleak House, are as
well. This reading is fitting for a novel that was completed, as Dickens writes to his friend and
subeditor, W. H. Wills, at a château that is “the best doll’s house” (LCD 290). We can only
wonder if Dickens took his conjuring doll into this doll house château when he reinvented the
novel form, giving her a coin and getting, in return, a secret.

106
Chapter Three:

George Eliot Practices Throwing

When George Eliot imagined the origins of storytelling, she reached for a ludic image. A
child’s curiosity about its doll, Eliot suggests, is what leads to authorship: “The presence of the
Jack in the box affects every child: it is the more reflective lad, the miniature philosopher, who
wants to know how he got there” (Leaves 305). Eventually, Eliot writes, this wonder about the
origins of one’s toys will transfer to a “refined face among the prisoners picking tow in goal” or
“some unforgettable face in a pulpit” (303). Storytelling based in dollplay, Eliot suggests, instills
a lifelong practice of identifying characters, imbuing them with consciousness, and composing
their life narratives. If the works of Charlotte Brontë led us to bury and resurrect our dolls, and
those of Charles Dickens encouraged us to imagine speaking to and through other bodies, those
of George Eliot inspire us to play with consciousness itself.
Eliot’s play with consciousness in part resembles Dickens’s ventriloquism, for just as
ventriloquists throw their voices between two bodies, so does Eliot throw consciousness first into
one character and then into another. Eliot’s practice is common in play in which children animate
their companions in one moment and then engage in far more violent forms of throwing, beating,
or even breaking in the next.
1
In Clara Bradford’s short novel, Ethel’s Adventures in Doll
Country (1880), the young eponymous protagonist, engages in such vacillations. She recalls that
she treated her former favorite doll “very badly,” boxing her ears and giving her a trial by court-

1
I am indebted to Mary Jo Bang’s poetry collection, A Doll for Throwing (2017), for first
considering the multiple meanings of “throwing” when it comes to dolls. As she notes of the title
to her collection, “Alma Siedhoff-Buscher’s Bauhaus Wurfpuppe (translated variously as throw
doll, throwing doll, or doll for throwing) was a flexible and durable woven-yarn doll with a
round wooden head––which if thrown, it was said, would always land with grace. A ventriloquist
is said to ‘throw’ his or her voice into a doll that rests on the knee” (67).
107
martial after neglect rendered the doll broken and soiled (82). When questioned about whether
she would again mistreat this doll now gone missing, Ethel responds that she “should certainly
punish her, for causing me so much trouble,” but also that she would try to forgive her (82). For,
Ethel claims, “I used to love her so much! I shall never love another doll as I did her” (82). The
young girl thus wavers between admissions of ill-treatment, violent rage, and deeply felt
protestations of love. Ethel’s shifting behaviors pose a problem, calling into question the extent
of her feelings, and whether she ever, really, loved her doll at all. A child’s quick shuffling
through two very different types of behavior in quick succession would appear to present at best
a paradox and at worst the suggestion that the child’s feelings are not authentic. But such
apparently paradoxical behaviors and feelings are routine in dollplay and Ethel’s easy switching
between the roles of caretaker and abuser is far from uncommon.
In this way, while all novelists are ventriloquists, speaking through other people without
moving their lips, George Eliot throws her voice in a way different from Charles Dickens. For
Eliot, fiction is not only a form of play, but also a form of emotional and moral engagement. In
the fiction of George Eliot, readers are asked repeatedly to engage with the characters and
characters in turn with other fictional persons and objects, but these relationships are no more
stable or benign than those of Ethel and her abused doll. Nineteenth-century dollplay illustrates
that throwing consciousness, and thus feeling empathy, is an active practice. It is something that
anyone can do––or not––at any given moment, but it is also a practice replete with failures and
inconsistencies. A child learns to feel with and through her doll, but she also practices
discarding––throwing away––those feelings. Even if loving and maternal feelings are eventually
transferred to a spouse, child, or other person (as many nineteenth-century parents and
dollmakers hoped and imagined), it is often done so at the expense of the doll, who is then
108
abandoned. And, as we shall see later in this chapter, even that practice is not stable: affection,
no matter how deeply felt, can be transferred, sometimes quite abruptly, back to the doll, leaving
the other person, even the child herself, bereft and unloved.
Eliot, who herself experienced these same oscillations of affection in her vexed
relationship with her much-beloved brother, makes these conflicts felt throughout her fiction.
Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (1860) offers the clearest fictional version of this
passionate relationship, alternating between punishing and soothing her “Fetish” doll, throwing
and disavowing her empathy, practicing the complicated art of caring deeply for multiple persons
at once. This alternation between punishing and soothing, battering and forgiving, not only
operates as an education in throwing consciousness for both Maggie and the novel’s readers, but
also raises the question of to what extent Maggie’s empathy is lasting, or if it is even “good.”
Empathizing with a doll, character, or person does not necessarily mean that we are not equally
likely to deny those figures the ability to feel at a later moment. In doing so, we render inanimate
a person or object that was previously imbued with consciousness.
By tracing the influence of childhood narrative experiments with dollplay, readers can
see how Eliot experiments with throwing consciousness in an exercise that is linked to her roles
both as an author and as a sister in her “Brother and Sister” sonnets and Mill on the Floss, a
connection frequently made by critics who choose to identify Maggie with her creator. Even
more than for Brontë or Dickens, the doll was something Eliot never quite abandoned, for the
anxiety that underlies Maggie Tulliver’s play––that is, that by animating one object of affection,
another is rendered inanimate––only comes to fruition within the multiplot novel, specifically
Daniel Deronda (1876), in which readers are thrown between Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel
Deronda, comforting one while neglecting the other. In this novel, Eliot not only plays once
109
again with her characters, but with us, her readers, testing our abilities to throw consciousness
into more than one character as we oscillate between Gwendolen and Daniel. Even at the end,
Eliot will not let us throw away childish things forever. Though Eliot “abandons” Gwendolen at
the end of her novel, closing with Daniel and shutting Gwendolen up again with her mother at
Offendene, she demands that we still hold on to Gwendolen, that we stay attached to her, painful
as that may be. We cannot, that is, understand why we are resistant readers at the end of Eliot’s
career, continuing to be invested in Gwendolen’s story even after she is put away, if we do not
first understand what exercise in empathy and abandonment initially led us to pick up the dolls.

Practicing Empathy
To begin perhaps more abstractly: just what is empathy, why does Eliot want us to have
it, and how does it enter nineteenth-century culture? It doesn’t, exactly. The word “empathy” did
not enter into the English language until 1909 when Edward Tichener introduced it in his
Elementary Psychology of Thought Processes, and since then has taken on many different
meanings, making it particularly difficult to define (Coplan and Goldie xii). Psychologist C.
Daniel Batson identifies at least eight different current uses of the term “empathy,” noting that
while scholars of empathy “typically agree that empathy is important, they often disagree about
why it is important, about what effects it has, about where it comes from, and even about what it
is” (3). Initially, “empathy” derived from the German Einfühlung (literally, “feeling into”), and
was a concept primarily used in aesthetics (Coplan and Goldie xii). In the early twentieth
century, Benjamin Morgan explains, “empathy lost its bodily connotations and came to signify a
psychological process similar to what would have been called sympathy in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries” (220). I prefer the word “empathy” in this chapter because I am applying it,
110
as Anna Lindhé does, in its more modern meaning as “the sense of ‘feeling with’ other
individuals” as opposed to sympathy’s “feeling for” (22). When Theodor Lipps referred to
Einfühlung in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, he based it on a feeling of “inner
resonance” in which “[w]e experience the other’s feelings as our own because we project our
own feelings onto the other,” and this feeling of projection is closely aligned with my theory of
throwing consciousness (emphasis added Coplan and Goldie xii). When Eliot wrote that “The
greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist is the extension of our
sympathies” she was using “sympathy” in the way that we apply “empathy” today (Eliot, Essays
144).
This chapter considers empathy in children’s dollplay where dolls act as mediums for
experiencing both their own feelings and the feelings of others. Children feel with and through
their dolls by throwing consciousness, resulting in what I refer to in this chapter as “empathic
play.” Jonathan Belman first uses this term in his dissertation on “empathetic play” in his study
of video games that are intended to cultivate particular (positive) ideological or political views
(1). For Belman, empathetic play is when players are directly informed to play empathetically (as
opposed to for entertainment only), either imagining how a character feels or how they would
feel if they were in similar circumstances. Significantly, Belman argues that empathetic play
“does not occur naturally in the absence of instructions to empathize” (103). I use the term
“empathic play” (rather than “empathetic”) to distinguish my use of the concept from Belman’s.
Empathic play does not require that a player is directly instructed to play empathically, although
in some cases this may have occurred, but it does require a medium (such as a doll, fictional
character, or simulated character) through which one is able to feel.
111
That reading novels engenders empathy from readers has become somewhat of an
accepted fact amongst literary scholars. Timothy Gao has recently argued that we might consider
our engagement with novels, and the Victorian novel in particular, as a form of “play because
examples and representations of how children and adults make-believe offer us (as they offered
the Victorians) exemplary models for the often ineffable process of imaginative engagement with
fictions” (original emphasis 2). A novel that a reader can “play through,” as one does, according
to Clark C. Abt, when attempting to solve a problem in a video game, could likewise result in
greater empathetic feelings (qtd in Belman 1). Critics have generally considered this to be a good
thing, following a theory shared with psychologists and other defenders of the humanities that
empathy, whether for a person, animal, or fictional character, leads to action based on
compassion. This theory, known as the “empathy-altruism” hypothesis, upholds the novel in
particular as providing experiences for readers that act as substitutes for “shared feelings with
real others” (Keen vii). Martha Nussbaum takes this theory one step further, suggesting that
reading literature cultivates readers’ “powers of imagination that are essential to citizenship”––
that is, that literature inspires readers to better understand and care for people in the real world
(85).
However, some critics have begun to question the extent of readerly empathy in enacting
empathetic or altruistic actions beyond the novel. Suzanne Keen argues against such transference
when she questions “the contemporary truism that novel reading cultivates empathy that
produces good citizens” (xv). Just because we empathize with characters in the novels we read,
she argues, does not mean that we will then be moved to take effective action in our own lives to
help others, and, indeed, Keen persuasively notes that there is little evidence that many readers
have done so (xxi). Even more suggestive is the question of whether empathy is as positive a
112
quality as we have assumed it to be: Fritz Breithaupt opens his ominously titled work, The Dark
Sides of Empathy (2019), with the radical claim that we sometimes “commit atrocities not out of
a failure of empathy but rather as a direct consequence of successful, even overly successful,
empathy” (3). Turning specifically to literature, Anne Lindhé persuasively argues that reading
may not actually produce “ethical effects” since “empathetic responses to one character occur at
the expense of another character in the story world” (20). According to Lindhé, “the presumed
empathy that the reader feels with a literary figure may trigger, or even be contingent on, the
reader’s antipathies or indifference towards another character in the story” (20). Readers may be
practicing empathetic skills and feelings while engaging with a particular character, but at the
same time they are practicing opposite non-empathetic and dehumanizing ones towards
another.
While fascinating, almost all of these studies have predominantly focused on adult
experiences of empathy. This focus on adult experiences neglects where the impulse to construct
immersive narratives and find connections with invented characters begins––that is, in
childhood. To understand narrative empathy, we must consider the beginning of narrative
experimentation, where characters (and authors) first begin attempting strategies to feel with
another, and to make another do so as well through throwing consciousness and empathic play.
We can do so by turning to accounts of play, and, in particular, dollplay, where we can observe a
child’s initial attempts to imagine with and through the other. This method is in keeping with
studies by twentieth and twenty-first century child development specialists, psychologists, and
113
educationalists who use dolls to train children in empathetic emotions and to navigate how to
express and act upon those emotions.
2

That dolls are considered pivotal to the development of empathetic emotion is evident in
nineteenth-century literature and culture. As Marcus argues, “Dolls were an apt subject for
children’s literature because, like fiction itself, they were amusements justified by their ability to
teach sympathy” (158). Mary Clai Jones similarly notes that Dolly Dear; or the Story of a Waxen
Beauty (1883) “lauds the self-sacrificing love girls should display in caring not only for their
dolls but also for the less fortunate. Sophronia, the doll narrator, instills her owners with
patience, empathy, and care-taking” (para. 1). These messages regarding the doll’s role as
teacher of empathetic behavior were often explicit. In Margaret Gatti’s Florence and Her Doll
(1865), young Florence claims “though you know there is not any danger of my killing my doll,
in reality; you know it is only make believe: My doll cannot feel,” her mother responds, “but it is
possible, that at some future time, you may have the charge of a baby who can feel; and it will be
well, if any of the lessons, taught to you now in play, should remain upon your mind, and prove
of real service to you then” (125). Florence’s father makes a similar claim, telling Florence after
she has taken great pains to dress and care for her doll that “the little girl who is careful and
tender even of a doll, that cannot feel, deserves to be trusted with the care of a living creature”

2
See Kirstine Beeley’s Using the Empathy Doll’s Approach: Developing Emotional Awareness
in Early Years Settings and Mercy Karuniah Jesuvadian and Susan Wright’s “Doll Tales:
Foregrounding Children’s Voices in Research.” Furthermore, in his work in game design,
Belman and his colleagues have found that “empathy is one of the values that [game design
instructors] most frequently select” from a set of listed values such as “peace,” “liberty,” and
“tolerance,” concluding that empathy is often the goal behind the construction of serious video
games, a goal that often carries over to doll design (10; 9). Role play in particular, he concludes,
elicits “[h]igh-engagement empathy” that leads to an “altruistic response,” but intriguingly the
player need not play the role of the sufferer: the results were the same when the player took on
the role of the oppressor (Belman 69).
114
(147). Even if Florence has to constantly remind herself that her doll cannot feel, she learns to
treat it as if it does, enabling her development into a more caring and empathetic––or at the very
least––responsible, person.
The notion that dolls taught children to be more empathetic carried over to adult fiction
as well, albeit less explicitly. The unfortunate eponymous narrator of Wilkie Collins’s Basil
(1852) writes fondly to his beloved sister Clara, who, he suggests, is the most caring person he
knows: “May your kind eyes, love, be the first that fall on these pages, when the writer has
parted from them for ever! May your tender hand be the first that touches these leaves, when
mine is cold!” (18). Clara, whom the narrator presents to us “as complete a contrast as could well
be conceived” from the modern women he criticizes, represents an ideal of love and compassion
(20). The narrator further makes a point of showing how she suffers on behalf of those whom she
loves, noting that “Suffering was, for her, silent, secret, long enduring [...] The very strength of
her emotions was in their silence and secresy [sic]” (23). It comes as no surprise then when,
much later, the narrator reveals that one of his most tender memories is of her embracing her doll
as a young girl: “Clara––then a little rosy child––used to wait gravely and anxiously, with the
doll in her arms, to say good-bye for the last time, and to bid us come back soon, and then never
go away again” (195). Clara, with her doll clutched in her arms, represents to the narrator the
ideal of a caring and empathetic woman, even as a small child. The doll’s presence as a thing that
is loved and cared for cues readers into the type of person she grows up to become––that is,
caring, maternal, and loving––even as it also highlights Clara’s childhood need to be loved
herself as her brother leaves her behind. Conversely, as the brickmaker and Judy Smallweed
showed us in Dickens’s Bleak House, characters that grow up without dolls are predictably cruel,
115
negligent, and lacking in empathetic emotions. Readers can conclude that to have never learned
to care for a doll will lead to an inability to empathize in adult life.
However, autobiographical accounts show girls engaging in a far more complicated
relationship with their dolls, one where they are able to simultaneously deny the doll’s feelings
and feel empathy for the doll. One doll-player reports that “when she found her doll’s head
hollow [she] thought it had always been dead” (Ellis and Hall 147). But this strange conclusion
means that during previous occasions, when the doll had seemed to be living, she had in fact
been deceased. How, according to the child’s imagination, could the doll have been both
apparently animate, instilled with feeling and emotion, and later discovered to have been lifeless
the whole time? The child concludes that it is possible for the doll to somehow occupy both
positions at once. In this way, children were often able to imagine their dolls as at once alive and
dead, feeling and insensible.
While it might seem that the doll’s resemblance to the human form would engender the
children’s attribution of feelings, nineteenth-century children report that the doll’s deterioration
and waning human resemblance bore little impact on their perception of the doll’s ability to feel.
One former doll-player, Alice Brizee, defines a doll later in life as an “image of something you
had in your mind. It’s not always perfect or not always whole. Sometimes they’ve got an arm
broken off or something but still, they meant something to you” (Brizee emphasis added).
3

Another doll-player reports that she “cherished [her doll] till arms, legs, and hair were gone, and
it was a painful sight, and her mother burned it; though she had plenty of others far prettier, she

3
Alice Brizee, born in 1906, made this statement as a participant in the Doll Oral History Project
conducted by Dorothy Washburn at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY in
1987. As part of this project, Washburn interviewed area men and women who had played with
dolls between 1900 and 1940. Cassette recordings and transcripts of these interviews currently
reside in the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play.
116
cried all night and almost all day. Her intense grief lasted a week” (Ellis and Hall 139). Her
intense emotion lasted well beyond the time expected by her older relations, who, asking her
three years later about the doll, caused the girl to burst into tears and say, “Why did you burn it, I
loved it so, and she loved me. She is in God’s house and sometime I will see her” (139). The
girl’s parents cannot understand how their daughter could prefer a doll that is worn into an
unrecognizable shape, without limbs or hair, but the emotions the girl ascribes to the doll are
particular to that figure and cannot be transferred to another. However, the girl’s transition from
referring to her doll as “it” (“I loved it so”) to “she” (“and she loved me”) indicates that while the
girl expects to see her doll again in heaven, the doll still occupies a status somewhat between an
object and a person.
4

The doll’s position as something between object and person was fostered by dollmakers
and by accounts of doll production, which emphasized the doll’s slippage into human
characteristics. An 1887 article in The American Stationer on “The Birth of a Doll,” details the
steps of pressing, varnishing, and baking involved in forming the papier-maché for a Parisian
doll, but also refers to these dolls, with their superior materials, as “blue-blooded,” and notes that
the delicate nature of their porcelain heads means that they are “liable to be cracked; but, after
all, not more so than the cranium of the ordinary, every-day, flesh and blood baby,” and
concludes that “[a] good Parisian doll is almost as difficult to rear as the squalling son and heir of
a modern millionaire” (1042). Another article in the Stationer later that same year titled “A Rag

4
Even the reminder that dolls are made of wood, paper, and porcelain little affects the way that
young children perceive their dolls’ inner world. Ellis and Hall find that “[e]ven long after it is
known that [dolls] are made of wood, wax, etc., it is felt that they are of skin, flesh, etc” (135).
This feeling of the doll’s liveness does not mean that the doll is limited by the same rules as the
human body. As one dollplayer recounts, “Two of my dolls had their heads broken off, but this
made no difference in my treatment, for they seemed endowed with life and feeling” (Hall and
Ellis 138).

117
Doll” performs a similar oscillation between the doll as object and as person, but with the
Parisian doll’s apparent class opposite. This “Cinderella of the play-room,” made of “a gallon of
bran and a piece of stout linen,” can “do all of those things which are fit and proper for such a
young lady to perform” (1325). Even as readers learn that dolls are made from “molded paper”
and their appendages held in place by “elastic bands,” they are taught to regard them as objects
very like the children they resemble (“Birth of a Doll” 1042). Children likewise viewed their
dolls as paradoxically both lifelike and as objects that are incapable of feeling.
The doll’s ability to act as a stand-in for a living person––presumably so that children
might learn to someday care for real children of their own––also posed the threat of permanently
taking the place of the living. In Flora Annie Steel’s short story, “Mussumât Kirpo’s Doll,” from
her collection The Flower of Forgiveness (1894), readers can witness how a doll takes
precedence over a living person when one has been routinely mistreated by those around her.
The story opens when a fifteen-year-old married girl, Mussumât Kirpo, is given “a Japanese
baby-doll with a large bald head” by the English ladies who run the local mission school in
Punjab (277). This is deemed “not the correct thing” as the English ladies “always draw the line
about dolls when a girl is married [...] these tiny trifles help to emphasise our views on the child-
marriage question” (277). The Mission ladies show their disapproval of child-marriages by
denying that a married girl is still a child; now that Kirpo is married––while still young––she
cannot have a doll; she must instead tend to her own children. Julia Smith, the woman
responsible for this mistake goes to Kirpo with the intention of taking back the doll, but she finds
that Kirpo desires to keep her prize, while the family that she has married into scorns the doll
(“She wants none of your dolls or your books,” Kirpo’s mother-in-law tells Julia, “they aren’t
worth anything”), exposing their lack of sympathy towards Kirpo, whom they “did not count for
118
much” due to her mental and physical disabilities (279). The narrator, too, is rather critical of
Kirpo’s love for this doll, speaking unsympathetically of her “cunning” in hiding the doll from
her in-laws, who would sell it for money, and suggesting that her careful treasuring of this doll is
a form of “miserliness” (Steel 281).
However, Kirpo’s desire to keep and care for her doll emphasizes her own compassion,
loneliness, and desire to love and be loved, highlighting the unfeeling judgments of the Mission
ladies, Kirpo’s in-laws, and the story’s narrator. The doll becomes a source of secret comfort for
Kirpo that not even the narrator is able to penetrate. The narrator is unsure what, exactly, Kirpo
did with her doll––“[p]erhaps Kirpo got up at night to play with it; perhaps she never played with
it at all”––but, regardless, she carefully “wrap[s]” the doll and “burie[s] it away somewhere”
(281). Later, the narrator repeats this ambiguity after Kirpo becomes pregnant: “[p]erhaps this
gave Kirpo more time to play with the Japanese doll, perhaps it did not” (282). The secret of the
doll’s existence is almost as precious as the doll itself. When asked about the doll, Kirpo would
“nod her head mysteriously,” a ritual that reinforces the doll’s secret existence (281).
The doll may comfort Kirpo, but it does not successfully train her to care for others. In
fact, the doll becomes the only thing or person for which Kirpo feels, supplanting the empathetic
feelings towards others that the doll was supposed to have engendered. When Kirpo gives birth
to a son, Julia returns to visit her former pupil and requests that Kirpo return the doll “now that
[she] has a live one of [her] own,” making both the doll’s supposed purpose as a training ground
for a baby and the interchangeability between doll and child explicit (283). Despite her claims
that she no longer wants her doll, this later turns out to be untrue. When Julia begs the in-laws to
let the dying Kirpo hold her newborn son (thus far withheld from her), they finally hand over her
baby, but poor Kirpo insists, “My doll! My doll! I like my doll best” (285). In a final terrible turn
119
of events, she dies before the doll can be brought to her. The doll, at first a substitute for the
child the gossips imagine she will never have, eventually becomes more beloved than the son she
is not allowed to hold. As Shampa Roy suggests, Julia and Kirpo’s in-laws misinterpret her
desire for her doll as a “maternal craving” when it in fact represents her “need to possess a
‘thing’” (63). The Japanese doll carries with it further associations with the “idea of Japan” that,
as Grace E. Lavery further argues, link it to the aesthetic category of “the exquisite” where
beauty and violence converge, making Kirpo’s attachment about much more than maternal
leanings (x). Regardless of its meaning, Kirpo, treated as a disposable doll, finds that her
Japanese doll, the only thing she was allowed to keep as her own, is the thing that she loves most
of all.
This story thus suggests that emotional devotion to dolls could perversely diminish the
capacity for feeling towards other human beings, rather than ensuring that the child would use
the doll to learn how to love and then find those feelings to be easily transferable to living
persons. Furthermore, the feelings that the doll-player has for the doll may not necessarily be
those of tender love and compassion, as is the case with Ethel, who punished her dolls despite
claiming that she loved them. Doll tales and other literature in which dolls appear show that they
are repeatedly broken, abused, beaten, and whipped, showing that empathy is, in practice,
complicated, fleeting, and often felt for one person at the expense of another. Eliot drew upon the
practice of throwing consciousness and empathic dollplay when she sought to better understand
feelings that can be at one moment all-consuming and the next apparently disregarded. The
nuances and apparent contradictions of such play shape the depiction of scenes not only from her
own life, but her novelistic form.

