Also

by
Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene
and from McFarland

Women, Art and the New Deal (2016)

Winifred Black/Annie Laurie and the Making of Modern Nonfiction (2015)

Seeing the American Woman, 1880–1920: The Social Impact of the Visual
Media Explosion (Katherine H. Adams, Michael L. Keene, Jennifer C. Koella,
2012)

Women of the American Circus, 1880–1940 (2012)

After the Vote Was Won: The Later Achievements of Fifteen Suffragists (2010)
 Paper Dolls
Fragile Figures, Enduring Symbols
Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Jefferson, North Carolina
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-2939-1

© 2017 Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by
any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publisher.

Front cover image of 1920 Cinderella paper dolls © 2017 PicturesNow

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

  Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
    www.mcfarlandpub.com
KHA: For Barbara Ewell

MLK: For all my family

 Acknowledgments

As always when we write, we would like to thank the fine librarians of

Loyola University, especially Pat Doran and Jim Hobbs.

Kate would additionally like to thank her chair, John Biguenet, and her
dean, Maria Calzada, for their kindness and their support. She also profited
from insights about the project provided by her department’s ELF writing
group chaired by Hillary Eklund; by her colleague Laura Murphy; and by
Jane Joyner and the Camp Street Readers.

Books came for this project from many libraries through interlibrary loan.
We also profited from the research assistance of Mary Borgo at Indiana
University.

For the excellent images, we are indebted to the Photoshop skills and
generosity of Willie Wax.
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Paper Power Begins

2. Political Satire and Change

3. Paper Characters and the Creativity of Toy Theatres

4. Paper-Doll Books: The Movable Voyage of Education

5. The Myth of the American Family

6. Fashion Paper Dolls: The True Woman’s “Evil Twin”

7. Transformation and the Celebrity Paper Doll

Color Images

8. Paper Doll as Symbol: Vulnerability and Medical Care

9. Paper Doll as Symbol: The Male Desire for the Not Real

10. Paper Doll as Symbol in Feminist Films and Novels

11. Paper Doll as Symbol: For the Young Adult Audience

12. Paper Doll as Symbol: LGBTQ Culture

13. The Paper Figure in the Twenty-First Century

Conclusion

Chapter Notes

Bibliography

List of Names and Terms

 Introduction

The longest chain of paper dolls recorded by the Guinness Book of World
Records, created in Hendersonville, Tennessee, in August 2014, measures over
25,000 feet, or almost five miles. A British group, led by mixed media artist
Paula MacGregor and a non-profit community organization, Slack Space, is now
attempting to break that record with dolls made from a template and colored by
volunteers. To reach that goal, MacGregor has set up “creation stations” at
community centers, schools, libraries, shopping centers, and fairs. Both through
her website and these booths, she is attempting to involve adults and children
and thus increase participation in the community, her plan being to join all the
dolls by their arms and hands as a symbol of unity.1

The paper doll can be read as creating a continuum not just of joined arms and
hands but of meaning, throughout history. Certainly over the generations paper
has had a great impact as the conveyor of writing and as the medium for the
paintings housed in museums. But other sorts of more ephemeral paper images
of human beings, wielded as actual item and as symbol by people of all ages and
classes, have also had a huge influence, in organizing lives and conveying
meaning, their power changing to do the work of different cultures and eras.

Paper dolls, often referred to as paper figures or idols when not expressly
intended for children, are two-dimensional figures drawn or printed on paper for
which accompanying clothing may also be made.2 Such figures have generally
been neglected by scholars, even when made by adults for adults and certainly
when seemingly made just to entertain children: “Clearly, paper dolls have
always been taken for granted as a cheap, charming toy.”3 But this type of
human image, and material culture, has played a key role in social history and
has quite a current presence, with surprising force in the digital age. Historian
Kenneth Gross writes about “the need for a made thing to tell a story, to become
a vehicle for a voice, an impulse of character.” He continues by asserting that
“the thing acquires a life”—and paper figures have certainly been transformed
into stories, voices, and characters.4 In The Art of Japanese Paper, Dominique
Buisson asserts that “throughout time paper has been the mirror of the soul,
exceptional in its suppleness, solidity and whiteness, yet easily destroyed; this
material has shown itself to be so entirely ‘human’ in its weaknesses and faults
that it has become the symbol of culture itself. Without it, there would be
history, no memory.” Here Buisson speaks primarily of paper as employed by
“writers, historians, poets and painters,” but makers of the simplest human forms
have certainly also created potent and pervasive cultural messages.5

Paper Dolls through History

Paper dolls have a long history of conveying meaning. Papercutting to create

images became common in China with the invention of paper in the first century
CE, as a means of crafting religious messages.6 This skill and habit spread to
Japan, where with few mineral resources available, paper would be used for
more activities and objects than elsewhere, and paper figures would take on an
array of religious, political, and communal meanings.7

The paper figure would quite differently become the jumping jack—or pantin—
in France beginning during the reign of Louis XV. This articulated figure
provided amusement to adults as well as a means of critiquing the aristocracy,
political satire made possible through a seemingly harmless toy. In various
forms, paper figures would endure as a means of satirizing politicians, including,
recently in the United States, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump.

In the early nineteenth century in England and in the United States, along with
continuing to impact politics and social values, paper dolls appeared in stories
for children, the emphasis on clothing indicating the transformations possible,
especially through active education. As deployed in toy theatres, paper dolls also
involved their owners in the extremes of exotic characters and crises.

As paper dolls came into the United States, their accompanying stories would
soon be shortened, often appearing just on the envelope in which the dolls were
sold. A deluge of products by McLoughlin Brothers and other companies,
involving scores of appropriate, affluent outfits, would provide a powerful
ongoing vision of American values, depicting the accepted as well as the
outsider or Other.8 Even with no written text, or perhaps especially without one,
these dolls, clothes, and accessories would tell an influential (white, middle-
class) American story.
Into this century, when fewer children play with traditional paper dolls, their
symbolic power has continued apace. In plays, films, and an amazing quantity of
novels, both in the teen and adult markets, these figures have continued to serve
a complex function, depicting what might be required, of good teenagers for
example, as well as the spirited rejection of traditional expectations. And in
recent decades, as demonstrated by exhibits and books, many artists have
embraced the paper figure to work out their own responses to the current era of
paper-thin security and permanence.

