Dolls serve as comfort; they also creep us out. Which is it gonna be? And how do storytellers utilise their multivalent presence in our lives?
Outside the West, dolls are sometimes a part of supernatural/religious belief. Perhaps the most memorable and oft-utilised by storytellers is the Haitian vodou usage, which has been heavily simplified for Western audiences. Likewise, the concept of the ‘gwumu’ in Papua New Guinea is complex, and ‘doll’ is a substandard translation:
People describe gwumu as an agency hiding inside the body of another: it may be referred to as a “doll” for example, and an additional idiom I recorded referred to these familiars as “little sisters”. Though gwumu are held to be concealed in the interior of persons, they may nevertheless sometimes be seen as apparitions, especially when they have left the body of a person to hunt.
Becoming Witches
Westerners are historically no less suspicious of dolls and doll-like concepts. The following is from a well-known 1958 dictionary of symbols, written by Juan Eduardo Cirlot, and offers interesting insight into mid 20th century thoughts on human psychology:
The doll, as a symbol, appears more often in psychopathology than in the main stream of traditional symbolism. It is well known that in a number of mental disease the patient makes a doll which he keeps carefully hidden. According to J.-J. Rousseau the personality of the sick person is projected into the toy. In other cases it has been interpreted as a form of erotomania or deviation of the maternal instinct: in short, a hangover from, or regression to an infantile state. Recently, in so-called ‘Pop-art’, dolls have been included in ‘informal’ pictorial images. In Spain Modesto Cuix art has produced the most dramatic and profound work of this kind, the obvious symbolism of which is related to the ‘putti’ of Renaissance art, but, by a reversal of meaning, these dolls are made to appear maimed and soiled as if they were the corpses of children annihilated by bombs and other forces of destruction.
Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols
Go a little further back in history and you’ll find news stories such as Hellish Nell and her Dolls.
In 1926 [Hellish Nell] developed from clairvoyant to physical medium by offering séances in which she claimed to be able to permit the spirits of recently deceased persons to materialise, by emitting ectoplasm from her mouth.
In 1928 the photographer Harvey Metcalfe attended a series of séances at the house of Duncan. During a séance he took various flash photographs of Duncan and her alleged “materialization” spirits including her spirit guide “Peggy”.[6] The photographs that were taken reveal the spirits to be fraudulently produced, such as a doll made from a painted papier-mâché mask draped in an old sheet.
Wikipedia entry for Helen Duncan, Hellish Nell’s real name
We give our kids dolls, and the way kids play with them — practising their language and social skills — can feel at times like the doll itself is alive, even to an adult observer (even when we know that’s not the case). This is the uncanny valley of dolls:
Also:
THE VARIOUS FUNCTIONS OF DOLLS IN STORYTELLING
Origin Stories In Children’s Literature
Dolls are useful in ‘where-did-I-come-from’ stories. Unlike human babies, the origin story of a doll baby is easier to deal with. A large number of toy stories for children begin with toys who seem unwanted, either lost, discarded, or in a shop — the proxy orphanage (e.g. The Mouse and his Child by Russell Hoban). These stories are inevitably about friendship, and friendship stories must start from a place of loneliness.
DOLLS AS SYMBOL OF FEMININITY
The link between dolls and girls is historical and strong. In 20th century storytelling and illustration it’s rare to find a boy playing with a doll. Dolls are used to let young girls practice the emotional labour they’ll eventually be expending upon their families for real. Dolls teach girls to share, to make cups of tea, to nurse, to heal and most of all, to mother.
A doll doesn’t necessarily bind girl characters to the house in domestic stories; it sometimes means girls are out on adventures, but with dolls.
Contemporary storytellers are likely to give dolls to boy characters in order to critique the message that boys can’t play with girl toys.
Doll Bones by Holly Black is a 2013 middle grade horror novel by Holly Black, and won the Newbery Honor and Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature, among other things.
Zachary (Zach) Barlow is described as a boy who is tall for his age and good at sports, but who jettisons his admission into privileged masculinity by continuing to play with ‘dolls’. Over the course of the story his challenge will be to break free from external expectations for how he should be and learn to embrace what he loves and who he really is.
In chapter two, Zach’s macho father throws out all Zach’s toys, and with the toys go Zach’s social life, imaginary life and feelings for his father. The father thinks he is doing his son a favour. By throwing out his son’s toys he will turn him into a real man. In middle grade fiction the parents are quite often well-meaning but completely off-base, standing in the way of their children being who they really are.
DOLL AS EVIDENCE OF OFF-KILTER PSYCHOLOGY
Doll Bones also utilises mid 20th century psychology: The character of Alice Magnaye uses her doll as an idealised alter ego.
Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud documented a case study of a woman who believed her dolls would awaken and come to life with a certain gaze. Freud then considered larger ideas of dolls coming alive as a delight to some children rather than inciting fear.