120

Empathizing with Maggie
In Eliot’s novel, The Mill on the Floss, nine-year-old Maggie Tulliver, has not one, but
two dolls. She treats each with alternating compassion and, at best, callous indifference. The
paradoxical relationship that nineteenth-century children had with their dolls informs our reading
of Maggie’s apparently contradictory behavior with her own dolls. Her first doll enters the
narrative after she is admonished by her father and Mr. Riley for her (in their opinion)
inappropriate reading, which they request she put away and instead seek out her mother. In
response, “Maggie shut up the book at once, with a sense of disgrace, but not being inclined to
see after her mother, she compromised the matter by going into a dark corner behind her father’s
chair, and nursing her doll, toward which she had an occasional fit of fondness in Tom’s
absence, neglecting its toilet, but lavishing so many warm kisses on it that the waxen cheeks had
a wasted, unhealthy appearance” (Mill 22). In this moment of shame, Maggie grants her doll the
honor and affection that she desires (as the narrator notes, Maggie hoped that “Mr. Riley would
have a respect for her” after learning about her reading habits, “for it had been evident that he
thought nothing of her before”), imbuing it with consciousness (20). The doll thus takes on a
very intricate role, acting at once as a replacement for her brother Tom, who is absent and cannot
receive her love, and for herself, who is in need of affection at that moment.
Despite these layers of meaning, Maggie finds it extraordinarily easy to forget all that her
doll means to her in a moment. Upon learning of her brother’s impending departure for schooling
elsewhere, she abandons her expressions of care, treating the doll without a thought for its
feelings: ““Father,” broke in Maggie, who had stolen unperceived to her father’s elbow again,
listening with parted lips, while she held her doll topsy-turvy, and crushed its nose against the
wood of the chair,—“father, is it a long way off where Tom is to go?” (27). For Maggie, this
121
waxen doll becomes a substitute for which she cares only in her brother Tom’s absence; as soon
as he––or mention of him––returns, the doll is again rendered inanimate, a thing without feeling.
Maggie later performs a similar, although inverse, act of thoughtlessness in relation to living
things. When Tom goes off to school and Maggie later realizes that she has neglected his pet
rabbits, she is horrified not that they suffered and died, but that she will be punished for it.
Addressing the head miller, she cries “O Luke, Tom told me to be sure and remember the rabbits
every day––but how could I, when they did not come into my head, you know? O, he will be so
angry with me, I know he will, and so sorry about his rabbits––and so am I sorry” (34). Tom’s
return suddenly puts the rabbits back into her head, reminding her of their existence and need to
be cared for. Her feelings for them only exist through her understanding of what her brother will
feel when he learns their fate. Her doll conversely does the opposite, acquiring meaning only as
an alternative to Tom.
The fear that underlies so many of the empathetic acts that occur in this novel is that of
empathizing with the wrong object or subject, and the anxiety that this feeling will render the
wrong person or thing inanimate. Peter Logan highlights this fear when he discusses how Mrs.
Tulliver makes the error of empathizing with her soon-to-be-lost objects, rather than her broken
husband, and in doing so, effectively switches the relative liveness of one with the other: “By
contrasting the paralyzed Mr. Tulliver with Mrs. Tulliver’s vibrant household objects, the novel
sets up a reversal of value, in which objects appear alive and the living appear lifeless” (76). For
Maggie, it is important that her doll only have meaning in her brother’s absence, so that he
always remains vibrant, even in the doll’s presence.
The interchangeability of Maggie’s doll with her brother, Tom, is further emphasized by
her mother’s own careful doll-like treatment of her son. Echoing Maggie’s concern regarding
122
Tom, Mrs. Tulliver asks, if the school is “so far off as [she] couldn’t wash him and mend him?”
(27). While Maggie denies her doll the washing and mending that Mrs. Tulliver bestows upon
her son, these were the qualities that dolls were supposed to instill in their young owners. Rather
than successfully teaching Maggie to practice the “maternal arts of” grooming that she might
then someday apply to her own children, the doll mirrors her own “unfeminine” lack of careful
toilette. Mrs. Tulliver finds Maggie to be a rather bad doll, at least according to her
understanding of what a doll should be and do. She begs her daughter, “let your hair be brushed,
an’ put your other pinafore on, an’ change your shoes––do, for shame; an’ come an’ go with
your patchwork, like a little lady” (16). But Maggie will not be a “little lady” and instead of
brushing her hair she tosses it with “the air of a small Shetland pony” (16). In this way, Maggie
cues readers that she is using her doll to practice something far more interesting than her toilette.
This complicated relationship becomes more apparent with Maggie’s second doll, who
receives a similar, although more detailed and painful treatment. This “large wooden doll, which
once stared with the roundest of eyes above the reddest of cheeks” is now merely a “trunk” that
is “entirely defaced by a long career of vicarious suffering,” and which the narrator refers to as a
“Fetish” (Mill 31). Most disturbing is the “[t]hree nails driven into the head” of the doll, a form
of “vengeance” that was “suggested to her by the picture of Jael destroying Sisera in the old
Bible” (31). As cathartic as driving in the nails is for Maggie––the narrator claims that the “last
nail had been driven in with a fiercer stroke than usual, for the Fetish on that occasion
represented aunt Glegg”––she later finds that the nails leave behind too tangible a reference to
pain (31). Maggie finds that the visible presence of the nails prevents her from being able to
“fancy that the head was hurt when she knocked it against the wall, nor to comfort it, and make
believe to poultice it, when her fury was abated” (31). Surprisingly, Maggie finds as much use of
123
her wooden doll as a vehicle for enacting her rage against those who exert power over her (such
as her Aunt Glegg), as for then allowing her to take on the role of comforter. Like the children
who described their dolls has having opposite personalities, Maggie perceives her doll as
experiencing a pain that she can then comfort, but she also expresses no difficulty in forgetting
this pain, nor the need to comfort it, when she notices “a sudden beam of sunshine,” which leads
her to “throw away the Fetish and run to the window” (32). This quick abandonment suggests
that despite the fervor of feeling that she works herself into, she is also aware that this feeling is
of her own imaginative creation, one that she can readily abandon.
And yet, the intensity of Maggie’s actions against and with her wooden doll suggests a
full immersion in the belief that the doll feels with her. When Maggie gives up hammering nails
into the doll’s head, she soothes herself by “alternately grinding and beating the wooden head
against the rough brick of the great chimneys” until she reaches a “passion that expell[s] every
other form of consciousness––even the memory of the grievance that had caused it” (Mill 31-2).
Maggie’s loss of “every other form of consciousness” implies a complete fusion with the
experience of her doll––that is, the kind of breakdown of boundaries and distinctions that are so
necessary to experiencing empathy. And so, this all-consuming feeling demonstrates that Maggie
is actually very adept at practicing––and experiencing––empathy by throwing her consciousness
into the Fetish. But her desire, and ability, to feel what others feel may not be as good of a thing
as we would wish it to be. Reading Maggie’s impulse and desire for empathetic feelings
outwards from this scene shows the problem of empathy in this novel. Maggie, who has spent
her childhood practicing powerful acts of empathetic emotion, at times takes, as her brother Tom
later tells her, “pleasure in a sort of perverse self-denial” and at others “[has] not resolution to
124
resist a thing [shes] know[s] to be wrong” (409). Her strong empathetic impulses are not
consistent and may eventually come at someone else’s expense.
This problem becomes especially apparent in the relationships that she has with Tom, her
cousin Lucy, and the two men who love Maggie, Philip and Stephen. Despite Philip’s
implication that Maggie does not feel enough (at least for him, as he tells Maggie, “Have some
feeling for me, as well as for others”), she in fact feels what he feels so intensely that it takes the
form of physical pain (319). Vanessa Smith suggestively notes that Philip becomes a sort of
Fetish-like figure who is variously treated by Tom and Maggie: “Tom inadvertently ‘grinds and
beats’ where Maggie poultices the new object” (48). Remembering the insults her brother threw
at Philip when he learned of their relationship, Maggie experienced “so vivid a conception of
what [Philip] had felt under them, that it was almost like a sharp bodily pain to her” (362). Philip
reciprocates this feeling, claiming that he too has felt her suffering and suffered on her behalf. He
writes to Maggie claiming, “I have felt the vibration of chords in your nature” and “that no
anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into
which I have entered in loving you” (522; 523). He asserts that it is he that has borne her
suffering, rather than the other way around, that it is this very pain that has been transformative
for him. Unlike Maggie, “the new life” to which this love and suffering leads him becomes an
unshakeable state and the suffering he feels on her behalf appears to bring him a small form of
peace.
But Maggie finds that she cannot maintain her empathy for everyone equally. When her
other love interest, Stephen, offers to take the blame for their elopement, she insists it wouldn’t
make a difference as she would “feel what happened to [him]––just the same” (Mill 487). This
feeling towards Stephen is what leads her to distance herself from Philip and his pain. “[W]hy
125
should not Philip suffer?” she wonders to herself (478). Empathizing with Stephen comes at
Philip’s expense––not only does she not feel his pain, but she also stops caring (at least at certain
moments) about whether he suffers, throwing consciousness from one lover to the other. This is
as Stephen would have it. As he tells Maggie, “it is better, it is right that we should marry each
other. We can’t help the pain it will give” (467). Stephen acknowledges the impossibility of
caring for everyone equally and at once, suggesting that they must instead consider their own
feelings.
But Stephen is really considering only his own feelings, not Maggie’s. Unlike Philip, he
does not claim to feel Maggie’s suffering; rather, he asserts that his suffering is the most
unbearable, and no other pain can come near it. As he writes to her, “Maggie! Whose pain can
have been like mine? Whose injury is like mine? Who besides me has met that long look of love
that has burnt itself into my soul, so that no other image can come there?” (Mill 534). He denies
her suffering as equal to his own, even though, as Philip does with her, she finds herself vibrating
to the intensity of his emotion: “She did not read the letter: she heard him uttering it, and the
voice shook her with its old strange power” (original emphasis 535). Maggie does not make
claims or protestations; she physically takes on the feelings and sufferings of others.
And so, fictional characters act as dolls in this novel––the narrator even describes one
character, Bob Jakin’s wife, as having the “general physiognomy of a Dutch doll” (Mill 404).
Maggie’s cousin, Lucy Deane, finds that there is a “general uncanniness” about Maggie that we
might interpret as Maggie’s desire to feel with and through others who have come to take the
place of her dolls (403). Maggie’s confidences to Lucy strangely mirror the cathartic release she
once found with her dolls; Maggie finds that sharing her story with Lucy allows for a “relief”
that she had “never before known” (402). While Maggie reveals her “inmost life,” Lucy sits doll-
126
like with her “sweet face bent towards [Maggie] with sympathetic interest, and [her] little hand
pressing hers” (403). This moment is apparently quite different from Maggie’s thrashing of her
wooden Fetish, yet it fulfills the same need––to have another experience her emotions along with
her, and, in that way, allow her to unburden herself of her pent-up feelings.
But Maggie will eventually discard Lucy, wondering, “why should not Lucy [...] suffer?”
(Mill 478). She later renounces this thought, telling Stephen “I feel no excuse for myself––none–
–I should never have failed towards Lucy and Philip as I have done, if I had not been weak and
selfish and hard––able to think of their pain without a pain to myself that would have destroyed
all temptation. O, what is Lucy feeling now? –– She believed in me––she loved me––she was so
good to me––think of her…” and asking “‘O God is there any happiness in love that could make
me forget their pain?” (496; 544). She begs others to consider the feelings of those whom she has
temporarily been able to dismiss and even claims that there is nothing that could make her
“forget” them and their suffering, even though she earlier attempted to do just that. It remains,
however, that she is momentarily able to distance herself from the person with whom she shared
her “inmost” self. Here, Maggie treats Lucy like one of her dolls, sharing her most intimate
feelings, and then turning away in favor of another.
However, Maggie, too, eventually reveals herself to be George Eliot’s doll, and is
similarly abandoned. As we have already seen, Smith compellingly notes that at several points
the novel aligns Maggie with her Fetish and that “[w]e last see her sitting opposite Tom, once
more evoking the Fetish, ‘with eyes of intense life looking out from a weary, beaten face’” (52).
Ground, beaten, and comforted at turns, Maggie experiences alternations between acts of care
and suffering that we, as readers, inflict upon her, so that, as Smith notes, “[a]s the novel
progresses, the fort/da of grinding and poulticing shifts from the world of the object, outward
127
and inward, to Maggie’s interactions with others and herself” (45). And like all dolls, Maggie is
eventually put aside. At the end of the novel, after readers have spent hundreds of pages feeling
with, through, and for Maggie, she drowns, as she and her brother go down “in an embrace never
to be parted; living through again in one supreme moment the days when they had clasped their
little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together” (Mill 542). If true empathy requires
that two beings feel together as one, then Maggie and Tom have fulfilled this need exactly, for,
as their tombstone reads, “In their death they were not divided” (544).
Philip and Stephen, too, find themselves connected with Maggie after her death, even if
they continue living. Her two lovers, visiting her grave for many years afterwards, feel “that their
keenest joy and keenest sorrow were for ever buried there” (Mill 544). While one of the men,
presumably Stephen, eventually marries and visits the grave with his wife (who we might
assume is Lucy), the other always makes “solitary” sojourns to the burial site (544). Rather,
“[h]is great companionship was among the trees of the Red Deeps, where the buried joy seemed
still to hover––like a revisiting spirit” (544). Maggie’s ghost becomes for both of the men, but
especially for Philip, the figure through which his “keenest” emotions are still felt. Philip no
longer needs Maggie’s physical presence to imagine her love, pain, and suffering, and, at the
same time, he cannot do without her in imagining––and feeling––his own.
Readers were likewise affected by Maggie. As he awaited the final installment of Mill,
George Eliot’s publisher, John Blackwood, wrote to her on March 7, 1860, describing how
profoundly he was experiencing the protagonist’s suffering: “I am indeed wearying for the rest
and feel the misfortunes impending on Maggie like a personal grief” (GEL 3:272). Foreseeing
the terrible future that lies in wait for the novel’s protagonist, Blackwood claims to have felt her
pain as if it was his own. But for Eliot, Maggie is ultimately expendable and, like one of her
128
dolls, rendered mute and inanimate. This abandonment, as final as it may seem, is, however, only
temporary. Maggie may die, but Eliot takes up her figure again and again in an effort to continue
thinking through her own conflicted relationship with her brother Isaac.

“another childhood-world”
Dolls for Eliot are linked to forming empathetic feelings, as well as to generating
narratives. Her own memories of dollplay that occurred well into her adulthood are linked to
compassion for her elder sister, Christiana (or, as she was more commonly known, Chrissey),
and her hardships. Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans on November 22, 1819) was the youngest of five
siblings who lived to adulthood: she had two elder half-siblings, Robert (born 1802) and Frances
Lucy (also Fanny, born 1805), in addition to her sister Chrissey (born 1814) and brother Isaac
Pearson (born 1816). Twin younger brothers named William and Thomas were born on March
16, 1821, but tragically lived only ten days. When visiting Chrissey in the winter of 1852, Eliot
writes fondly of playing with her elder sister’s many children, describing that she received “large
doses of romping and doll-dressing” (qtd. in Haight, Biography 126). This playful scene is filled
with joy, even as Chrissey’s family is in a position of relative hardship following her husband’s
death. As Eliot later wrote in a letter to her friend Caroline (Cara) Bray, “My chief trouble is
poor Chrissey […] Think of her in that ugly small house with six children who are inevitably
made naughty by being thrown close together from morning till night” (qtd. in Haight,
Biography 126). Eliot’s fond memories of playing with Chrissey’s children are intermixed with
her sympathy for their difficult circumstances and resultant misbehavior, and she consequently
desires to provide some additional form of assistance for her sister and her family. But her
empathy––that is, her ability to imagine what her sister is enduring––also leads her to make
129
selfish decisions. Thinking of the horrible house, she writes to Cara that “To live with her in that
hideous neighbourhood amongst ignorant bigots is impossible to me. It would be moral asphyxia
and I had better take the other kind––charcoal myself and leave my money, perhaps more
acceptable than my labour and affection” (qtd. in Haight, Biography 126). Knowing––and
feeling––the wretched circumstances of her sister’s position, she decides that she could not stay
and endure it.
The intricate relationship between dollplay, consciousness, empathetic feelings, fiction-
making, and her complicated relationship with her family plays out in Eliot’s novels and poetry.
Indeed, Eliot’s writing becomes a form of throwing consciousness and empathic play that seeks
to mediate her own life experiences, particularly with her brother. Eliot’s biographers and critics
have speculated that her love for her brother influenced her representation of Tom and Maggie in
Mill on the Floss, largely contributing, as Nancy Henry notes, to Mill being “called Eliot’s most
autobiographical novel” (12).
5
Certainly, it is tempting to read Eliot’s biography into her fiction,
considering her own claim that “The best history of a writer is contained in his writings––these
are his chief actions” (qtd. in Henry 1). And yet, Eliot strongly resisted the practice of finding out
the “real” characters and places in her earlier fiction, particularly Adam Bede (1859). In her
letters she repeatedly denies that her characters are based on specific living persons, impatiently
claiming in a letter to Charles Bray on September 19, 1859 that “There is not a single portrait in
Adam Bede” (original emphasis GEL 3:155). There may be similarities, Eliot concedes, but no
one should recognize their copy in the pages of her novel.

5
Henry goes on to note many of Mill’s correspondences to Eliot’s life in addition to the link
between Tom and Maggie and Isaac and Mary Ann, including the popular connection amongst
biographers between the three Pearson sisters and the Dodson sisters (30), and the image of
ships, laden with coal, that opens the novel and scenes of coal barges from Eliot’s childhood
(26).
130
Despite Eliot’s earlier insistence that her early characters were not taken from life, her
biographers dwell on the close connection she shared with her brother, Isaac, and the influence
of this relationship upon The Mill. Eliot’s first biographer, her surviving husband John Cross,
writes that “the early part of Maggie’s portraiture is the best autobiographical representation we
can have of George Eliot’s own feelings in her childhood, and many of the incidents in the book
are based on real experiences of family life” (Cross, Life 1:23). He is careful to add, however,
that these experiences are “so mixed with fictitious elements and situations that it would be
absolutely misleading to trust it as a true history” (Cross, Life 1:23). Every biographer since
points to the formative period following the death of Eliot’s twin brothers ten days after their
birth, when her mother became ill and the family was dispersed. At this time, Isaac and Mary
Ann (approximately five and two years of age, respectively) were sent to a nearby school where
Henry concludes, “the youngest brother and sister were left to play together, and Mary Ann
conceived the deep love for (and vulnerability to) her older brother” (31). Jennifer Uglow notes
that both brother and sister treasured memories of playfulness and affection during this period,
for “in the stories Isaac told Cross, they frequently escaped to play” (16). This idyllic time
between brother and sister forged strong memories of a time of mutual affection.
But as their lives progressed, they also diverged, and the loss of Isaac as a companion
weighed heavily upon Eliot. When Isaac married in 1841, and Eliot moved with her father to a
suburb five miles away, she suddenly found herself not only in a new home, but also without a
confidant, writing in a letter “I have no one who enters into my pleasures or my griefs, no one
with whom I can pour out my soul, no one with the same yearnings the same temptations the
same delights as myself” (qtd in Henry 46). The much greater loss came later, after Eliot had
already become a published author. When Isaac discovered that Eliot was living with George
131
Henry Lewes outside of a legal marriage in 1857, he stopped writing to her and required that
Chrissey (who was financially dependent) do the same. Chrissey violated this prohibition when
she became ill and wrote to Eliot shortly before her death on March 15, 1859––a reconciliation
to which Eliot responded warmly. “The past is abolished from my mind,” she claimed to her
friend, Sara Hennell, “I only want her to feel that I love her and care for her” (GEL 2:26). Isaac
maintained “the long silence” for over two decades until after Eliot’s marriage to John Cross on
May 16, 1880, when he wrote to offer his “sincere congratulations” (qtd. in Haight, Biography
541). To this, Eliot quickly sent a heartfelt reply, asserting that “our long silence has never
broken the affection for you which began when we were little ones” (qtd. in Haight 541). Her
strong affection from childhood, Eliot claims, was sustained through years of familial exile.
Despite Eliot’s claim that her affection for her brother was never broken, the dolls present
in her depictions of brothers and sisters in childhood scenes suggest a more complicated
relationship between herself and Isaac. Nine years after writing The Mill on the Floss, Eliot
imagined another childhood bond between brother and sister in her sonnet sequence, “Brother
and Sister” (1869).
6
These sonnets, which Eliot called “Little descriptive bits on the mutual
influence of their small lives,” are steeped in yearning for a time to which the poem’s speaker
wishes to return (qtd. in Uglow 16).
7
Moving through nostalgic scenes filled with childish romps

6
There are many correlations between Eliot’s sonnet sequence and the early sections of The Mill,
but the sequence also points to the novel’s end. Reflecting upon childhood scenes, the speaker in
the sonnets remembers the “The firmaments of daisies since to me / Have had those mornings in
their opening eyes” (Eliot, Poems 353). The daisies in these lines resonate with the final scene
between Maggie and Tom, when they drown embracing as in the times when they had “roamed
the daisied fields together” (Mill 542).
7
Henry speculates that “Brother and Sister” may also have been a response to the illness and
death of Lewes’s son Thornton (Thornie), who would die on October 19, 1869 (175). His
impending death, which Eliot mused, “seems to me the beginning of our own,” may have infused
her reflections upon her life and childhood in her sonnets (qtd. in Henry 178).
132
through flowers, picnic baskets, gypsies happening upon play, and fishing, the speaker tells of an
ideal love between brother and sister that she longs for years later: “I cannot choose but think
upon the time / When our two lives grew like two buds that kiss” (Eliot, Poems 352). This
perfect understanding between them makes them appear almost as one, in which emotions are
completely shared:
His sorrow was my sorrow, and his joy
Sent little leaps and laughs through all my frame;
My doll seemed lifeless and no girlish toy
Had any reason when my brother came. (356)
His sadness and happiness are indistinguishable from her own as she keenly feels these emotions
within her own “frame.” The brother and sister’s union, however, is troubled by the presence of
the doll in the line following her description of how she physically feels her brother’s emotions.
The doll seems “lifeless” only now that the brother has arrived––presumably it previously
appeared to the girl to be alive and filled with feeling, perhaps sharing in her sorrows and joys in
the same way that she now does in her brother’s. The ease with which the girl puts away her doll
shows that even apparently perfect shared understandings can be easily sundered.
For if the girl can put away her doll, so too can the boy someday put aside his sister. The
sister is very much like a doll that he cares for: he “pluck[s]” fruit that she cannot reach, he
guides her “tiny shoe” to sturdy stepping-stones and must always remind himself that “she is
little, and I must be kind,” when he wishes to do something without her (Eliot, Poems 356).
Learning how to elevate his sister’s needs and abilities over his own desires, the brother practices
the sort of empathy that nineteenth-century parents hoped that dolls would train their children to
feel. The poem’s speaker imagines her brother cultivating a sense of her “separate life”––that she
133
is “A Like unlike, a Self that self-restrains,” thus granting him a “nobler” character (356). The
speaker imagines that he learned to feel her emotions in the same way that she felt his and
grandly concludes that “His years with others must the sweeter be / For those brief days he spent
in loving me” (356). Having learned to love and empathize with her, the speaker assumes that
her brother will be a more empathetic person with others. And yet, this empathy may not be
lasting––we know that the brother’s empathetic feelings for his sister occupied only “brief days”
that are now in the distant past and there is no reason to suggest that a future empathy would
sustain a longer period of time.
Indeed, the threat of a coming separation shadows the brother and sister’s idyllic frolics
together. The speaker’s reminisces are interrupted by forebodings of a separation to come.
Sitting by a “brown canal” that appears “endless” to her, the speaker claims that she was
“Unknowing how the good I loved was wrought, / Untroubled by the fear that it would cease
(Eliot, Poems 354). Her emphasis on how “Unknowing” and “Untroubled” she was suggests that
later she will become knowing and troubled, that the seemingly “endless” river will indeed flow
into the sea. The very eagerness with which the speaker thinks back upon her childhood reveals
that the closeness between the brother and sister no longer exists: “I cannot choose but think
upon the time…” The time she reflects upon is now distant and different from the present in
which she lives. In the sequence’s final sonnet, she confesses that after parting for school, “we
never found again / That childish world where our two spirits mingled / Like scents from varying
roses that remain / One sweetness, nor can evermore be singled” (Eliot, Poems 357). As
seemingly inextricable as two intermingled scents, the children are nevertheless parted. Their
souls may be “yearning in divorce,” but they are apart, occupying “two forms” that make
separate courses through the world (357).
134
Eliot idealizes empathic play while also exposing its inherent contradictions. If one can
feel what another feels, one can also abandon one set of feelings for another, allowing those
initial feelings to wane or die. The speaker’s ability to render her doll animate and lifeless as
needed is replicated in the brother and sister’s affection for each other that is eventually put
aside. The speaker, in reflecting upon past scenes, “picks up her doll again,” bringing back to life
the shared emotions she had with her brother, but the indications of a coming separation remind
the reader that the doll will always eventually be put away. The speaker concludes the sequence
by admitting “But were another childhood-world my share, / I would be born a little sister there,”
suggesting a continued yearning for her own past and her brother while also implying that a
substitution would be acceptable––she considers not her own childhood, but “another childhood-
world.” Indeed, Eliot appears to have given herself just this, imagining another childhood-world
through her sonnets, where brother and sister are blissfully––if temporarily––united.
The contradictions and limitations of and idealized notions about empathic play shape
Eliot’s fiction. Fiction, born from forms of dollplay that create compassion, also enables the
ability to discard those feelings, troubling critical assumptions that novels implicitly elicit
empathetic feelings from readers and will have positive impacts on later interactions. By
returning to scenes familiar from her own childhood, Eliot wonders if an all-consuming feeling
of empathy can ever be sustaining, or, if like a broken doll, it will always, eventually, be
discarded.

