PINTEREST REVELATIONS

I’ve been ignoring Pinterest for years, assuming that it was sort of like Etsy — girly little fondnesses and cute homemade stuff.  Certainly there are no Native American people posting that I’ve seen and the photos that individuals collect about “Indians” are miscellaneous, misattributed, and old 19th century stuff.  They're on the edge of being offensive due to stereotyping.

These are from Popovy Sisters.

But then I ran across “art dolls” which includes jointed, posable, incredibly slender and idealized dolls suitable for clothing and adorning.  They were sophisticated versions of the paperdolls I amateurishly drew as I approached puberty.  Many of them are remarkable.  Closely related are artist-augmented babydolls, so realistic that it’s hard to believe they aren’t real.  Both categories are very expensive.  

Next I found old friends: cloth doll children.  We had a family friend who made them and dressed them in little bib overalls or dresses.  We could play with them at her house but never take them home.  In high school I made some to use as marionettes.  How nice.  How non-threatening.  

Then I finally got nudged into Pinterest because I was thinking about octopuses and a whole new world fell open.  Little pastel octos and entirely terrifying tentacled monsters.  Whole other genres appeared: clusters of middle-aged women having a visit, extremely fat women with tiny sweet faces, and. . . gay boys.

Boys.  If you’ve been reading me a while, you may know that a decade ago I wrote with a cluster of boys in Paris who had formed a family based on photography and art.  AIDS was just arriving.  Boys this age are obsessed with two things: personal relationships and universal justice.  (Reversals also count: I mean, enough anger can turn these to destruction and cruelty.)  They’re all grown men now and we’re not in touch.

But on Pinterest I discover a whole new genre, writing with drawing, something like cartoons except about the lives of a special category of boys: gay, in need of family, falling in love with each other, trying to understand risky survival.  The narrative is as clear as the drawing but I still don’t understand a lot because I’m not them in their world.  I have no advisors.  My brothers are dead.

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This section was removed at the request of the author.

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So I get my Google fingers going and discover there are real books, published by Scholastic, about this kind of boy in this kind of tale.  https://theravenboys.fandom.com/wiki/The_Raven_Cycle.  The author is Maggie Steifvater.  First book in 2012.  NYT best seller  #1.  https://theravenboys.fandom.com/wiki/The_Raven_Boys_Wiki    This is so wildly amazing that I can hardly believe it.  I thought all this was supposed to be secret.   Of course, none of these Raven fans know anything about me — why would they?  But I’m still curious about them.

There are two related literary genres that I do know about, though I’m not spending time on them right now.  One is “lone” and romantic figures, usually male, who may be associated with wilderness and always has a “spirit animal” like a wolf associated with him.  In the Raven Chronicles, it is a raven, of course, which makes for remarkable art.  This is an old trope in Europe and elsewhere, but it is reinvigorated by being gay boys which pulls in some of the cowl-and-cape brotherhood of monastics.  I also think of Neah Bay -- vampires are not far off.

The other genre, which is not recognized as a genre, is that of women — often gay — who write about gay men — often historical.  I’m thinking about Mary Renault, who was gay and oppressed in England in WWII but found family as a nurse caring for soldiers and later in South Africa among a community of liberal ex-pats.  And I’m thinking of Patricia Nell Warren whose “The Fancy Dancer”, is a much beloved novel about a priest and a Native American, which is a Montana book that both men and women love — quietly.  Neither writer wanted to be known as “gay” or any other restriction on the right to simply be a human who writes.  So many times and places to explore, so many differences that turn out to be samenesses.

Here's a puzzle.  Rowling's Harry Potter is portrayed here again and again as a grown man, always a dark and handsome figure, often seeming scholarly and always seeming probably Irish and sometimes suggesting Jesus.  Kenner's question:  What does it mean?  

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IS "CALL THE MIDWIFE" PORNOGRAPHY?

This is a doll.