What Work They Do

Through the centuries, paper images have concerned religion, politics, and moral
codes; the heights of creativity; cultural definitions of womanhood, motherhood,
and the family; the proper approach to education; the dictates of fashion; self-
image and self-esteem; even the end of life. In developing all of these topics, in
many iterations, these figures have always concerned change. As Dominique
Buisson mentions, “Paper reigns supreme in the subtle game of
transformation.”9

One English paper doll set that sold well in the United States had a title
emphasizing dramatic difference: The Protean Figure and Metamorphic
Costumes (1811).10 The envelope contains a hand-colored paper doll of a man,
in long underwear, looking forward though standing to the side, with island,
boat, and rocks on shore behind him. Twelve intricately folded paper envelopes
house the hand-colored costumes and accessories needed for his many possible
metamorphoses: a plain walking suit; a formal gray mourning suit; a foppish
jacket and pantaloons; a gray Quaker habit with long vest and big black hat; a
monk’s habit; an English officer’s uniform; a highly colored Turkish costume; a
German Hussar suit; and a French military uniform, an especially odd choice
given England’s opposition to France in the Napoleonic Wars.11 In these
costumes, we begin with the man and see so much change, of who he might be
or might suddenly become. As Mary Hillier noted in Dolls and Dollmakers,
these costumes could “catch an adult fancy”—by depicting the transformations
of dress and activity that could occur in a man’s life and in a nation’s history.12

These and so many other figures, employed from paper’s origins in China
forward, have portrayed the quick transformations of human life, its ephemeral
nature, these images made not just by courtiers or publishers or a few highly
trained artists, but across communities, by adults and children, an ongoing
presence in material culture. Social critic Gerry Canavan wrote recently that
“Today anything could happen—immortality is invented, the aliens finally show
up, the comet is spotted that will kill us all—and we would believe it. We are
bathing in change, marinating in it, maybe drowning in it.”13 And one means
that people have always employed to respond to change, and at times to direct it,
has been the paper figure.
 Chapter 1

Paper Power Begins

“Paper dolls have a history of symbolism, witchcraft and sorcery,” critic

Suzanne Aker has claimed, and indeed they do, having been made not only to
entertain children but to create religious and social meaning, with a focus on
metamorphosis.1 From the beginning of paper production, in China and Japan,
paper figures have protected the home, shepherded the dead, separated good
from evil, and taught the young. This vulnerable medium, certainly more fragile
than stone or marble, has provided a unique means of considering the thousand
natural shocks that the flesh is heir to, the changes of a moment, of a lifetime, or
of history. Many of the earliest of figure types have remained powerful, as the
actual also became a symbol that could shape the messages of novels, plays,
films, television shows, and video games.

Paper’s Antecedents

Making paper requires first macerating some type of fiber, mixing the resulting
threads with a liquid like water, and draining the mixture through some type of
screen, a sheet of matted fiber then remaining on the screen’s surface. Before its
invention, other surfaces had been created for recording the written word.2
Ancient Egyptians produced such a substance from the plant Cyperus papyrus,
which grows in the swamps of the Delta; they also employed it in the
manufacture of boats, rope, and baskets. Using hieroglyphs as well as at least
three other scripts, scribes preserved the beliefs and history of ancient Egypt on
papyrus scrolls. In ancient Greece and in Rome, special workshops also began
making papyrus, the products ranging from a rough wrapping material to a much
smoother variety employed for state documents and hand-crafted books. This
material was not actually a form of paper since making it involves cutting the
stalks of the plant and pasting them together, not creating a new macerated
substance.
In Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and later across Europe, papyrus scrolls gained a
rival from parchment, made from animal skin, and from vellum, made
particularly from calfskin, both of these stronger, more durable, and heavier than
papyrus. The English word “parchment” evolved from the name of the ancient
Greek city of Pergamon, a thriving center of parchment production during the
Hellenistic period.”3

Beginning in China

Ancient and medieval artists in the west made human likenesses not from
papyrus or parchment but from marble, wood, wax, ivory, terracotta, bone, and
rags. It would be in China and Japan that macerated paper, and figures made
from it, would become common. As a material for writing, the Chinese first
employed bamboo and silk. In about 105 CE, Cai Lun (T’sai-Lun), an official
attached to the Chinese Imperial court, created a highly usable new material, for
which he employed mulberry and other long bark fibers along with fishnets, old
rags, and hemp waste.4 His process involved plant fibers softened with lime
water, crushed, ground with hand mortars into a paste, strained through a sheet
made of bamboo fibers or cloth, and then dried and spread out. With the
invention of this material and factories set up to produce it, extensive planting of
mulberry began as well as other plants with the right sort of fiber: hemp,
mitsumata, and gampi. Almost right away, as this method spread, the Chinese
began to use this new substance to make human figures.

Over the centuries in China, such figures came to take on special power. Making
and enjoying them could soothe the soul, as Chinese poet Tu Fu (712–770)
wrote. Describing a night spent among friends, he addresses the “you” who had
caused them to come together and who had cut the paper figures, charms that
brought out the friends’ elemental nature:

Dusk already become night, you hung lanterns

out and swung door after door wide open.
You soothed our feet with warm water,
And cut paper charms to summon our souls.5

Such ephemeral charms might especially relate to the mutable and immutable
and thus to the nature of human life, as Dominique Buisson commented about
the paper used to make them: “When folded, it became the sign of its presence.
Paper was easy to shape and easy to destroy, which suggested the seasonal cycle
of life and death.”6

From the time of their first use in China, paper figures indeed did represent one
of the most fundamental of changes, from life to the territory of the dead, their
import thus involving a type of witchcraft or sorcery. The custom was to burn an
image of the deceased person at the funeral service, a means of purifying the
body before the spirit left it.7 The funeral might also involve burning paper
images of family, associates, and items of value or placing such images in the
grave, all to provide help in the beyond. This type of ceremony engaged respect
for the dead but also fear of the dead person’s spirit: if sent into death
unattended, the soul might search out a means of subsistence and torment
survivors to get what it needed.8

Concerning his travels in Asia from 1271 to 1295, Venetian merchant and
adventurer Marco Polo wrote in his Il Milione, or The Travels of Marco Polo,
about the surprising uses of paper that he observed there. At funerals in several
regions, he witnessed paper figures, male and female, being destroyed along
with the corpse as part of traditional rituals. In the Province of Tangut in
Northwest China, he observed an especially elaborate burial ceremony to which
friends and family brought food and drink, played instruments, and “cut in
paper, men, horses, camels, and coins the size of bezants [a medieval gold coin],
convinced that the deceased will possess all these things in the future state,” the
ceremony symbolizing the ephemeral nature of life as well as the human desire
to hold onto communal values and relationships.9
The Kitchen God (Hampton C. DuBose, The Dragon, Image, and Demon,
1887).