Throwing Narratives
In Eliot’s later novel, Daniel Deronda, readers are placed in Maggie’s position, as we
alternate in our attachments between Gwendolen Harleth, who occupies much of the first half of
135
the narrative, and Daniel Deronda, with whom we spend increasing amounts of time towards the
novel’s end: like Maggie, we now have two dolls.
8
Thrown between narratives, flipping from
Gwendolen to Daniel, comforting one while neglecting the other, readers find themselves
involved in their own experiments in consciousness. Though Gwendolen is doomed to be
abandoned by the novel’s end, she begins the novel by believing herself to be the one controlling
those around her. Only as the novel grinds on, does she find herself ground down, eventually
realizing that she is (and always has been) the doll of others and will, finally, be put away.
Gwendolen, however, does not follow the script of other abandoned dolls by becoming
inanimate at the novel’s end; rather, she remains vibrant, with a powerful hold on our
consciousness, even as the other characters (and perhaps even the author herself) want to cast her
aside.
Gwendolen first appears on the stage of the novel as a doll, albeit one who thinks she can
toy with the lives of others. The novel’s first book is appropriately titled, “The Spoiled Child,”
signaling a type of childhood even though Gwendolen, by the time she first makes her
appearance at Offendene, where the narrative truly begins, is “twenty and more” (Deronda 18).
In fact, one of the first things that we learn about her is that Offendene was “not the home of
Miss Harleth’s childhood” (15). We do not know much about her childhood (if she had a doll,
we never hear of it), but her instincts for care do not seem to have been particularly well-

8
Smith argues that Maggie’s beating of her Fetish extends to the novel’s form itself, suggesting
that “Damaged toys are objects the mind trips over as it pursues the narrative of Bildung,” and
that these damaged toys take the form of the “toy story,” that is, “an alternative narrative
working within and against the imperatives of the bildungsroman: ‘grinding and beating’ at its
certainties, forgetting and losing its plots” (39). As Henry points out, Daniel Deronda is an even
more complex version of the bildungsroman, in which Eliot “chose to narrate the ‘careers’ of her
characters in Daniel Deronda out of sequence, questioning the notion that beginnings are
inevitable, and intentionally altering the established bildungsroman formula epitomized in the
first chapter of David Copperfield” (2-3).
136
groomed––as a child she had never been “thoughtlessly cruel,” but, nevertheless, she “found it
difficult to think her own pleasure less important than others made it” (18). While her childhood
is marked by the absence of a loving father and a home to which one could grow attached, it is
also equally full of indulgence. As we learn, she is treated like a “princess in exile” by her
mother, four sisters, and their governess (18). Gwendolen’s nature, full of “fire and will,”
impresses itself so strongly on the household that when they arrive together at Offendene, they
all immediately look to Gwendolen “as if their feelings depended entirely on her decision” (18).
Gwendolen attributes this influence to a sense of being in control of her surroundings, not
suspecting how much her surroundings work to accommodate this feeling.
Gwendolen’s “childhood”––that is, her state of innocence and presumed feeling of
significance––ends with the introduction of Mr. Mallinger Grandcourt, her future husband. When
he arrives at the Archery Meeting, Gwendolen, convincing herself that she is in control of her
movements and that Grandcourt is in her thrall, moves only in relation to him, as if she were a
puppet on a string:
There should be no slightest shifting of angles to betray that it was of any consequence to
her whether the much-talked-of Mr. Mallinger Grandcourt presented himself or not. She
became again absorbed in the shooting, and so resolutely abstained from looking round
observantly that, even supposing him to have taken a conspicuous place among the
spectators, it might be clear she was not aware of him. And all the while the certainty that
he was there made a distinct thread in her consciousness. (Deronda, p. 88)
Her very apparent indifference to his presence affirms that her actions, rather than performed
separately from him, are very much a direct result of his movements. This drama is later (earlier)
echoed when Daniel observes Gwendolen gambling, and she continues losing under his gaze,
137
certain that he is “still watching her” and thus all the more reason “why she should not flinch, but
go on playing as if she were indifferent to loss or gain” (6). In both scenes, Gwendolen is a child
playing at being independent, confident that she is being watched as she acts out not-being-
watched. Her efforts to abstain from “looking round” in a way that it “might be clear she was not
aware of him” is a message directly for Grandcourt that conveys her absolute awareness of him
(emphasis added 88). Not only does she reveal her total attention towards Grandcourt, but
readers also learn that she feels pulled towards him in a way beyond her control by the “distinct
thread in her consciousness” that connects them and confirms his presence in the audience (88).
As soon as this “thread” appears, the narrator suggests that Gwendolen’s
accomplishments are not exclusively her own, undermining her role in her own achievements.
“Perhaps,” the narrator suggests, “her shooting was the better for it [the thread]: at any rate, it
gained in precision” (Deronda 88). Grandcourt, simply by arriving at the event, takes control and
partial credit for her success, which, the narrator tells us “was just what her mamma and her
uncle would have chosen for her”––an ominous statement that will prove equally true for the
marriage offer Grandcourt will eventually make her (89). Gwendolen’s judgments, which
initially––she thought––carried so much weight, are increasingly overshadowed by what others
“would have chosen,” which also turns out to be the only choice actually open to her (89).
Gwendolen remains unaware at this moment of just how little autonomy she has (and, of
that, how much she will lose), but the reader cannot claim such ignorance. As the narrator details
her continued efforts to “see nobody in particular” (the particular “nobody” being, of course,
Grandcourt, but also a suggestion that she really sees no person but him), the narrator also admits
that her thoughts “undeniably turned in other ways” (Deronda 89). She thinks of Herr Klesmer,
who remains “unconquered” and whose indifference troubles her––an indifference that is in
138
exact opposition to the attention she is receiving from Grandcourt, who she is well aware is
admiring her (89). Even her focus on a very different sort of person is simply another way of
indirectly thinking about Grandcourt, who gains in influence during this event and the conclusion
of the chapter. His name, which ends the book, emphasizes his total control at this point (even if
it still appears indirectly). The final words of the first book are actually those of Lord
Brackenshaw, who approaches Gwendolen and says, “Miss Harleth, here is a gentleman who is
not willing to wait any longer for an introduction [...] Will you allow me to introduce Mr.
Mallinger Grandcourt?” (89). Grandcourt’s official introduction is also the end of Gwendolen’s
childhood.
Grandcourt’s puppeteering becomes diffuse as the puppet-show expands to include
characters beyond Gwendolen. At the roving archery match in Cardell Chase, the participants are
removed from consciousness of the “blissful beauty of earth and sky” as they are too “busy with
a small social drama almost as little penetrated by a feeling of wider relations as if it has been a
puppet-shew” (Deronda 123). Within this drama, Mr. Lush performs Gwendolen’s trick of
pretending to be unaware of another’s presence towards her, keeping “himself aloof from her”
and “never even look[ing] at her obviously,” and, in doing so, suggests his total focus on her
(123). He, like Grandcourt before him, carefully controls Gwendolen’s movements, anticipating
her aversion towards him. When they pack up to leave, Mr. Lush “was concerned to save ladies
the trouble of fetching [their bows],” and while he “did not intend to bring Gwendolen’s” she
“hurried to fetch it herself” before he could do so (123). This provides the opportunity for the
valet to pass her a letter along with her bow, allowing for a transmission that Mr. Lush is deeply
invested in orchestrating, but from which he has managed to assume the appearance of being
totally separate from.
139
What follows is the revelation of one of the novel’s great secrets, and, in this way, the
puppet-shew sets the scene for revelation, setting up a link between dolls and puppetry and the
novel’s unfolding of hidden information. The letter doesn’t in itself contain a secret, although it
demands that Gwendolen keep it secret, and, in return, she will “hear something to decide her”
on Grandcourt’s marriage proposal (Deronda 124). This letter effectively brings about the
meeting between Gwendolen and Lydia Glasher, who will tell Gwendolen what she should not
do (marry Grandcourt). The exchange between the two women requires the same promise of
Gwendolen as that of the letter––that is to keep a secret. “I have promised to tell you something,”
Lydia begins, “And you will promise to keep my secret” (125). This promise Gwendolen quickly
gives, but surprisingly it is the only assurance she gives. Lydia does not also ask her to promise
to reject Grandcourt––she assumes that the knowledge she reveals should guarantee this event
without any confirmation from Gwendolen.
From this moment on, Gwendolen is entirely the doll of others: Lydia (who sends her
diamonds and into a screaming fit of terror); Grandcourt (who knows she has married him
against her will): and Lush, whose return she fails to stop. Nonetheless, despite finding herself to
be the doll of others, Gwendolen continues to comfort herself with the thought that she has a doll
of her own––Daniel Deronda––to whom she can confide her innermost secrets, and with whom
she might strive to become a better person. After Grandcourt’s death, she confesses to Daniel, “I
thought then I would tell you the worst about myself. I tried. But I could not tell everything”
(Deronda 581). If only, Gwendolen seems to suggest, she could have prevented later actions by
playing them through with Daniel, rather than living them, almost to the point of murder, with
another. In this emotionally heightened scene, they both appear to return to childhood:
Gwendolen’s voice takes on a “childlike” tremor and Daniel clasps her hand “as if they were
140
going to walk together like two children,” evoking the image of Maggie and Tom and the
children in the “Brother and Sister” sonnets (581; 582). When Daniel attempts to resist her
confession, she demands that he continue the role of confidant that he has hitherto fulfilled: “But
now, if you cannot bear with me when I tell you everything––if you turn away from me and
forsake me, what shall I do? Am I worse than I was when you found me and wanted to make me
better? All the wrong I have done was in me then––and more––and more––if you had not come
and been patient with me. And now––will you forsake me?” (581). Gwendolen implies that his
earlier presence and willingness to listen to her account of her suffering and empathize with her
prevented her from becoming a “murderess”––her doll, she thinks, saved her from the worst of
herself (581).
There is one action that she admits to performing (“the only thing I did towards carrying
out my thoughts”), and this action takes on an ambiguously toy-like association and quality
(Deronda 582). An object, “small and sharp, like a long willow leaf in a silver sheath” lies
“longed for among the beautiful toys in the cabinet in [her] boudoir” (582). She finds that she is
then “continually haunted” by this small, sharp object, as she wonders how she “should use it”
and “fancie[s] [...] putting it under [her] pillow” (582). As if the knife has a mind of its own it
pursues her. She locks it up and drops the key into the ocean but finds that she then only wonders
how she “could open the drawer without the key” (582). The only way for Gwendolen to resist
the knife’s strange power is to confide in Deronda, attributing to him the ability to guard her
from evil simply through his compassion for her misery.
If Gwendolen hopes that Deronda will fulfil the role of a doll for her, then Daniel hopes
that Mirah will perform this role for him. When she first appears, the narrator suggests that it is
as if Daniel, who had been singing a moment before of sorrow, had been ventriloquizing her
141
misery: “Deronda, awaiting the barge, now turned his head to the river-side, and saw at a few
yards’ distance from him a figure which might have been an impersonation of the misery he was
unconsciously giving voice to: a girl hardly more than eighteen, of low slim figure, with most
delicate little face, her dark curls pushed behind her ears under a large black hat, a long woollen
cloak over her shoulders” (Deronda 156). Daniel further identifies doll-like qualities in Mirah,
noticing her “delicate, childlike beauty” and the way she bears the “pale image of unhappy
girlhood” (157). As if she were a miracle of design, he cannot brush away the image of her
“white face with small, small features and dark, long-lashed eyes” (157). She becomes
emblematic of “girl-tragedies” everywhere, as if she has no particularity of her own, but is
merely a stand-in for other girls, other women––perhaps most of all of for his mother (he thinks,
“perhaps my mother was like this one”) (157; 159).
Daniel is not alone in thinking of Mirah in this way. When he brings her to find refuge
with the Meyricks, they too focus on Mirah’s diminutive size when they themselves are smaller
and Deronda finds himself “inwardly rejoicing that the Meyricks [are] so small” (Deronda 167).
Despite this, Mrs. Meyrick immediately refers to Mirah as a “poor child” and her daughter Mab
takes Mirah’s “small right hand” between her own (168). Even though Mirah is taller than the
Meyricks, Mab runs out to buy her “a pair of tiny felt slippers [...] because there were no shoes in
the house small enough for Mirah” (174). The narrator, too, falls into the same line of thought,
describing Mirah as looking down at her new slippers in a “child-like way” (174). Mirah’s role
as a doll anticipates the way Daniel will eventually discard Gwendolen for his newer (smaller)
model.
Daniel’s attention, like the Meyricks’, is on Mirah, but our attention as readers is
increasingly directed towards him. Maggie’s experiences teach us that throwing consciousness
142
into one character leads us to neglect another, and as we spend more time with Daniel, we must,
however reluctantly, relinquish some of our attachment to Gwendolen. We met Gwendolen first,
we have known her longer and also know her better (through focalized narration, not exposition),
but just as she is drawn towards Daniel, so are we compelled by the narrative to turn towards
him. While Gwendolen desires that their narratives be brought together, Daniel wishes to marry
Mirah rather than Gwendolen, and it this desire that the novel’s ending fulfills.
The effect of this two-plot structure that is at turns intertwined and at others quite
separate is, as Schor notes, “jarring” (“Make-Believe” 58). Eliot is playing with both her
characters and her readers when she switches back and forth between Gwendolen and Daniel,
caring for one while abandoning the other, producing an effect of being thrown back and forth
upon the reader. When Daniel spots Gwendolen in the boat as it returns to shore following the
accident (and Grandcourt’s death), Schor argues that “[Eliot] is freeing us to worry about
Gwendolen, toying with us as we watch Gwendolen struggle in the boat, and then aligning our
sympathies with Daniel as he watches Gwendolen return to shore, wondering (as we do, along
with him) if she has actually murdered her husband” (“Make-Believe” 58). This oscillation
occurs very quickly, as in Chapter LIV readers witness Gwendolen wrestling with “plans of evil”
(Deronda 574) as she handles the boat’s steering and then only a few pages later, in Chapter LV,
are thrown back to Daniel who observes with “fluctuating fears” as Gwendolen is rowed in “pale
as one of the sheeted dead” (577).
These oscillations apparently come to an end at the novel’s conclusion, as the final
chapter rests upon Daniel, his marriage to Mirah, and the death of Mirah’s brother, Mordecai.
Readers apparently say farewell to Gwendolen in the previous chapter, in which they see
Gwendolen and Daniel come together for a final time with “clasped hands,” again echoing
143
Maggie and Tom and the “Brother and Sister” sonnets, before parting forever (Deronda 680).
Finding herself within her mother’s arms rather than Daniel’s in her final part, Gwendolen
claims, “I mean to live” (680). And live she does, refusing to become inanimate even as readers
are thrown back to Daniel in the novel’s final chapter, for, as Schor notes, the note that
Gwendolen sends to Daniel with the request, “Do not think of me sorrowfully on your wedding-
day” (original emphasis 682), ensures that of course he (and we) will do just that. As Schor asks,
“Is there any trick more powerful than that which begins, ‘Do not think of me’?” (Curious 218).
Gwendolen remains in our minds even as Daniel (and Eliot) quietly put her away on the shelf.
It might seem that Eliot cares more about Daniel at the novel’s end, granting him the wife
of his choosing and the mission in life he had so long craved. And yet, of the many gifts that
Daniel receives on his wedding day we learn that the one “more precious than gold and gems” is
Gwendolen’s letter. Daniel may get what he wants, but Gwendolen receives something more
meaningful: the ability to retain a hold of our consciousness, the gift of remaining animate, even
as we throw consciousness towards someone else. In this way, Eliot reinscribes the abandoned
doll with new meaning––the doll that is thrown away is not rendered mute and still, but rather
retains a powerful hold over our consciousness, continuing to be imbued with life even after
being put aside.
The project of empowering Gwendolen is an important one for Eliot, who wishes to
reanimate another abandoned doll: Mary Ann Evans. “Put away” by Isaac years before, Eliot
desires to fill her childhood self with consciousness, granting Mary Ann Evans as powerful a
hold over the brother who forsake her as Gwendolen has over Daniel and the novel’s reader.
Maggie Tulliver may be joined again with Tom at the end of Mill on the Floss, but this
reunification is only possible in death, and in Eliot’s “Brother and Sister” sonnets the “two
144
forms” never meet again––as the poem’s speaker, we know that the sister thinks much of her
brother, but we do not know if he ever thinks of her after their separation (Eliot, Poems 357).
Mary Ann Evans is thus the loved and abused doll, cast aside by Isaac, and Eliot’s project of
“putting away” Gwendolen is actually one of ensuring that the abandoned doll is not forgotten.
On the shelf she may be, but mute, unloved, and inanimate, she is not.

145
Chapter Four:

Keeping Secrets with Alice and Henry James

Maisie Farange, the eponymous character of Henry James’s novel What Maisie Knew
(1897), has a secret so secret she will not even tell her doll. This is in part a myth, for it is, as
D.A. Miller would call it, an “open secret”: all readers of What Maisie Knew already know what
Maisie hopes to keep to herself (205). But in a novel obsessed with revealing a consciousness
that is not known even to the subject of the narrative, this moment of concealment suggests
something more complicated than a child who keeps secrets. It asks us to consider who is told
secrets and why anyone would choose to keep secrets from a doll, a listener who is presumably
the best keeper of secrets. To address these questions, this chapter will trace three threads: the
turn at the end of the nineteenth century from sharing secrets with dolls to keeping secrets from
them, the related history and significance of diary-keeping, and the diarist Henry James knew
best, his sister Alice James, whose diary reflects a complicated sense of language, power, and
memory. These strands come together in a reading of What Maisie Knew that suggests Henry
James’s late elusive style drew upon his sister’s diary, the secrets she both relayed in it and kept
from it, and a growing childhood practice of narrative refusal.
Alice’s diary specifically helps us read Maisie’s encounters with her doll, Lisette, with
whom Maisie practices these scenes of deception, withholding, and refusal. The young Maisie
creates challenges for readers very much like those Alice herself once posed: we are as unsure of
what Maisie knows as her brothers were of what Alice knew. From Alice, Henry learned the
power of not-telling and the novelistic possibilities of a secret we see being not told. Alice’s use
of her diary as both an ideal confidante and an incomplete record––she does not tell her diary
everything, even when she claims she will––furthermore mirrors nineteenth-century dollplay,
146
during which children practice both telling secrets to and keeping secrets from their dolls. The
sometimes sheer serendipity of missed entries and other withheld information in diary-keeping
may seem less intentional than instances of children who keep secrets from dolls, but even these
moments perform a similar kind of narrative work, where desired information is ultimately
withheld. A diary is a type of doll in book form, a companion to which both children and adults
confide the feelings, thoughts, and events of their day. Both Alice’s diary and Maisie’s
interactions with Lisette reveal how the withholding of information, or secret-keeping, becomes
a means to developing a sense of self. I argue that this model of withholding persists across
Henry James’s late novels––namely, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903),
and The Golden Bowl (1904)––where readers may witness the evolution of dollplay into a
metaphor for female thought processes, which are consistently secretive or wrapped in
vagueness.
Turning to Alice James’s work as a way of understanding Henry’s novels deviates from
traditional approaches, which have tended to consider Alice James in isolation, if at all. Elizabeth
Duquette observes that while “scholars have noted the ways in which Alice’s diary directly
engages William’s thought, few have explored her relationship to Henry in the text” (721). Even
rarer is the consideration of either brother in relation to her––that is, scholars who are interested
in Alice James might also consider how her ideas and writing were influenced by the works of
her brothers, but those interested in Henry and William have not placed much emphasis on her
writing, despite her brothers’ high praise of her diary and evidence that they read and thought
much about it.
1

1
Jane F. Thrailkill is one exception in her compelling exploration of Henry, William, and Alice’s
collective creation of a “play space for exploring consciousness” (213).
147
In fact, no one makes the case better for Alice’s diary than Henry himself. Despite his
initial fear that society would learn that he once told Alice that “Augustine Birrell has a self-
satisfied smirk after he speaks,” he wrote to William that the diary is “heroic in its individuality,
its independence––its face-to-face with the universe for and by herself––and the beauty and
eloquence with which she often expresses this, let alone the rich irony and humour, constitute (I
wholly agree with you) a new claim for the family reknown” (qtd. in Strouse 321). The critical
tendency to overlook Alice’s merits as a writer may in part be due to a fascination with her life
as an invalid (a fascination from which her brothers were not exempt) that obscures her presence
as a writer, a storyteller, and a keeper of secrets. Henry James was already a successful novelist
when he first encountered Alice’s diary, but his remarkable late style was shaped so considerably
by studying his sister’s medium––the diary––and the secrets it shares, as well as those that it
continues to withhold.

