| <Saturday Review, 27 February 1869, 275-6>
| <DOLLS.>
| <Eliza Lynn Linton>
| <etext downloaded from Project Gutenberg with thanks>
| The love of dolls is instinctive with girl children; and a nursery
| without some of these silent simulacra for the amusement of the little
| maids is a very lifeless affair. But outside the nursery door dolls
| are stupid things enough; and, whether improvised of wisped-up bundles
| of rags or made of the costliest kind of composition, they are at the
| best mere pretences for the pastime of babies, not living creatures to
| be loved nor artistic creations to be admired. Certainly they are
| pretty in their own way, and some are made to simulate human actions
| quite cleverly; and one of their charms with children is that they can
| be treated like sentient beings without a chance of retaliation. They
| can be scolded for being naughty; put to bed in broad daylight for a
| punishment; seated in the corner with their impassive faces turned to
| the wall, just as the little ones themselves are dealt with; the doll
| all the time smiling exactly as it smiled before, its round blue beads
| staring just as they stared before; neither scolding nor cornering
| making more impression on its sawdust soul than do little missy's sobs
| and tears when nurse is cross and dolly is her only friend. But
| the child has had its hour of play and make-believe sentiment of
| companionship and authority; and so, if the doll can do no good of
| itself, it can at least be the occasion of pleasantness to others.
| Now there are women who are dolls in all but the mere accident of
| material. The doll proper is a simple structure 
| of wax or wood, <p> 'its
| knees and elbows glued together;' </p> and the human doll is a complex
| machine of flesh and blood. But, saving such structural differences,
| these women are as essentially dolls as those in the bazaar which open
| and shut their eyes at the word of command enforced by a wire, and
| squeak when you pinch them in the middle. There are women who seem
| born into the world only as the playthings and make-believes of human
| life. As impassive as the waxen creatures in the nursery, no
| remonstrance touches them and no experience teaches them. Their final
| cause seems to be to look pretty, to be always in perfect drawing-room
| order, and to be the occasions by which their friends and companions
| are taught patience and self-denial. And they perfectly fulfil their
| destiny; which may be so much carried to their credit. A doll woman is
| hopelessly useless and can do nothing with her brains or her hands. In
| distress or sickness she can only sit by you and look as sorrowful as
| her round smooth face will permit; but she has not a helping
| suggestion to make, not a fraction of practical power to put forth.
| When a man has married a doll wife he has assigned himself to absolute
| loneliness or a double burden. He cannot live with his pretty toy in
| any more reality of sympathy than does a child with her puppet. He can
| tell her nothing of his affairs, nothing of his troubles nor of his
| thoughts, because she can impart no new idea, even from the woman's
| point of view, not from want of heart but from want of brains to
| understand another's life. Is she not a doll? and does not the very
| essence of her dollhood lie in this want of perceptive faculty both
| for things and feelings? What are the hot flushes of passion, the
| bitter tears of grief, the frenzy of despair, to her? She sees them;
| and she wonders that people can be so silly as to make themselves and
| her so uncomfortable; but of the depth of the anguish they express she
| knows no more than does her waxen prototype when little missy sobs
| over it in her arms and confides her sorrows to its deaf ears.
| Whatever anxieties oppress her husband, he must keep them to himself,
| he cannot share them with her; and the last shred of his credit, like
| the last effort of his strength, must be employed in maintaining his
| toy wife in the fool's paradise where alone she can make her
| habitation. Many a man's back has broken under the strain of such a
| burden; and many a ruined fortune might have been held together and
| repaired when damaged, had it not been for the exigencies and
| necessities of the living doll, who had to be spared all want or
| inconvenience at the cost of everything else. How many men are
| groaning in spirit at this moment over the infatuation that made them
| sacrifice the whole worth of life for the sake of a pretty face and a
| plastic manner!
| The doll woman is as helpless practically as she is useless morally.
| If she is in personal danger, she either faints or becomes dazed,
| according to her physiological conditions. Sometimes she is hysterical
| and frantic, and then she is actively troublesome. In general,
| however, she is just so much dead weight on hand, to be thought for as
| well as protected; a living corpse to be carried on the shoulders of
| those who are struggling for their own lives. She can foresee no
| possibilities, measure no distances, think of no means of escape.