Along with these funereal figures, other Chinese paper charms provided symbols
of the mutable, especially as images of Taoism. Chinese homes traditionally had
a picture or a padded paper figure of the Kitchen God, Zao Jun (Tsao Chun),
hanging above the stove, a watchdog to observe and protect the family; a ritual
of praise performed at the new and full moon each month insured that he would
continue his vigilance. During the Chinese New Year, Zao Jun ascended to
heaven to present a report to the Jade Emperor concerning the good or bad
behavior of family members: they might “bribe” Zao Jun by smearing his mouth
with sugar or honey so that he would present a “sweetened” version of their
deeds or misdeeds. Then his ascent occurred through the ritualistic burning of
this figure, with a new image of him placed above the stove for the coming
year.10

Chinese tradition also involves a fuller story of the Kitchen God, which provided
a powerful symbol for novelist Amy Tan. This god was first a man who left his
virtuous and kind wife, Guo, and squandered all their money on a new young
wife who ultimately left him. Chancing upon Guo, a poor servant that took in
people in need, he was consumed by guilt and ultimately threw himself into the
fire. As a reward for his courage in admitting his wrongdoing and repenting his
sins, the Jade Emperor made him into a god that oversees the home.

Here is a man with the power to leave and ruin a family and a god who can
control a family through his annually renewable power. In Tan’s The Kitchen
God’s Wife (1991), the Chinese grandmother, who had left an abusive marriage
and immigrated to San Francisco, equates this god figure to the FBI, CIA, Mafia,
or the IRS and to the all-controlling husband who should not be wielding power:
“Why would I want that kind of person to judge me, a man who cheated his
wife? His wife was the good one, not him.” She gives her granddaughters her
own traditional altar to the Kitchen God to use as a dollhouse, but does not
supply the paper image, for “this kind of luck, you don’t want.”11

Over the centuries, the Kitchen God paper figure has contained an overlay of
meanings and possibilities, involving cruelty, selfishness, kindness, and
meanings and possibilities, involving cruelty, selfishness, kindness, and
forgiveness. And this figure has always concerned the ephemeral quality of
human good and evil, our changing traits demonstrated through the need for
twice monthly valuations and an annual cleansing of sin as well as the god’s own
story. Tan’s novel also employs the figure to focus on changes in family
traditions and in judgments of male power.

Another grouping of paper figures from ancient and modern China—the Eight
Immortals, legendary beings who generally appeared along with Laozi, founder
of Taoism—also represent metamorphosis. These images have commonly been
made of paper or of cardboard, sometimes padded. Beginning in the Tang
Dynasty (618–907), the Eight Immortals provided a popular theme in artwork,
chronicling strength and weakness as demonstrated in youth and age, wealth and
poverty, masculinity and femininity. Zhongli Quan, chief of the immortals, holds
the elixir of life and the power of transmutation; poor scholar Lü Dongbin,
patron of the sick, also acknowledges the coming of death; Lan Caihe,
sometimes man and sometimes woman, chants verses denouncing life as
fleeting. Special props that the Eight Immortals carry strengthen the message of
choice and change: Li Tieguai, a beggar, holds a gourd that gives him the power
to leave his body at will; Zhang Guolao can make his paper mule into a real one
and escape from any difficulty; Cao Guojiu holds tickets that enable him to enter
the imperial court, but they remain in his hand because he has given up that life
and chosen instead to become a hermit.12

Like the Kitchen God, these paper figures may no longer have a religious
connotation, but they still hold cultural power. A family today might employ an
image in ceramic or pressed paper of all Eight Immortals, facing in different
directions, to protect the house from crises that might come from all sides. In the
tradition of feng shui, such images would insure safety while also bringing long
life, good fortune, a good name and recognition, compassion, and generosity of
spirit.13

These images continue to appear in popular culture also, often to represent

transformation. The 1998–99 Singaporean television series Legend of the Eight
Immortals featured stories adapted from the Ming dynasty novel Dong You Ji by
Wu Yuantai. In the television show, when a demonic cult threatens the universe,
the Jade Emperor, the supreme ruler of Heaven, forms the Eight Immortals into a
team, each member shifting in form to prevail against evil. The ongoing story
involves treacherous followers who attempt to cause the Immortals to turn
against each other, but ultimately the Eight combine to bring peace to the
universe.14

The Eight Immortals also play an important role in the popular video game, Fear
Effect 2: Retro Helix, released in 2001 by Kronos Digital Entertainment, in
which, as paper figures, the Eight appear as versatile guides in a land of
perplexing puzzles and transformations. The game, beginning in Hong Kong in
the year 2048, features male and female heroes, Glas and Hana, maneuvering
through the havoc of a global epidemic, with theft, murder, and anarchy
controlling various sites: an ultra-modern Hong Kong, the walled city of Xi’an,
the lost tomb of the first emperor of China, and, finally, Penglai Shan, the
legendary mountain island of the Eight Immortals. At Penglai Shan, Glas and
Hana lose sight of each other. The Immortals appear to them separately,
introducing themselves and presenting challenges to overcome while telling
them both that “the time for change is upon us”: they must take charge of their
own future within a hazardous, ever shifting landscape. With this advice and
these challenges, Glas and Hana grow in mental and moral power, come back
together, and ready themselves for a final fight and threshold.15

In X-Men comic books also, in twelve issues in 2004, the Eight Immortals
appear as adaptable heroes, protecting China when the mutant Xorn massacres
the people of a small village, the story emphasizing sudden shifts in the action
and judgments of it. When the X-Men attempt to leave and take Xorn with them,
the Eight Immortals attack because they feel Xorn is their responsibility. But
after Xorn’s containment helmet cracks and his evil causes a black hole to open,
the Eight Immortals team up with the X-Men, the plot complications involving a
widening concept of loyalty and an altered view of the foreigner or Other.

From China to Japan

From China, where paper figures over the centuries reflected so many alterations
possible in the life of an individual and community, such images came to Japan,
in 610 CE, imported by monks for writing sutras, Buddhist sacred texts. By 800,
Japan’s skill in papermaking was unrivalled.16 In a country with limited natural
resources, various everyday goods like clothes, room dividers, and toys as well
as vestments and ritual objects for Shinto priests and statues of Buddha would be
made from this material.

The Japanese quickly adapted paper figures for their own religious purposes,
continuing the connection to witchcraft or sorcery. Within shrines created in the
service of Shinto, a traditional religion, the priests made folded paper go-hei,
resembling cloaked figures, to render the protective spirit of the temple portable.
As in China, the paper figure also escorted the individual from life to death.
Beginning in the Asuka period (538–710), families placed the flat or tubular
katashiro, of roughly human shape, in coffins or with other offerings for
cremation as a representation of the ephemeral nature of life. During that period
the katashiro involved the destiny of the group as well as the individual: these
paper images might be buried en masse, to guard the community against disease,
famine, warfare, and malevolent influences, indeed against the many sudden
changes that could signal ruination.17

Beginning in the Nara period (710–94 CE), as another element of the Shinto
tradition, a special form of katashiro, called a hitogata, came to be used in
purification rituals as a scapegoat, to name and celebrate the possible positive
change in human beings.18 Believers purchased these figures at Shinto shrines,
took them home, and painted on them the characters of their names, birthdates,
and gender. Then they breathed on the figures and rubbed them all over their
bodies to transfer diseases or moral impurities. These figures would next be
returned to the shrine for a mass religious ceremony in which a priest took them
out into deep water and either threw them into the waves or set them afloat on
paper boats, sweeping away sins and illness, getting rid of the “transgressive
chaos of pollution.”19

In The Tale of Genji, a classic work of Japanese literature written in the early
years of the eleventh century, Murasaki Shikibu depicts such a cleansing
ceremony. This work recounts the many sins of Genji, a son of a Japanese
emperor and a low-ranking concubine. After he abandons his wife and kidnaps a
young girl, the new emperor exiles Genji to the town of Suma where he pursues
a ritualistic cleansing or lustration:

It was the day of the serpent, the first such day in the Third Month.