Speaking Dolls
Let us return to an image from earlier chapters: the lonely girl, her loving doll, and the
imaginary companionship they shared. The girl in H. Rutherford Russell’s My Dolly (1877) says,
“I don’t like a Dolly that talks too much. And I do like one that never tires of listening….[E]ven
mamma is sometimes too busy to hear me. But my Dolly listens and listens to all my stories and
never thinks them too long” (qtd. in Marcus 161). According to this doll-player, the ideal doll
never speaks back, but rather “listens and listens,” never threatening to disagree, give advice, or
pass the story on to someone else. With such a doll, an audience is guaranteed, and a secret is
always safe.
But even the most silent dolls, those which ostensibly keep the children’s secrets, will tell
these secrets when left to their own devices, sometimes directly narrating the stories of their
148
previous owners, and other times merely suggesting that there is a story that remains untold. Doll
narratives, such as Victoria-Bess: The Ups and Downs of a Doll’s Life (1879), detail the intimate
stories of the girls who kept them (Victoria-Bess bitterly tells us that the girl she belonged to
“never did say ‘please,’ by any chance, or ‘will you?’”) (44). Even when dolls are not given the
narrative space in which to tell their stories, they speak: the very presence of a doll implies that
secrets have been shared, and thus that secrets exist. As Gonzalez argues, dolls seek to uncover a
child’s secrets: “Hearing and seeing everything but suspected of nothing, the doll is thus poised
to become the perfect agent of surveillance” (“Disciplinary Surveillance” 40). Dolls can thus
take on a powerful form of agency as their presence begins to control the behaviors of those who
play with them. As one girl says of her doll in Julie Gouraud’s book, Memoirs of a Doll, “I
sometimes think she is a spy on all my actions,” suggesting that what the doll knows will be
shared with others––the danger of a “spy” is that she will report you to someone else (34).
Talking dolls in children’s fiction not only revealed children’s secrets and behavior, but
also sometimes punished them. In Mary Mapes Dodge’s 1865 story, “Cushamee; or, the Boy’s
Walk,” in The Irvington Stories, little Lulu Laffer begins the story with what appears to be an
affectionate exchange with Cushamee, her “talking doll” (54). The girl asks her doll, “what are
you looking at with your big blue eyes?” to which the doll responds, “Mam-ma!” (54). The doll’s
cry of “Mam-ma!” suggests that the doll is looking only at her little mother, but as the story later
shows, Cushamee sees much more than that. Lulu’s misbehaving brother (who claims that he
would “cut off the head of every doll in the land” or “hang all the girls” if he were king), suffers
a nightmare journey in which a far more articulate Cushamee appears by his bedside and forces
him to encounter the angry spirits of all the animals he has tortured (59). “No mercy for you!”
yells Cushamee, as she pushes Tom down a hill (66). The formerly cruel Tom is then kept in
149
check by the doll’s somber “Pap-pa!” after returning to the waking world (67). Similarly, in
Ethel’s Adventures in Doll Country, Ethel’s talking “Pa-and-Ma” doll gives a long account of the
many injustices she has suffered at the hands of her mistress, and Ethel is brought before the
Queen of Doll Country for punishment (176).
An actual speaking doll, then, poses even more dangers then a silent, observant one.
Perhaps this is in part why Thomas Edison’s 1890 phonograph doll––sometimes called a
“Dollphone” or a “Phonodoll”––was a complete commercial failure (“The ‘Dollphones’”;
Feaster n. 22). Edison’s dolls played recordings made by female factory workers with the turning
of a crank at their side, and while initially anticipated to sell well (an April 26, 1890 article in the
Scientific American reports that the factory had “a capacity for making about 500 talking dolls a
day”), production was shut down after only a few weeks (263).
2
These dolls were meant to have
far greater conversational abilities than earlier speaking dolls that had already been on the market
for decades, and which could typically only pronounce “mama” and “papa.”
3
Phonodolls worked
through a more complicated system, in which the phonograph “recorded by cutting a groove on a

2
The phonograph dolls’ ill success may also have been due to the largely unpleasant and
unintelligible sound of their recordings, eight of which have been recovered and are available for
curious listeners on the Thomas Edison National Historic Park website:
https://www.nps.gov/edis/learn/photosmultimedia/hear-edison-talking-doll-sound-
recordings.htm. The doll was also reportedly expensive––as one article in the American Stationer
concludes, the talking doll’s “price is too high, and it must necessarily be a doll for the classes”
(“Chat by the Way”).
3
Patrick Feaster notes that these dolls, which mimicked human speech “by means of reeds,
bellows, and the like,” had been around since the early nineteenth century, with a French patent
from Johann Nepomuk for a “talking doll, which pronounces the two words papa and maman,”
initially approved in 1823-24 (para. 2). French patents for variations of this speaking doll persist
into the mid- and late-nineteenth century so that an 1887 article in The American Stationer on
“Where Toys Come From” concludes that “Great enterprise has been shown in Paris in the
matter of walking, talking and sleeping dolls” (927). News accounts suggest that these novelties
were also established sights in both the United States and Britain, such as the Daily Telegraph’s
claim in 1889 that “Speaking dolls are not such very great novelties” (“Talking Doll,”
Telegraph).
150
wax cylinder” that was inserted into the doll’s body (Feaster para. 5). Newspapers reporting on
the much-awaited phonograph dolls stressed that their conversational skills were a product of the
dolls’ excellent memory, rather than simply technological innovation. An advertisement in the
February 17, 1889 issue of the New York Times emphasized how the dolls, after being “brought
from Europe” were being trained by “lady instructors” to learn to speak properly: “The doll
pupils are required to repeat [the lady instructor’s] words until every accent and inflection is
satisfactory. The dolls have such wonderful memories that not only do they repeat their lessons
with accuracy, but they even ‘hold the voice’” (“The Talking Doll” 13).
Perhaps it is that “holding” of the voice that doomed the Phonodoll to a premature grave.
The dolls’ precise recall and increasing abilities of language, unnerving in themselves, are even
more so placed in a product that had already become associated with surveillance and the effects
of spying. The dolls’ ability to “hold the voice” suggests that the doll could replicate a child’s
words perfectly, and, alarmingly perhaps even replace them.
4
An illustration in The Scientific
American reproduces this anxiety, showing the factory women making the recordings as
themselves quite doll-like with stiff arms and a hair ribbon bow placed between two shoulder
blades, as if it were a knob to turn (see figure 4.1).
5
The Times article concludes that the dolls’
“voices are strong and their articulation so clear that their conversation can be heard up one flight

4
Like many nineteenth-century dolls, the bodies for the Edison dolls were produced in
Sonneberg, Germany, the center of nineteenth-century toy production (Newburyport Herald).
5
Conversely, a poem in the Dec. 1, 1888 issue of Moonshine argues that there is little need for
speaking dolls, as many fashionable women are already automatons: “Edison’s last invention / Is
wonderful indeed; / But one thing we may mention, / Such toys we hardly need; / For does not
friend or lover, / Among the sex that’s weak, / Enough of dolls discover, / Who can do naught
but speak?” (“Speaking Dolls” 256). Speaking dolls thus served as a metaphor for women,
providing language for how men perceived female speech as scripted and automatons as the
fulfillment of female artificiality.
151
of stairs with distinctness” (13). A child’s conversations with her dolls could no longer be
whispered, and certainly were no longer secret.
6

Some talking dolls were unambiguous in their roles as agents of parental control.
Apparently bringing to life the doll narratives where talking dolls would articulately bring down
the ill-behaved children who played with them, these dolls were capable of reprimanding
children when they disobeyed their parents. In one 1889 German article, “Phonographische
Puppen,” that was sent as a clipping to Edison and kept among his papers, there is a story
reportedly told by a lady friend of Edison, in which a parent is plagued by an untruthful four-
year-old child. Fortunately for the parent, “a phonograph doll created beneficial change” (eine
phonographische Puppe schuf heilsam Wandel) (my translation “Phonographische”). Not telling
the suspicious child of the doll’s peculiar abilities, the child happens to turn the handle one day
and the doll solemnly proclaims, “Children must not tell lies, never, never tell lies!” (Kinder
dürfen nicht lügen, niemals, niemals, lügen!) (my translation). The article concludes by saying
that the girl modified her behavior as a result of the mysterious and watchful doll’s admonitions,
but the positive perception of this incident and change is filtered through the parent’s opinion.
The scripts eventually selected for Edison’s phonograph dolls were of equal cultural
importance and often dictated how one interacted with the doll. In an American article published

6
The attempt to create dolls that could hold whispered conversations carried over into the
twentieth century, most explicitly with Mattel’s 1965 “Baby Secret,” a soft-bodied doll with a
pull-string and moving mouth that whispers various “secrets”––“I like to sleep with you,” “Hold
me close and whisper,” “I like to whisper in the dark,” “Is anyone else awake,” etc.––which, as
emphasized in accompanying television advertisements that ran in the 1960s, appear to solicit a
child’s secrets and emphasize the doll’s solitary bond with the child (When It Was Cool). A
similar doll from the mid to late 2010s called “My Friend Cayla” not only elicited secrets (if you
ask the doll to listen to a secret, she responds “Sure go ahead; be very quiet though. I promise not
to tell anyone; it’s just between you and me because we are friends”), but also recorded the
child’s conversations, leading to complaints about privacy violations and even the toy’s
banishment in some European countries (Naylor).
152
on December 21, 1887 on “Edison’s Dollphone,” the reporter finds himself unable to resist the
doll’s instructions (“Edison’s Dollphone”). After the doll is wound up and repeats “I am tired
and sleepy now. Please put me in my little bed,” the reporter finds that he was convinced “that
she was telling the truth, so he laid her gently down on the table nearby” (“Edison’s Dollphone”).
The doll’s directions on how she should be handled is indicative of how speaking dolls sought to
predetermine modes of play, but the most evocative of the Edison doll’s scripts is the Lord’s
Prayer. In this case, the doll’s words were not meant merely to be a trick for the child’s (or
adult’s) amusement, but also to be a religious instructional text for young girls; as Feaster notes,
this script “was the one most explicit in its pedagogical intent, connected as it was with religious
instruction” (para. 10). One unhappy customer directly expresses the desire that the speaking doll
would mold a young child’s speech and behavior. In a letter dated January 27, 1891, Mrs. H. M.
Francis writes that a friend to whom she had sent an Edison phonograph doll experienced “great
disappointment” when the doll turned out to be faulty and failed to repeat the prayer, “and more
so for the reason that he had a little girl about the height and possibly the age of the aforesaid
talking Doll, whom he thought might learn this handsome prayer by hearing the Doll repeat it”
(qtd. in Feaster para. 10). In this case, the talking doll does not so much reveal a child’s secrets
as prevent them––the child is programmed to speak and think like the doll, just as the doll was
once trained by a “lady instructor” to repeat its little speech.
7
The child’s fear of being replaced
or effectively turned into a doll appears justified, even if the effort is a failed one.
But with all the ambivalence of a reader finding a governess in a novel by Henry James,
some nineteenth-century critics imagined that a doll that spies on children or seeks to correct

7
Feaster notes that by 1889 Edison had begun to imagine the possibility of “‘customized’
recordings” and stores where “the buyer could have records prepared to order in the voices of
their choosing” (para. 12).
153
their behavior would be the worse instructress in the benefits of play. A writer for the London
Daily Telegraph writes on October 31, 1889 that such dolls will disrupt the “drama of the doll”
(Telegraph). The performance that children act with their dolls, the anonymous writer argues,
has only “two actors”: one that is “necessarily passive” (the doll) and another that is “necessarily
and incessantly active” (the child) (Telegraph). The active child takes on many roles that the doll
cannot––“author,” “double-voiced actor,” “audience,” and “dramatic critic”––and it is these
roles, according to the article, that makes the drama an engaging and useful one for the child
(Telegraph). A speaking doll, the author speculates, would force the child into the passive role:
“how, it may be asked, is a little girl to get on with a doll that has always something to say for
herself; that lays down the law [...] The conditions of the doll drama would be wholly reversed”
(Telegraph). Speaking dolls preclude the possibility of a ventriloquism that was so productive in
Charles Dickens’s dollplay, and the Telegraph concludes that with such a role reversal, the girl-
child must lose her position as author of the scene, giving this position up to her doll (and to the
manufacturers who have scripted her speech).
8
Dollplay would not seem to allow for two active
agents.
The fear that the talking doll would render the human interlocutor redundant plays out in
E.E. Kellett’s strange story, “The Lady Automaton,” which appeared in Pearson’s Magazine in
1901.
9
Narrated by a fashionable doctor called Phillips, the story follows the fortunes of an

8
John Picker argues that phonograph’s effects on dollplay extended to other forms of cultural
production: “Although the art of ventriloquy historically had fostered the notion of a gap
between speaker and voice, the phonograph mechanized this theatrical act, displacing it with a
simple scientific process that had similar results. Quite suddenly in the 1880s, throwing voices
became easy but lost was the control that the ventriloquist had always had over placement and
timing” (Soundscapes 127).
9
Picker notes that an earlier (and longer) version of Kellet’s story was published as “The New
Frankenstein” in his collection, A Corner in Sleep and Other Impossibilities, in 1900 (“My Fair
Lady Automaton” 92).
154
inventor, Arthur Moore, whose invention of a phonograph leads people to think that “even
Edison must soon begin to look to his laurels, or he would be eclipsed by the rising fame of this
young man of thirty” (663). So, when Moore decides to build an “anti-phonograph” that
responds, rather than repeats, the words said to it, and then puts this device into the body of a
woman, he evokes Edison’s own failed experiment with the phonograph doll, although his
automaton is wildly successful (664). When Phillips first meets the lady automaton, he accuses
Moore of “ventriloquizing,” unable to believe that a machine could replicate conversation so
convincingly, but he is quickly assured that this is not the case (666). The automaton speaks of
her own accord, making ventriloquism on Moore’s part unnecessary.
Rather than relieving Moore, and allowing him an independent existence, the
automaton’s actions instead take center stage in the story as Moore withdraws even further from
society. As Tzachi Zamir writes of the puppet, she demonstrates “the illusiveness of freedom and
the disturbing autonomy of one’s creations” (392). The creator actually becomes increasingly
dependent upon his creation, responding to what the automaton experiences, rather than
embarking on adventures of his own. When the automaton, named Miss Amelia Brooke, is
complete, the inventor Moore is physically and emotionally exhausted, claiming, “she is more
than a doll; she is ME. I have breathed into her myself, and she all but lives; she understands and
knows!” (668). As Phillips admits, “every time danger threatened Amelia, Moore’s spirits
seemed to sink; every time she surmounted the danger his spirits rose again” (674). This passive
response to Amelia’s actions culminates in his death after one of the two men she accepts
proposals of marriage from stabs her at the altar, and as she falls to the ground so, too, does
Moore who is later found “leaning against a pillar” (675). As the writer in the Daily Telegraph
foretold, the roles between doll and person are reversed. This reversal takes on a new valence in
155
George Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion (1913), which appeared a few years later. Rather than
making an automaton to replace a woman, the phonetics professor, Henry Higgins, attempts to
make a woman into an automaton by training her to speak and act in a prescribed way.
But the supposition that speaking dolls made children essentially passive underestimates
children, who found new ways of enacting authorship through practicing scenes of narrative
refusal, denying the doll the answers and behaviors it seeks. If technological innovation at the
end of the nineteenth century was intended to lead to an increased ability to hold a conversation,
children did not find this to be the case. Instead, they found that talking dolls not only inhibited
the secret-sharing previously inherent in dollplay, but also made explicit their fears about the doll
as a spying presence––or at least as an object that might somehow reveal their most precious
thoughts to others. When Ethel enters Doll Country, the Fairy who guides her gives only one
warning: “You can speak to me, but not to the dolls. If you do, I can’t answer for the
consequences” (original emphasis Bradford 80). Ethel fails to follow the Fairy’s instructions and
subsequently faces the consequences, but the strange admonition reflects an awareness amongst
children that they might be better off not speaking to their dolls and keeping their thoughts to
themselves.
The child’s silence in the face of the doll that speaks and threatens to expose her secrets
(perhaps, even, punishing her for it) is not the end of dollplay’s influence on narrative form, but
rather a new development. Henry James’s depictions of narrative refusal in dollplay shows that
these acts where children learned to avoid sharing their secrets with their dolls were as important
as earlier practices where the dolls offered children emotional release. Telling stories to a doll
inspired doll-players to become authors and narrators of their own stories. Keeping secrets,
156
however, increasingly allowed children to realize the power of what is not said, and how not-
telling created a new balance of power between child, doll, and the world of adults around them.

The Secrets of Alice James
Henry James learned about the practice of secret-sharing and withholding in dollplay
indirectly, from his sister’s diary. This is not so strange when considering that diaries, whether
intended to remain hidden or to communicate a story on the writer’s behalf, were treated as ideal
confidantes. The language diarists use to “converse” with their diaries––such as when
nineteenth-century diarist Henrietta Embree addresses her diary as “dear old blue book” and
claims that “it is to you my old friend I come confiding my most intence [sic] wish”––echoes
that which nineteenth-century children used when confiding in their dolls (qtd in Wink 55; 64).
A diary is a doll for a woman who has grown up, and so the practice of secret-sharing and
withholding that begins in childhood with dolls evolves into one with diaries in adulthood.
Diaries, like silent dolls, are the best kind of audience; they “listen and listen,” no matter how
long the story––and they never talk back.
But, like speaking dolls, books threaten to reveal the secrets they contain. Books would
seem to be intended for reading––that is, for the sharing of stories and knowledge. And yet,
diaries appear to resist this function, at times imagining a world of writers without readers. Other
twentieth and twenty-first century diaries are commonly sold with an attached lock and key:
these exist in versions both for children with cheap heart-shaped locks and skeleton keys, and for
adults, with impressive combination locks and plain leather covers. These books suggest that
they will keep our secrets, that they are, in fact, made to do so. The twenty-first century
journalist Erin Killian claims that her diary was such an important confidante that it became a
companion, even taking on a personality. “I called my diary Sue,” she says, “I have no idea
157
where the name came from––but I was loyal to her and told her my feelings. And she did her
best to keep my secrets––Sue had a lock and a little key” (Killian para. 2). Sue assumes the role
of a best and most trusted friend, from whom Killian withholds nothing. “I divulged all of my
deepest secrets,” Killian claims, “secrets I would never tell an adult” (para. 4). Despite Killian’s
belief that Sue’s best efforts (that lock and little key) will keep her secrets safe, in the end these
efforts are thwarted. One fateful day, Killian writes, “I HATE my bro because he peeked in you,
Sue” (para. 3). This violation of Killian’s private thoughts, as Killian knows, is not really Sue’s
fault. Diaries consistently fail to keep the secrets they were meant to protect, even when the diary
itself is meant to remain a secret. If a narrative begins with one character who keeps a diary or
private journal, then by the story’s end these private thoughts will often be revealed. A diary
becomes everybody’s secret.
This is not a new narrative pattern. In Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859),
readers are shocked out of their complacent reading of Marian Halcombe’s diary by the intrusion
of the villainous Count Fosco, who finds the diary and leaves a message therein for Marian,
claiming that reading the diary afforded him “an unexpected intellectual pleasure” (358). Not
only does this undo Marian’s activity as an active investigator, but after this interference the
diary’s extracts cease and Marian disappears as a narrator within the novel. In Anne Brontë’s The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), we are made even more aware that all diaries are secrets that
eventually are intruded upon.
10
The mysterious tenant, Helen Huntingdon, gives her diary to the

10
Brontë’s use of the diary as a narrative device is, as Priti Joshi notes, “the most abused aspect
of the novel’s narrative structure” (913). George Moore was one of the diary’s early critics,
wishing that a “man of letters would have laid his hand upon [Brontë’s] arm and said: You must
not let your heroine give her diary to the young farmer” (218). More recently, critics have argued
against this view, as Juliet McMaster compellingly concludes that “Helen’s diary, written in
stages of experience only as she reaches them, can adequately convey the pain, the pathos, and
the bitterness of a strong love gone sour” (363).
158
novel’s frame narrator, Gilbert Markham, to explain misconstrued appearances and dispel
rumors. He learns, in addition to the details of her history, that her diary has played a key role
once before, in the exposure of her plans to leave her husband. Just as she wonders “is it not time
to deliver” her son from his father’s example, she finds that her husband is standing behind her
“actuated by some base spirit of curiosity,” and his reading of her words thwarts her plans (308;
309). And yet, after that first intrusion, she continues to keep a diary.
11
Despite what we know to
be the diary’s inability to keep out curious readers, we all, nonetheless, continue to tell our
diaries our secrets, and somehow expect them to keep them.
12

Some writers, however, do keep secrets from their diaries, even if these secrets are open
ones, easily known by the prying reader. Such is the case in Virginia Woolf’s short story, “The
Legacy” (1944), when Gilbert Clarendon receives from his deceased wife, Angela, the fifteen-
volume set of little books, bound in green leather, that make up her diary (281).
13
As Gilbert
reads, he finds that Angela’s diary is marked with more and more omissions as the circumstances
leading up to her death become clearer. The mysterious “B.M” with whom she holds

11
Conversely, some nineteenth-century diaries were kept with the specific intention of
preserving the diarist’s memory. Henrietta Embree, in a diary spanning from January 1, 1856 to
her death in June 1863, speculates on the significant role her diary may someday play in the
preservation of her memory (Wink 55). Embree hopes that after her passing, her diary will
“reveal to them that, that never would have been known had you not of spoke it” (qtd in Wink
55). Her repeated mode of direct address for her diary as you emphasizes her perception of the
dear old book as both a confidante and as an agent in ensuring the telling of her story once she is
gone.
12
Recent scholarship questions to what extent diaries are really meant to remain secret,
reconsidering them rather as a form of autobiography. As Amy Wink concludes, diaries act as a
particularly “feminine form of autobiography,” one that allowed them to record their history
despite their daily domestic responsibilities (original emphasis xii).
13
Strouse notes that Virginia Woolf’s personal diary includes “Alice James” under a list of
“Books read or in reading” on October 2, 1934 (the year in which Burr’s edition appeared) (325).
Woolf’s story “The Legacy,” while revised and submitted for publication in Harper’s Bazaar in
1940, did not appear in print during her lifetime (see Mitchell A. Leaska’s edition of the Virginia
Woolf Reader 124).
159
conversations, exchanges books, and spends a great deal of time alone becomes, in the last
volume of the diary, only “he” (286). As her lover grows in importance in her life, her husband
becomes relatively insignificant, and there is only one “he” to whom she could possibly be
referring. The final pages are almost entirely blank, but they convey much: “Then: ‘I wrote him a
letter.’ Then pages were left blank. Then there was this: ‘No answer to my letter.’ Then more
blank pages; and then this: ‘He has done what he threatened.’ After that––what came after that?
He turned page after page. All were blank. But there[,] on the very day before her death[,] was
this entry: ‘Have I the courage to do it too?’ That was the end” (286). From a distance, the events
both recorded––and not––are clear: Gilbert’s wife wrote to her lover claiming that she could not
leave her husband or otherwise could not be with him, her lover killed himself, and then she, in
an effort to rejoin her lover, did the same. Gilbert, however, is as unable to understand his wife in
death as he was in life, and immediately after reading this final entry rushes to call his wife’s
secretary and confidante in an effort to “know the truth” (287). Unlike Gilbert, readers do not
need her to know the secretary’s confirmation of events to know what has happened. Instead,
readers learn from Angela’s keeping of her diary that she was able to establish a private
independent life, one that she eventually reveals to her husband partially through telling
omissions.
The diary as a form of agency and as a creator and revealer of secrets was not lost on
Alice James, the sister of psychologist William James and novelist Henry James, who devotedly
kept a diary in the last few years of her life.
14
This project, while well-known to her nurse, who
cared for her through years of pain and illness, and her companion and partner Katharine

14
All biographical information pertaining to Alice James is from Jean Strouse’s foundational
biography, Alice James: A Biography, unless otherwise noted.
160
Peabody Loring, remained a “a sort of secret” from her brothers during her lifetime (Yeazell 5).
Ruth Yeazell notes that it was not until two years after Alice’s death that Loring had copies of
the diary made for herself and each of Alice’s three surviving brothers, when they read it for “the
first time” and saw how their stories had been carefully recorded (5). Loring reports that the
eldest, William James, “never thanked me for his copy, simply acknowledged the receipt of it
and certainly never made any suggestion as to its being read or not” (qtd. in Edel v). Jean Strouse
notes in her biography of Alice James that William actually did read the diary, writing to Henry
afterwards that it struck him with “strange compunctions and solemnity” as well as with its
“deep humor!” (qtd in Strouse 319). He concluded, unlike Henry, that it “ought to be published”
and laments the “tragic impression of personal power venting itself on no opportunity” (319).
William unthinkingly goes against his sister’s dying injunction to not dwell on the limits of her
life: “When I am gone,” she wrote to him, “pray don’t think of me simply as a creature who
might have been something else, had neurotic science been born” (xiii).
15

While William’s first impulse was to publish his sister’s diary, Henry’s most certainly
was not. He responded to reading his sister’s diary by writing to William that he was “terribly
scared and disconcerted––I mean alarmed––by the sight of so many private names and allusions
in print” (qtd. in Edel v). He implored Loring not to publish the diary, as she intended––“though
[Alice] never said so, I understand that she would like to have it published,” she wrote––and
dreaded that their youngest brother, Robertson, would make the diary public (qtd. in Edel v).
16
“I