Pornography as defined by our current American culture must struggle with its assumptions of what the taboos are.  As it turns out, you can get as nude as you want, so long as you wear a condom.  The sub-groups, sometimes covert, have been captured by youngsters, so that once-shocking just-out-of-combat S/M has devolved into trendy corsets, pinching and poking, plus a little bondage with clothesline or a pony crop.  At least that’s what it appears to me, but what do I know?  I’m outside all this, which to many people makes my opinions totally useless.

But it also frees me from assumptions and lets me be provocative.  So I will take advantage of that to claim that “Call the Midwife” is pornographic.  This opinion won’t damage their fans — it will attract more.  People are tired of conventional porn or they wouldn’t be watching those “Shades of Gray” and perverse murder series.  In fact, our whole Western society is having to radically reframe our understanding of the ideas clustered around coitus and flesh.  

We now know which molecules cause arousal, what the tissue consequences are, where the germ cells must go and what they do when they get there.  Maybe a few laggards still haven’t figured out that a vagina is internal, a vulva is external, and a clitoris is much more than the little tender button.  The interactions of drugs are known and not nearly so magical as was hoped, not even Viagra.  It’s the social and emotional elements that make intercourse magical, and these are the elements that also create and feed the stories on “Call the Midwife.”

Childbirth, which is the obvious continuation and consequence of the sex act, was once a matter of life and death.  Because of that it was surrounded with as much fantasy as the idea of a Muslim warrior being greeted in Paradise by all those virgins.  They were sentimental assurances to keep people doing what their culture wanted them to do.  Sentimental meaning knee-jerk conventions about what a mother might feel about giving birth and the consequences of an infant in the household, even one that has enough wealth and skill to sustain a new human being.  (Sometimes I’m tempted to write a satire about the Ayatollah trying to manage his young, obstreperous and flighty horde of virgins who want things, but aren’t sure what they are.  They brandish catalogs.)

“Call the Midwife” lifts up the act of childbirth to the level we normally expect of filmed “love-making.”  That is, the red-faced rictus grimaces are extreme versions of someone having an orgasm, complete with gripping the pillows and making rhythmic sounds.  Instead of one partner present, there are one or two nurse/nuns investigating the perineum which is never shown, which is also a convention in some porn.  (There’s no breast-feeding in this show, though women claim it may be the most truly erotic act of their lives.)  There is an almost jealous concern that a male not be present, unless he is a doctor.  Doctors have the ultimate privilege, the total access of lovers and husbands, in spite of never having babies if they are male.  The more money, the more access; the more access, the more money.

As though I were male, I’ve not given birth nor have I observed a birth, except animal birth.  Even that is impressive.  The whole idea of one animal coming out of the guts of another is shocking, a sci-fi seeming event that needs the mythic meaning element, the ritualistic understanding of “boil water,” the proper presentation, the moment before the infant begins to breath on its own.  (“Call the Midwife” never strikes a baby to make it cry.  They rub the back and use a rubber tube to clear the airways.)

On this show few mothers die, all babies are “beautiful,” and Christian ideas dominate because, after all, the nurses are either nuns or living with nuns.  During my chaplaincy in preparation for ministry, I was discouraged from visiting the infant ICU because I was Unitarian and therefore didn’t talk about God’s plans for babies.  Faulty or incomplete babies were there: babies with guts outside their bodies or their backs incomplete so that their spines were exposed.  Some of them were so premature as to teeter on the edge of survival and no one knew whether they would ever be complete.

One woman gave birth to a seemingly complete baby that was faulty inside and died.  It was because of her drinking and she knew it, but no one discussed that.  Instead the whole focus was baptizing the baby so it could go into Heaven.  But Catholic dogma at the time — and all chaplains were obliged to observe the dogma of the faith of the patient — forbade the baptizing of a dead baby.  It would go to Limbo.  The priest reasserted this.  The woman was very poor and often had to depend on the charity of her church, so she didn’t want to be defiant.  But she INSISTED that the baby be baptized.  

