Galatea's Daughters: Dolls, Female Identity and the Material Imagination
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Galatea‘s Daughters: Dolls, Female Identity and the Material Imagination in Victorian Literature and Culture Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Maria Eugenia Gonzalez-Posse, M.A. Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2012 Dissertation Committee: David G. Riede, Advisor Jill Galvan Clare A. Simmons Copyright by Maria Eugenia Gonzalez-Posse 2012 Abstract The doll, as we conceive of it today, is the product of a Victorian cultural phenomenon. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that a dedicated doll industry was developed and that dolls began to find their way into children‘s literature, the rhetoric of femininity, periodical publications and canonical texts. Surprisingly, the Victorian fascination with the doll has largely gone unexamined and critics and readers have tended to dismiss dolls as mere agents of female acculturation. Guided by the recent material turn in Victorian studies and drawing extensively from texts only recently made available through digitization projects and periodical databases, my dissertation seeks to provide a richer account of the way this most fraught and symbolic of objects figured in the lives and imaginations of the Victorians. By studying the treatment of dolls in canonical literature alongside hitherto neglected texts and genres and framing these readings in their larger cultural contexts, the doll emerges not as a symbol of female passivity but as an object celebrated for its remarkable imaginative potential. The doll, I argue, is therefore best understood as a descendant of Galatea – as a woman turned object, but also as an object that Victorians constantly and variously brought to life through the imagination. The chapters of my dissertation examine how this imaginative potential was put to use but also how it was perceived as coming under threat by the pressures of materialism and commercialization. iii In my first chapter I examine the doll‘s role as creative muse that elicits imaginative fictions by means of its intrinsic impassive nature but that also embodies and gives material shape to those imaginings. I consider how Victorian authors like Stevenson and Hodgson Burnett saw the fanciful animation of dolls in play as a precursor to the animation of characters in literary production and, in particular, Dickens‘s use of this trope to articulate a vision of himself as an author that draws from the child‘s more fluid relationship with the material world. Then, in Chapter 2, I turn to the ―doll memoir,‖ a once popular but now neglected subgenre within children‘s literature in which dolls are endowed with subjectivity as the narrators of their own stories, to examine how these tales co-opted the imagination to generate a sense of disciplinary surveillance in their young readers, threatening to reverse the power relationship between girls and their dolls. In chapter three, I study the rise of the luxury doll industry and consider how the material excess and consumer promiscuity associated with this ―doll of the period‖ was perceived not only as endangering childhood imagination but also used by writers like Eliza Lynn Linton and Mary Elizabeth Braddon to explore femininity as a commodified form. In my final chapter I turn to narratives of doll production in periodical publications to show how a visit to the factory could deconstruct the fantasy of the doll by reducing it to its material parts, but could also give rise to a more imaginative way of understanding commodities as objects shaped by their material histories. As a mediator between the real and the ideal, I argue, the doll embodies a new kind of imagination, one that operates in conjunction with, rather than against, materiality, and in which woman acts both as medium and as agent. iv Acknowledgments I have long looked forward to writing these acknowledgements as an opportunity to express my most heartfelt thanks to all those without whose support this dissertation could not have been written. I would first like to thank each of the members of my dissertation committee for their great generosity in their willingness to continue to advise me from across the Atlantic. I am grateful to David Riede for introducing me to many of the ideas that inspired this project and for his willingness to continue to offer his guidance even when my research veered away from them, often into unexpected territories. I could not have completed this project without his generous open-mindedness about my subject and his continued and patient support. I am grateful to Jill Galvan, whose careful and incisive comments on my chapter drafts always pushed me to make my claims bolder and clearer, and for her reassuring enthusiasm about my topic. I am also grateful to Clare Simmons, whose expansive knowledge about all aspects of Victorian life and literature always steered me towards thinking about the bigger picture in contextualizing my arguments and highlighting their significance. Heartfelt thanks are also due to Amanpal Garcha, whose advice early on in the conception of this project encouraged me to think creatively about the shape that it could take. I am also grateful for the friendship and support of Amanda Gerber, Meghan Burke Hattaway, Erin Kelly and Lis Lindeman Ravert, the smartest, funniest and kindest v friends that one could ever wish for. To Meghan I owe special thanks, not only for her encouragement and for reading chapter after chapter, but also for making this process a lot less lonely than it could have been. I would also like to thank my family and, in particular, my parents, Guillermo and Adriana, who have always supported me in all my endeavors and have always believed me capable of achieving anything I set out to do. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank Alejandro Riaño, my husband, whose belief in my ability to finish sustained me when I was weighed down by doubts of my own, and who, possessed of a seemingly endless supply of kindness, patience, generosity and good humor, has always been my best and most enthusiastic champion. vi Vita July 6, 1982 ....................................................Born, Buenos Aires, Argentina 2003................................................................B.A. International Affairs, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. 2005................................................................M.A. English, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 2005-2009 .....................................................Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University Publications Guest co-editor, Special Issue: ―The Intersections of Private and Public Life: Papers from the British Women Writers Conference,‖ Prose Studies 33.3 (2011). ―‗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 39 (2011): 33-57. Entries for ―Violence,‖ ―Fate,‖ and ―Heroism‖ in A Tale of Two Cities in Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature. Ed. Jennifer McClinton-Temple. Facts on File, 2011. Fields of Study Major Field: English vii Table of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... v Vita .................................................................................................................................... vii Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Literary Doll Play and Dickens‘s Fantastic Realism ...................................... 32 Chapter 2: Silent Surveillants: Imaginative Discipline in the Doll Memoir ..................... 88 Chapter 3: Rampant Modernizations: The Luxury Doll, the Girl of the Period and the Sensational Heroine ........................................................................................................ 135 Chapter 4: The Work of Fairies: Deconstruction and Imagination in Narratives of Doll Production ....................................................................................................................... 189 Works Cited: ................................................................................................................... 235 viii List of Figures Figure 1. Illustration of the doll ―At Homes‖ proposed in Funny Folks. ........................... 4 Figure 2. Images of maternal doll play in Miss and her Doll. .......................................... 13 Figure 3. ―Dickens‘ Dream‖ by R. W. Buss.. ................................................................... 61 Figure 4. ―Chirp the Second‖ by Richard Doyle. ............................................................. 62 Figure 5. ―The Arrival of the Doll.‖ From Jeanne Sylvie Mallès de Beaulieu‘s The Well- Bred Doll. ........................................................................................................................ 105 Figure 6. Ethel and the Birch Rod. From Clara Bradford‘s Ethel’s Adventures in the Doll Country. .......................................................................................................................... 124 Figure 7. Nineteen-inch ―Portrait‖ Jumeau doll.. ..........................................................