15
Strouse argues that Alice’s illness “justified her failure to achieve while allowing her to
preserve a sense of potent capacity,” so even if she implored others not to think of her in this
way, she may have done so herself (122).
16
Leon Edel notes that Loring honored Henry James’s request to not publish the diary, and even
withheld sharing the typewritten copy with Robertson; it wasn’t until “half a century after
Alice’s death [that] she presented it to Robertson’s daughter, the late Mrs. Mary James Vaux, of
Bryn Mawr” (vi). Even now, readers can only ever have mediated access to the diary and to
161
seem to see them showing it about Concord––and talking about it,” Henry writes to William,
“with the fearful American newspaper lying in wait for every whisper, every echo” (qtd. in Edel
vi).
Loring, however, was right about Alice’s intentions for her text: Henry’s obsessive fear
of the diary’s publication does not seem to have been one his sister shared. Despite keeping the
diary a secret from all except a select few, her thorough editing up until the day of her death
suggests that she at least partly imagined that someday it would be read by others. In the diary’s
final entry, Loring writes that “[a]ll through Saturday the 5th and even in the night, Alice was
making sentences. One of the last things she said to me was to make a correction in the sentence
of March 4th [...] This dictation of March 4th was rushing about in her brain all day, and
although she was very weak and it tired her much to dictate, she could not get her head quiet
until she had had it written” (Diary 232-3). Dying from breast cancer after years of living as an
invalid, James’s final days were marked by pain and thoughts of her impending death. In the
much labored-over March 4th entry, she reports, “I am being ground slowly on the grim
grindstone of physical pain, and on two nights I had almost asked for K.’s lethal dose” (232).
Aware that the “bewildered little hammer that keeps [her] going will very shortly see the

Alice’s thoughts. Alice tells us that at times she asked Loring to transcribe and edit the diary for
her, a form of mediation which presumably shaped both how and what she put down on paper.
When Loring privately printed four copies of the diary in 1894 she further added a few small
edits and “a half-dozen footnotes” (Edel v.). James’s first editor for public printing, Burr, tells us
in her 1934 preface that James inserted many newspaper clippings into her journal, but that these
have been “thought best to omit” because they refer to events long past and because she believes
that they would “dilute” James’s own prose and feeling (Preface 1). While Leon Edel’s 1964
edition of the diary includes these inserts, he also notes that “[s]ome of the clippings are missing
in the original manuscript,” in which cases he has “relied upon the Loring edition” (viii). These
editors, even as they have approached the manuscript with great care, present frames through
which readers must now view James’s text.
162
decency of ending his distracted career,” Alice continues to pursue her writing project, capturing
her thoughts up until the day before her passing (232).
In doing so, Alice takes on an agency otherwise denied her. Alice, who begins by
describing herself as simply an “appendage to five cushions and three shawls” was perceived by
others as well as herself as an object or as a type of repository (Diary 81). Much of this
perception was due to her years of relative isolation at home. Beginning at age fifteen, she
continually struggled with bouts of “neuralgia,” which she described as “impossible sensations
of upheaval” (qtd. in Edel 5). In 1878, when she was thirty years old, she suffered a terrible
breakdown, which was recorded in letters between her parents and brothers. Her father reported
that Alice was “half the time, indeed much more than half, on the verge of insanity and suicide”
(qtd. in Edel 6). While she recovered and eventually returned to a period of health and activity,
the remainder of her life would see similar relapses, and her diary is punctuated with frequent
mentions of her death, or, more often, of her frustrating inability to die: “‘Tis a great waste that I
didn’t die whilst K. was here,” she muses after the conclusion of a visit from Loring (Diary 88).
Alice’s repetition of such phrases betrays a real yearning for her escape from life’s constraints.
Due to her long periods of illness, Alice’s family viewed her as primarily dependent upon
them (“Father is bearing Alice’s calls upon him in a most miraculous way,” her mother writes),
but in fact, her life as an invalid leant itself to her position as author and secret-sharer (qtd. in
Edel 6). For many years, her family would visit Alice in her sickroom and tell her their stories,
aligning with Erika Wright’s theory of the invalid in nineteenth-century novels, in which invalids
“function as a powerful center” in fiction, “interfering with and enhancing” stories (112). In her
introduction to Alice’s journal, Anna Robeson Burr writes that Henry particularly felt his sister’s
absence after her death because “for so long as she had lived she had been for him like a vase of
163
previous memories” (Introduction 82). Alice reminded her brother of past times and narratives,
as well as acting as a “vase” for his stories, anecdotes, and gossip.
In this way, Alice herself becomes rather doll-like, as both adults and children perceived
invalids, like dolls, to be ideal confidantes.
17
This relationship was often evoked through
dollplay, where dolls often suffered from prolonged diseases. From “measles” to “small pox” to
“consumption,” children reported that their dolls suffered greatly, and they were subsequently
treated (Ellis and Hall 144). These sick dolls were often cured, but sometimes they remained
sick, and just as often they “died.” When asked if her “dolls were sick often,” one doll-player
from Rochester, New York, responds, “Oh yes, they needed constant attention” (Jackson). For
another, Jenell Batzing, sick dolls were a moment for practicing care: “I can remember we would
play nurse and doctor with the dolls [...] we used to give them physicals and taping broken legs
or bandaging them [...] They were sick and they needed a cold washcloth” (Batzing). Dolls
sometimes remained sick for a very long time, as the doll-players tended to their ill (or broken)
dolls, finding a companionship just as strong, if not stronger, than when their dolls were whole.
One girl reports, “Once the mice gnawed dolly and let bran out. She then became an invalid,
confined to her bed, and I loved her most of all” (Ellis and Hall 139). Dolls often specifically
took on the diseases and sufferings of their owners (and, one owner reports, vice versa). “When I
was sick,” one doll-player reports, “my doll was sick too; she went through whooping cough,
measles and scarlet fever with me. If either of us got sick the other did” (145). In a similar vein,
Ellis and Hall find that all “the dolls of an invalid child were invalids” (145). Another, Violet

17
Perhaps no character better illustrates this connection than Jenny Wren, the disabled dolls’
dressmaker in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865), who knowingly observes those
around her. Intriguingly, Henry James was one of Jenny Wren’s fiercest critics, asking “What do
we get in return for accepting Miss Jenny Wren as a possible person?” (Literary Criticism 854).
164
Dutton (1899-?), associates playing with dolls with her disabled friend: “The girl next door was
crippled and I used to play with her a lot [...] we’d cut [paper dolls] out” (Dutton). The doll is not
just a confidante of the child’s sufferings, it is also a companion that endures and experiences
along with her.
Even Alice appears to think of herself as the receptacle that her family supposes her to be
when she imagines that her body is a space that could be occupied by others. Moved by a sudden
sense of “joy in the rich, throbbing complexity of life” and struck by her Nurse’s “rudimentary
expression,” she asks her caretaker, “Oh Nurse, don’t you wish you were inside of me!” (original
emphasis Diary 48). Reminding James of a recent and debilitating headache, her Nurse responds
vehemently in the negative, which James reports as a blow to her “vanity” (48). Despite this, her
feeling of “throbbing with the pulse of the Race” and the “fountain of all Happiness within [her]”
is one where she feels filled with and at one with all the stories and feelings of those who
surround her (49).
But Alice’s decision to begin the project of her diary is a turning away from being a
receptacle for the stories of others to the process of narrating her own. In one of her earliest
entries, she delights in beginning “a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself,”
suggesting a sense of her own subjectivity and its value (original emphasis Diary 25).
Furthermore, she reports feeling a great need to unburden herself somewhere to someone,
writing that the diary “may have its yet to be discovered consolations. I shall, at least, have it all
my own way, and it may bring relief as an outlet to that geyser of emotions, sensations,
speculations and reflections which ferments perpetually within my poor old carcass for its sins”
(25). She considers her diary as the space for sharing both the large and inconsequential events
of her life. In her brief opening entry, she writes “I think that if I get into the habit of writing
165
about what happens, or rather doesn’t happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and
desolation which abides with me” (25). Her diary becomes a space for her to share the significant
and the mundane, a companion that will ease her sense of loneliness.
Despite claiming to share all, Alice both curiously “told” much to her diary and, at times,
also withheld. After announcing Loring’s arrival on September 3, 1889, she does not write again
until November 16, after Loring’s departure. Alice reports that Loring “seems decidedly to have
‘interrupted the Diary, Miss,’ as Nurse plaintively predicted after her arrival,” implying that
Loring perhaps temporarily replaced the diary as confidante (Diary 56). Despite Alice’s
suggestion that “that calamity perhaps isn’t irretrievable,” she never really is able to retrieve
these “unrecorded” events (56; 57). Her next entry details a few events that occurred during this
lapse in diary-writing, but at roughly a page and half, it is about the same length as her usual
daily entries and we are left to assume that much of the last two months is lost to us. Strouse also
notes the diary’s other “large gaps during the fall of 1891: it registered neither William’s visit
nor the London opening of The American” (307). These notable omissions highlight the
inevitable loss of other, unknown, absences.
Both through what she records––and what she withholds––Alice uses her diary as a
means, as Duquette suggests, of “articulat[ing] a sense of self” (719).
18
Even without knowing of
her diary, her brothers perceived her selfhood as something wonderful. After her death, her
youngest brother Robertson, wrote “Dear Alice’s life didn’t seem beautiful, but I doubt not it
was interiorly beautiful” (qtd in Strouse 316). Alice had a less flattering opinion of this brother,

18
Alice was not alone in her interest in discovering, or uncovering, this sense of self. William,
the eldest of the James siblings, wrote an essay on psychology titled “The Hidden Self,”
published in Scribner’s in 1890. This essay details the treatment of female hysterics by Pierre
Janet and Albert Binet, which they performed through hypnotism, automatic writing, and
induced trance-states.
166
writing to Henry in the fall of 1882 that “his vices and his virtues his joys and his agonies are all
equally superficial, he seems to be without any interiors at all” (qtd in Strouse 205). Strouse ties
Alice’s sense of self directly to the diary, claiming that Alice “discussed in her diary the
importance of a sense of self: ‘When will women begin to have the first glimmer that above all
other loyalties is the loyalty to Truth, i.e., to yourself that husband, children, friends and country
are as nothing to that’” (219). The diary is the companion with whom a woman can share that
truth.
But Alice was not the only one who sought to express her sense of self in writing and
Henry in particular sought to capture his sister’s rich interior world in fiction. In his novel, The
Princess Casamassima (1885-6), Alice shows up as Rose Muniment, the invalid sister of Paul
Muniment, who appears connected to all of humanity from her apparently remote and all-
knowing position. Her brother Paul tells the amused Hyacinth, “It’s very wonderful: she can
describe things she has never seen. And they are just like the reality” (PC 151). Rose responds,
“There’s nothing I’ve never seen [...] That’s the advantage of my lying here in such a manner. I
see everything in the world” (151). Rose implies that she “sees” what her visitors share with her,
but even this would not account for “everything.” She sees more than her visitors––there’s
“nothing” she hasn’t seen. Her brother’s insistence that what she describes is “just like the
reality” grants her that power even as other characters question it. Hyacinth remains skeptical of
her perception: “You don’t seem to see your brother’s meetings––his secret societies and clubs,”
he insists, “You put that aside when I asked you” (151). In the end, Rose sees only what she
wants to see.
But Rose is more than just an omniscient narrator of selected scenes. She is both the
receiver of secrets, and, in her long monologues to Hyacinth, a pivotal revealer of secrets. When
167
Rose meets Hyacinth, she lets out a series of confidences regarding herself, her brother, and their
friend Lady Aurora, while he waits listening. She tells Hyacinth that the “day [Lady Aurora] had
first seen Paul was the day they became so intimate [...] The little woman, the little girl, as she
lay there (Hyacinth scarcely knew how to characterise her), told our young man a very good
secret, in which he found himself too much interested to think of criticising so headlong a burst
of confidence. The secret was that, of all the people she had ever seen in the world, her ladyship
thought Rosy’s Paul the cleverest” (PC 144). In her supposedly isolated state, Rose would seem
to be an ideal keeper of “very good secret[s],” but she, like the diary left unattended, is capable
of being equally indiscreet with the secrets entrusted to her.
19

Rose, then, takes on a pivotal position as a trader and dealer of secrets, one that aligns her
with the doll’s role. Rose’s appearance further links her with the doll, a likeness she shares with
Hyacinth and Pinnie, as Henry James often describes Hyacinth, Pinnie, and Rose Muniment as
“little”––they appear as the “little bookbinder,” the “little dressmaker” and the “little person,”
respectively (PC 122; 225; 133). Rose expresses a strong liking for looking up at those in higher
social positions, which she is gladly able to do with Lady Aurora, who makes a “tall figure” that
she, however, seeks to disguise with a “kind of drooping erectness” (132; 133). But what makes

19
Rose is doll-like in her position as confidante, but she does not own a doll herself. The only
character in Princess Casamassima that does is the young neglected Millicent Henning, whom
the dressmaker, Amanda Pynsent, calls to fetch Hyacinth in the novel’s opening chapter. The
“dingy doll” with which she played suggests her apparent coarseness (PC 54). It is this doll
which first comes to Hyacinth’s mind when he meets Millicent after a period of several years:
“To Hyacinth she appeared to have no connection with the long-haired little girl who, in Lomax
Place, years before, was always hugging a smutty doll and courting his society; she was like a
stranger” (107). Her doll, and her devotion to it, justifies the dressmaker’s feelings that Millicent
must be a “vulgar girl,” and yet it also indicates Millicent’s ability for compassion, and, perhaps,
her desire to be loved in return (97).
168
these characters appear most doll-like is not their relatively small stature, but their large narrative
significance and the secrets they hold from themselves and each other.
Alice’s diary may appear small when compared to the large bodies of work produced by
her brothers William and Henry, but her work too holds large narrative significance. Despite this,
critical evaluations of her work have tended to emphasize her status as relatively minor. Leon
Edel opens his introduction to her diary by claiming that it “represents her modest claim on
posterity beside the works of her famous brothers” (v).
20
That her claim was merely modest was
not a view specifically shared by her “famous brothers.” Despite Henry’s terror about Alice’s
diary coming out in print, he did insist that “[i]t is heroic in its individuality, its independence ––
its face-to-face with the universe for and by herself” (qtd. in Strouse 321). Alice may have
referred to herself in self-deprecating terms, a habit that was then echoed in critical works on the
James family, but this does not adequately reflect the size or scope of her achievement.
21
What
Alice wanted––and through her diary, achieved––was something more like what Rose Muniment
had: the ability to decide who gets to know what. In the vast conspiracy that is The Princess
Casamassima, Rose is the only character who comes close to the narrator’s level of perception.
She is the doll, alone on the shelf, watching the children.

20
Duquette notes that recently feminist critics have attempted to reevaluate the perspective
expressed by Edel as to the relatively unassuming legacy that Alice’s diary makes, but she also
intelligently points out that an over-reliance on a “psychoanalytic methodology” leads critics to
“too often judge Alice’s journal as indicative of loss and failure” (717).
21
The project of the diary is one about which Alice herself had doubts. She was particularly
dismayed after reading the letters and journals of George Eliot and claimed that after finishing
the final volume she felt only “horrible disillusion” about the “creator of the immortal Maggie”
(Diary 41). Perhaps, partially, this feeling is due to her opinions regarding the volume’s editor,
Eliot’s husband John Cross. Alice blames Cross for having apparently “done his best to wash out
whatever little colour the letters may have had” (41). James’s critique of Cross as an editor of his
wife’s work perhaps also points to her anxieties about the future of her own text, and who will
change the form––and life––of her diary. What an author chooses to withhold is quite different
from what an editor refuses to disclose.
169
Henry James and the Secrecies of Dollplay
That Henry James’s work was deeply influenced by his sister and her life is not so
surprising when considering their close and sustained friendship. When Katharine Loring entered
Alice’s life and began to take over much of her care, Henry, while he often expressed his
gratitude for and admiration of Loring, felt himself made relatively redundant by this new
important personage in Alice’s life. As he expressed in a letter home, “Alice and Miss L. are
very independent of me––& A. indeed seems so extraordinarily fond of Miss L. that a third
person is rather a superfluous appendage” (qtd in Strouse 199). Henry, now finding himself to be
the “appendage” as his sister once described herself, no longer notes a sense of importance in
Alice’s company, but one of being excluded.
This feeling only emphasizes how strong their mutual connection had been and, indeed,
continued to be. When, in the summer 1872, Alice traveled to Europe with Henry and their Aunt
Kate (their mother’s sister, Catherine Walsh), she found strength and enthusiasm for all that she
encountered, despite an episode with her health in Switzerland. Five years later, she wrote to a
friend that “I am frightened sometimes [...] when I suddenly become conscious of how
constantly I dwell on the memory of that summer I spent abroad” (qtd in Strouse 160). When she
left the United States for the last time in 1884, she and Loring settled at 7 Bolton Row, only a
few minutes from Henry’s lodgings from 1885-7.
22
Henry continued to see Alice often during
her time in England, and when she died, he wrote to a friend that “She was not only my nearest

22
In 1887, she removed to Royal Leamington Spa in Warwickshire, where she and Loring took
rooms in a boarding house at 11 Hamilton Terrace, and where Henry continued to visit her.
When, in 1890 she suffered from a breakdown, Katharine returned and moved her to the South
Kensington Hotel in Queen’s Gate Terrace, close to Henry’s residence at 34 De Vere Gardens. In
February 1891, Katharine found a house at 41 Argyll Road on Kensington’s Campden Hill,
where Alice died on March 6, 1892.
170
and dearest relation, but she was a cherished social relation, as it were, as well and a great––on
the whole my greatest, social resource” (qtd in Strouse 317). Both brother and sister deeply
valued time and conversation with the other.
And so, it is not surprising that Alice’s diary informs our understanding of her brother’s
novelistic projects. Henry did not have a doll, but he did have Alice, and just as a child’s games
with her doll continue to be important to the child’s narrative experiments long after she has put
her doll away, so, too, do Alice and her diary continue to shape her brother’s fiction well after
she is gone. Alice, who for many years served as Henry’s “doll,” listening to his stories from the
rooms which in her later years she rarely left, turned out, to Henry’s dismay, to be a “talking
doll,” retelling his stories in her own way. Henry’s relationship with Alice shapes his fiction,
about which he suggests a persistent anxiety that his characters in fact have a life all their own
well before learning of Alice’s diary. The revelation of her authorship prompts a new mode of
narrative technique where information must be withheld even from the characters themselves
who threaten to overwhelm their author.
Henry specifically considers his characters in a doll-like manner in his prefaces. In his
opening to Portrait of a Lady (1880-1), he describes fiction as a kind of dollhouse into which
every author views a different scene: “The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a
million [...] These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the human
scene” (45-6). The novel’s protagonist, Isabel Archer, about whom the novel must make “an
ado,” sits within The Portrait, or as Henry says, “a structure reared with an ‘architectural’
competence” (48; 50). These characters are ones that Henry can make much about or “put away”
until later play, a situation he articulates in his preface to The Princess Casamassima, where he
describes returning to the character Christina Light when in search of a social connection for his
171
new protagonist: “To look for this necessary connexion was for me to meet it suddenly in the
form of that extremely disponible figure of Christina Light whom I had ten years before found
left on my hands at the conclusion of Roderick Hudson. She had for so long, in the vague limbo
of those ghosts we have conjured but not exorcised, been looking for a situation, awaiting a niche
and a function” (44). The Princess’s return, Henry concludes, is proof that she refuses “to be laid
away with folded hands in the pasteboard tomb, the doll’s box, to which we usually relegate the
spent puppet after the fashion of a recumbent worthy on the slab of the sepulchral monument”
(45). The Princess’s animation––her ability to have a life that seems all her own––scares Henry,
and this fear extends to his feelings about all his characters who “revive for [the author] by a
force or whim of their own and ‘walk’ round his house of art like haunting ghosts, feeling for the
old doors they knew, fumbling at stiff latches and pressing their pale faces, in the outer dark, to
lighted windows” (45). These haunting characters “walk” around the dollhouse that is the novel,
and like the speaking, walking dolls of which children are wary, Henry concludes, “I mistrust
them, I confess, in general” (45).
This unease about how much a doll––or a character––really knows comes to fruition in
Henry’s novel, What Maisie Knew. Even more than in Alice’s diary, readers are left watching
nothing happen as they seek to discover what the young, powerless, eponymous heroine––who is
tossed like a plaything from one parent or guardian to another––really “knows.” Maisie has thus
produced much speculation amongst her fellow characters and scholars as to what she does––or
does not––know and how this reflects the extent of her inner world. As her governess, Mrs. Wix,
says to her at one point, “you yet did seem to know. Thank God in his mercy, at last, if you do!,”
epitomizing the pervasive simultaneous confidence in and doubt about what Maisie grasps of the
adulteries and scheming that surround her (WMK 208). This debate has been longstanding as the
172
child Maisie is notoriously difficult to understand––as Roisín Laing notes, the novel itself
questions any attempt “to access the child’s innocent, inarticulable, knowledge of self” (99).
Maisie consistently eludes us.
What has received less attention is just how, exactly, Maisie became so successfully
mysterious about the extent of her knowledge. Rather than considering Maisie’s knowledge or
moral character, readers might turn their attention to her method of training herself to be
secretive, a method that helps to shape her inner world, and one which Henry learned from his
sister Alice’s diary and which he later uses in the formation of his late novelistic style. Initially
doll-like herself with her “small, still life,” Maisie’s dollplay, during which she practices the
withholding of desired information, allows her to assume a position of agency (WMK 13). As
Maisie becomes more aware of the events that surround and concern her, familiar forms––such
as the “stiff dolls on the dusky shelves”––begin to come to life (13). The dolls “move their arms
and legs” and “old forms and phrases began to have a sense that frightened her” (13). And yet,
what this sudden animation inspires is not more storytelling, but less, as Maisie famously takes
to concealing her observations from everyone, beginning with her dolls. The discovery of the
dolls’ animation and a frightening shine to old forms then leads to a feeling of “danger” to which
the only “remedy” is “the idea of an inner self” or “concealment” (13). This inner self becomes
an infinite storage space into which Maisie appears “not to take things in” (12). And yet, her
parents try to fill her, as if her “little gravely gazing soul” were a “boundless receptacle” into
which they could pour all of the evil things they thought about the other (12). In becoming aware
of how her parents imagine her as a doll, she realizes the means of ensuring that she is not a doll,
but rather a person endowed with her own rich inner self.
173
This is not a development that comes immediately. Maisie spends a great amount of time
practicing her method of concealment as a means to grow her inner self. Specifically, Maisie
practices with her French doll, Lisette, pretending that her doll wishes to know where she has
been and what she has been doing, but pointedly refusing to satisfy the doll’s curiosity. Maisie
practices being mysterious and restraining from telling all with her French doll, even devising
exercises where she imagines that Lisette asks her questions that she refuses to answer. As
Lisette’s questions lead Maisie to self-revelations, Maisie herself becomes more adept at evading
her doll’s inquiries. This is a role reversal from her interactions with the adults, when Maisie
herself asks questions of the “ladies who gathered there,” sending them into hysterics (WMK
26). Repeating this experience from a different subject position allows her to undo her
humiliation and project it onto Lisette. The performance further enables her to become astute in
gathering, collecting, and concealing her own inner world, one separate from the expectations of
others.
Her doll, Lisette, in return “asks” Maisie questions, which allows her to reenact and
reproduce the feelings of the adults who are amused by her innocence. Soon, “she understood
more, for it befell that she was enlightened by Lisette’s questions, which reproduced the effect of
her own upon those for whom she sat in the very darkness of Lisette” (WMK 26). Maisie,
amazed by Lisette’s ignorance, “often imitated the shrieking ladies” who were so amused by her
(26). In the end, Maisie concludes that her doll cannot possibly understand her secrets, all while
wondering if she successfully comes off as closed off and knowing as her mother: “There were at
any rate things she really couldn’t tell even a French doll. She could only pass on her lessons and
study to produce on Lisette the impression of having mysteries in her life, wondering the while
whether she succeeded in the air of shading off, like her mother, into the unknowable” (26). The
174
narrator implies that Lisette as a “French doll” is a bit too knowing (“even a French doll”) and
yet still not knowing enough to be let in on Maisie’s secrets. Instead, Maisie practices “the
impression of having mysteries,” until, in fact, she does. To pretend to have a secret is,
eventually, to produce one.
Maisie does not feel guilty about imitating the visiting ladies who laugh at her, but she
does feel ashamed later of a certain tone she takes with her doll, when she realizes that she is
mimicking her mother. Lisette, after Maisie’s long absences, “tried hard to discover where she
had been,” and she finds out “a little” but “she never discover[s] all” (WMK 27). The doll,
however, eventually oversteps in her efforts to uncover Maisie’s movements: “There was an
occasion when, on [Lisette] being particularly indiscreet, Maisie replied to her––and precisely
about the motive of a disappearance––as Mrs. Farange had once replied to Maisie: ‘Find out for
yourself!’ She mimicked her mother’s sharpness, but she was rather ashamed afterwards, though
as to whether of the sharpness or the mimicry was not quite clear” (WMK 27). As Maisie mirrors
the behaviors of her mother, she realizes that she wants to be neither her mother, nor someone
who would imitate her. The performance of withholding becomes key to Maisie’s self-
development and her development as a source of narrative intelligence.
But it is not just that Maisie withholds from others; the novel itself often withholds
information from its readers. We, like Mrs. Wix, may give a “sidelong look,” left with “room for
wonder at what Maisie knew” (WMK 265). The novel tells us much and yet, by allowing
ambiguity to remain, Henry James constructs a rich inner world for Maisie––and the novel––one
that reflects that created by his sister in her dedicated diary-writing. Maisie’s doll, like Alice’s
diary, allows her to confide, and withhold, narratives that allow her to establish agency over her
175
life and position herself as the center of knowledge. Readers, too, eventually take on the role of
the doll-like diary when reading the novel, as they are confided in, and yet remain unknowing.
What Maisie Knew’s obscurity about the extent of Maisie’s knowledge is thus indebted to
the diary of Alice James and its occasional elusiveness, whether intended or simply a product of
the impossibility of recording everything. Mechanically, Henry began imitating his sister as well.
Due to wrist pain, Henry James began dictating What Maisie Knew in 1897, and this change has
been one famous critical explanation for the evolution in Henry James’s style (Hoover 258).
Alice, too, increasingly relied upon dictation as her illness worsened and the diary’s final entry
by Loring notes that she recorded the final entries for Alice. Strouse further observes that
“beginning December 31, 1890, the diary is written entirely in Katharine’s hand” (298). Loring
tells us in the last entry that “it tired her much to dictate, she could not get her head quiet until
she had had it written” (Diary 232-3). Both in the form of composition and in the withholding
nature of the text, then, did Alice make an indelible impression upon her brother’s work, training
him in the practice of narrative refusal and the art and power of cultural forms of dollplay.
After Maisie, Henry James continues to work out the relationship between dollplay,
secrets, and the development of self in his later novels, where these three things coalesce in his
representation of female thought. The Wings of the Dove, while not possessing a literal doll
within its pages, does mention dollplay as a metaphorical visualization of consciousness.
Unaware of what is in store for her, Milly Teale sits thinking of how others perceive her: “It was
exactly what she was doing this afternoon; and Milly, who had amusements of thought that were
like the secrecies of a little girl playing with dolls when conventionally ‘too big,’ could almost
settle to the game of what one would suppose her, how one would place her, if one didn’t know
her” (176-7). The narrator likens Milly’s imagination to the “secrecies” of dollplay once one has
176
become too big to indulge in such behavior, suggesting that there is something about her way of
thinking that would be embarrassing if discovered.
Milly fails to be the doll that Kate Croy wishes her to be, showing the fluidity of the
relationship between doll and girl, player and played. Milly’s thought-play prepares her for this,
and, in turn, her dollplay prepares her for these transports of thought. The availability of an
object that easily allows a slippage of self, and is so generative of storytelling, enables this later
experimentation between reader and narrator, narrator and character, woman and girl, girl and
doll. When Milly engages in her thought play, she at once assumes the position of doll and doll-
player, showing that these roles are not so distinct. She can in one moment be both the subject of
the thoughts of others and the subject of her own thoughts as she thinks about how others think
of her. The doll signifies this complicated network of relationships and allows us to move
forward in our understanding of nineteenth-century narrative technique.
Eventually, vagueness itself becomes synonymous with dollplay. In James’s novel The
Ambassadors (1903), the narrator notes that Lembert Strether’s words and thoughts take on the
form of a girl dressing her doll: “It was all very well for him to feel the pity of its being so much
like lying; he almost blushed, in the dark, for the way he had dressed the possibility in
vagueness, as a little girl might have dressed her doll” (401).
23
His act of withholding––of not
being more explicit––appears, strangely, to describe an action that is made up of details, fabrics,
and frills. Dollplay becomes for Henry James an act that is defined not just by material things