| Never quick nor ready, pressure paralyzes such wits as she possesses;
| and it is not from selfishness so much as from pure incapacity to help
| herself or to serve others that the poor doll falls down in a helpless
| heap of self-surrender, and lets her very children perish before her
| eyes without making an effort to protect them.
| As a mother indeed, the doll woman is perhaps more unsatisfactory than
| in any other character. She gives up her nursery into the absolute
| keeping of her nurse, and does not attempt to control nor to
| interfere. This again, is not from want of affection, but from want of
| capacity. In her tepid way she has a heart, if only half-vitalized
| like the rest of her being; and she is by no means cruel. Indeed, she
| has not force enough to be cruel nor wicked anyhow; her worst
| offence being a passive kind of selfishness, not from greed but from
| inactivity, by which she is made simply useless for the general good.
| As for her children, she understands neither their moral nature nor
| their physical wants; and beyond a universal 
| <p> 'Oh, naughty!' </p> if the
| little ones express their lives in the rampant manner proper to young
| things, or as a universal <p> 'Oh, let them have it!' </p> 
| if there is a howl
| over what is forbidden or unwise, she has no idea of discipline or
| management. If they teaze her, they are sent away; if they are
| naughty, they are whipped by papa or nurse; if they are ill, the
| doctor is summoned and they have medicine as he directs; but none of
| the finer and more intimate relations usual between mother and child
| exist in the home of the doll mother. The children are the property of
| the nurse only; unless indeed the father happens to be a specially
| affectionate and a specially domestic man, and then he does the work
| of the mother ~~ at the best clumsily, but at the worst better than the
| doll could have done it.
| Very shocking and revolting are all the more tragic facts of human
| life to the smooth-skinned easy-going doll. When it comes to her own
| turn to bear pain, she wonders how a good God can permit her to
| suffer. Had she brains enough to think, the great mystery of pain
| would make her atheistical in her angry surprise that she should be so
| hardly dealt with. As dolls have a constitutional immunity from
| suffering, her first initiation into even a minor amount of
| anguish is generally a tremendous affair; and though it may be pain of
| a quite natural and universal character, she is none the less
| indignant and astonished at her portion. She invariably thinks herself
| worse treated than her sisters, and cannot be made to understand that
| others suffer as much as, and more than, herself. As she has always
| shrunk from witnessing trouble of any kind, and as what she may have
| seen has passed over her mind without leaving any impression, she
| comes to her own sorrows totally inexperienced; and one of the most
| pitiable sights in the world is that of a poor doll woman writhing in
| the grasp of physical agony, and broken down or rendered insanely
| impatient by what other women can bear without a murmur.
| When she is in the presence of the moral tragedies of life, she is as
| lost and bewildered as she is with the physical. All sin and crime are
| to her odd and inexplicable. She cannot pity the sinner, because she
| cannot understand the temptation; and she cannot condemn from any
| lofty standpoint, because she has not mind enough to see the full
| meaning of iniquity. It is simply something out of the ordinary run of
| her life, and the doll naturally dislikes disturbance, whether of
| habit or of thought. Yet if a noted criminal came and sat down by her,
| she would probably whisper to her next friend, 
| <p> 'How shocking!' </p> but she
| would simper when he spoke, and perhaps in her heart feel flattered by
| the attention of even so doubtful a notoriety. If she be a doll
| with a bias towards naughtiness, the utmost limit to which she can go
| is a mild kind of curiosity about the outsides of things ~~ the mere
| husk and rind of the forbidden fruit ~~ such as wondering how such and
| such people look who have done such dreadful things; and what they
| felt the next morning; and how could they ever come to think of such
| horrors! She would be more interested in hearing about the dress and
| hair and eyes of the female plaintiff or defendant in a famous cause
| than many other women would be; but she would not give herself the
| trouble to read the evidence, and she would take all her opinions
| secondhand. But whether the colour of the lady's gown was brown or
| blue, and whether she wore her hair wisped or plaited, would be
| matters in which she would take as intense an interest as is possible
| to her.