Someone in her family brought an elegant white christening gown.  The head nurse on that ward was Catholic and the church rules allow any believing Catholic to administer sacraments in the absence of a priest.  So one night she quietly baptized the baby, saying she could not leave a child on the stairs waiting for the Golden Gates to admit it to Heaven.  

Everything was fine then, except that they were all mad at me, holding me responsible.  I was safe to blame.  The exception was the mother, who took me into her confidence.  In her culture, the tradition was to give money to a new mother and her visitors had been doing exactly that.  She showed me the little hoard of bills in her pillowcase with great satisfaction.  Then I understood.  

“Call the Midwife” is not so direct about the religious rules of childbirth.  The nuns are Anglican, a more elastic system developed within English life.  Screenwriters are the “theologians” and they choose their dogmas carefully.  We see no love-making.  A few Golden Rules contain the hatred and destruction.  The nuns still sing praise.  Immigrants are treated gingerly.

The actor who plays the doctor and the doll who plays a baby.

The most shocking story might be about biology gone berzerk, partly because it is addled by technology: the story abut the thalidomide baby, which was made vividly horrifying by a babydoll of exquisite accuracy, even capable of movement.  I couldn’t help thinking of sex dolls.  Evidently there is a minor industry creating artist’s dolls which evolved out of artists using high technology of materials and molds to make super-realistic replicas of people, but perhaps out-of-scale so that an infant could fill a whole room.  Or maybe the artist makes only a head but as big as a room.

Giant head by ?

These are challenges meant to jog us out of assumptions and to think more deeply about what matters, what is possible, what consequences might come about from what seems delightful and private.  Granted, “Call the Midwife” is sort of gender-assigned porn, because they are female flights of fantasy about something males may impose arbitrarily, a way of softening something that carries pain, blood, and change.  Should it be stigmatized?  Should it be included in junior high sex education classes?

I DON'T WANT BABIES

About 1966

At an early age it was my life decision never to get pregnant.  The gynies write down “null partum” on my chart.  They didn’t believe I haven’t at least had an abortion.  I had an absolute rule that I would not consort with a man who wasn’t sterile.  There weren’t many of them and they were older.  My actual husband was twice my age.  There was plenty of canoodling in that consortium and in fact he had quite a colorful reputation.

The reason I didn’t have children were:

a) I wanted to be a free spirit who didn’t have to always give up my own goals in order to feed and house children;

b) I never found a man who would or could dependably and healthily help raise children — many of them wanted to BE children.

c)  My extended family (cousins and sibs) dropped the family gatherings and the sense of connection.

d)  As far as I could understand, World War never ended — it just moved around and made different groups into refugees.  Walk for miles across barren lands carrying a starving child?  No.  And don't tell me it can't happen here.  Ask an Indian.

Trail of Tears

e)  I was physically terrified of pregnancy and childbirth which seemed to me like a form of cancer.  The prospect of a larval parasite growing inside me was quite accurately depicted in the “Alien” movies.

f)  In my day (b 1939) out-of-wedlock pregnancy was a social disaster — not unlike a social death sentence.  

g)  Marriage was everything (very much entwined with pregnancy) and my mother's worst fear for me was her worst curse: “no one will ever marry you.”  It was the taunt against her as a young woman (she married at thirty) and then converted to teasing predictions that her husband would leave her.  This was totally unjustified. 

h)  I have discovered that men will try to attach to me for reasons other than sex and if they are turned away, they become vengeful, not because of jealousy but because of need. 

h)  My social skills stink.  I’m always reacting as though I were in some other century, some other country, some other part of town.  Some people thought I was crazy and I was determined not to pass it on.

i)  I don’t fit with women.  Maybe one or two.  My political and sentimental patterns are so different they seem hostile.

i)  If I had a child, it would have such an intense grip on my heart that I would kill to protect it and give my own life to save it.  Attachment to cats or maybe very close friends via email is about as much as I can handle, but the people closest to me are male.