“The day when a man who has worries goes down and washes them away,”
said one of his men, admirably informed, it would seem, in all the annual
observances.
 Wishing to have a look at the seashore, Genji set forth. Plain, rough curtains
were strung up among the trees, and a soothsayer who was doing the circuit
of the province was summoned to perform the lustration.

Genji thought he could see something of himself in the rather large doll
being cast off to sea, bearing away sins and tribulations.

“Cast away to drift on an alien vastness, I grieve for more than a doll cast
out to sea.”

The bright, open seashore showed him to wonderful advantage. The sea
stretched placid into measureless distances. He thought of all that had
happened to him, and all that was still to come.

In a storm that follows, Genji remains calm and speaks to the gods about his new
status as a man cleansed of blame.20 Afterwards he returns to the court where he
is pardoned and where ultimately one of his sons becomes emperor.

Besides washing away impurities on a specially designated cleansing day,

katashiro or hitogata could protect the living throughout the year. Arranged in
groups of eight dolls, representing eight spatial directions from which damage
might come, they served a purpose similar to that of China’s Eight Immortals.21
Additionally, fishermen placed folded paper figures on their boats for protection:
if a storm developed, they threw them into the water in substitution for the
people on board.

The katashiro or hitogata, a form of protection and purification, could also

provide a personal means of countering the tyrannical.22 In the eighth century
and beyond, as Ivan Morris claims in The World of the Shining Prince, many
citizens, who found the emperors and all their sycophants to be arbitrarily cruel
and violent, attempted to exercise a special form of control: “If one wished to
put a curse on an enemy, one buried a paper image (katashiro) of him and
recited certain secret spells and prayers. Carried out effectively, this curse could
result in illness or even death for the victim, and it was of course one of the few
methods of redress available against more powerful members of the
hierarchy.”23

Over the centuries, these various traditions of purification and protection have
led to rituals intended to bring security and future prosperity to children. From
the Heian period (794–1185), amagatsu dolls, made for children at birth, served
to safeguard them from disease and evil influences. Of a simple design, in a T-
shape, white, with no particular features, they were made of pressed paper and
silk. Additionally, Hinamatsuri or the Girls’ Day Festival, began to be celebrated
in Japan on the third day of the third month, involving court dolls on a tiered
stand, with ladies-in-waiting, musicians, and footmen, and a marriage party at
the top, the dolls at first formed of folded paper and later of many substances,
such as porcelain and wood, some models quite expensive.24 Today this display
and the ceremonies that accompany it involve a time to celebrate girls as they
head toward adulthood and marriage and to symbolically engage a formidable
group in praying for their health and happiness.25 Additionally, Elder Sister
dolls, or anesema, stick figures covered with paper kimonos, have taught girls
about clothing and cosmetics, their influence based on the assumption that even
the youngest ones should be interested to learn from older sisters. First made in
the Edo period (1603–1868), these dolls also helped to teach the proper etiquette
for dining and entertaining.26

In China and Japan, citizens as well as their priests began using the new
substance of paper to represent the most essential of human changes and crises:
of children growing into adults, of adults trying to increase the security of their
homes and rid themselves of sin, of families attempting to cope with the death of
a loved one, of communities seeking to assure their future prosperity. These
powerful symbols have remained, beyond their initial ties to religion, as
indicators of human strength and weakness and of the transformations to be
sought and to be avoided.

And in Mesoamerica

The tradition of creating paper figures, the ephemerality of the material

indicative of the often abrupt alterations of life, began in China and Japan but
also had early roots in the Americas, again with connections to witchcraft. Since
1000 CE, members of one of the early complex cultures of Mesoamerica, the
Otomi, now centered in San Pablito, Mexico, have made paper from plant fibers
or bark, the fibers washed, wrung out, arranged cross wise, beaten with
moistened volcanic rock, and allowed to mesh into a smooth, stable sheet that
dries in the sun.
Symmetrical images of spirit entities, primarily associated with agriculture,
here representing the chile plant, Otomi Indians (Museum of Anthropology,
University of Missouri, Mac 1978-0067).

Curanderos, special curers of both paper and the ills suffered by community
members, cut symmetrical paper images of spirit entities for use in various
rituals, primarily associated with agriculture. With depictions of avocados,
apples, peppers, corn, sugar cane, and peanuts sprouting from their arms and
legs, the entire image dyed often to the color of the crop and arms raised in
supplication for aid, these dolls buried in fields ensure a good harvest. The
Otomi also make dolls, buried at a distance from the village during a group
ceremony, to carry away the spirit of evil and sickness. With both types of
figures, the Otomi and their curanderos recognize the volatile nature of the
present and future, indeed the dire effects possible from a poor harvest and from
illness and sin.27

As soon as people learned to make paper, especially in China and Japan and the
Americas, they began employing paper figures to display basic human traits and
desires. These creations came to represent various forms of change, their
messages involving sin and innocence, youth and adulthood, feast and famine,
and power and weakness as well as, most basically, life and death, connections
to religion and witchcraft increasing their power. From their very beginning,
these images, and indeed their ephemerality, have allowed for consideration of
our vulnerabilities and needs, of the binary oppositions occurring in fragile
human life.
 Chapter 2

Political Satire and Change

From China and Japan where paper images provided commentary on the
vulnerabilities and quick alterations of human beings, knowledge about paper
production spread through Asia, and then in the eighth and ninth centuries Arab
Muslims set up paper mills in Cairo, Morocco, Baghdad, and at Mecca. The
Muslim conquest of Spain brought papermaking to the West, with one of the
first paper mills in Europe opening at Xativa, Spain, in 1151. Papermaking then
began to gradually spread across Europe: the first paper mills in France opening
in 1189, and in Germany in 1320. With the invention of the Gutenburg printing
press in 1450, the demand for paper became greater across Europe.1

In Japan, katashiro figures were sometimes used to put a curse on a member of

the all-powerful emperor’s court. As paper figures spread from China and Japan
to the west, they would continue to wield political power. In Europe and then in
the United States, the ephemeral substance of paper, something that people could
increasingly afford to own, became a preferred choice to satirize various forms
of aristocracy, of power, of injustice. By manipulating this substance—easy to
bend, to costume, and even to burn—the citizen could assume symbolic power
over the courtier or president, the tyrannical thus rendered temporary and weak:
seemingly entrenched leaders and established values could change.