DISCARDED DOLL AS END OF GIRLHOOD
At eleven, we still played with dolls. Some were missing limbs; others had lost lashes and hair; all had patches of skin scraped and dulled by the years of dressing and undressing, incessant bathing. We owned no male dolls but a set of tin soldiers I begged my mother to buy. The soldiers were disproportionally small, which made perfect sense to us because most of the boys in our class were shorter than the girls. We protected the soldiers fiercely, and not because they were fewer in number and cost more, but because they seemed so delicate to us and somehow helpless, in need of nurturing and reassurance. We handled the soldiers with care and stowed them in their box every evening.
Sometimes we pretended that the soldiers had just returned from the war to their wives and girlfriends. Then we would strip them naked and lay their stiff cold bodies on top of the pink plastic ones and rub the figures together as hard as we could.
“Do you think she’s pregnant by now?” Milka would ask.
“Maybe. How long does it usually take?”
“Don’t know. Let’s rub some more,” she’d say, and slide her doll back and forth under my soldier.
from The Orchard by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, 2023
THE HORROR DOLL
There is something inherently horrifying about children looking after even smaller children (because they can’t).
The Conjuring/Annabelle movies are popular contemporary Catholic horror films. An inhuman spirit attaches itself to a doll. So let’s get the doll exorcised. Simples. Except the storytellers have covered that one. The doll isn’t possessed as such, because demons don’t possess things, only people. Instead, this demon clings to the doll, manipulating it, in order to give the impression of a haunting. The target is really Donna’s soul.
It’s interesting that this trope is still so hugely popular, especially after the spoofy Child’s Play movies which began in the 1980s and are still going strong.
DOLLS TO MINIATURISE A STORY WORLD
All about that: here.
Doll Bones is a great example of a story which utilises miniatures: The children play on a driveway in an American suburban house, but imagine they are playing in a much more vast environment. The asphalt is ‘The Blackest Sea’. The children are themselves dolls compared to the vastness of the world, creating a mise en abyme effect.
The three child characters of Doll Bones by Holly Black are introduced in the first chapter in a scene where they are playing together. Zach is subtly the main character. The world is filtered through his eyes. Ingeniously, the children are described via the roles they play with dolls.
DOLLS AND HOLIDAY TRADITIONS
Saint Nicolaas’ feast in the Netherlands includes a tradition of sending love dolls, or ‘vrijers’ anonymously to your sweetheart (to be) through Sinterklaas. (A Christmas/Valentines Day combo.)
The Almost-Human: A Survey of Dolls in Storytelling
The doll looks back without seeing. This is its essential quality, the thing that separates it from every other object in human culture and makes it so extraordinarily useful to storytelling: it has the face of a person, the approximate form of a person, and none of the interiority of a person. We made it to look like us, and then we gave it to children to practise loving. What happens next — in the hands of writers, filmmakers, psychologists, and children — is the subject of this survey.
The doll is simultaneously the most innocent of objects and the most disturbing. It sits at the intersection of almost every major theme in storytelling: the nature of the self, the relationship between love and projection, the horror of the familiar made strange, the feminist politics of being treated as an object, the desire to create life, and the question of what consciousness actually requires. No other single object has generated as much symbolic weight across as many different genres and traditions. The doll is a vessel, and what gets poured into it tells us almost everything about the culture doing the pouring.
The Theoretical Foundation: Freud, Hoffmann, and the Uncanny
Any serious survey of dolls in storytelling must begin with E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story The Sandman (1816) and Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay Das Unheimliche (“The Uncanny”), which analyses it — because together they constitute the theoretical architecture within which almost all subsequent doll narratives operate, whether consciously or not.
Hoffmann’s story follows Nathanael, a young student already disturbed by childhood trauma involving a sinister figure called the Sandman who he believes visits at night to steal the eyes of children who won’t sleep. As a young man, Nathanael falls obsessively in love with Olympia — the beautiful, silent daughter of his professor Spalanzani. Olympia listens to him for hours, staring with unblinking, luminous eyes. She says almost nothing. She is the ideal audience for Nathanael’s own torrential emotions. She is, he eventually discovers, an automaton — a mechanical doll made by Spalanzani and the sinister optician Coppola (whom Nathanael identifies with the Sandman of his childhood). Her eyes are artificial. When Spalanzani and Coppola fight over her and she is destroyed, Spalanzani throws her bloody eyes at Nathanael. He collapses into madness.
Freud’s analysis of this story identifies the unheimlich — the uncanny — as the unsettling experience produced by something that is simultaneously familiar and strange. The doll is the paradigmatic example: it has the form of what we know most intimately (the human face and body) in a context that makes that familiarity strange (an inanimate object, a made thing). Hoffmann’s Olympia heightens this by making Nathanael’s love for her legible and his delusion comprehensible — she is a perfect listener, endlessly available, never disappointing, never threatening. His love for the automaton is, Freud argues, a form of narcissism: Olympia is a mirror that reflects only Nathanael’s own desires back at him. What he loves is not her but the image of himself she produces.
Freud’s insight about Olympia is the insight about the doll that the entire tradition has been working through ever since: that we love dolls because they demand our projection without threatening us with a counter-projection of their own. The doll will always be what we need it to be. It is the safest possible object of love, and therefore, Hoffmann and Freud suggest, the most dangerous.