The situation on my father’s side was a little different from that on my mother’s side.  Both sides were country people, but my grandfather was well-educated in Scotland and my grandmother taught until she married and homesteaded in South Dakota.  (Brulé Sioux country: Faulkton, established after the Sioux were moved to Rosebud.)  Her first infant was premature because she rode the wagon to town late in pregnancy.  He lived 17 days.  Her sister ran off with an improvident man because she was pregnant by accident. She died in childbirth. 

My grandfather is back center

Beulah, my grandmother, was never hearty and in that inland part of the continent before iodized salt, had health troubles that developed into goiter and pushed the family to relocate to Portland, OR, where the food was often from the sea.  I think she was carrying endocrine flaws, possibly at the level of the epigenome.  She was very strict and a WCTU member because of her brother’s alcoholism.  But no one on that side is religious, just very conscious of propriety.

On my mother’s side the confusions were emotional and connected directly to class, wealth and success.  The siblings married another rural family stream that followed those principles regardless of sin, law and relationships.  But it was as though my father thought subsistence was the only level of prosperity that was safe.  He just never was ambitious and neither were my brothers.  My mother compensated.

All of this affected my understanding of family, marriage and children.  I never saw children as unconnected to those forces or as unconnected to other life on the planet.  To me a baby is not an object, not a doll.  But a doll, even a paper doll, can in my imagination become a Pinocchio, a Velveteen Rabbit.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_m054tLKvs  I worry about them.  Some of them (yeah, the Pinocchios) don’t like that.

University of Manitoba

My father’s education was at the University of Manitoba where his roommate was part of the “Green Revolution”, improved crops that they hoped would end famine, but it didn’t.  If there was more food, the people on the edge had more children, because children were a form of wealth and insurance.  I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of overpopulation and it's tense relationship to grain.

I didn’t escape other people’s children, most directly my step-daughter’s children, whose mother’s early death of cancer left them traumatized and confused in the care of their biological father who had remarried a woman with many children.  It was a freeforall.  They sought love where they could in many different forms, mostly alcohol and sex, but also in achievement. 

Ellison Westgarth MacFie Scriver and Mary Strachan Scriver (me)

Bob had never raised his own children (I was a third wife) and was unreal about his grandchildren.  His mother, their great-grandmother or “Little Grandma”, had never grown up emotionally and did not help, though she mimed being the fond grandmother.  In the end she wanted an orderly prosperous life with one Boston Bull terrier and the pretty daughter of her other son.  It was not narcissism so much as theatre, and children never follow the script.

The place that would have been occupied by babies of my own genome was taken up by animal children.  My arms and pillow were often occupied by pups and kits, but they were transient, only needing months to grow up and leave.  If you put a human baby in my arms, my emotional reaction is so strong that I turn red and begin to sweat, heart pounding.

Me, my mother, and brother.

I was highly skeptical of these baby creatures.

So babies are to me something like bombs, carrying demands and consequences that are nearly impossible to meet.  I think that to my mother her babies were like that except that she managed to give me what she had most wanted:  to finish her college degree and to have a proper wedding.  I didn’t much care about them except as means to a life of my own, but even then I had to take refuge with her again a few times.  By that time my father, who had a closed skull concussion in 1948, was dead, but my youngest brother had also come home with brain damage and so the pattern repeated.

I’m glad I never had children.  The brother who had hit his head so hard turned out to have an excellent healthy daughter whom I know now.  When it is time, which is years away, she will be the one to have my body cremated and my household dispersed and she is capable of doing that.  I’m grateful.

My last baby doll

Christmas, 1950

If one has no children of one’s own, there are plenty of other children who are dying literally for lack of family.  Some of them are inventing new forms, maybe a webwork of street kids or households of criminalized kids or kids raised in care.  Because I am atypical and “normal” life is a mystery to me, I am sympathetic to the ornery, fragile, medically problematic, temperamentally volcanic, and fantasist kids.  They’re a little like those animals I raised.  

The ghastly part is that the bobcats and foxes I had cuddled did not have the reflexes they ought to have been taught and were murdered, often by human kids.  The same thing sometimes happens to atypical kids for something like the same reasons, but the murderers are usually grown men, power-cravers whose own families are not enough.  They’re hard on pets, too.  If I knew someone had hurt a baby of mine, I would . . .  It would not end well.