Pantin: A Political Doll

In France, a paper doll called a pantin followed the tradition from Japan of
embodying political critique. From the 1720s up to the French Revolution, the
citizenry enjoyed a cardboard novelty thought to have been invented at the
village of Pantin near Paris; though the dolls were not actually printed there, the
village’s reputation as a place for dances and dancers helped to increase their
popularity. In the eighteenth century, these figures on paper—not permanent,
moving and swaying, manipulatable—provided a thing of fun but also of
politics, both celebrating the aristocracy and declaring power over it, the word
entering the language soon after the object entered homes.2

The pantin was probably the earliest commercial paper doll, extremely popular
for over fifty years. Published on a sheet in six parts, with separate head, torso,
arms, and legs, the doll could be cut on heavy paper or light cardboard and the
appendages attached by threads; a second set of longer strings brought together
above the doll’s head made the limbs easy to control. With the strings being
pulled, the doll could dance riotously, always with a bit of a jerking movement.

The resulting figure might seem a bit scary as it moved, indeed “uncanny” to use
the term that Freud applied to a wider range of dolls.3 Charles Dickens
commented, as he recalled the Christmas tree of his childhood, about the beauty
but also the unsettling, uncontrolled movement of the pantin, at that time still a
popular purchase:

The cardboard lady in a blue-silk skirt, who was stood up against the
candlestick to dance, and whom I see on the same branch, was milder, and
was beautiful; but I can’t say as much for the larger cardboard man, who
used to be hung against the wall and pulled by a string; there was a sinister
expression in that nose of his; and when he got his legs round his neck
(which he very often did), he was ghastly, and not a creature to be alone
with.4

While a child of any generation might find the pantin unsettling, parents found
them highly amusing. It seemed in Paris after their invention in the 1740s, in
fact, as though everyone was playing with this toy, as Edmond Jean François
Barbier, a legal consultant to the parliament, commented: “These silly things
engrossed the attention of all of Paris, amusing everyone to such an extent that
you could not go into any house in January 1747, without finding a Pantin
hanging by the mantelpiece.”5 Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert, a French
physicist and philosopher, co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclopédie,
published between 1751 and 1772, wrote the entry on the pantin, discussing the
surprising, and to him inappropriate, appeal that this toy had for adults:

There is a little figure painted on pasteboard, which, by means of little

strings which you pull, makes little contortions proper for the amusement of
children. Posterity will find it difficult to believe that in France persons of a
 ripe age could have, in an access of vertigo that lasted far too long, amused
themselves with these ridiculous toys and employed themselves in
searching for them with such enthusiasm, while in other countries Pantins
were relegated to children of the most tender age.6

Edmond Barbier also asserts that as the craze for these paper novelties spread
from Paris to the French provinces, pantins came to fill each floor of the house.
With more and more produced, they soon ranged in size from four to twenty-
eight inches and included cheap, black-and-white versions to be painted at home
as well as expensive hand-colored varieties. Small unpainted and unassembled
pantins sold in shops for four sous, or half an American cent; the Duchesse de
Chartres and Duchess d’Orleans commissioned the most costly versions, works
of art painted by François Boucher, for 1500 livres, or perhaps $10,000 in
today’s currency. In 1746 and 1747, engravers Jean-Baptiste Poilly and Charles-
Nicolas Cochin marketed quite costly versions as well.7 This fad thus expanded
the field of decorative design for working artists: to make his living, along with
creating large paintings on canvas, Boucher created home tapestries, hotel
decorations, theatre costumes and sets, fans, and watch cases as well as pantins.8

During the reign of Louis XV, women at court got permission to bring pantins
before the king. At Versailles Palace, Madame du Barry, a favorite mistress,
staged regular theatricals starring them, her power in court ushering in “an air of
dissolute frivolity, a care-for-nobody swagger, and mocking superciliousness.”
A history of France in 1878 described “the new moneyed aristocracy,” in the
courts of Louis XV and Louis XVI, as enthralled by this fad, many courtiers
painting their own pantins. “Even magistrates on their benches, and grave
officials,” this history continued, “might be seen pulling the string of some
dancing figure, called a pantin.”9

Many pantin figures, created by Boucher as well as commercial publishers,

came from the Italian commedia dell’arte, a popular entertainment involving
comedic pantomime and improvisation. Adaptation of these beloved characters,
fun to manipulate with strings, proved helpful in boosting pantin sales. They
included Harlequin, a comic servant character whose brightly colored garments
covered in diamond shapes made him readily recognizable; Scaramouche, a silly
and sly braggart, usually seen in a cloak strumming a guitar; Pierrette, a devious
servant; and her husband Pierrot, a sad clown and buffoon, dressed in a long
white or striped cloak with big buttons and wearing white makeup.10 As pantins,
these characters could become part of the shows put on in homes. Pierre Laujon,
a playwright and song writer, describes this means of private enjoyment in his
song “Chanson sur le Pantins” from the 1760s; here he addresses the figure
directly and then speaks to his father about the resulting joy that was readily
available for purchase:

Tu dansais Pantin?
tu sentais sans cesse
Avec tant d’adresse
Qu’en moi-même je disais:
    Ah! mon père!
Qu’il est donc plaisant!
Qu’il est donc divertissant!
    Ah! mon père!
Sachez où l’on vend
De quoi me donner autant
De contentement!

(You danced, Pantin? You emoted constantly with so much skill. And this
is what I said to myself: “Ah! my father! It is pleasant. It is such a
diversion. Ah! my father! I know where they sell that which gives me so
much contentment.”)11

While government officials and their wives joined in this play with pantins,
many of these jointed figures satirized them—and thus associated the king,
judges, aristocrats, and even the clergy with the devious figures of the
commedia. A popular song of the time, in fact, commented that with this fad
Frenchmen “chérisse une image / Dont il est la réalité”: they cherish an image of
which there is a reality.12 The image/reality in this case concerns aristocratic
Frenchmen jumping aimlessly, easily manipulated, sporting the latest of
expensive, frivolous costumes, with change quickly possible in their stature and
power, indeed in their very presence.13 Though in his The Skeptic’s Walk
(Promenade du Skeptique) in 1747, Denis Diderot referred disparagingly to
young people as “giddy,” as “talking of everything and knowing nothing,” he
argued that the pantins in their hands were not simple frivolities: they led to
discussion of politics and to “profound reflections” on inequality.14 These
figures common among courtiers thus also served to critique them while
constructing the dolls’ possible owners, regular French citizens, as capable of
exercising control.
A pantin of Harlequin from the commedia dell’arte.
These pantins quickly spread to other countries in Europe though not at the same
level of popularity or of social satire. Lady Hervey, who in 1715 became Maid
of Honour to Queen Caroline, wife of King George II of England, recognized in
her letters the varied uses of the pantin in France: “Comedy, satire, gallantry,
and politics enlisted their jerking, strutting figures, and made them serve their
own ends.” Hervey further commented on the pantins’ lesser meaning in her
own country. Indeed, she claimed that her fellow citizens, often the object of her
scorn, had missed the doll’s possibilities: “The English, who heard of this
fashion by the time the French were tired of it, according to their usual custom,
took it up, without any finesse; and so have the amusement of twirling about a
scaramouche, as I have seen a thousand children do of three years old. In the
French there was at least some humour and entertainment in it, but our people
mean nothing by it but an awkward, dull imitation.”15
Pantin of an eighteenth century French courtier (Wikimedia Commons).