Hoffmann also establishes the motif of the eyes. Nathanael’s childhood terror is that the Sandman takes eyes; Olympia’s eyes are artificial and eventually literal missiles. The doll’s eyes — which look without seeing, which meet the gaze without returning it — are the seat of its uncanniness. Every subsequent horror doll tradition knows this instinctively.
Rilke on Dolls: The Essay That Changed Everything
Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1914 essay Einige Reflexionen über Puppen (“Some Reflections on Dolls”) — written as a preface to a collection of wax doll photographs — is the most philosophically disturbing text about dolls in any language, and it deserves extensive quotation because it thinks about dolls in a way that no subsequent writer has quite matched.
Rilke argues that the doll is the child’s first experience of the hostile object — the thing that demands love and returns nothing. He writes of the doll:
“It was content to fall, if we threw it, and did not feel our growing indifference, when we left it lying where it had fallen. It let us babble away before it without tiring, and if we were sometimes silent, it was not so penetrating in its silence as an animal would have been, which moves in the house as an equal, or a dog that looks at us with its warm brown eyes.”
The doll, Rilke argues, is the practise material for loving the unresponsive — for loving something that cannot love you back. It prepares the child for the experience of being alone in a relationship, of investing feeling into a space that returns only what you project into it:
“What we knew of it, or rather, what we suspected of it, filled it to the brim; it was like a vessel into which we poured all we felt.”
This is the doll as training for grief, for unrequited love, for the fundamental asymmetry of loving more than you are loved. Rilke treats this not as an incidental feature of playing with dolls but as their essential function: they teach us that love can be total and its object still absent. “It was a bit like Fate.”
The essay ends with the observation that dolls occasionally surface from forgotten corners of old houses, and that the encounter is always disturbing — because the doll still carries the residue of everything that was projected into it, all the childhood feeling with which it was saturated, but it gives none of it back. It keeps everything. It is, Rilke concludes, something like the soul: a vessel for what we have been that returns nothing of what we gave.
Rilke’s essay is not widely read outside literary circles, but its argument runs beneath the surface of almost every serious doll narrative in the 20th century. The doll as the object that receives without returning; as the training ground for the asymmetries of feeling; as the vessel that keeps the past locked inside it — all of these are Rilke’s insights before they are anyone else’s.
The Doll Seeking Humanity: Pinocchio and the Velveteen Rabbit
Two of the tradition’s most beloved doll narratives are both organised around the same desire: the doll that wants to become real. But they approach this desire from opposite directions, and their difference illuminates something important about what “real” means.
The Adventures of Pinocchio — Carlo Collodi (1883)
Collodi’s wooden puppet is made by the carpenter Geppetto to be a son, and spends the novel trying to deserve the humanity his creator wishes for him. The story’s moral architecture is explicit: Pinocchio becomes a real boy not through any chemical or magical transformation but through proving himself good — obedient, honest, self-sacrificing. He is real when he has earned reality.
This makes Pinocchio the doll narrative that is most invested in the relationship between form and character: the wooden body is the external sign of an incomplete interiority, and the real boy’s body is the reward for moral development. The nose that grows when he lies is the most famous single element — the body that cannot hide the self’s moral condition, that makes the inner life externally legible. Pinocchio’s body is a moral barometer.
The story is also about the relationship between creator and creation — Geppetto makes Pinocchio, loves him, is repeatedly disappointed by him, is swallowed by a whale while searching for him, and is eventually saved by him. The creator’s suffering at the hands of his creation, and the creation’s eventual redemption through saving the creator, is the doll narrative’s version of the Frankenstein plot — which is also a creation narrative — but resolved in the direction of love rather than destruction.
Every adaptation of Pinocchio — and there have been dozens — reveals what its moment thinks the relationship between authenticity and goodness looks like. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022) sets the story in Fascist Italy and makes Pinocchio’s refusal to be obedient — his fundamental independence of spirit — the thing that saves him rather than the thing that needs to be cured. Del Toro’s Pinocchio is already real; the story is about a world that tries to turn real, wild children into obedient puppets.
The Velveteen Rabbit — Margery Williams (1922)
Williams’s story approaches the realness question from the other direction. The Skin Horse — an old toy who has been loved so long he has become Real — tells the Rabbit what Real means:
“Real isn’t how you are made. It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
The Rabbit asks if it hurts. The Skin Horse says generally it does. He says it doesn’t happen to toys that break easily or have sharp edges or need to be carefully kept. He says it takes a long time.
Williams’s Real is the opposite of Collodi’s: it is not moral achievement but the consequence of being loved. The doll does not earn reality through good behaviour; it receives reality as the gift of sustained love. This is the doll as the beneficiary of what Rilke’s essay identifies as the child’s one-directional love — but Williams inverts Rilke’s pessimism. The love is not wasted on an unresponsive vessel; it transforms the vessel. The doll becomes what the child has always imagined it to be.