MYSTERIOUSLY TENDER

An image kept appearing in arts zines that was benign but somehow skewed — not quite this and not quite that.  It was big but evidently benign since it had its head on an unalarmed child’s lap.  Maybe a sort of merman. Aren't those flippers for feet?  Maybe a walrus anomaly. 

Then there was this obscene object: 

Two HAIRY anuses on this poor blob and evidently blood pouring out of one!  Egads!  Even if it's ketchup that's just about as bad.  What kind of disease would make a person leak ketchup? What kind of person would create this little horror?   Is it symbolic?  Of what?  I started tracing back to find clues.  More.  Disturbing.  But somehow seductive.

A hand?  A baby?  Both?

Then this little baby showed up on Google Images when I was looking for something else.  I thought maybe it was a puppet.  Long hair, red, is not usual on human babies, but red hair is a mutation that "stuck," so why wouldn't they be prone to more mistakes of gestation?

Thalidomide babies?  I’d been reading in “Boyology” about chimeras like werewolves, vampires, mermaids, and so on.  I’d seen the movie about the half-alien/half-cat baby that no one could bear to destroy and I’d been talking about gestational anomalies that docs tried to save, though they would be lifelong freaks if they did.  The subject was not about realistic physical freaks, but about psychological mergings, ways to express emotional distortions.  

But even totally accurate imitations of humans, presented as art work, in the way only modern plastics would allow, had some kind of aura they projected.  I remember the first dolls that had convincingly real-seeming skin, and that the makers had abandoned sweet little puppet faces in favor of being frozen while crying.  One felt they were real and had an urge to respond to their puckered faces, so one started patting their backs and soothing "there-there." 

A few artists experimented with this intersection of instinct and uncanniness.  Sometimes the replicas were adults or even life-sized sex toys, but the impulse to make dolls continued to be fulfilled.

Fanged newborn

This little beast above was created by an artist out of the same kind of materials and techniques used on the ultra-realistic doll-babies that cost a fortune.  But alongside the evoked impulse to cuddle and rock this little creature was a troubling impulse to smother it with a pillow.  Like some ancient tribe afraid of strange things.

Somehow sex and birth were involved, maybe because of nudity.  There is an essential strangeness about inserting part of one's body into someone else, and it's even stranger for one person to emerge from the belly of another person.

I've written before about the disturbing art work of artists who replicate people, often messing with scale, so that a head might be huge.   But then these apparently small sculptures are more strange.  Like Dark Crystal.  Pan’s Labyrinth.  The picture books about trolls and elves had the same vibe but imagined creatures are far more shocking when they seem to be actual flesh.  Less like fantasy and more like sci-fi.  Science gives us many unbelievable but quite actual creatures these days.

Then I found this one:

I fancied I'd actually glimpsed it perched on one of my teetering piles of books.  Rocking a bit on its tiny buttocks.  I reach out a hand.  It turns around . . .

An elephant child. Or piglet.  Quite worried, it seemed.  But I'll put the cats outside.  This is far beyond Thumbelina or Peter Pan or Tinker Bell.  A baby from Star Wars. 

These figures are the work of Patricia Piccinini, whom I read is a major artist in Australia, the continent where evolution proceeded in quite a different way and where the aboriginals and animals are strange, the landscape is eerie, and one feels the presence of the nearby Unseen.

"Nearly Beloved" is by Helen McDonald who is not the familiar and lovable English woman who wrote about her hawk, though I have a feeling that the two Helens would get along very well.  She herself is not the artist, Patricia Piccinini.  This Helen McDonald (no "a" in the Mc) wrote the first major publication on Patricia Piccinini. This book reproduces and discusses all Piccinini's major works.  It costs $75, which is about the same as Bob Scriver's biggest book, "The Blackfeet, Artists of the Northern Plains."  (I know because my copy came from a bookshop in Australia via the Internet.)  Both these little creatures and pre-contact Native Americans have the kind of Otherness that makes us very very curious, but feeling a little endangered.