Though Harvey was correct in asserting that in England pantins came to be

viewed as children’s toys, some English politicians and artists did make some
use of them for political commentary. When Horace Walpole, influential
member of Parliament and acquiantance of Lady Harvey, visited the French
court in 1766, he was not treated with the respect that he felt that he deserved: he
commented that “Thus was I dandled about with my little legs and arms shaking
like a pantin,” recognizing that he appeared as a useless aristocrat to these
Frenchmen, someone that they could easily manipulate.16

Another Englishman who employed this symbol of wasteful affluence, William

Hogarth, made several satirical paintings and etchings that focused on changes
that French fashion, silliness, and waste were bringing to his country. Charmers
of the Age, an etching from 1742, reduces famed French dancers, then all the
vogue in London, to pantins. In this work, two of them leap high in the air while
spectators on both sides applaud wildly: these performers seem completely
mechanical, lifted by strings, one with her legs splayed like an abandoned doll,
both appearing as toyish fads not real artists.17 Hogarth’s painting Taste à la
Mode, also from 1742, provided, in the action occurring both in a room and in
the framed paintings hanging there, a pastiche of all the latest accoutrements of
foppish aristocracy: fops, a pet monkey, huge hoop skirts and stays, a Venus de
Medici in high heel shoes, a stack of wigs and muffs, and with it all a framed
picture of a French dancing master, rigidly posed with arms held from above like
a pantin’s. In another Hogarth engraving entitled Pantin à la Mode, from 1748,
now in the British Museum, a priest and six aristocratic men and women play
with their pantins along with a monkey who wears the hat of one of the men.
The engraving has verses at the bottom of the page praising older British values
and claiming that “Gallic Influence bid Foppery rise and turn’d the Scale of
Sense.”18
William Hogarth, Pantin à la Mode, 1748 (© The Trustees of the British
Museum).

A lessening of interest in pantins in their native France may have come about in
the latter half of the nineteenth century because, as happens with every fad,
society moved onto the next new thing. Another explanation appeared in
Barbier’s journal: he says that police interfered and prohibited them in 1756
“because the women, under the lively influence of this continual jumping, were
in danger of bringing children into the world with twisted limbs like the
pantins.”19 Other histories have concentrated not on fads ending or children
endangered, but on a government seeking to assert control: “The authorities did
not in fact care for this ready means of caricaturing and satirizing public figures
of the day.”20 Esther Singleton, prolific writer on art, travel, and dolls, claimed
that their heyday ended because the citizenry was becoming more mature than
their leaders, no longer willing to just play at critique but readying themselves
instead for revolution, and so only those satirized still played with the toy: “The
nobility unraveled tapestry and other materials, played with Pantins and lapsed
into childhood, while the people came of age!”21
Throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, pantins continued to be
produced, usually as children’s toys but occasionally still as a very adult form of
political satire. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a French
publishing house, Pellerin, produced pantins representing traditional commedia
dell’arte figures as well as many of the earlier targets: magistrates, priests,
coxcombs, and ladies of quality. This firm also produced other figures worthy of
manipulation and ridicule, such as a savage German Kaiser Wilhelm II, released
in the 1890s. Accompanying this Kaiser is all that he had stolen, including
French sculpture, champagne, silver plate, and jewelry, this loot piled together
with his rifle behind his large black boots and stuffed into his pockets. Well into
the twentieth century, the Pellerin firm commonly exported satirical pantins: the
account books of Lewis Page, a New York toy dealer, recorded the orders he
made between 1929 and 1933 for “dancing Jacks painted” and “caracatures
common and comical.”22

Pantin: The Continuing Symbol

Even though the pantin lost popularity, the image and word remained as a
powerful symbol, in English texts as well as French, as a means of judging those
with power (for the moment) and highlighting the possibility of change.

Long after the French Revolution, historians in English as well as French

employed the pantin as a symbol of government corruption and ineptitude in that
era. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer’s history of France, written in 1878, depicted
Louis XV as an expensive bauble controlled by mistresses: “Louis-Henri was the
pantin, but his ‘favourite’ pulled the string.”23 In 1894, concerning a book
entitled Women in France in the Eighteenth Century, a reviewer used playing
with the pantin as a symbol of the emasculated, ineffectual men of the French
aristocracy: while their vapid wives spent time at cabarets, male courtiers just
“played with pantins at home.”24

And this word has continued to describe politicians, well beyond the last kings
of France. As Esther Singleton noted concerning men in government in the
twentieth century who never had an independent idea, “The race of Pantins made
of flesh and blood does not seem to be disappearing from the bosom of society.
France, like any other country, can class as Pantins a great many persons who
have embraced a political career: the Government pulls the strings and the
Pantin, whatever his age or quality, gambols like a pasteboard figure.”25 In the
Canadian Parliament in March of 2012, speaking about the prime minister’s
inflexible control of the government agency that regulates airlines, Rodger
Cuzner of Cape Breton-Canso, a Liberal Party member of the House of
Commons, declared that “la ministre se sert du Conseil canadien des relations
industrielles comme d’un pantin” (“The minister has used the Canada Industrial
Relations Board as a pantin”).26

In the twentieth century, the word also went beyond this satire of politics.
Cultural historians Mary E. Lewis and Dorothy Dignam noted in 1947 that
“Finally the word ‘pantin’ came to be used to describe any one who didn’t have
sense enough to know his own mind. A person who could be bossed by others,
or controlled by the one who ‘pulled the strings,’ was a ‘pantin.’”27 Indeed, even
in the naming of a mental health problem, French doctors used the pantin as a
symbol for not knowing or controlling one’s own mind. In 1965, Dr. Harry
Angelman labeled a neuro-genetic disorder afflicting out-of-control children,
those with jerky movements, sleep disturbance, and seizures, as a “syndrome du
pantin hilare,” the name fortunately changed to Angelman Syndrome in 1982.28