23
Another male character of Henry James’s has his language compared to dollplay. In The
Golden Bowl, toy soldiers––a type of doll––initially appear to describe Bob Asssingham’s
“extravagant language,” rather than his thoughts (72). His wife, Fanny Assingham, finds that this
language reminds her “of a retired General whom she had once seen playing with toy soldiers,
fighting and winning battles, carrying on sieges and annihilating enemies with little fortresses of
wood and little armies of tin. Her husband’s exaggerated emphasis was his box of toy soldiers,
his military game” (72).
177
and information shared, but also by that which is not present and is not said. Later, Maria accuses
Lambert of this “doll dressing” in his speech: “‘What I see, what I saw [...] is that you dressed up
even the virtue” (424). She suggests that he obscures even that which is good, so that nothing is
fully clear.
This obscurity continues to play out in female forms of thought play in Henry James’s
last completed novel, The Golden Bowl, where Maggie Verver’s consciousness is withheld from
readers for so long. When the novel final opens into Maggie’s thoughts after predominantly
following those of her husband, the Prince Amerigo, the extent to which readers already know
what she thinks without ever being told is remarkable. What she knows, but never tells us, is
“something precious and precarious” that she keeps from everyone (478). Like Milly, Maggie
imagines herself as both doll and doll-player. At a dinner party, Maggie finds herself as the
subject of communal speculation: “The point of view––that one––was what she read in their free
contemplation, in that of the whole eights; there was something in Amerigo to be explained, and
she was passed about all tenderly and expertly, like a dressed doll held, in the right manner, by
its firmly-stuffed middle, for the account she could give” (361). Maggie’s awareness, however,
of the situation, and her possession of a knowledge unsuspected of her, keeps her from fully
becoming the doll that she imagines (like Milly) others perceive her to be.
The doll disappears from the text, but the secrecies of Henry James’s dollplay remain
through Maggie’s refusals of speech and thought. When Maggie questions Fanny Assingham
about the relationship between her husband and her stepmother, Charlotte, she sounds rather like
Lisette: “What awfulness, in heaven’s name, is there between them? What do you believe, what
do you know?” (403). But by the end of the conversation, she has revealed through her questions
that she already knows that the two are lovers and that she has already begun to influence their
178
movements. “And that’s how I make them do what I like!” she tells Fanny Assingham (409). In
fact, Maggie’s dollplay directly echoes Maisie’s games with Lisette when, after the Prince
discovers that his wife has ceased “[n]ot to know” and questions her about the extent of her
knowledge and of those of others, she responds, “Find out for yourself!” (472). Maggie becomes
“quite changed,” as she describes herself, not just by having proved herself not to be “too stupid
to have arrived at knowledge,” but also by her wisdom in keeping the extent of that knowledge to
herself (483).
Her deception becomes the source of her power over those around her––when the Prince
tells Maggie that Charlotte “ought to have known you,” Maggie replies that “If Charlotte doesn’t
understand me it’s because I’ve prevented her. I’ve chosen to deceive her and to lie to her” (580;
581). Maggie claims to have learned to “lie,” but much of this lying is accomplished by
omission. When Charlotte pretends to Maggie that she is leaving for America in order to separate
Maggie from her father and to finally have her husband to herself, Maggie’s part of the
conversation is made up almost entirely by questions. Charlotte asks Maggie if she has worked
against her, and Maggie responds, “What does it matter––if I’ve failed?” at the very moment
when she realizes that she has won (557). By choosing to follow along in Charlotte’s
performance, Maggie appears passive, but because she is also actively withholding knowledge
from Charlotte, she assumes the position of knowledge and control.
The abstract and bodiless doll that pervades Henry James’s late novels is not so strange
when readers consider that Henry James’s characters, too, verge on the bodiless. Jane Thrailkill
notes the body of criticism that has “argued that the mid-1890s were a turning point for Henry
James’s fictional technique, marking a period when his fiction eschews the encounter with
physical places and persons for the ‘bodiless’ realm of the modern novel of interiority” (212).
179
Virginia Woolf herself comments on this, Thrailkill observes, when, in thinking of a character
who dies halfway through Henry James’s short story, “The Friends of the Friends” (1896),
Woolf wonders, “And yet––does it make very much a difference? Henry James has only to take
the smallest of steps and he is over the border. His characters with their extreme fineness of
perception are already half-way out of the body. There is nothing violent in their release. They
seem rather to have achieved at last what they have long been attempting––communication
without obstacle” (qtd. in Thrailkill 212).
24
Woolf moves from wondering if it makes “very much
a difference” to concluding that, in fact, it does. The body is the last material form obstructing a
wonderful and uninterrupted means of perfect communication.
Woolf’s meditation is telling, and the story that directly inspires it ties Henry James’s
narrative experimentation back to Alice, and to her diary, which he would have read two years
before. “The Friends of the Friends” opens, as does this chapter, with the “delicate question” of
the “possibility of publication” of a diary, one in which the frame narrator worries that the diarist
has been “fearfully indiscreet” (81). We are given but a “fragment” of this diary that the frame
narrator further arranges into “small chapters,” indicating the type of editorial work that Henry
advocated for his sister’s text (81). Certainly, the frame narrator’s claim that the diarist “has
given her friends neither name nor initials” as if she “had desired the world should have the
benefit of [the diary],” aligns with Henry’s reaction upon reading his sister’s diary, noting that
she did not remove such forms of identification and yet still had desired for it to be published
(81).

24
“The Friends of the Friends” first appeared as “The Way it Came” in the May 1896 issues of
the Chap Book and Chapman’s Magazine of Fiction, but James later renamed the story for
inclusion in the 24-volume New York Edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James issued
between December 1907 and July 1909 (Lustig xxvi-xxvii).
180
The nameless diarist may be indiscreet, but it is not her consciousness that primarily
occupies her narrative. Rather, it is those of her two close acquaintances (a dear friend, and a
man who eventually, and briefly, becomes the diarist’s fiancé), who both saw their parents’
ghosts when they were children. And of these, it is the woman, the friend who dies quite
suddenly, who haunts the text, appearing regularly to the man after her death, when in life their
meeting was always prevented by some accident. Referring to the friend’s first visit to the
fiancé’s apartment, the diarist exclaims, “She was dead, she was dead!” while the man maintains,
“Oh, she was live! She was, she was!” (original emphasis “Friends” 104). At first, it seems that
the man is insisting that she appeared in his apartment before her death, rather than as a ghost, as
the diarist insists. But the man’s interpretation of the friend’s appearance becomes clearer later
on, when the diarist accuses him of continuing to see her, after her undeniable death: “You see
her––you see her: you see her every night! [...] She comes to you as she came that evening”
(109). The body is but a barrier (as the diarist claims, the “remnant” of his life that he would give
her is nothing to the “joy of what she gives you”) to the ideal communication the two friends are
able to share, after the woman leaves her body, and finally, inevitably, the man leaves his own
through the work of his “own hidden hand” (110; 109; 111).
Henry James’s great narrative experiment is, as Thrailkill argues, to allow a character to
“serve as the story’s focalizing consciousness even after she dies” (212). This representation of
female consciousness, existing without a body, mirrors the dollplay, which evolves into thought
play, completely separate from the material forms that initially inspired the narrative experiment.
The diarist refers to herself as “playing [her] part” and claims to her fiancé that he, too, “acted
[his] part” (109). The dead friend plays with them from beyond the grave, switching roles with
the dolls of Lambert Strether’s thoughts or the ones being played with in secret that the narrator
181
uses to imagine Milly Theale’s consciousness. As the bodiless “doll” that has come to represent
female consciousness, the friend’s consciousness becomes the heart of the story, and her friends,
who attest to their relative realness, are the ones who are now played with.
For Henry, dolls and characters both become aligned with the ghostly. Like the Princess
who refuses to lie silent in her “doll’s box,” characters haunt both the text and the author. In
Henry James’s other well-known tale featuring not just one child, but two, The Turn of the Screw
(1898), the governess who narrates the tale believes that it is she who will “watch, teach, [and]
‘form’ little Flora” and her brother, Miles (125). The beautiful children, who appear “divine” to
the governess––and so incapable of any misdoings––must then be passive, obedient, and
powerless (132). To quiet any misgivings about Miles, the governess simply glances at his
appearance: “My dear woman,” she says to the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, in response to the
credibility of a charge against him, “look at him!” (132). The children, like beautiful dolls,
appear perfect. However, the governess discovers that it is not the children who are her dolls, but
she who is theirs. The children belong to the ghosts of Miss Jessel, the governess’s deceased
predecessor, and Peter Quint, the uncle’s valet, also deceased. As the governess later reports,
“[The children] pulled with an art of their own the strings of my invention and my memory,”
turning her consciousness into a puppet that they control (185). Realizing that the children’s
facade of almost unnatural beauty and goodness was always part of the plot to control her, the
governess tells Mrs. Grose, “It’s a game [...] it’s a policy and fraud!” (181).
The governess, as doll/puppet, apparently believes herself to be at odds with the ghosts,
but the distinction between them is in fact blurred, with the governess often trading places with
the ghosts who haunt her. When she spots Peter Quint’s face through a window one day, she
races out to confront him and, not finding him there, goes to stand in his place: “It was
182
confusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he had stood. I did so; I applied my
face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room. As if, at this moment, to show me
exactly what his range had been, Mrs. Grose, as I had done for himself just before, came in from
the hall. With this I had the full image of the repetition of what had already occurred” (Turn
143). Reenacting the scene, but now with the governess in the position previously held by a
ghost, Mrs. Grose “pulled up short,” “turned white,” and “started, in short, and retreated just on
[the governess’s] lines” coming out to the lawn to meet her (143). The governess, unaware of her
own slippage with the ghostly wonders to herself “why she should be scared” (143). Later, it is
the ghosts who appear human, and the governess who takes the ghost’s place. During her third
encounter with Quint, he appears to her as “living” and “as human,” while she begins to “doubt
if even I were in life” (170; 171). Ghost, person, and puppet merge together.
What makes The Turn of the Screw so connected to What Maisie Knew is how much
within this novella is withheld. Readers never know the exact contents of the letter dismissing
Miles from school (and the governess claims that the letter goes “into no particulars” about the
school’s reasoning for his dismissal); the children’s uncle who hires the governess asks that she
“should never trouble him [...] neither appeal nor complain nor write about anything” and never
explains why; Miles claims that he “said things” to “those [he] liked” at school that got him into
trouble, but never reveals what those things were; and even Miles’s air of innocence is
“indescribable” (128; 122; 234; 132). The governess, who seeks to know and who narrates the
story that takes up most of the novella’s pages, withholds much from us even as she wonders at
the knowledge of Miles and Flora. She finally concludes that the children “haven’t been good––
they’ve only been absent. It has been easy to live with them because they’re simply leading a life
183
of their own” (181). The minds and bodies of the children are also withheld, apparently out of
the governess’s and Mrs. Grose’s reach.
Henry’s theory of a bodiless spirit, one that “communicat[es] without obstacle,” appears
to derive from the diary in “The Friends of the Friends,” but it was a theory that Alice James
rejected when it came to her own person. She apparently dismissed the idea of being spiritualized
after death, especially as others began to pass on messages for her to take beyond: “It is taken for
granted apparently that I shall be spiritualized into a ‘direct messenger,’ for here comes another
message for Father and Mother; imagine my dragging them, of whom I can only think as a
sublimation of their qualities, into gossip about the little more or the little less faith of Tom, Dick
or Harry” (Diary 231). And yet, Alice does not seem to write off communication entirely, merely
that of which she considers too mundane to be of any relevance to them, now that they are a
“sublimation of their qualities.” Communication of a more wonderful kind might still be
possible, however, even if “gossip” would be ridiculous in Alice’s eyes.
And so, Alice resists to some extent a theory put forward––and desperately hoped for––
by Charlotte Brontë, who sees her siblings in the Yorkshire landscape and wishes to reach out
and hold them again. For Alice, who finds communion with the rest of humanity when she feels
that she has transcended the limits of her own body, the goal is not to re-realize, or re-materialize
those who are gone, but rather to de-materialize the body that contains her so that she might
more perfectly connect with them. That is, by withholding the body, one is finally able to “hold”
another again. When Alice describes the feeling of “throbbing with the pulse of the Race,” she
apparently sheds her body and is filled with the vitality of all those around her (Diary 49). This is
an act that carries over into her brother’s story, “The Friends of the Friends,” when the diarist-
narrator tells her fiancé that it is her dead friend who “rules,” “holds,” and “has [him] all” (110).
184
She cannot bring herself to ask him if he “had touched her,” knowing that it would sound “horrid
and vulgar” (104). The question is out of place, not just because it would seem to suggest that
something improper had occurred, but also because it misses the point: physical touch is not
necessary for the intense relationship between the two friends.
Whereas Brontë imagined that a book might eventually take the place of a body, Alice
and Henry James wonder why one might need a body at all. Alice, who was tormented by her
body for much of her life, desires to leave it behind and Henry imagines that a more intimate
form of communication would be possible without the body as an obstacle. Out of thinking of
dolls and diaries as repositories that withhold information from others, and from which the child
or author can themselves withhold, comes a new form of narrative play where material forms
fade away. In this play, an action, like dressing a doll, which would typically make one think of
tangible objects, becomes intangible. Each of this project’s previous chapters suggested the
movement of dollplay toward the incorporeal: Brontë kills and resuscitates her wooden soldiers,
discovering that fiction can be a powerful tool for reanimating those who are gone; Dickens’s
ventriloquism through a doll allows him to imagine how one narrator can speak through the
“body” of another; and Eliot finds that fictional characters, like dolls, can be easily loved and at
the next moment abandoned. Together, Alice and Henry envision a form of dollplay that
transcends material forms.

185
Coda:
Unstitching
Now that our project is complete, we can unstitch our way back to where we began, with
considering Maria Edgeworth’s call for children to destroy their toys and the elusive secret that
lies at Frankenstein’s heart. The practice of seeking out narrative secrets within dolls persists
into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, where dolls become guardians of hidden and
embedded narratives, and, in some cases, the story’s narrator. The doll’s body and the book we
open become one and the same, and the narrative folded within it is the very story that we are
reading, a letter from the author given to us in the doll that we call “the novel.” To unstitch the
doll in search of its inner workings is, simply, to open a book. Readers, in reading, unthread the
doll page by page, line by line, until, eventually, they reach the end.
As mentioned in this project’s previous pages, dolls were receptacles of secrets because
children (and adults) initially viewed them as perfect keepers of these secrets. The fictional
Victorian poet, Christabel LaMotte, in A.S. Byatt’s novel, Possession (1990), highlights this
perspective when she writes, “Dolly keeps a Secret / Safer than a Friend,” positing that the best–
–or perhaps the only––caretaker of her confidences is a doll (86). Since the doll cannot speak
(“Her wax lips are sealed”), it is not so remarkable that she is capable of keeping a secret to
herself (86). However, Anna Burns’s novel Milkman (2018), suggests a second reason for the
doll’s ability to keep such secrets close to her hollow chest: the doll is “such a minor item” that
she is rendered “invisible” even when lying in plain sight (262). The doll––silent, unseen––
would appear to be the ideal vehicle for confession, and so it is not so surprising that dolls in
both these novels not only receive spoken secrets, but also guard written ones, quietly tucked
away in their furniture and bodies.
186
Written secrets, are, of course, discoverable by curious readers, even from the sealed lips
of dolls, and these concealed pages are all eventually found. The doll is, as LaMotte says, the
perfect overseer for information which must necessarily remain secret––“Friends may betray us /
Love may Decay / Dolly’s Discretion / Outlasts our Day” (Byatt 86). And yet, the doll also
always fails to keep these secrets secret forever: the love letters LaMotte folded inside her dolls’
furniture are eventually uncovered by two academics a century later. In Burns’s novel, set during
the Troubles in Northern Ireland, where fear and policing restrict movement, thought, and
imagination to such an extent that the narrator hardly names anything directly, not even herself, a
girl decides that the safest place to hide a strange letter is inside the body of a forgotten doll. But
after her death, this letter, too, is found by her sister and shared with the narrator, showing that a
doll’s discretion cannot, actually, be trusted.
Dolls may not keep these written pages secret, but they do delay their disclosure––a
function that, despite the apparent efforts of the authors to keep their pages hidden, is one of
which they are aware. LaMotte’s poem describing the doll’s incomparable ability to keep secrets
is exactly what leads the two inquisitive academics (who take the poem seriously) to open up the
dolls’ four-poster bed and discover LaMotte’s hidden love letters, “neat as folded
handkerchiefs,” stored inside (Byatt 87). It is as if the poet trusted the dolls to keep the secrets
only until the people whose lives depend on these secrets are gone. Once it is safe to reveal the
secret––when LaMotte’s affair with a well-known married poet can no longer cause any harm––
the doll does so.
The stakes of such secret-keeping (and disclosing) are even more heightened in Milkman,
where hiding what makes you vulnerable, strange, different, or otherwise “beyond-the-pale” is
crucial to survival (215). The dead girl (referred to as “tablets girl” because of her penchant for
187
poisoning everyone) leaves a note that “seemed to be a private missive written by some aspect of
tablets girl to another aspect of herself,” and which tablets girl might also have intended for her
sister, whom she had previously accused of being “some unacceptable aspect of herself,” to find
only posthumously (Burns 262; 218). Tablets girl openly lists her fears––“that of being needy; of
being clingy; of being odd; of being invisible; of being visible (263). As she says, “Nine and
nine-tenths of us think we are spied upon, that we replay old trauma,” inadvertently admitting
that she dreads becoming like the rag doll that holds her secrets, at once “visible” and
“invisible”––a vehicle for “replay[ing] old trauma” (263). Tablets girl’s strange letter exposes
what she could not accept in life, but, after her death, brings some clarity to the sister she left
behind.
By asking dolls to keep narrative secrets and at the same time fully expecting that they
will eventually reveal them, these stories join a tradition of nineteenth-century novels that use the
doll as a sign of a story to come. This is true even when the hidden secret is not a document. In
Rosario Ferré’s short story, “The Youngest Doll” (1991), the secret that lies inside the doll is not
a paper message, but a deluge of “frenzied” river prawns that descend upon a greedy husband
(6). The dolls, which are made by an abused aunt for her nieces from materials “from the land”
in Puerto Rico, thus enact vengeance against one of the men, a doctor, who tortured the aunt
(and, later, the youngest niece, who he marries) for much of her life by pretending that he could
not cure her of a prawn that burrowed inside her leg (3). The doll, which sat in the man’s house
for many years before releasing the prawns, acts as a sort of messenger––a harbinger and an
assassin––who waits for the right time to unveil her charge.
Perhaps this is the greatest change from the nineteenth century to the twentieth: these
dolls tell their stories with a vengeance. The secrets that reside inside all of these dolls, from
188
Possession to Milkman to “The Youngest Doll,” are those that have been repressed by social
conventions. Once unspeakable, almost literally, their revelation has the potential to bring about
acts of justice, compassion, even reparation. But as readers learn in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest
Eye (1970), this is unfortunately not always the case. The painful “secret” that lies within white,
blue-eyed baby dolls––“the secret of the magic they weaved on others”––enacts a more terrible
kind of violence against the narrator, Claudia, and the other young Black girls who desire to be
loved in Morrison’s novel than those of the prawns upon a selfish doctor in Ferré’s story (22).
Claudia dismembers the loathed baby dolls in search of their “secret,” but discovers only the
mechanism that makes them speak, a “mere metal roundness” (21). The secret is, in fact, a
terrorizing message from a society that teaches Claudia and the novel’s other young Black girls
that they are not beautiful, and therefore that they are unworthy of love.
When it comes to narrative form, the doll’s secret is often that of narrative itself, a
revelation that consistently plays out across the work of one of the most talked-about (and
secretive) authors writing today: Elena Ferrante. Ferrante experiments with dolls as narrative
vessels, especially in her children’s book, The Beach at Night (2016), which harkens back to
nineteenth-century doll narratives such as Maitland’s Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina in which
doll-narrators relate their various travails and treatment at the hands of children. Ferrante’s doll
has been forgotten on the beach, and she is bitter and angry at the girl who has left her to face the
elements alone, and who has recently acquired a new kitten that threatens to displace the doll in
her affections. But, unlike dolls in earlier doll narratives who lament the loss of their beauty,
dress, and limbs, the doll in the Beach at Night worries most about her loss of language and the
treasures that she hides “at the back of [her] throat”––that is, all the words that her little mother,
Mati, has taught her (16). These words have real value in the world of this story and when the
189
Mean Beach Attendant finds the doll alone in the sand, he tells the doll that the thing he wishes
to take are the words that “your mamma put inside you” (16). Fishing inside her with a small
hook, the Mean Beach Attendant pulls out all of her words, including the doll’s name, claiming
that he will sell them at the “doll market” where “they pay a lot for words that come from
games” (16). The doll, for her part, claims that she would “rather burn, keeping in [her] chest the
words of her games with Mati,” finding a fiery death preferable to the loss of her ability to
converse with and tell stories to Mati (26). Language itself, Ferrante’s story tells us, is the doll’s
most valuable possession.
In perhaps one of the saddest doll-narratives of all, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun
(2021) takes the doll narrator and gives her an entire novel, showing that doll narratives need not
be relegated to children’s literature. Set in a future time where children are genetically enhanced
and socially isolated, Artificial Friends (or AFs) like Klara are intended to provide
companionship to lonely children. Ishiguro’s novel follows a familiar doll-narrative form, from
toy shop to junk yard, opening with Klara occupying a space in the shop window, hoping to be
chosen, and ending with her final meeting with the store Manager, who tells Klara that she is
sure that her child “barely knew the meaning of loneliness with you there” (300). Klara is in fact
an automaton––we know that she can “get short” (8) and that at a crucial moment of sacrifice she
donates some necessary “P-E-G Nine solution” (223) from her head––but her function as
playmate and child companion blurs the distinction between human and nonhuman. Through
Klara’s narration, at once limited and deeply perceptive, we observe the inner recesses of the
humans she comes to know and love, experiencing with her the act of understanding the lives she
has lived. As Klara puts it to the Manager, “I have my memories to go through and place in the
190
right order” (302). Making our way through the novel’s six numbered parts, it feels like we have
succeeded in helping her do just that.
And so, even now, at the close of this project, I would argue that we hold onto our dolls
for as long as possible, even if others assume that putting them away is a sign of growing up.
Using the metaphor that we have been following through these final pages, Emily Dickinson
writes circa the summer of 1862, “And They can put it with my Dolls, / My childhood, and the
string of spools, / I’ve finished threading –– too ––”) (186). When asked in her August 25, 1987
interview as part of the Strong National Museum of Play’s Doll Oral History Project how old she
was when she stopped playing with dolls, Ruth McEntee joyfully replied “Oh, I think I was quite
a big girl” (McEntee). But she quickly adds the regret I must admit I share at the end of this
project: “I just hated to see everything go. I kinda had a sad feeling about it” (McEntee). It is not
only childhood that we leave behind, but the origins of complex forms of narrative
experimentation that continue to reshape the novel today. If we must leave our dolls behind, we
should do so only after having fully pulled them apart at the seams, like the nineteenth-century
girls who searched their dolls for hearts and brains (finding none), making sure that we have
exhausted all that the doll has to tell us. Even then, like McEntee, we may find ourselves
wrapped in a sad feeling that replaces the doll’s cold embrace, one that envelops this project now
as it reaches its final pages.
*
If I may, one last thread to pull through before I, like Dickinson, put my dolls away.
While writing this project, I found myself in the position one summer of needing to drive from
Baltimore to Los Angeles. With nothing but time and space before me, I thought I would make
rather an indirect journey, making several stops at local cemeteries. A few months before, I had
191
discovered through a late-night wander down an online rabbit hole that there are several
dollhouse graves across the United States. These strange, sad monuments sit alone amongst
grave markers of a more familiar kind, testaments to play that endure after a child’s death. I
decided to find them.
George H. Haynes describes visiting a cemetery in Baltimore in 1891 and being struck by
the “cemetery doll-houses” that decorated the children’s graves (878). These “strange
monuments,” boxes with glass fronts containing formerly beloved playthings, dolls, cups, and
doll furniture, were left on the graves with the implication that the children would then take these
things with them into the afterlife (878). All of these graves, Haynes notes, are marked with
German epitaphs, suggesting that while cemetery dollhouses appear on American graves, the
trend of cemetery dollhouses derives from Germany.
Dollhouse grave markers were not limited to this one cemetery or region. In Cincinnati,
Ohio, rests one of the oldest remaining doll-house tombstones (see figure 5.1). Brothers John and
Michael Keating, both stone masons, built a two-story dollhouse tombstone in the late 1860s for
their children: John’s children, Mary Julia (1867-1868) and Eddie (1874-6), and Michael’s
daughter Mary Agnes (1875-6).
1
It took me a long time to locate the grave, despite its apparently
distinctive shape. I circled the cemetery until spotting the dollhouse at its heart, standing by
itself. Perhaps the Keating brothers originally included furniture inside the dollhouse-turned-
tombstone, but if so, those relics have been stolen or lost over the years and replaced with more
modern artifacts (see figure 5.2). Other dollhouse tombstones followed suit: Vivian May