I’d been reading in “Boyology” about chimeras, which is a medical term and happens, though usually between two people -- maybe unfinished twins.  I’d seen the movie about the half-alien/half-cat baby that no one could bear to destroy until it was too late, and I’d been talking about gestational anomalies that docs tried to save, though they would be lifelong freaks if they did.  Then there are the plastic surgery disasters. This little beast suggested that if it were created by an artist, it was by using the same kind of materials and techniques used on the ultra-realistic doll-babies that cost a fortune.  Or the art work of artists who replicate people.  But these sculptures are more strange.  Here are two quick samples, both rather elfish.

I'd been vaguely aware of "art dolls," some of which fit into this context.  They are in newsstand magazines.  The creators often use Fimo to create one-of-a-kind creatures.  David Powell, son of Bob's close friend Ace Powell, makes mannequin Indians this way and dresses them authentically in mixed media clothes and artifacts.  One-fifth life-sized, he says they sell better than paintings.

The anti-Disney frame of mind makes the mermaid's tail of actual fish flesh and her new legs are those of a Borg.  So many veterans wear prosthesis legs and do not hide them.  A new art form is the decoration of replacement limbs.

https://vimeo.com/channels/114698  I found this pleasant little music YouTube vid about a record cover Piccinini designed.  She's young and pretty, not the bent-over dark witch we might have imagined.

We know immigrants and foreign lands.  We know people are different on the outside but wonder about the insides -- are other people really like us?  Aren't they dangerous?  We know we should be kind and understanding about human Otherness: gays, autistics, the blind and so on.  But they are somehow threatening.  Maybe it's the fear of being oddballs ourselves.  What if your own child turned out to be "queer" in some way, and yet so beautiful, so fragile, so otherworldly.  One's heart breaks even thinking about it.

And then there is the horror of reality.   Now you're ready to watch this performance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSgz56-w9H0

EVEN WITH PHOTOS, HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT'S REAL?

Since my father closely documented the lives of my nuclear family with photographs, I’ve been using them to compose an outline for a memoir, separating them out into themes and chronologies and posting them on Thematic.co, which concentrates on sequential photos.  I run onto problems and insights that are a little disruptive.

The times were much more innocent and so there are photos of us nude, quite young, from the back, cavorting at pajama time before the pj’s went on.  If I publish them, am I inviting accusations of pedopornography?  They were used by the family as markers of growth, freely shared, posed in front of my father’s cherished phonograph console which -- in a kind of metaphor for the times -- seemed to have drawers but in fact had a lid which opened to the turntable.  That is, since my father was an aficionado of classical music and had a respectable collection of 78’s which he stopped playing at some point in the late Forties, it represented Culture but never explained or developed.  We danced madly to the Khatchaturian Sabre Dance but didn’t know what it was.  Only my father had any idea what he was playing on his records.  He had no formal music education.

We used the radio buttons alongside the turntable which had little stickers on the keys to denote which station it would bring up.  We loved the sensation of pushing them, even when the radio was off. There were two seeming “drawer pulls” on the front which we kids would turn and turn, in hopes that they would at last do something.  At some point that piece of furniture disappeared but I have no idea the circumstances, so I must have left by then.  The records had been moved to an inaccessible set of shelves he created under his desk in the basement between the wood pile and the laundry with stacks and stacks of orange crates full of genre paperbacks.  The “literary” books were upstairs.

My father was a fond man, unless opposed, and in the early years liked to play with us and read to us.  He had a lot of little parlor tricks about paper wads and illusions involving silk scarves and pocket toys like a black Scottie and a while Sealyham with magnets mounted on the bottom that would make them repel or attract each other.  A similar magnet trick involved King Tut and his sarcophagus.  His tricks were a defense, to keep things from being real, make people laugh.  He was a traveling man in rural Oregon and used his tricks with the farmers he dealt with as well as with his family.