In fiction, opera, and film, the pantin as the inconstant, the unconfident, has gone
through many iterations. Published in 1898, Pierre Louÿs’ novel La Femme et le
Pantin concerns Concita Perez, who lures men and then rebuffs them, seemingly
bent on torturing whoever she is with: in her grasp, men are weak pantins.
Mexican painter Angel Zárraga, who exhibited his work in Spain and Italy,
created an oil painting in 1909 with the same title, showing a naked Concita
figure with a knowing look, holding a grotesque male figure, in a woman’s
nightgown, by a string. Riccardo Zandonai adapted Louÿs’ novel in 1911 as
Conchita, an opera in four acts that premiered in Milan. The story has also
appeared in five films, including Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman
(1935), starring Marlene Dietrich, and Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of
Desire (1977). Two French films maintained the original title, one made in 1928
by Jacques de Baroncelli, starring Conchita Montenegro, and one made in 1959
by Julien Duvivier, starring Brigitte Bardot, as perhaps the ultimate femme fatale
making men into manipulated, ruined pantins. The promotional poster for this
film version of the story centered on a giant Bardot dressed in provocative red
and a small male pantin, his arms flailing, on the side in black and white.

Other works of fiction developed a different symbolic import for this jerkily
moving figure, concerning not the manipulated politician or lover but the man
who moves through life without any higher calling, just reacting to events and
not exercising control. A 1982 Alain Page novel Tchao Pantin and a 1983 film
adaptation with the same name, appearing in the United States as So Long,
Stooge, concerns Lambert, who works the night shift at a gas station, rarely
speaking, living alone, a drunk and a small-time thief. It takes a crisis and then a
kind woman named Lola to help him act with purpose—to start to feel again and
find new enthusiasm for life, to move from pantin to man.
Angel Zárraga, La Femme et le Pantin, 1909 (Wikimedia Commons).

From the eighteenth century in France, pantins have been figures on strings—
kings, courtiers, judges, and lovers. Owners of the toy, as well as writers
describing its use, feature its ability to bend and be manipulated, to engage in
jerky, humorous movements—a lack of intentionality and strength embedded in
this wobbly form. This jumping figure has embodied so much that might be
critiqued and altered—in a society’s hierarchies or an individual’s sense of self-
respect and moral purpose.

Politics and the Modern Paper Doll

Though the jointed pantin doll entered the United States primarily as a toy for
children, other sorts of paper images became a key part of political critique in
this nation, a response to aristocratic assumptions of power, as was the pantin in
France. In the United States as paper dolls came to have tabs and
interchangeable outfits, to be sold by magazines and publishers to various
audiences for various purposes, they would also continue to embody political
and social critique.

A modern instance of the paper figure or doll as political satire, created for the
1992 Columbian quincentennial, is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Paper Dolls for
a Post Columbian World with Ensembles Contributed by the U.S. Government.
This grouping of images challenges the idea that the nation, and especially its
Native Americans, have actually achieved a post-colonial status in the post–
Columbian world.

The work consists of a series of 11 × 17 pieces, made with a watercolor wash.

Unframed at the time of their making, these pieces could be mounted separately
or together. The many possibilities for arranging the twelve watercolors allow
Smith to “resist narrative closure” as multiple voices personalize the story of
ongoing colonial domination. These panels employ pop art traditions and paper
dolls to personalize Smith’s vision of the devastation caused by conquest, by
forced assimilation, and by continuing prejudice.29

In this exhibit, Smith concentrates on Chief Charlo and the Salish-speaking

people, her ancestors, who were forced from their ancestral homes between the
Cascade Mountains and the Rocky Mountains, following terms set by the
Garfield Agreement of 1872, and sent to the Flathead reservation in western
Montana, this mandated exodus devastating to these individuals as well as to
their social and cultural values. In pushing back against the dominant history of
American glories celebrated at the quincentennial, Smith has claimed, “I am
always turning myths upside down and backwards. I defend, affirm, hold up, the
other realities, the true ones, the human ones.”30

Smith decided to employ paper dolls, and especially the iconic Barbie and Ken,
which Mattel had issued in paper as well as three-dimensional forms, to depict
how Native Americans put on various costumes and even skin colors as
requirements of the dominant culture.31 With separated cards or dolls, each
person “stands alone in an unpainted indeterminate space on his or her separate
scrap of earth,” the use of English further denoting the group’s loss of a
communal tribal past when they migrated to the reservation.32 The first row
features the paper dolls: Father le de Ville, a Jesuit, and then Ken, Barbie, and
Bruce Plenty Horses. Belgian Jesuit priests had founded the Saint Ignatius
Mission, where Smith was born. They also operated boarding schools like the
one that her doll character Ken attends. Father le de Ville, the only non–Native
among the paper dolls, appears as a bastion of white values who, like
government officials, sought to alter the traditional tribal community. He appears
with just one costume as presumably he remains within this powerful robe and
role.

In these drawings of paper dolls, Ken Plenty Horses appears with many tabbed
costumes, showing his changing function in his family and community. He
leaves his ancestral home, with pride, still dressed in a capote, a wool garment
traditionally made by a wife or mother and used for hunting, which had become
the dress of exile, as Smith states above the costume: “Capote for traveling in
forced removal after Garfield Treaty 1891.” Another panel visually isolates the
headdress from the warrior and declares its monetary value in the hands of a
white collector, the warrior no longer allowed, as Smith writes, to speak his own
language, play drums, dance, sing, or wear the headdress. Ken’s journey has led
to his living under government control, clothed in a simple blanket and not the
capote. He finally dons commercially made clothing for degrading trips to get
government handouts “when not allowed to hunt and gather own food.” Ken’s
wife, Barbie Plenty Horses, wears the one outfit of the maid instead of the
extensive upper-class wardrobe of a Barbie doll: the Native American Barbie
will spend her life cleaning the houses of white people, Smith tells us, after
attending a Jesuit school.

Ken and Barbie’s son Bruce is so changed by boarding school that his hair and
looks become different; indeed they indicate a “discrete second Bruce.”33
American Indian boarding schools, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, educated Native American children according to European-American
standards. The Bureau of Indian Affairs founded a series of these schools
imitative of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, established in Pennsylvania in
1879, far from the reservations, its founder Richard Henry Pratt known for
declaring “Kill the Indian and save the man.”34 There, as in Jesuit schools,
children received new clothes and haircuts and were forbidden to speak their
native languages, their traditional names replaced by acceptable English ones. In
Smith’s work, the change in the boy’s skin color reiterates before-and-after
photographs made by John Choate in the 1880s at boarding schools in the east,
the dramatic difference from dark to much lighter skin tones achieved with green
filters over the lens to darken the “before” and a red or yellow filter for the
“after,” a symbolic indicator of a required cultural change.35 In the second
Americanized portrait of Bruce, Smith notes that he has been required to change
his clothes, manners, religion, language, and his very skin. Two other panels
concern deadly diseases contracted through this contact with white people:
smallpox and tuberculosis.