1
John Keating (1845-1901) was born in Ireland and his younger brother Michael (1850-1911)
was born on the Isle of Wight, United Kingdom shortly before the Keating family departed from
Liverpool for New York. Details on the Keating family come from the files of Gravestone
Transformations, the company restoring the Keating Dollhouse in 2021 (Keating Dollhouse).
192
Alison’s (1894-1899) (see figure 5.3) in Connersville, Indiana and Lova Cline’s (1902-8) in
Rushville, Indiana, among others.
2

All of these dollhouse tombstones share in common the remains of a child beneath them
and formerly loved objects (often replaced or added to by visitors over the years) within. I did
not bring anything with me, so I straightened some felled furniture before continuing on my way.
Visiting the graves, it is hard not to imagine that being there makes us part of the story somehow,
that to hold a doll or engage in the lost child’s play connects us. At the dollhouse grave in
Medina, Tennessee, visitors report seeing a child in the cemetery at night, playing in her house
with her dolls.
3
As I wrote this project, I thought now and then of her small hands with a wooden
form, a faded, dusty dress, her tiny fingers, her lonely play. Typing these words while thinking of
her, I like to think that––in a way––we are playing together.

2
A local newspaper, the Palladium, ran an article on September 29, 1946 by Mildred Limpus
claiming that at least two other dollhouse tombstones existed in the area at the time. Limpus
writes that Vivian’s tombstone was inspired after seeing one “in an old cemetery near Austin
now known as Boston” and requested one like it: “Vivian told her grandfather that when she died
she wanted a doll-house over her grave filled with her toys” (Limpus). Limpus also notes another
dollhouse, belonging to Elsie Marie Shepler, that was built over her plot in Springersville,
Indiana after her death in 1913.
3
See “My First Ghost Hunt-Hope Hill Cemetery.”
193
Bibliography

“A Corpse Going to a Ball.” New-York Observer, 8 February 1840, p. 1.

Agugliaro, Siel. “Frozen Dolls and Famous Actresses: A Tale of Two Charlottes.” Special
Collection Processing at Penn. PENN Libraries Blogs, 26 July 2017,
https://pennrare.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/frozen-dolls-and-famous-actresses-a-tale-of-
two-charlottes/. Accessed 25 January 2021.
Alexander, Christine. The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë. Prometheus Books, 1983.

Alexandre, Nicholas Marie. The Adventures of a Ventriloquist; Or, the Rogueries of Nicholas.

Containing the Following Entertainment, so Successfully Performed by Mons. Alexandre,

at the Adelphi Theatre, Strand, And with Signal Approbation Before Most of the Crowned

Heads and Princes of Europe. Duncombe, 1822.
Anderson, Amanda. Bleak Liberalism. U of Chicago, 2016.
Auyoung, Elaine. “Standing Outside Bleak House.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol 68, no. 2,
2013, pp. 180-200.
Axton, William. “The Trouble with Esther.” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 4, 1965,
pp. 545-557.
Babbage, Charles. On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. Charles Knight, Pall Mall
East, 1832.
Bang, Mary Jo. A Doll for Throwing. Graywolf Press, 2017.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, 1974.
Batzing, Jenell. Interview by Dorothy Washburn. Doll Oral History Project. 1987.
Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Phaidon, 1995.
194
Beeley, Kirstine. Using the Empathy Dolls Approach: Developing Emotional Awareness in Early
Years Settings. A&C Black Publishers Limited, 2009.
Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil
Rights. New York UP, 2011.
Boehn, Max Von. Dolls and Puppets. Translated by Josephine Nicoll, Charles T. Branford Co., 1
956.
Bradford, Clara. Ethel’s Adventures in the Doll Country. John F. Shaw and Co., n.d. [1880].
Breithaupt, Fritz. The Dark Sides of Empathy. Translated by Andrew B. B. Hamilton, Cornell
UP, 2019.
[Brimley, George.] “Dickens’s Bleak House.” Spectator, vol. 26, 1853, p. 924.
Brizee, Alice. Interview by Dorothy Washburn. Doll Oral History Project. 1987.
Brontë, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, edited by Herbert Rosengarten, Oxford UP, 2008.
Brontë, Anne, and Branwell, Charlotte and Emily. Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal:
Selected Writings. Edited by Christine Alexander, Oxford UP, 2010.
Brontë, Charlotte. “Farewell to Angria.” Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal: Selected
Writings, edited by Christine Alexander, Oxford UP, 2010, p. 314.

–––. Jane Eyre: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. Edited by Richard J. Dunn, W.W.
Norton & Company, 2001.
–––. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë: With a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, Vol 1:
1829-1847. Edited by Margaret Smith, vol 1, Oxford UP, 1995.
–––. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë: With a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, Vol 2:
1848-1851. Edited by Margaret Smith, vol 2, Oxford UP, 2000.
195
–––. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë: With a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, Vol 3:
1852-1855. Edited by Margaret Smith, vol 3, Oxford UP, 2004.
–––. Shirley. Edited by Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith, Oxford UP, 2008.
–––. Tales of Angria. Edited by Heather Glen, Penguin Books, 2006.
–––. Villette. Edited by Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith, Oxford UP, 2008.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 4th ed., Edited by Richard J. Dunn, W.W. Norton & Co.,
2003.
Brown, Kate E. “Beloved Objects: Mourning, Materiality, and Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Never-Ending
Story.’” ELH, vol. 65, no. 2, 1998, pp. 395-421.

Brown, Kenneth. “Models in History: A Micro-Study of Late Nineteenth-Century British

Entrepreneurship.” The Economic History Review, vol. 42, no. 4, 1989, pp. 528-537.

Brown, Marshall. “‘Frankenstein’: A Child’s Tale.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 36, no. 2,
2003, pp. 145-175.
Burns, Anna. Milkman. Graywolf Press, 2018.
Burr, Anna Robeson. Her Brothers (Introduction). Alice James, Her Brothers, Her Journal by
Alice James, edited by Anna Robeson Burr, Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1934, pp. 3-82.
–––. Preface. Alice James, Her Brothers, Her Journal by Alice James, edited by Anna Robeson
Burr, Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1934, pp. 1-2.
Byatt, A.S. Possession: A Romance. Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.
Caldwell, Janis McLarren. “Conflict and Revelation: Literalization in the Novels of Charlotte
Brontë.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 31, no. 2, 2003, pp. 483-499.

Capes, Bernard. “A Doll and a Moral.” The Pall Mall Magazine, vol 19, no. 79, 1899, pp. 410-

412.

196
Carter, Sarah Anne. “Sickness and Death in Doll Play, 1850-1897.” The Dublin Seminar for New
England Folklife Annual Proceedings 2002: The Worlds of Children, 1620-1920, edited
by Peter Benes, Boston U, 2004, pp. 25-41.
“Chat by the Way.” The American Stationer, 17 Apr. 1890, vol 27, p. 895.
Cheadle, Brian. “David Copperfield and the Autobiographical Fragment Reconsidered.” Dickens
Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 3, 2019, pp. 205-223.
Clark, Anna E. “Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Protagonist.” ELH, vol. 81, no. 1, 2014, pp. 245-
268.
Cockton, Henry. The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, the Ventriloquist. Willoughby &
Co., 1858.
Collins, Wilkie. Basil. Smith, Elder, and Co., 1866.
–––. The Woman in White, edited by Julian Symons, Penguin, 1974.
Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford UP, 2000.
Cross, John. George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals. Harper and Brothers,
1885. 3 vols.
Daily News, 31 October 1849, p. 2. British Newspaper Archive.
Davies, Helen. Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate
Puppets. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Davies, Stevie, editor. The Brontë Sisters: Selected Poems. Routledge, 2002.
Davis, Laura Mager. “China Heads: Glazed Porcelain Dolls from 1840 to 1890.” Quarterly
Bulletin – Archeological Society of Virginia, vol. 48, no. 2, 1993, pp. 73-87.
Derrida, Jacques. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, U of Chicago,
1992.
197
Dever, Carolyn. Death and the Mother From Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the
Anxiety of Origins. Cambridge UP, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House: An Authoritative and Annotated Text, Illustrations, a Note on the
Text, Genesis and Composition, Backgrounds, Criticism. Edited by George Ford and
Sylvère Monod, W.W. Norton & Co., 1977.
–––. David Copperfield. Edited by Jeremy Tambling, Penguin, 2004.
–––. Little Dorrit. Edited by Harvey Peter Sucksmith, Oxford UP, 2012.
–––. The Letters of Charles Dickens, 1833-1870. Edited by Mamie Dickens and Georgina
Hogarth, Macmillan and Co., 1909.
–––. Our Mutual Friend. Penguin, 1997.

Dickinson, Emily. Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them. Edited by Cristanne
Miller, Harvard UP, 2016.
Dodd, George. “Dolls.” Household Words, 11 June 1853, pp. 352-356.

Dodge, Mary Mapes. The Irvington Stories, James O’Kane, Publisher, 1865.
“Doll Making in Thuringia.” The American Stationer, 31 Jan. 1889, p. 243.
“doll, n.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020,
www.oed.com/view/Entry/56597. Accessed 1 November 2020.
“Dolls.” Littell’s Living Age, 31 Oct. 1868, p. 286.
“Dolls at the Paris Exhibition.” The Ladies Treasury: An Illustrated Magazine of Entertaining
Literature, n.d., pp. 592-4.
Dromgoole, Will Allen. “The Doll’s Funeral.” The Daily Picayune, 3 Jan. 1897, p. 22.

Duquette, Elizabeth. “‘A New Claim for the Family Reknown’: Alice James and the
Picturesque.” ELH, vol. 72, no. 3, 2005, pp. 717-745.
198
Dutton, Violet. Interview by Dorothy Washburn. Doll Oral History Project. 1987.
Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Edel, Leon. Preface. The Diary of Alice James by Alice James, edited by Leon Edel, Dodd,
Mead, and Co., 1964.
Edgerley, C. Mabel. “The Structure of Haworth Parsonage.” Brontë Society Transactions, vol. 9,
no. 1, 1936, pp. 27-31.
Edgeworth, Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Practical Education. J. Johnson, 1798.
“Edison’s Dollphone: It Can Talk, and Sing, and Sigh, and is Remarkably Intelligent.” St. Joseph
Herald, 21 Dec. 1888. Thomas A. Edison Papers (TAED SC88038B).
“Edison’s Phonographic Doll.” Scientific American, 26 April 1890, pp. 257; 263.
Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. Edited by Graham Handley, Oxford UP, 2014.
–––. The Essays of “George Eliot.” Edited by Nathan Sheppard. Funk and Wagnalls, 1883.
–––. The Mill on the Floss. Penguin, 2003.
–––. The Works of George Eliot: Poems. Wheeler Publishing Co., 1900.
–––. The Writings of George Eliot: Essays and Leaves From a Notebook. Edited by John Walter
Cross, Houghton Mifflin, 1908.
–––. Scenes of Clerical Life. Edited by Jennifer Gribble, Penguin, 1998.

Ellis, A. Caswell and G. Stanley Hall. “A Study of Dolls.” The Pedagogical Seminary, vo. 4, no.
2, 1896, pp. 129-175.
Feaster, Patrick. “‘Things Enough for So Many Dolls to Say’: A Cultural History of the Edison
Talking Doll Record.” National Park Service, 20 Apr. 2015,
www.nps.gov/edis/learn/photosmultimedia/a-cultural-history-of-the-edison-talking-doll-
record.htm#_edn22. Accessed 10 Sept. 2020.
199
Ferrante, Elena. The Beach at Night. Translated by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2016.
Ferré, Rosario. “The Youngest Doll.” The Youngest Doll, translated by Rosario Ferré and Diana
Vélez, U of Nebraska Press, 1991, pp. 1-6.
Forman-Brunell, Miriam. Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American
Girlhood, 1830-1930. Yale UP, 1993.
Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. Vol. 1, Cambridge UP, 2011.
Francis, Henry M. Letter to Alfred Ord Tate. 27 Jan. 1891. Thomas A. Edison Papers (TAED
D9153AAG; TAEM 132: 206).
Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by
Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Blackwell, 2002, pp. 168-174.
Froude, James Anthony. Thomas Carlyle: a History of the First Forty Years of His Life, 1795-
1835. Vol. 1, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1891.
Gao, Timothy. Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Fictional
Experience. Cambridge UP, 2021.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Edited by Angus Easson, Oxford UP, 2009.
Gatti, Margaret. Florence and Her Doll: A Tale. William Tegg, 1865.
Gatty, Mrs. Alfred. “Aunt Sally’s Life.” Victorian Doll Stories, edited by Gillian Avery,
Schocken Books, 1969.
Gifford, Daniel. GB190609900A. “Improvements in and Relating to Eye Mechanism for Dolls.”
His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 5 July, 1906. European Patent Office Espacenet
Database,
https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/032656345/publication/GB190609
900A?q=pn%3DGB190609900A.
200
Glen, Heather. “Introductory Note.” Tales of Angria, edited by Heather Glen, Penguin, 2006.
Goldblatt, David. Art and Ventriloquism. Routledge, 2005.
Gordon, Lyndall. Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life. W.W. Norton & Co., 1994.

Gonzalez, Eugenia. Galatea’s Daughters: Dolls, Female Identity and the Material Imagination
in Victorian Literature and Culture. 2012. The Ohio State University, PhD dissertation.
–––. “‘I sometimes think she is a spy on all my actions’: Dolls, Girls, and Disciplinary
Surveillance in the Nineteenth-Century Doll Tale.” Children’s Literature, vol. 39, 2011,
pp. 33-57.
–––. “‘What remains? An empty doll-case’: Deconstruction and Imagination in Victorian
Narratives of Doll Production.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 18, no. 3, 2013, pp.
335-349.
Gouraud, Julie. Memoirs of a Doll; Written by Herself: A New Year’s Gift. George Routledge
and Co., 1856.
Griffin, Cristina Richieri. “George Eliot’s Feuerbach: Senses, Sympathy, Omniscience, and
Secularism.” ELH, vol. 84, no. 2, 2017, pp. 475-502.
Haight, Gordon Sherman. George Eliot, a Biography. Oxford UP, 1978.
–––, editor. The George Eliot Letters. Yale UP, 1954. 9 vols.
Halliday, Aria S. Fashioning Black Barbies, Princesses, and Sexual Exppresion for Black Girls:
The Multivisuality of Nicki Minaj. 2017. Purdue University, PhD dissertation.
Hardie, Martin. “The Land of Dolls.” English Illustrated Magazine, Dec. 1904, pp. 282-288.
Harvey, W.J. Character and the Novel. Cornell UP, 1965.
Haynes, George H. “Cemetery Doll-Houses.” Christian Union (1870-1893), vol. 44, no. 19,
1891, p. 878.
201
Henry, Nancy. The Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Heritage, Barbara. “Archaeology of the Book.” Charlotte Brontë: The Lost Manuscripts, The
Brontë Society, 2018, pp. 22-69.
Hoddinott, Alison. “Perils of Biography: Charlotte Brontë and Tennyson.” Brontë Studies, vol.
34, no. 1, 2009, pp. 47-56.
Holmes, F.M. “Making Dolls’ Eyes: A Curious Industry.” The Children’s Friend, n.d., pp. 104-
6. Nineteenth-Century UK Periodicals. Accessed 19 January 2021.
Hoover, David L. “Modes of Composition in Henry James: Dictation, Style, and What Maisie
Knew.” The Henry James Review, vol. 35, 2014, pp. 257-77.
Howitt, Margaret. “A Tribe of Toymakers.” The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction
and Recreation, 4 December 1875, pp. 772-6. British Periodicals. Accessed 19 January
2021.
Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables. Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood, Thomas Y. Crowell & Co,
1887. 5 vols.
Jackson, Catherine. Interview by Dorothy Washburn. Doll Oral History Paroject. 1987.
Jackson, Mrs. F. Nevill. Toys of Other Days, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908.

Jaffe, Audrey. Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience. U of
California Press, 1991.
James, Alice. Alice James, Her Brothers, Her Journal, edited by Anna Robeson Burr, Dodd,
Mead, and Co., 1934.
–––. The Diary of Alice James, edited by Leon Edel, Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1964.
James, Henry. The Ambassadors. Barnes and Noble Classics, 2007.
–––. The Golden Bowl. Penguin Classics, 2009.
202
–––. “Charles Dickens.” Literary Criticism, edited by Leon Edel and Mark Wilson, Library of
America, 1984, pp. 853-858.
–––. “The Friends of the Friends.” The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories, edited by T.J.
Lustig, Oxford UP, 1992, pp. 79-111.
–––. The Portrait of a Lady. Penguin Classics, 2003.
–––. The Princess Casamassima. Penguin Classics, 1987.
–––. “The Turn of the Screw.” The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories, edited by T.J. Lustig,
Oxford UP, 1992, pp. 79-111.
–––. What Maisie Knew. Penguin Classics, 2010.
–––. The Wings of the Dove. Penguin Classics, 2008.
James, William. “The Hidden Self.” Essays in Psychology, Harvard UP, 1983, pp. 247-269.
Jalland, Pat. Death in the Victorian Family. Oxford UP, 1996.

Jesuvadian, Mercy Karuniah and Susan Wright. “Doll Tales: Foregrounding Children’s
Voices in Research.” Early Child Development and Care, vol. 181, no. 3, 2011, pp.
277-285.
Jones, Mary Clai. “Refashioning Spaces of Play in Victorian Doll Stories.” Gender in Victorian
Popular Fiction, Art, and Culture, special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies,
vol. 12, no. 3, 2016.
Jordan, John O. Supposing Bleak House. U of Virginia, 2011.
Joshi, Priti. “Masculinity and Gossip in Anne Brontë’s Tenant.” SEL: Studies in English
Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 49, no. 4, 2009, pp. 907-927.
203
Kalnay, Erica Kanesaka. “Yellow Peril, Oriental Plaything: Asian Exclusion and the 1927 U.S.-
Japan Doll Exchange.” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, 2020, pp. 93-
124.
Keating Dollhouse. 2021, https://keatingdollhouse.com/about/. Accessed 15 Feb. 2021.
Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford UP, 2007.
Kellett, E.E. “The Lady Automaton.” Pearson’s Magazine, vol. 11, 1901, pp. 663-675.
Killian, Erin. “Prescription for a Belly Laugh: My Childhood Diary.” NPR, 12 Jul. 2010,
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126281301. Accessed 24 Mar.
2020.
Laing, Roisín. “What Maisie Knew: Nineteenth-Century Selfhood in the Mind of the Child.” The
Henry James Review, vol. 30, no. 1, 2018, pp. 96-109.
Langland, Elizabeth. Anne Brontë: The Other One. Macmillan, 1989.

Lastinger, Valérie C. “Of Dolls and Girls in Nineteenth-Century France.” Children’s Literature,
vol. 21, 1993, pp. 20-42.
Lavery, Grace E. Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan. Princeton UP,
2019.
Lewis, Linda M. Dickens, His Parables, and His Reader. U of Missouri, 2011.
Lindhé, Anna. “The Paradox of Narrative Empathy and the Form of the Novel, or What George
Eliot Knew.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 48, no. 1, 2016, pp. 19-42.
Limpus, Mildred. “Dollhouses Still in Cemeteries as Monuments to Girls of Another Day.”
Palladium [Richmond, Indiana], 29 Sept. 1946, p. 14.
Logan, Peter. Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives. State University of New York
Press, 2009.
204
Low, Francis. “Distinguished Women and Their Dolls.” Strand Magazine, July 1894, pp. 250-
257.
–––. Queen Victoria’s Dolls. George Newnes, 1894.
–––. “Queen Victoria’s Dolls.” Strand Magazine, Sept. 1892, pp. 222-38.
Lustig, T.J. “Note on the Texts.” The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories, edited by T.J. Lustig,
Oxford UP, 1992, pp. xxxvi-xxxviii.
Lutz, Deborah. The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects. W.W. Norton & Co., 2015.