The story’s ending is devastating and perfect: the Velveteen Rabbit is burned with other toys when the Boy gets scarlet fever. A fairy takes him and makes him genuinely real — no longer a toy but an actual rabbit. In the spring, the Boy sees a rabbit in the garden that seems familiar somehow. The Real that love created has survived the destruction of the form that love was given to.
Williams is making a claim about the nature of love itself: that it creates something that outlasts its occasion. The doll is real because it was loved, and it remains real even when the form through which it was loved is gone.
The Doll as Woman: Ibsen and the Politics of Being Treated as an Object
A Doll’s House (Et dukkehjem) — Henrik Ibsen (1879)
Ibsen’s play is the most important engagement with the doll concept in serious drama, and it works by inverting the horror tradition: rather than an inanimate doll threatening to become animate, it is a living woman gradually recognising that she has been treated as a doll — and choosing, at enormous cost, to become real.
Torvald Helmer calls his wife Nora his “little skylark,” his “little squirrel,” his “little spendthrift.” He arranges her, decorates her, manages her — and the house they live in is a doll’s house: comfortable, warm, prettily furnished, and fundamentally false. Nora has spent her marriage performing the role that Torvald requires: charming, childlike, dependent, decorative. She has had a secret — she once forged her father’s signature to borrow money that saved Torvald’s life, and has been quietly repaying the loan for years — and this secret is the only dimension of her inner life that Torvald has not managed and arranged.
When the secret surfaces and Torvald’s response reveals his utter failure to know or respect her as a person, Nora leaves. She walks out of the doll’s house, and the slamming of the door at the play’s end is one of theatre’s most famous sounds. George Bernard Shaw called it “the door slam heard round the world.” What it announces is a woman’s decision to stop being a doll and become a person — to choose the difficulty of a real self over the comfort of a performed one.
Ibsen’s title was deliberate and deeply considered. The doll’s house is not simply a metaphor for a comfortable bourgeois home; it is a specific image of the woman’s position within it. She is the doll in the house — the beautiful, arranged, managed object around whom the domestic space is organised. Her realness is not in question to those around her; her realness is precisely what is in question to her.
The play’s feminist power — which made it scandalous in 1879 and remains potent — is its insistence that the woman’s inner life is real and sufficient and cannot be satisfied by the doll’s house, however beautiful. Torvald is not a villain; he is a man who genuinely loves the doll he has arranged his wife to be. The horror is that his love is sincere and entirely insufficient. He loves a performance. He has never met the person performing it.
Estella in Great Expectations — Charles Dickens (1861)
Miss Havisham has made Estella a doll — consciously and explicitly, fashioning her from childhood into an instrument of revenge against men. Estella has been trained not to feel; she has been made beautiful and cold, a weapon aimed at the male heart, designed to break it as Miss Havisham’s heart was broken. She tells Pip with genuine puzzlement: she has no heart to lose. She does not know what love feels like. She has been made not to know.
Miss Havisham’s project is the deliberate manufacture of a woman who cannot be hurt because she cannot feel — which is the doll’s condition exactly. She has made Estella into the ideal doll: beautiful, responsive on the surface, genuinely absent within. And the horror she eventually confronts — in her climactic scene with Estella — is that the doll she made cannot love her either. The weapon she fashioned is also aimed at her. She wanted to make a thing that could not be hurt; she made a thing that cannot love.
Dickens’s treatment of Estella is one of his most complex characterisations precisely because she is simultaneously victim and instrument, a woman whose inner life has been genuinely deformed by her creation as a doll, and who must spend the novel’s second half asking whether anything recoverable remains inside that carefully fashioned coldness.
The Animated Doll: Horror and the Return of Agency
The horror tradition’s use of dolls is organised around a single reversal: the object that was supposed to be controlled achieves agency. The doll that was made to be played with starts to play. The thing we arranged begins to arrange us.
“Living Doll” — The Twilight Zone (1963)
This episode — one of the most celebrated in the series — features Talky Tina, a doll belonging to a little girl, who speaks threatening messages to the girl’s abusive stepfather. “My name is Talky Tina and I’m going to kill you.” Only he can hear her say these things. She denies it to others. He tries to destroy her and cannot.
Rod Serling’s episode is more sophisticated than its summary suggests, because Talky Tina is not straightforwardly evil — she is protecting the child. The doll that has absorbed the child’s love, the child’s fear, the child’s need for protection, has become the instrument of that protection. She is doing what the adults around the girl will not do: she is threatening the person who threatens the child.
The episode ends with the stepfather tripping over Tina at the top of the stairs and dying. The final image is Tina telling the mother: “My name is Talky Tina, and you’d better be nice to me.” The doll’s agency is real, its violence is directed at the guilty, and its final warning is a moral instruction to the surviving adult. This is the horror doll as moral agent — disturbing in form but functioning as justice.
Child’s Play (1988) and the Chucky Franchise
The Good Guy doll containing the soul of serial killer Charles Lee Ray is the horror tradition’s most elaborated killer doll — a franchise that has run for over thirty years and evolved from pure horror through self-aware camp to, in the recent television series, something approaching genuine character study.
