DEAR LITTLE DOLLIE, MY POPPET

Myself, two years old, 1941

A “poppet” or “puppet” is a little human figure, often of a child or baby. A “doll” originally meant a handful of rags or maybe twigs or something else like a “corn dolly,” which is a little weaving of ripe wheat (now just right) into a figure to put up for decoration. “Poppet” seems to have its roots in an a medieval peddler who sold a very popular sort of small figure, the most successful of which was supposed to be the Empress Poppea. In the end both poppet and doll and even puppet came to be terms of endearment.

“Puppenphilia” is a word I made up to suggest the love of something like a poppet, a puppet, a puppy -- a dear little thing one can cuddle and coo over, a doll. It stirs strong feelings, even in grownups, but esp. little girls and some little boys. Here and there it flips people over into violence, flinging dolls against the wall, tearing their arms off, poking out their blinking eyes. A ghastly tale in the recent newspaper was about a mother who went insane, tore off her baby’s toes and face, split his skull and ate his brains. Then she returned to sanity and realized . . .

Doll abuse happens to baby dolls and Barbie dolls, but is probably differently motivated. As a little girl I was aghast when a guest child threw my beloved “Blackie” -- obviously an African American doll -- against our bedroom ceiling and broke off all her toes. Some of my earliest dolls disappeared long ago -- Clarabelle was left out in the grass overnight and her painted face peeled off, so my mother burned her. I would have loved her even faceless. Our big old wood and coal furnace immolated more than a few of my dolls and whole villages of paper dolls. It always happened at night while I was asleep. But I still have a box of dolls on which I painted a little Petrouchka puppet I made. Inside are Ruth Ann, my oldest doll; Irene, my snazziest babydoll; and Katy, a red-headed Toni doll which was a sort of precursor to Barbie. Also, Dottie Dimples, my mother’s kid-bodied doll with a broken china head.

I Googled “love of dolls” and up came:
The Journal of Genetic Psychology - Google Books Result 1897 - Psychology
... etc., only 17% speak of lack of child companionship, and 72% prefer playing dolls in company; 38% say that love of dolls grew out of love of real baby, ...
books.google.com/books?id=hW4VAAAAIAAJ... -

It’s one of those strange saved-from-the-scrap-heap scanned books that has somehow escaped destruction. Someone with raspberry-pink vinyl gloves put it into the scanner. Now I’ve downloaded it. But it’s 442 pages long -- I won’t print it.


The book, in it’s Edwardian matter-of-fact way, says that babydolls are all about mothering and paperdolls are slightly more adult, like Barbie. Clothes and social roles. Fairytales. There’s a good deal of talk about “rude” dolls, which seems to have a double meaning: on the one hand primitive dolls, perhaps improvised like a knotted washcloth, and on the other hand dolls that are ugly or broken. There’s a good deal of worry about the improvement of children through the use of dolls. In schooling dolls, does the child internalize the lessons? They had sent out a little questionnaire and received so many replies that they considered them “intractable” and struggled to fit them into some kind of chart. “Did you like the old dirty dolls better than the new ones?” (Yes.) And they wanted details -- and got mountains of it! -- about putting dolly to bed, making her behave, and how she was treated if she became ill. (I recall applying vaccinations with a pine needle when I got my own.) Maybe most importantly, they asked about the relationship between dolls and babies and whether a girl ready to have real babies would or should put aside her dollies.

A first tiny “Chinese” doll that fit into into my hand was given to me when I was maybe four years old. It was a bisque china baby with arms and legs that moved. Someone gave it to me when I was very sick with a childhood affliction: chicken pox, measles -- one of those. I had enough fever to walk funny and I was put to bed in my parents’ bedroom to spare my brothers from contagion, though I’m not sure which of we three had it first. It was a precious little thing and I loved it. My mother had cautioned me that it would break but I needed to go to the bathroom and I couldn’t bear to leave it behind. I dropped it on the ceramic tile bathroom floor and it shattered. I’d killed it. My mother didn’t spare me any guilt. It was during WWII and none of us were spared anything, even though we seemed perfectly safe in Portland, OR. Perhaps my mother was afraid of dropping me. She was a Spanish flu survivor.

I never had much interest in ethnic dolls or display dolls. I had some little sitting Indians from Pendleton, just a few inches high, and unwound their blankets to see what they were wearing. Not only were they not wearing anything, they were only stuffed blobs with heads. Huh! The children in the questionnaire reported making dolls out of everything, which made me think of the pastoral care story about the woman who had no chance to grieve for her stillborn baby so wrapped a blanket around a cantalope and carried it around, singing soothingly. One of the oddest of the children’s reported dolls was “a turkey wing named Dinah.” A two-year-old adopted an old red slipper. Has anyone made a study of the connection between dollies and fetishes for gloves or shoes? This article says Kraft-Ebbing did, but I no longer have a copy.

There was a substantial number of male doll owners, maybe a fifth of the children, but it diminished, of course, as they got older. GI Joe dolls hadn’t been invented. But there were all those sets of farm animals. My brothers dearly loved their stuffed animals and we had a strange little yellow spotted rubber bathtub toy that was called “the Jeep.” It was a creature out of “Smilin’ Jack,” but I don’t remember much except that it could jump.

Much dollie drama revolved around sickness, bedtime and even death. Tim’s Cinematheque boys have a clip of a naked baby doll being solemnly buried by several boys. This is how we learn to organize our feelings and relationships. When Bob’s daughter died, we had her two little girls for the summer so I made a doll house and gave them each a little girl doll. They spent hours out there talking to each other in high voices, working through their feelings. Bob was upset that I never finished the house, but I suspect it was better only wallpapered, never really furnished much, because they could imagine and improvise.

The Edwardian study recommended that dollies be discouraged after a point, because it is natural for children and savages to “see personality in everything” but clung to into adulthood, this could lead to the worship of idols. No negative comment is made when it is noted that Queen Victoria had 132 dolls which represented important personages. Is that not a miniature court with herself as the idol? She made them each a little handkerchief a half-inch square.

The study thinks that boys should be encouraged to play with dolls, in spite of the danger of them becoming “milliners,” in hopes that it will make them more tender and protective of women and children when they are grown. A pupa or pupo in early Latin is a child. The best guess of the word-hounds is that poppet goes back to ancient word, “push,” that means to nourish. Wouldn’t we want all our children to be nurturing?