I cannot recall either of my parents ever holding my dolls as though they were real babies, but my mother would sometimes make doll clothes.  I was given a “Cherry Ames, Student Nurse” book, one of a series, sort of a medical version of Nancy Drew.  In it, the intrepid student nurse on night duty finds a bedridden little girl crying.  She has no doll, so Cherry goes to fetch the demo doll the nurses use to learn things.  It’s life-sized, inflatable, and there is a funny sequence about Cherry wrestling the creature down the hall to the ward, meeting someone and pretending to be dancing with it.  I had no idea that the doll the writer was really thinking of, entertaining himself with the thought of, was a sex surrogate doll.  But I read the sequence over and over, feeling that there was something behind it.

One of several family-darkening forces was my maternal grandmother’s cancer, which killed her over a period of years.  I have no memory of her but my mother said I used to play alongside her bed where she would watch me with my paper dolls.  I do remember an episode when we stayed with my grandfather in Roseburg so my mother could do the canning.  My grandmother must have been in the hospital.  We left in such a hurry that neither I nor anyone else thought to bring any of my dolls.  Today’s middle class families would simply go buy another doll, but then money was tight.  My grandfather asked me to draw a doll on a thin piece of plywood and he cut it out for me with a jigsaw.

By then my dolls were transitioning towards adulthood.  There were no sexy Barbie dolls on the market yet.  I didn’t draw a baby doll but something more like a paper doll.  Paper dolls are all about clothes and posing.  A little girl in that Roseburg neighborhood invited me to play dressups in her mother’s old nightgowns.  My mother wore plain flannel dress-length nightgowns, but her mother wore slippery satiny full-length nighties with embellishments.  We were Betty Grable and Lana Turner.  I had never heard of them, but that sophisticated little girl assured me they were the most sexy women in the world.  Her mom read movie mags.  My mother didn't allow them.

She and her family lived in the basement of their house while her father built the rest of the rooms above them, so that the first floor was like a stage on which to prance around, throwing our skinny hips back and forth and patting the back of our hair.  Her young veteran father thought we were very amusing and her mother rolled her eyes but smiled.  My mother was too involved in a row with her father to notice.  My father was, of course, missing, working.

Back in Portland, in good time, I had a “Toni doll” with hair as red as Maureen O’Hara’s -- a slightly larger scale figure than Barbie and not so busty.  You could set the hair with sugar water.  The girl across the street had a Madame Alexander doll, which was too splendid to take out of the box.  It was Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in the famous green dress impossibly made from drapes.  Fortunately, the package had a cellophane front so we could at least admire her.  A few houses down lived a girl who had an untouchable collection of small Story Book dolls: Little Bo Peep, and Cinderella and Snow White.  They were like six-year-olds with beauty contest hair who wore elaborate fussy costumes.

My last doll was a realistically squalling infant which my mother thought I was too old to want.  I never did play with it much or even cuddle it very much.  By then I was sewing my own clothes, but never made any clothes for the doll.  My eighth grade graduation present was a kitten and I transitioned to a living creature that slept stretched against me in a mixture of child and lover.  Somehow I got stuck at that stage.  Or circled back.

Today the remnant of my dolls is in a box out in the storage shed that I used to call my “bunk house.”  I can’t quite bear to just throw them in the trash, but the heat and moisture of storage has made them neither collectible nor desirable as toys.  Anyway dolls now are far more sophisticated.  

Included in the box is “Dottie Dimples,” my mother’s cherished doll with a bisque china head.  She entrusted me with DD, but I dropped her and broke her head.  After a trip to the doll hospital (in those days one got a damaged doll fixed rather than buy a new one) she was restored.  But I broke her again.  Another doll infanticide.  The look of pain and contempt on my mother’s face has never left me.  This time she refused to fix “Dottie Dimples.”

The truth is that I didn’t care a whole lot.  She wasn’t MY baby.  I didn’t want babies anyway, I told myself.

What does this have to do with my father’s nude photos of his children?  I can’t quite get at it. Do I want to?

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?