The original Child’s Play plays on the specific horror of the toy that a child trusts completely. Andy Barclay knows that Chucky is responsible for the deaths around him and cannot convince the adults; the child is believed by no one because children are not believed, and the doll is the instrument of the child’s specific vulnerability. The Good Guy doll is the most trustworthy-seeming object in the culture — a toy marketed to children, cheerful, friendly, saying “I’m your friend till the end” — and Chucky is the corruption of exactly that trust.
What the franchise discovers over time, as it grows self-aware, is that Chucky’s humanity is what makes him interesting. He is a person — vicious, crude, funny, capable of genuine attachment in his deranged way — trapped in a doll’s body, dealing with its limitations (short, unable to drive, difficult to take seriously as a threat), resentful of his condition. The later films and the television series use Chucky’s doll status as a sustained metaphor for outsider identity: the thing that cannot be assimilated, that makes others uncomfortable, that is always looking in from outside the category of the acceptable.
Annabelle and the Possessed Doll Tradition
The Annabelle doll in the Conjuring universe — based on a real Raggedy Ann doll allegedly associated with paranormal activity and kept in the Warrens’ Occult Museum — represents the doll as vessel for something that the doll’s blankness invites. The real Annabelle is not, by most accounts, particularly frightening-looking. The film replaces it with a vintage porcelain doll of the kind that is already uncanny in appearance — because the filmmakers understand what Freud understood: the doll’s horror is intrinsic to its form, not to any particular history.
The possessed doll tradition across horror film — from Dead Silence (2007) to The Boy (2016) to Dolls (1987) — consistently uses the doll as the object that looks like an innocent container but holds something that should not be contained. The doll’s blankness — its inability to express what it contains — is the horror. It could hold anything. You cannot tell from its face what is inside it.
The Ventriloquist’s Dummy
The ventriloquist’s dummy is a doll that speaks — or rather, through which the ventriloquist speaks, in a voice that is deliberately not quite the ventriloquist’s. It is the doll tradition at its most explicitly psychological: the split self externalised into a figure that can say what the performer cannot.
Dead of Night (1945) — the British horror anthology — contains what many consider the finest dummy narrative in cinema. Michael Redgrave plays Maxwell Frere, a ventriloquist whose dummy Hugo gradually takes over his personality, eventually committing murder and attempting to escape into another ventriloquist’s act. The film presents Hugo’s takeover as either genuine supernatural possession or the externalisation of Frere’s own dissociated personality — and deliberately refuses to decide which. The dummy says what Frere represses. Whether the dummy is causing the repression to surface or is simply the form it takes is left permanently open.
Magic (1978), with Anthony Hopkins as the ventriloquist Corky and a dummy named Fats, works on the same ambiguity: Fats says what Corky cannot — his rage, his desire, his violence. The film is a character study of a man so thoroughly divided that the division has been externalised into a performed relationship with an object. Fats is Corky’s Hyde, and the question of whether Fats is real or a psychotic symptom is the film’s central unresolved mystery.
The ventriloquist’s dummy tradition is the doll tradition at its most explicit about projection: the dummy speaks the ventriloquist’s voice and says the ventriloquist’s dark material, and the performance of distance — this is not me, this is the dummy — is the thin membrane between acceptable and unacceptable self-expression.
What If the Dolls Were Alive? Toy Story and Consciousness
Toy Story series — Pixar (1995–2019)
Pixar’s solution to the doll-consciousness question is both the most optimistic and the most melancholy in the tradition. The toys in Andy’s room are fully conscious, fully feeling beings who exist primarily to be played with, and the series tracks what that existence — of consciousness in service of another’s pleasure — actually requires of a person.
Woody’s identity is entirely organised around being Andy’s toy. His terror when Buzz Lightyear arrives is not simple jealousy but an existential crisis: if he is not Andy’s favourite, what is he? He has built his entire self around his function, and function is precarious. This is the doll’s existential condition made fully explicit: a being whose purpose is to be used, who has to find meaning within that constraint, who must ask what remains of the self when the purpose is exhausted.
The series’ great subject — developed with increasing gravity through three sequels and the Pixar short Toy Story of Terror — is obsolescence. Toys age out of use. Children grow up. Andy’s departure for college in Toy Story 3 is one of animated cinema’s most emotionally complex sequences, because it makes explicit what was always implicit: that the toys’ purpose is temporary, that the relationship they have built their identity around will end, and that what happens after that is the question the film must answer.
The incinerator sequence in Toy Story 3 — where the toys hold hands and prepare to die together, surrendering to the inevitable — before being saved by the claw is the series’ emotional climax, and it works because the film has genuinely earned it. These are conscious beings facing death with dignity, and the dignity is real. The fact that they are toys makes it more moving rather than less.
Toy Story 4 extends this further by raising the question of whether Woody can choose a purpose beyond service to a child — whether the doll can, at the end of its functional life, become something else. His choice to stay with Bo Peep and become a “lost toy” rather than return to Bonnie is the series’ most radical conclusion: the toy choosing its own life, its own relationships, its own purpose. It is, implicitly, the doll’s declaration of independence — the Doll’s House ending in plastic and polyester.