–––. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture. Cambridge UP, 2015.
Madsen, Emily. “Phiz’s Black Doll: Integrating Text and Etching in Bleak House.” Victorian
Literature and Culture, vol. 41, no. 3, 2013, pp. 411-433.
Maitland, Julia. The Doll and Her Friends; Or, Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina. Griffith and
Farran, 1862.
Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England.
Princeton UP, 2007.
Marin, Ileana. “Charlotte Brontë’s Busy Scissors Revising Villette.” Brontë Studies, vol. 39, no.
1, 2014, pp.42-53.
–––. “Charlotte Brontë’s Heron Scissors: Cancellations and Excisions in the Manuscript of
Shirley. Brontë Studies, vol. 38, no. 1, 2013, pp. 19-29.
Marsh, Kelly A. The Submerged Plot and the Mother’s Pleasure from Jane Austen to Arundhati
Roy. The Ohio State UP, 2016.
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated
by W.D. Halls, W.W. Norton, 2000.
205
Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor; Cyclopædia of the Condition and
Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not
Work. George Woodfall and Son, 1851. 3 vols.
May’s Doll: Where Its Dress Came From: A Book for Little Girls. John and Charles Mozley,
1851.
McEntee, Ruth. Interview by Dorothy Washburn. Doll Oral History Project. 1987.
McMaster, Juliet. “‘Imbecile Laughter’ and ‘Desperate Earnest’ in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,”
Modern Language Quarterly, vol 43, no. 4, 1982, pp. 352-368.
Michelet, Athénaïs. The Story of My Childhood. Translated by Mary Frazier Curtis, Little,
Brown, and Co., 1867.
Michie, Helena. “‘Who Is This in Pain?’: Scarring, Disfigurement, and Female Identity in ‘Bleak
House’ and ‘Our Mutual Friend.’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 22, no. 2, 1989, pp.
199-212.
Miller, D.A. The Novel and the Police. U of California Press, 1989.
Mills, Jenny. I Buried My Dolls in the Garden: The Life and Works of Elizabeth Blair Barber. U
of Western Australia Press, 1999.
Moore, George. Conversations in Ebury Street. William Heinemann Ltd., 1924.
Morgan, Benjamin. The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and
Literature. U of Chicago Press, 2017.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Vintage, 2007.
Moshenska, Joe. Iconoclasm as Child’s Play. Stanford UP, 2019.
206
“My First Ghost Hunt–Hope Hill Cemetery.” The Paranormal Spectator, 2017,
https://theparanormalspectator.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/my-first-ghost-hunt-hope-hill-
cemetery/. Accessed 15 Feb. 2021.
Naylor, Brian. “This Doll May Be Recording What Children Say, Privacy Groups Charge.” All
Tech Considered: Tech, Culture and Connection, 20 Dec. 2016,
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/12/20/506208146/this-doll-may-be-
recording-what-children-say-privacy-groups-charge. Accessed 14 October 2020.
Newsom, Robert. Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things: ‘Bleak House’ and the
Novel Tradition. The Dickens Project, UC Santa Cruz, 1988.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal
Education. Harvard UP, 2003.
Nussey, Ellen. “Reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë.” Scribner’s Monthly, 1871, p. 112.
O’Donnell, Patrick. “‘A Speeches of Chaff’: Ventriloquy and Expression in Our Mutual Friend.”
Dickens Studies Annual, vol 19, 1990, pp. 247-79.
Palmer, Lisa Kay. (Re)Visioning the Female Body: The Doll in Contemporary Latin American
Narrative. 1998. University of California Los Angeles, PhD dissertation.
Pardoe, Julia. Lady Arabella, Or, The Adventures of a Doll. Kerby and Son, 1856.
Peers, Juliette. The Fashion Doll: From Bébé Jumeau to Barbie. Berg, 2004.
“Phonographische Puppen.” Strasbourg Der Post, 21 Nov. 1889. Thomas A. Edison Papers
(TAED SC891851; TAEM 146:548).
Picker, John M. “My Fair Lady Automaton.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 63,
no. 1, 2015, pp.
–––. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford UP, 2003.
207
Pittard, Christopher. “The Travelling Doll Wonder: Dickens, Secular Magic, and Bleak House.”
Studies in the Novel, vol. 48, no. 3, 2016, pp. 279-300.
–––. “V for Ventriloquism: Powers of Vocal Mimicry in Henry Cockton’s The Life and
Adventures of Valentine Vox, the Ventriloquist.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long
Nineteenth Century, no. 24, 2017, pp. 1-26.
Pizzo, Justine. “Esther’s Ether: Atmospheric Character in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House.”
Victorian Literature and Culture, vo. 42, 2014, pp. 81-98.
Plotz, John. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton UP, 2008.

“Poured-wax dolls.” Miller’s Antiques Encyclopedia, edited by Judith Miller, Mitchell Beazley,
2nd edition, 2003. Credo Reference,
https://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/mae/p
oured_wax_dolls/0?institutionId=887. Accessed 24 Apr. 2018.
Preston, Annie A., “How Snip Broke Up a Doll’s Funeral.” Christian Union (1870-1893), vol.
25, no. 19, 1882, p. 440.
“pupil, n.2.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020,
www.oed.com/view/Entry/154768. Accessed 12 November 2020.
Purvis, Robert C. Doll. US681974A, United States Patent Office, 3 September 1901. European
Patent Office Espacenet Database,
https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/drawing?channel=espacenet_channel-333fdc24-
b68d-4d68-838c-83f7768f65c0.
Rajan, Supritha. “The Epistemology of Trust and Realist Effect in Charles Dickens’s Bleak
House.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 72, no. 1, 2017, pp. 64-106.
Rappoport, Jill. Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture. Oxford UP, 2012.
208
Rees, Frank L. Letter to C.G. Goodfellow. 25 May 1973. V&A Collections, Frank Rees and Co.
Limited (MOC/MAT0/665).
“resurrectionist, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020,
www.oed.com/view/Entry/164109. Accessed 1 November 2020.
Richardson, Ann-Marie. “Reinventing Heaven.” Charlotte Brontë: The Lost Manuscripts, The
Brontë Society, 2018, pp. 132-174.
Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. Columbia UP, 1996.

Rose, Phyllis. Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.

Rosengarten, Herbert and Margaret Smith. “Explanatory Notes.” Shirley, Oxford UP, 2008, p.
554.
Roy, Shampa. “‘a miserable sham’: Flora Annie Steel’s Short Fictions and the Question of
Indian Women’s Reform.” Feminist Review, vol 94, no. 1, 2010, pp. 55-74.
Rutherford, Vanessa. “Technologies of Gender and Girlhood: Doll Discourses in Ireland, 1801-
1909.” Dolls Studies: The Many Meanings of Girl’s Toys and Play, edited by Miriam
Forman-Brunell and Jennifer Dawn Whitney, Peter Lang, 2015, pp. 103-119.
Sawicki, Joseph. “‘The Mere Truth Won’t Do’: Esther as Narrator in ‘Bleak House.’” The
Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 209-224.
Schiffman, Robyn L. “Wax-Work, Clock-Work, and Puppet-Shews: Bleak House and the
Uncanny.” Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 30, 2001, pp. 159-171.
Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment.
Routledge, 2011.
Schneider, Reinhild. Eine Puppenwerkstatt in Sonneberg. Deutsches Spielzeugmuseum, 2009.
209
–––. Kleine Welten: Die Sammlung des Deutschen Spielzeugmuseums. Deutsches
Spielzeugmuseum, 2015.
Schor, Hilary Margo. Curious Subjects: Women and the Trials of Realism. Oxford UP, 2013.
–––. Dickens and the Daughter of the House. Cambridge UP, 1999.
–––. “The Make-Believe of a Middle: On (Not) Knowing Where You Are in Daniel Deronda.”
Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Ohio State UP,
2011, pp. 47-74.
Schwarz, Helmut, editor. C. Baudenbacher First Nuremberg Wooden Toy Factory: Company
History and Annotated Sample Book. Nuremberg Toy Museum, 2008.
Ségur, Comtesse de. Les Malheurs de Sophie. Hachette, 1909.

Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion and Major Barbara. Random House, 2008.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: the 1818 Text, Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Responses, Modern
Criticism. Edited by J. Paul Hunter, W.W. Norton and Co., 1996.
Shepard, Nina B. “A Collector’s Evaluation of Old Dolls.” Your Dolls and Mine: A Collector’s
Handbook, edited by Janet Pagter Johl, Lindquist Publications, 1952, pp. 304-5.
Smith, George. Programme of the Entertainment Preceded by Memoirs and Anecdotes of Mr.
Love, the Polyphonist. W. Kenneth, 1848 [?].
Smith, Mrs. Castle [Brenda]. “Victoria-Bess: The Ups and Downs of a Doll’s Life.” Victorian
Doll Stories, edited by Gillian Avery, Schocken Books, 1969.
Smith, Mrs. Seba [Elizabeth Oakes Smith]. “A Corpse Going to a Ball.” The Neapolitan [Naples,
NY], 27 January 1841, p. 1.
Smith, Seba. “A Corpse Going to a Ball.” The Rover: A Weekly Magazine of Tales, Poetry, and
Engravings, Also Sketches of Travel, History, and Biography, 9 Dec. 1843, p. 225.
210
“Speaking Dolls.” Moonshine, 1 December 1888, p. 256. Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.
Accessed 19 January 2021.
Starr, Laura. The Doll Book. The Outing Publishing Co., 1908.
Steel, Flora Annie. “Mussumât Kirpo’s Doll,” The Flower of Forgiveness. MacMillan and
Co., 1894, pp. 275-285.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection. Duke UP, 1993.
Stoneman, Patsy. “Shirley as Elegy.” Brontë Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, 2015, pp. 22-33.

“Stories of Successful Business Women. Mrs. Peck, of the ‘Dolls’ Home.’” Home Chat, 11 Dec.
1897, pp. 665-666. V&A Collections, The Dolls House Toys Limited
(MOC/MATO/219).
Strouse, Jean. Alice James: A Biography. New York Review of Books, 2011.

Sully, James. “Dollatry.” The Contemporary Review, 1866-1900, vol. 75, 1899, pp. 58-72.

Thackeray, William. Vanity Fair. Edited by Helen Small, Oxford UP, 2015.

“The ‘Dollphones’: Mr. Edison’s Wonderful Toy for Nice Little Girls.” Galesburg Gazette, 3
Jan. 1889. Thomas A. Edison Papers (TAED SC89005A; TAEM 146: 371).
“The Doll’s Funeral: Upsetting the Village.” Current Literature (1812-1912), vol. 27, no. 6,
1895, p. 484.
“The Doll’s Funeral.” The Leeds Times, 20 July 1895, p. 4.
“The Dolls of the Grown-Ups.” Current Literature (1888-1912), Aug 1889, p. 97.

“The Making of Common Things: Dolls.” Chatterbox, no. 27, 1893, pp. 214-16.

“The Talking Doll.” The New York Times, 17 Feb. 1889, p. 13.
211
“Talking Doll.” Daily Telegraph, 31 Oct. 1889. Thomas A. Edison Papers (TAED SC89184A;
TEAM 146:547).
“Talking Dolls.” Newburyport Herald, 19 Mar. 1889. Thomas A. Edison Papers (TAED
SC89067B).
Taylor-Blake, Bonnie. “Defrosting Frozen Charlotte: 21
st
-Century Misconceptions about a 19
th
-
Century Doll.” So They Say, 6 July 2019, https://btaylorblake.com/2019/07/06/defrosting-
frozen-charlotte-21st-century-misconceptions-about-a-19th-century-doll/. Accessed 25
January 2021.
Thorne, Olive. “How Dolls are Made.” St. Nicholas: Scribner’s Illustrated Magazine for Girls
and Boys, edited by Mary Mapes Dodge, vol. 2, Scribner and Co., 1875, pp. 228-33.
Thrailkill, Jane F. “Play Is the Thing: Affect and Affordances in Alice, William, and Henry
James.” The Henry James Review, vol. 40, no. 3, 2019, pp. 212-225.
Tompkins, J.M.S. “Caroline Helstone’s Eyes.” Brontë Society Transactions, vol. 14, no. 1, 1961,
p. 22.
Torgerson, Beth. Reading the Brontë Body: Disease, Desire, and the Constraints of Culture.
Palgave Macmillan, 2005.
Uglow, Jennifer. George Eliot. Virgo Pantheon Pioneers, 1987.
Vandegrift, Margaret. “The Dead Doll and Other Verses.” Ticknor, 1889.

“ventriloquism, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020,

www.oed.com/view/Entry/222291. Accessed 1 November 2020.

Von Boehn, Dolls and Puppets. Translated by Josephine Nicoll, Charles T. Branford Company,
1956.
Wells, H.G. Floor Games. Small, Maynard, and Co., 1912.
212
When It Was Cool. “Baby Secret Doll by Mattel 1965.” YouTube, 20 Oct. 2016,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUMN4QfiwWU.
“Where Dolls Come From.” The American Stationer, vol. 22, 1 Dec. 1887, p. 1138.
Wilson, Gussie Louisa. A Hot Water Doll. GB189414984A. 6 July 1895. European Patent Office
Espacenet Database,
https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/032125043/publication/GB189414
984A?q=doll.
Wilt, Judith. “Confusion and Consciousness in Dickens’s Esther.” Nineteenth-Century Ficiton,
vol. 32, no. 3, 1977, pp. 285-309.
Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality. Basic Books, 1971.
Wink, Amy. She Left Nothing in Particular: The Autobiographical Legacy of Nineteenth-
Century Women’s Diaries. U of Tennessee Press, 2001.
Woolf, Virginia. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, edited by Susan Dick, 2nd
Edition, Harcourt, 1989.
–––. The Virginia Woolf Reader, edited by Mitchell A. Leaska, Harcourt, 1984.
Wright, Erika. Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Ohio
UP, 2016.
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Introduction. The Death and Letters of Alice James. U of California P,
1981.
Zamir, Tzachi. “Puppets.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 36, no. 3, 2010, pp. 386-409.
Zwerdling, Alex. “Esther Summerson Rehabilitated.” PMLA, vol. 88, no. 3, 1973, pp. 429-439.

213
Appendix

Figure 0.1: Image of a doll by Mrs. Peck of the “Dolls’ Home” company on Regent Street that
was modelled off of an 1837 photograph of Queen Victoria. Image appeared in an article titled,
“Stories of Successful Business Women. Mrs. Peck, of the ‘Dolls’ Home.,’” in the December 11,
1897 issue of Home Chat, p. 666. Mrs. Peck tells the reporter, “I had several dolls exhibited at
the Victorian Exhibition––one of my ‘Queen’ dolls was there. I modelled her myself from the
best authentic picture of her Majesty in 1837. The lips are parted, the teeth showing slightly, as
may be noticed in her best pictures of that time” (665). Located at the Victoria and Albert
Museum of Childhood, Bethnal Green.

214

Figure 0.2: Page image from H.G. Wells’s Floor Games (1911), p. 23. The image design at the
bottom of the page clearly shows that the “flat, small creatures” Wells disdains in his text are
German-made soldiers.

215

Figure 0.3: This series of film stills from the 1917 film Der Werdegang einer Puppe (The
Development of a Doll) shows a steady stream of workers delivering doll parts to the factory of
Cuno and Otto Dressel in Sonneberg, not unlike the scene Hardie describes seeing 13 years earlier.
Film located in Das Bundesarchiv via the European Film Gateway,
https://www.filmportal.de/video/der-werdegang-einer-puppe.
216

Figure 0.4: Image of girls (as labeled by the story’s narrator) carrying dolls, neatly tucked in like
babies, to the warehouse from Olive Thorne’s “How Dolls are Made” (1875), pg. 233.

217

Figure 0.5: Armin Reumann’s 1923 painting Puppenwerkstatt in Nachmittagslicht (Doll
Workshop in Afternoon Light). The worker’s faces are not visible as they hunch over their sewing
and pressing (the man in back appears to be working with molds). The diminishing light spurs on
their labor, even as they continue to do fine work in an increasingly dark atmosphere. Image
reproduced from Reinhild Schneider’s Eine Puppenwerkstatt in Sonneberg (2009).

218

Figure 0.6: Above: A family makes toys together in their home in the Thüringen region (image
from Kleine Welten, p. 40, date unknown). Below: children quickly pass items to each other (in
back) in a Sonneberg factory (film still from Der Werdegang einer Puppe [1917], located within
Das Bundesarchiv).
219

Figure 0.7: In this image following the article, “The Making of Common Things: Dolls” in the
1893 issue of Chatterbox, there is no sign of the children whose labor contributed to doll
production (no. 27, p. 216). Instead, images of white English girls delighting in their dolls are
interspersed with adults performing various steps in dollmaking. Original from the University of
California, digitized by Google.

220

Figure 0.8: Images of girls dressing dolls’ hair and carrying dolls to the warehouse from Olive
Thorne’s “How Dolls are Made” (1875), pg. 232. As Ellis and Hall note, doll hair brushing,
braiding, and combing is a common form of play (150) as is putting them to sleep, by rocking,
tucking in, and resting their heads (143) (refer to Figure 0.2).

Figure 0.9: A blind doll attracts the notice of swarming eyes in F.M. Holmes’s “Making Dolls’
Eyes: A Curious Industry” in The Children’s Friend.

221

Figure 0.10: Rows of eyeless doll heads are indistinguishable and inanimate, awaiting the eyes
that apparently bring them to life in F.M. Holmes’s “Making Dolls’s Eyes: A Curious Industry” in
The Children’s Friend.

222

Figure 0.11: Eyeless dolls “wait their turn” in F.M. Holme’s “Making Dolls’ Eyes: A Curious
Industry” in The Children’s Friend. Unlike in the previous images, these dolls appear to press
upon the workers’ space, eagerly jockeying for their eyes.

Figure 0.12: With eyes, the dolls joyfully peer around the room, taking on an animation previously
denied them in F.M. Holmes’s “Making Dolls’ Eyes: A Curious Industry” in The Children’s
Friend.
223

Figure 0.13: Squire Daniel Gifford’s illustration for a patent (approved July 5
th
, 1906) claiming,
“Improvements in and relating to Eye Mechanism for Dolls.” There are two counterweights, one
that controls the eyes, and the other the eyelids. This design illustrates a more complex version of
early designs, which only moved the eye itself.
224

Figure 0.14: Robert Purvis’s complex steel-bodied doll details eyelids and eyes capable of more
complex movement, controlled through weights and springs.

225

Figure 0.15: Ethel sings as part of a minstrel act at the circus in Clara Bradford’s Ethel’s
Adventures in Doll Country (1880) (63). The Black boy on stage is doll-like in stature and is
forced to perform as part of a racist song that enacts the violent deaths of his nine companions
until he is the last one remaining. A Rod looms behind Ethel as a reminder of the violence that
also threatens her as punishment for her former mistreatment of her toys.
226

Figure 1.1: (Top Left) “Emma,” 1896, Armand Marseille, on display at the Coburger
Puppenmuseum with a cutting of her owner’s hair from which her own is made. (Top Right)
“Elsie,” date and make unknown, a French doll with hair made from that of her owner, Mrs. John
Carroll Perkins (née Edith B. Milliken, 1869-1958). Object located in the Loring Greenough House
collections, Jamaica Plain, MA. (Bottom) In a letter held at the Loring Greenough House and dated
December 29, 1954, Mrs. Perkins describes how Elsie’s braid was made “in the same proportion
for Elsie that mine was for me.” Object located in the Loring Greenough House collections,
Jamaica Plain, MA. All photos by the author.

227

Figure 1.2: A girl holds a funeral for her doll (The Daily Picayune, 3 Jan. 1897, pg. 22). This
image appears alongside Will Allen Dromgoole’s poem “The Doll’s Funeral.” The presence of
both boys and girls at this event suggests that doll funerals were a popular past time across
genders, even as the grieving girl appears in front and center beside her “dead” doll. The doll’s
eyes are closed in this image, so that she appears at rest. The doll’s ability to close her eyes
would have made her particularly well-suited for such play.

Figure 1.3: Close up of “Little Book: by Charlotte Brontë, 1830,” held within the collections of
the Brontë Parsonage Museum. © The Bronte Society.

228

Figure 1.4: A circa 1850-1920 porcelain German Frozen Charlotte, alternately referred to as
badekinder (bathing children), or, for smaller models, penny dolls. These “frozen” dolls were often
floatable and could be taken into baths with children, hence badekinder. Hair, faces, and clothing
were often painted on, and, in some cases, clothing as well, although most models are nude. Models
also ranged widely in size, from one inch to over a foot tall. Courtesy of The Strong, Rochester,
New York.

229

Figure 4.1: Depictions of female factory workers making Edison’s phonograph doll in the April
26, 1890 issue of Scientific American. The top center image is of a female factory worker making
a voice recording for the phonograph dolls. The bottom left image showcases the sheer number
of phonograph dolls being produced, with dolls limply lined up across the factory floor.

230

Figure 5.1: The tombstone of Mary Julia Keating (1867-1868), Eddie Keating (1874-6), and
Mary Agnes Keating (1875-6) at St. Joseph New Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio. Photo by the
author.
231

Figure 5.2: Interior images of the Keating Dollhouse Tombstone in St. Joseph New Cemetery
(Cincinnati, Ohio). Toys, pinecones, and dollhouse furniture strew across the floor. The presence
of a pumpkin in a witch hat and Christmas tree suggest that visitors are most compelled to visit
the tombstone on holidays. Photos by the author.

232

See Figure 5.3: The dollhouse grave marker of Vivian May Allison (May 5
th
, 1894-October 20
th
,
1899), in Connersville, Indiana. Photo by the author.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Infectious feelings: disease, sympathy, and the nineteenth-century novel

PDF

Believing in novels: Evangelical narratives and nineteenth‐century British culture

PDF

Between homes: moving house in the Victorian novel and popular culture; and, Heroine (poems)

PDF

The curious life of the corpse in nineteenth-century English literature and culture

PDF

Living her narrative: Writing heroines in the eighteenth-century novel

PDF

Fictions of health: medicine and the ninteenth-century novel

PDF

Domestic topographies: gender and the house in the nineteenth-century British novel

PDF

Fictions of reference: character and language in nineteenth-century British literature

PDF

Between good girls and vile fiends: femininity, alterity and female homosociality in the nineteenth-century British Gothic novel

PDF

Women readers and the Victorian Jane Austen

PDF

Collaboration in color: master printers, dealer-publishers, and avant-garde lithography in late nineteenth-century France

PDF

Before Art nouveau: the invention, commercialization, and display of the modern interior in nineteenth-century France

PDF

Romancing the bomb: Gothic terror and terrorism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature

PDF

Outlaw mothers: marital conflict, family law, and women's novels in Victorian England

PDF

The cyborg in the basement: hauntedness and narrative transmography

PDF

Those secret exhibitionists: women's diaries at the turn of the twentieth century

PDF

'Such weight': Obesity, life insurance, and masculinity in mid-Victorian culture

PDF

Peculiar risks: art and insurance, 1780–1914

PDF

The joy of censorship: strategies of circumvention in novel and film

PDF

The Chinovnik and the Rond-de-cuir: bureaucratic modernity in nineteenth-century Russian and French literature

Asset Metadata

Creator Beehler, Brianna (author)

Core Title Dollplay: narrative rituals in nineteenth-century Britain

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Degree Conferral Date 2021-08

Publication Date 07/08/2023

Defense Date 05/10/2021

Tag Alice James,Charles Dickens,Charlotte Brontë,doll funerals,Dolls,Empathy,George Eliot,Henry James,material culture,narrative form,nineteenth-century culture,nineteenth-century literature,novel,OAI-PMH Harvest,Play,secrets,ventriloquism

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Schor, Hilary (committee chair), Accampo, Elinor (committee member), Boone, Joseph (committee member), Flint, Kate (committee member), Griffiths, Devin (committee member)

Creator Email beehler@usc.edu,brianna.beehler@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC15293612

Unique identifier UC15293612

Legacy Identifier etd-BeehlerBri-9714

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Beehler\, Brianna

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu