Even in this age of gender and gender role fluidity there is a lingering old world assumption that all girls like dolls. It’s biology, or cultural conditioning, or fulfillment of societal expectations–or some other such crap. Girls mimic mothering with dolls, roleplay, and practice consumerism. Play with dolls is a societally sanctioned personal experience; an act of imagination made real and usually contained in the private sphere of a child’s bedroom.

Photo by Joe Lencioni at shiftingpixel.com

I was never much for dolls when I was a kid—not baby dolls or Barbie dolls. I was more likely to dress up my cat than a doll. My indifference to dolls followed me throughout life. I used to go to a hair salon that was decorated in dolls. The owner collected dolls and had them displayed on shelf molding throughout the salon. There were dolls with ornate hairstyles—braids and curled bangs and beehives—and even more ornate costumes of silk and satin and velvet. The dolls were positioned so when I was trapped under a purple cape processing, they seemed to be looking down at me, judging me with their unblinking eyes and perfect baby doll mouths. I turned my chair away but I could still see the dolls behind me in the mirror. All their perfect blank faces looking at me at my most vulnerable, my most secret self, without my coiffed day to day shield—righteous bitches.

“The trick is to intensify and to overlay; to compress the patterns; to reduce them to simple expressions; to make every inch count double.”

–from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

Not long ago a visit to the Glessner House on Prairie Avenue made me think of dolls in another way. In the context of the ornate and decorative mansions on Prairie Avenue during the late 19^th century, the Glessner House, although grand in its own right, was somewhat of a palate cleanser. Unpopular with its luxury row neighbors when it was built in 1886, after visiting the new house during construction, Frances Glessner noted in her journal on October 24, 1886: “We walked across the street to take a distant look and two ladies passed by us—one said to the other ‘there isn’t a single pretty thing about it.’” The house built by architect Henry Hobson Richardson came to be recognized as innovative in design and is considered a landmark in residential architecture.

The Glessners lived in the house for fifty years and many of the furnishings and objects in the house are original and representative of the Glessner’s preferences and taste, which focused predominately on Arts and Crafts. The house reflects the dreams and desires of its inhabitants. That the Glessners commissioned such a radical departure in design for their primary residence and the thoughtfulness and intelligence exhibited in their selection of home furnishings, led me to expect that the residents of the Glessner House were at least as thoughtful and intelligent as their taste in home decor, at least as innovative in their thinking as their home design would suggest. In this context, I was interested to hear from the tour docent that years after she left the family home, the Glessner daughter, Fanny, constructed a series of dollhouse dioramas depicting violent crime scenes.

In her middle age, during the 1940s, after marriage and raising three kids, Frances Glessner Lee created eighteen miniature scenes based on actual homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths—The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. The Nutshells were used to train law enforcement officers in the instruction of forensic techniques of observation.

Contemporary photographer Corinne May Botz produced a series of images of the dioramas that were displayed in an exhibition and appear in a book, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Monacelli Press, 2004). The Nutshells reveal not only crime scenes but also a degree of detail and precision that is perhaps as revealing about the nature of their creator as it is about the methods of murder. An unlatched door, blood splatters on pink wallpaper above a baby’s crib, pink slippers knit with straight pins neatly lying on a pink-fringed throw rug, an overflowing ashtray, a framed painting of a buck that is no bigger than a postage stamp. The scale is exact and looking at the photographs of the dioramas is disorienting. The dollhouse dioramas impose a narrative. What happened in these domestic scenes in kitchens, bathrooms, and bedrooms? What is the story that must be imagined? Is there more than one story? Reduction suggests diminishment, less than, but in the case of The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, miniaturization intensifies and enlarges the effect. A drowning in a bathtub is reduced to a series of “simple expression[s]”: soap in a soap dish, a drain plug on a chain, a woman’s fully clothed body hanging over the tub, the water splashing in her face. Was she forced under the running water and drowned? Did she slip while filling the tub, knocking herself unconscious? Was she killed someplace else and her body placed in the tub?

“Children take up the suggestive qualities of space…”

–from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

From miniaturization to multitudes. I am the childless friend of women with daughters and granddaughters. Sometimes I am invited into this particular world, sometimes I spy. Recently I was a guest at the mother lode of the mother and girl child reunion—the American Girl Place on Michigan Avenue. A friend had traveled from St. Louis to Chicago with her seven-year-old granddaughter, Natalie, to visit the American Girl Place.

American Girl® encourages girls “to enjoy girlhood through fun and enchanting play.” That’s play with one or all of the American Girl characters, Just Like You® dolls, or Itty Baby® dolls. The American Girl store is a theme park devoted to dolls and their stuff—lots of stuff. Clothes and furniture and pets and gear for the pets like raincoats and grooming tubs, and a campfire with fake marshmallows on sticks, and a wooden ice cream churn, and two versions of tap dance outfits. The store is red and pink and black. The trademark shopping bags that girls are carrying in a six-block radius around the store are red. Like one of George Saunder’s short stories about the guy in the caveman real-action diorama or the CivilWarLand theme park, the American Girl Place is an exaggerated form of American consumerism. It’s fiction larger than life and gutted of imagination. In this space, the story is readymade, available for purchase.

Frances Glessner Lee’s dollhouse dioramas and American Girl doll nation: something big—murder, suicide, accidental death–made small and open to interpretation versus something small—a doll’s story, doll-sized black patent leather tap shoes—made larger than life and deathly static. Reverse gestures, yet both perverse, both violent acts of imagination.

First stop at the American Girl Place was the doll beauty salon. Josephina, one of the historical American Girl characters, had been promised a redo. Poor Josephina looked like she had been rode hard and put away wet. Natalie picked out a hairstyle for her doll—the tucked two braids with the turquoise ribbons—and the uniformed stylist tied a purple cape around Josephina’s neck. So there we were: Josephina trapped in a doll chair, hair on the loose, the three of us looking on, awaiting her transformation back into the only self that was possible for her.

Photo by Joe Lencioni at Shifting Pixel