Barbie: The Doll as Cultural Artifact and Feminist Subject
Barbie — Greta Gerwig (2023)
Gerwig’s film opens by explicitly invoking Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey — the monolith scene, the gathered apes, the moment of transformation — but here the apes are girls, and the monolith is Barbie. Small girls playing with baby dolls discover a full-size adult woman doll and begin, in slow motion, to destroy their baby dolls. Barbie, the film announces, liberated girls from the expectation that female play must be about practising motherhood. She gave them a self that was already an adult, already a subject, already capable of anything — astronaut, doctor, president.
This is the film’s first and most serious claim about the doll it is named for: that the Barbie doll was genuinely liberating in a specific historical moment, and that this liberation was real even if everything else about her was complicated.
The film then proceeds to make everything else complicated. Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) begins to have intrusive thoughts about death — an existential crisis that sends her into the real world. What she finds there is the gap between what she represents (possibility, empowerment, having everything) and what she does (sell an impossible body image to real girls, project an impossible life). The film holds both things simultaneously and refuses to collapse the tension between them: Barbie is genuinely liberating AND genuinely damaging, a projection of female aspiration AND an instrument of impossible standards.
America Ferrera’s monologue — spoken to Barbie in the film’s second half — is the most direct statement the film makes about what it is to be a woman in a world organised around impossible contradictions:
“It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.”
The speech lists the contradictions: too sexual, not sexual enough; too ambitious, too yielding; too loud, too quiet. It is the doll’s condition made human — the woman who must be the right things in the right combinations for the people around her, who is perpetually mis-scaled to her environment the way Alice was mis-scaled by her potions, who cannot find the correct version of herself because the correct version is defined by contradictions that cannot be simultaneously satisfied.
Ken’s parallel journey — discovering patriarchy in the real world and bringing it back to Barbieland as a kind of religion — is the film’s most explicit satire, but its more interesting dimension is what it reveals about Ken’s fundamental insecurity. Ken (Ryan Gosling) is a doll too: the male accessory to Barbie’s life, with no job, no identity, no function except in relation to her. His discovery of patriarchy is a traumatised person’s grasp at a structure that might give him self-worth independent of Barbie’s regard. The film is sympathetic to this even as it mocks it. The male doll’s crisis mirrors the female doll’s: both have been defined by their function within a system they didn’t design.
The film’s ending — in which Barbie chooses to become a real woman, mortal and imperfect, rather than remain a doll — is the Pinocchio resolution dressed in Chanel: the doll choosing the difficulty of a real self over the comfort of a performed ideal. She chooses a name (Barbara Handler, after Barbie’s real-world creator Ruth Handler) and enters the world she has always been sold as representing, but has never actually inhabited.
Great Expectations Revisited: The Child Made into a Doll
The most chilling doll-maker in literary fiction is not a toymaker or a witch but a jilted bride. Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) has frozen time at the moment of her abandonment — clocks stopped, wedding cake rotting on the table, wedding dress still worn — and into this frozen world she introduces a small girl named Estella, whom she fashions deliberately and consciously into a weapon.
Estella is the doll Miss Havisham makes to take revenge on men: she is trained to attract and then disappoint, to offer the appearance of love while withholding its substance. She is made beautiful and cold. She is told that her heart is a thing she does not possess. She is, in the vocabulary of the doll tradition, the perfect doll: all surface, no interior, gorgeous and empty.
The horror that Miss Havisham eventually confronts is the horror of the doll-maker who has been too thorough. Estella tells her, without cruelty, that she has no love to give — not to Pip, not to anyone, not to Miss Havisham herself. She was made not to. The fashioner of the perfect emotional weapon discovers that the weapon cannot discriminate. She made a thing that cannot be hurt; she also made a thing that cannot love. The instrument she aimed at others is also pointed at her.
Dickens’s Estella is the feminist doll narrative without the feminist consciousness — Estella is not Nora, does not have the resources to recognise her own condition and name it, cannot slam a door and walk out because she has been made not to want anything strongly enough to walk toward it. Her gradual recovery of something like interiority, in the novel’s later sections, is tentative and partial. Dickens does not give her Nora’s declaration. He gives her something bleaker: the possibility that the damage can be partially undone, and no certainty that it will be.
The Russian Doll: Vasilisa and the Protective Object
The Russian folk tale tradition contains a different doll archetype entirely: the doll as the mother’s love made material, the protective presence that sustains the child after the mother’s death.
In Vasilisa the Beautiful, the most widely collected version of the Russian doll tale, Vasilisa’s dying mother gives her a small doll and instructs her: if you are ever in trouble, feed the doll, and it will help you. The doll does help — through the ordeals that the wicked stepmother sets, through the terrifying visit to Baba Yaga’s house, through the tasks that should be impossible. The doll solves each problem while Vasilisa sleeps.
This is the doll as benevolent extension of the dead: the mother who cannot physically be present has condensed something of herself into an object that can continue to act on her daughter’s behalf. The doll here is not a vessel for the uncanny but a vessel for love that survives death — the Velveteen Rabbit tradition but more explicitly about inheritance and protection.