| The utmost limit to which enthusiasm can be carried with her is in the
| matter of dress and fashion; and the only subject that thoroughly
| arouses her is the last new colour, or the latest eccentricity of
| costume. Talk to her of books, and she will go to sleep; even novels,
| her sole reading, she forgets half an hour after she has turned the
| last page; while of any other kind of literature she is as profoundly
| ignorant as she is of mathematics; but she can discuss the mysteries
| of fashion with something like animation, these being to her what the
| wire is to the eyes of the dolls in the bazaar. Else she has no power
| of conversation. At the head of her own table she sits like a
| pretty waxen dummy, and can only simper out a few commonplaces, or
| simper without the commonplaces, satisfied if she is well appointed
| and looks lovely, and if her husband seems tolerably contented with
| the dinner. She is more in her element at a ball, where she is only
| asked to dance and not wanted to talk; but her ball-room days do not
| last for ever, and when they are over she has no available retreat.
| If a rich doll woman is a mistake, a poor one who has been rich is
| about the greatest infliction that can be laid on a suffering
| household. Not all the teaching of experience can make wax and glue
| into flesh and blood, and nothing can train the human doll into a
| dignified or a capable womanhood. She still dresses in faded
| finery ~~ which she calls keeping up appearances; and still has
| pretensions which no <p> 'inexorable logic of facts' </p> 
| can destroy. She
| spends her money on sweets and ribbons and ignores the family need for
| meat and calico; and she sits by the fireside dozing over a trashy
| novel, while her children are in rags and her house is given over to
| disorder. But then she has a craze for the word 
| <p> 'lady-like,' </p> and
| thinks it synonymous with ignorance and helplessness. She abhors the
| masculine-minded woman who helps her ~~ sister, cousin, daughter ~~ 
| so far
| as she can abhor anything; but she is glad to lean on her strength,
| despite this abhorrence, and, while grumbling at her masculinity, does
| not disdain to take advantage of her power. The doll is only passively
| disagreeable though; and for all that she carps under her breath,
| will remain in any position in which she is placed. She will not act,
| but she will let you act unhindered; which is something gained when
| you have to deal with fools.
| This quiescence of hers passes with the world for plasticity and
| amiability; it is neither; it is simply indolence and want of
| originating force. While she is young, she is nice enough to those who
| care only for a pretty face and a character founded on negatives; but
| when a man's pride of life has gone, and he has come into the phase of
| weakness, or under the harrow of affliction, or into the valley of the
| shadow of death, then she becomes in sorrowful truth the chain and
| bullet which make him a galley-slave for the remainder of his days,
| and which sign him to drudgery and despair.
| As an old woman the doll has not one charm. She has learned none of
| that handiness, come to none of that grand maternal power of helping
| others, which should accompany maturity and age and has still to be
| thought for and protected, to the exclusion of the younger and
| naturally more helpless, as when she was young herself, and beautiful
| and fascinating, and men thought it a privilege to suffer for her
| sake. Nine times out of ten she has lost her temper as well as her
| complexion, and has become peevish and unreasonable. She gets fat and
| rouges; but she will not consent to get old. She takes to false hair,
| dyes, padded stays, arsenic or <p> 'anti-fat,' </p> 
| and to artful contrivances
| of every description; but alas! there is no 
| <p> 'dolly's hospital' </p> for her
| as there used to be for her battered old prototype in the nursery
| lumber-closet; and, whether she likes it or not, she has to succumb to
| the inevitable decree, and to become faded, worn out, unlovely, till
| the final <hi> coup de grāce </hi> is given and the poor doll is no 
| more. Poor, weak, frivolous doll! it requires some faith to believe
| that she is of any good whatsoever in this overladen life of ours; but
| doubtless she has her final uses, though it would puzzle a Sanhedrim
| of wise men to discover them. Perhaps in the great readjustment of the
| future she may have her place and her work assigned to her in some
| inter-stellar Phalansterie; when the meaning of her helpless earthly
| existence shall be made manifest and its absurd uselessness atoned for
| by some kind of celestial <p> 'charing.' </p>