The Russian folk tale doll is also always small, always private, always fed (the doll eats a little of whatever Vasilisa eats — it is nourished by the same substance as the living child). This intimacy of maintenance is significant: the doll must be cared for to care for you. Love is not automatically stored; it must be sustained by reciprocal attention, even between the living and the dead.
Heinrich von Kleist and the Marionette: Grace, Consciousness, and the Puppet
On the Marionette Theatre (Über das Marionettentheater) — Heinrich von Kleist (1810)
Kleist’s short essay — written as a dialogue, framed as an observation about a marionette show — is one of the most counterintuitive texts in the doll tradition. A dancer explains to the narrator that marionettes move with more grace than human dancers because they have no self-consciousness. The puppet does not know it is being watched, does not perform its watching of itself, does not interrupt its movement with the reflective self-awareness that makes human movement effortful and awkward. The puppet’s centre of gravity guides it; the human dancer’s consciousness interferes.
Kleist’s argument is that the self-consciousness that distinguishes humans from dolls is also what makes human movement less than perfect — that grace, in the fullest sense, requires either the absence of consciousness (the puppet) or its transcendence (the god). The self-conscious human is permanently caught between these conditions, capable of neither natural grace nor divine grace.
This is the doll tradition’s most paradoxical contribution: the argument that the doll’s blankness, its absence of interiority, is not a lack but a form of perfection that consciousness cannot achieve. The doll is not aspiring to be human; the human is aspiring to the doll’s condition of unselfconscious movement. The tradition that begins with Hoffmann’s horror at the automaton ends, in Kleist, with the automaton as the model for the grace that human consciousness perpetually fails to achieve.
The Japanese Doll: Cultural Specificity and Hina Matsuri
Japan has a relationship with dolls that is both more ancient and more ritually elaborated than the Western tradition, and it has produced a distinct set of doll narratives that the Western tradition has only partially absorbed.
The Hina Matsuri — the Doll Festival, held on March 3rd — involves the display of elaborate sets of imperial court dolls, accumulated over generations, that represent a wish for the girl of the household: that she will live a long and happy life, find a good husband, and prosper. The dolls are not played with; they are ceremonially displayed and then put away. They are ancestors and wishes simultaneously — a connection to the past and a projection into the future, held in fragile form.
The Bunraku puppet theatre — developed in Osaka in the 17th century — uses near-life-size puppets manipulated by three operators simultaneously (the main operator controlling the head and right arm, the others controlling the left arm and the legs), with the operators visible on stage in full view of the audience. The theatrical contract of Bunraku asks the audience to see and simultaneously ignore the operators — to invest the puppet with the full emotional reality of a character while the machinery of its operation is entirely visible.
This is the doll tradition at its most formally sophisticated: a theatrical practice that asks the audience to perform the same investment that the child performs with a beloved toy, knowing perfectly well that the doll is an object being manipulated, and achieving genuine emotion anyway. Bunraku plays — which include the great tragedies of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, often called the Shakespeare of Japan — achieve pathos that the visible mechanism does not undercut. The audience knows the puppet is a puppet. They weep anyway.
Dolls in Contemporary Realist Fiction
Contemporary literary fiction has engaged with dolls in ways that take the tradition’s symbolic weight seriously while situating it in recognisably realist frameworks.
The Miniaturist — Jessie Burton (2014)
Set in 17th-century Amsterdam, Burton’s novel follows Petronella Oortman, who receives as a wedding gift from her merchant husband a cabinet dollhouse — an exact replica of their home. She commissions a mysterious miniaturist to furnish it, and the miniature objects that arrive begin to prefigure or mirror events in the actual house before they occur. A doll figure of a pregnant woman arrives before anyone knows Marin is pregnant. A cradle appears before the birth. The miniaturist seems to know the house’s future.
Burton uses the dollhouse and the miniaturist to explore the relationship between representation and reality — between the doll’s house as an object of control and the actual house as a site of uncontrollable life. Petronella’s husband Johannes has designed the perfect marriage just as he might design a perfect dollhouse: beautiful, ordered, and organised around a fiction (his homosexuality means the marriage will never be what he has designed it to appear). The dollhouse miniature and the house it models share a structural irony: both are perfectly arranged facades over lives that refuse to be arranged.
The miniaturist, who is never explained and never fully appears, is the tradition’s most interesting recent deployment of the doll-maker archetype: someone who knows what the house contains, who can see or determine the future, and who works through objects rather than direct intervention.
Piranesi — Susanna Clarke (2020) — a note
Clarke’s novel, discussed in the synesthesia survey for its cross-sensory perceptions, also engages with the doll tradition through its protagonist’s fundamental condition: Piranesi has been constructed — his identity fabricated by another person’s manipulation of his environment and his memory — and lives in a world that is itself a kind of elaborate dollhouse, a constructed environment in which he moves without understanding that he has been placed there. He is, in a sense, someone else’s doll — animated, conscious, but positioned and managed by a force he cannot see.
The Doll as Double: The Uncanny Self
One of the doll tradition’s most persistent and least explicitly discussed functions is the doll as double — the object that looks like the self and therefore becomes the repository for everything about the self that cannot be otherwise expressed or confronted.
In children’s play, the doll is always potentially the child’s double: dressed in the child’s cast-offs, addressed by name, given stories that map onto the child’s own anxieties and desires. The doll acts out what the child cannot — saying the forbidden thing, receiving the punishment the child fears, acting as surrogate for the whole range of experiences that the child is trying to process.
In adult fiction, this function becomes the doppelgänger tradition: the double that is either a projection of the self’s dark material (Jekyll/Hyde, where the double is literally released by chemistry) or the confrontation with an alternative version of the self (the various doubles in Dostoevsky, Poe, and their successors). The doll is the doppelgänger at its most material: an object you can hold and arrange, a double you can control — until you can’t.
The horror doll’s animation is always, at its deepest level, the return of what was projected into it: the child’s fears, the unconscious’s content, the repressed material given form and agency. Chucky is the violent id; Talky Tina is protective rage; the ventriloquist’s dummy is the self’s unsayable speech. They are all doubles — controlled projections that have escaped control.
And Barbie — the most contemporary and the most commercially produced of all these figures — is the culture’s double: everything a society wants for and fears in its women, given a smiling face and impossible proportions and sold, for seventy years, at a price that seems entirely reasonable until you examine what it is actually selling you.
Dolls as Projection
The doll’s power in storytelling rests on the same foundation as its power in life: it is the object we made to look like ourselves, and it looks back without seeing. Everything we project into that look — love, fear, meaning, horror, identity — is our own. The doll does not produce these things; it receives and reflects them.
This is why the doll is so useful to storytelling across such different genres. Horror uses the doll because nothing is more disturbing than what we thought we controlled achieving agency. Children’s literature uses it because nothing is more moving than the question of what love can make real. Feminist drama uses it because nothing captures the experience of being treated as an object more precisely than the image of the doll’s house. Psychology uses it because nothing externalises the dynamics of projection and narcissism more clearly than the figure of the person who falls in love with an automaton. Fantasy uses it because nothing encodes the desire to create life — and the terror of succeeding — more accessibly than the puppet that walks.
Rilke understood that the doll teaches children to love the unresponsive — to pour feeling into something that gives back only what you project into it. He thought this was cruel and possibly harmful. But there is another way to read it. The child who loves the doll with complete seriousness — who feeds it, names it, grieves for it, makes it real — is not practising a failure of love. She is practising love’s essential activity: the creation of meaning in the space between the self and the world, the investment of care into something that cannot guarantee a return.
That is what love does. That is what storytelling does. The doll, looked at from this angle, is not the hostile object that Rilke feared but the invitation to the fundamental human act: to make something real by attending to it.
The doll looks back without seeing. And we give it the gift of our seeing anyway. That is the oldest story there is.
PAPER DOLLS
The 12 Magic Changelings is a set of paper dolls from 1907… with a twist.
OTHER RANDOM LINKS ABOUT DOLLS
1. Artist repaints dolls to make them look like celebrities, from Lost At E Minor. See, dolls do have their uses.
2. Woman Is Addicted to Smelling Scary-Ass, Disembodied Doll Head, from Jezebel, because sometimes addictions are like sexual fetishes — completely and utterly inexplicable.
3. Over Half Of Mommyish Readers Would Buy A Presidential Barbie. (I’m not one of them.) Are we missing the point entirely by dressing Barbies up in presidential garb?
4. Arty Photos of people posing as Barbie and Ken, by Dina Goldstein
5. On the subject of toys and photography, 10 Best Flickr Groups Featuring Toys, from Inspired Mag
6. The Gender Politics Of The Dollhouse from The Society Pages
7. I Am Not A Doll! — from a six year old girl, described by her mother at Bosom Buddies Tackle Parenting
8. Creepy Alert! These 25 ‘Twisted Bean Stalk Nursery’ Dolls Will Haunt Your Dreams, from Babble
9. Eerie Photos Of A Subculture Devoted To Lifelike Baby Dolls from Co.Design
10. Black Is Beautiful: Why Black Dolls Matter from UTune
11. This Creepy Real-Life Barbie Infographic Makes The Doll Ideal Very Unappealing from Frisky
12. Here is a 3D printed doll, cloned from a real human’s head, that you can never unsee from Messy Nessy
13. Let’s Talk About American Girl Dolls from Thought Catalog
14. Lifelike baby dolls and the people who love them from Kottke
15. Sexy Halloween Costumes Are Just Like Doll Costumes, points out Rebecca Haines
Fans of architecture and the occult will want to mark the creepily abandoned doll village in the woods of Middlebury, Connecticut on their Google Maps. The demonic voices that commanded their architect to build them (then kill himself once he was done) are reportedly still living inside of them. Locals say that you can hear them at night, but as long as you don’t have a background in construction, you should be fine.
The Most Disturbing Urban Legend From Every State In America
Header painting: Charles Haigh Wood – Storytime 1893