While Smith employed paper dolls on posters to develop political themes,

filmmakers have also relied on them to depict the worst of government. Sean
Meredith’s comedic Dante’s Inferno (2007), for example, delivers political and
social satire with hand-drawn paper figures. Lying on the street hung over, this
modern Dante (voiced by Dermot Mulroney) joins Virgil (voiced by James
Cromwell) on a trip to hell, these figures being moved by wires and with fingers
that can clearly be seen from above. In the circles of hell, they encounter Trump
and Trump Plaza, sadistic coaches of young boys, gluttons, sellers of time
shares, pimps, slumlords, and an array of other villains before they arrive at the
U.S. Capitol. There, overweight white men, a connected series of dolls, all dance
the can-can together. As they put on various paper-doll outfits, they turn into
weapons manufacturers, defense contractors, lobbyists who write the nation’s
laws, senators controlled by contractors and lobbyists, and then prisoners in
orange. Above them dancing sexily on the top of the Capitol, the lyrics being
“all dogs have their day,” is the Statue of Liberty, a jointed pantin in a very short
dress, overseeing all that is corrupt, all that is for sale.36

Like Smith and Meredith, other satirists have reached for the paper doll to
comment on politicians and their power, on inequalities, on the silliness and lack
of substance in so many people with too much power.
of substance in so many people with too much power.

From 2008, Magnetic Dress-Up Sarah Palin Going Vogue, with a mix ’n’ match
magnetic wardrobe, produced by The Unemployed Philosophers Guild, features
Palin on the cover with oil rigs behind her and oil spilling across snow and a
deer, reflecting her support for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The doll wears a stars and stripes bikini and comes complete with a photograph
of McCain featuring his face blacked out; a crown for Palin to wear once he is
gone; binoculars to see Russia; a Saturday Night Life moose head; a big tea pot
to symbolize her wing of the Republican Party; a Bible; and a gun.

In November 2015, in New York magazine, illustrator Kyle Hilton, who wrote
Art History Paper Dolls, invited readers to play dress-up with Canada’s hunky
but questionably qualified new prime minister, Justin Trudeau. The tabbed
accoutrements to cover his body, which appears naked except for a well-placed
maple leaf, include, all from hipster designers, a watch with which to look like
James Bond, a beanie to protect his liberal mane, snazzy boxers that remind him
to be super, and a briefcase for transporting global secrets as well as the requisite
“lean and mean” Calvin Klein suit, a paper-doll set that certainly does not treat
him with the utmost respect.37
Kyle Hinton, Justin Trudeau Paper Doll, New York magazine, November
2015 (courtesy the artist).
For the 2016 election, Donald Trump also became an apt target for paper-doll
satire, as in a design made by Briana Haynie and presented with comments by
editor Kevin C. Cole in The Annual, an online journal of humor and cultural
critique. This figure in underwear, socks, and sock garters has only one suit to
don, but also a tabbed set of lines to place within a speech balloon, with this
direction: “Choose what Mr. Trump says as he pushes THE BUTTON and sends
nuclear missiles to bomb the world!” The choices include the emphatic “I AM
GOD.”38

Effigies: Paper Figures to Burn in Protest

Beyond the ongoing use of the paper doll as political symbol, as a means of
associating politicians with the silly and insubstantial, the paper figure has
offered other possibilities or special features for the political activist: it can
easily be strung up and burned. Generally made of paper perhaps combined with
cloth, often with a label of some sort to indicate the person targeted but with
little attempt to reproduce actual features, an effigy could be damaged or
destroyed in protest, indeed as a type of “image magic.”39 Certainly paper set on
fire could symbolize change, a rejection of established power, the quick
alterations of a revolution.

Some effigy figures have condemned those opposing an established government

though the meaning of the ritual can change quickly. The best known British
example concerns Gunpowder Plotter Guy Fawkes, who intended to blow up the
king in the House of Lords in 1605. Celebrating the fact that James I had
survived this attempt on his life, his supporters lit bonfires around London, and
months later the Observance of 5th November Act introduced an annual public
day of thanksgiving, which featured Fawkes burned in effigy. But the meaning
of this event changed with the increasingly negative evaluation of the Stuart
kings, and especially of pro–Catholic James II. During his reign, Gunpowder
Treason Day began to focus on anti–Catholic sentiment: increasingly boisterous
celebrations featured the burning in effigy of not just Guy Fawkes but of
Catholic priests and the pope along with James II and his Catholic wife Mary of
Modena.40 This tradition of Guy Fawkes Day effigy burnings has continued: in
November 2015, an image of then prime minister David Cameron, naked and
with a pig’s head in his lap, entered into the flames at Lewes in East Sussex.

As in changing versions of Gunpowder Treason Day, the paper figure employed

in other countries has most commonly symbolized opposition to an established
leader who at least figuratively should be tossed into the fire. In February 2015,
for example, as part of a Lenten festival, residents of the northern Ukrainian city
of Sumy burned an effigy of Russian president Vladimir Putin to protest Russian
military intervention in the Ukraine. Blamed for having annexed the Crimea, for
raising the level of violence and death, and for opposing ceasefires, Putin
appeared as a crudely constructed figure, with a pig’s snout, ultimately burned
on a pile of tires.41

In the United States, effigies have commonly been used to demonstrate

disapproval of leaders and their policies, beginning during the Revolution. In
1765, the newly forming Sons of Liberty burned Boston’s stamp agent in effigy,
destroying his office to get wood for the fire, an event that led to the instant
recruitment of many members and similar protests in other towns. The use of
paper figures intensified in the summer of 1776, the target having shifted to
George III, the effigy providing a means of symbolically calling for a swift and
violent government change, not just the end of a specific law or of a local
official’s tenure. On July 22, 1776, on Huntington, Long Island, protestors rolled
his paper likeness into an English flag lined with gunpowder; it was then “hung
on a gallows, exploded and burnt to ashes.” On July 29, in Baltimore, colonists
carted an effigy of George III through town and committed it to flames,
declaring this outcome as appropriate for a tyrant. After the war, many
Independence Day celebrations featured a likeness of George III paraded
through town and burned in a central square, the ritual a symbol of the past and
of the ongoing determination to defeat enemies to liberty.42

From the Revolution onward, paper effigies have continued to be a part of

American politics, employed on various sides of crucial issues. In 1795, effigies
appeared to protest the Jay Treaty between the United States and Great Britain,
which involved agreements concerning trade, wartime debts, and the American-
Canadian border. On July 4 of that year, anti-federalist Jeffersonian Republicans,
fearing that closer economic ties with Britain would promote the priorities of the
aristocracy, carried a paper effigy of chief treaty negotiator John Jay through the
streets of Philadelphia and burned it, an action repeated in other towns. Jay, in
fact, remarked that so many effigies of him were burning that he could have
walked from Georgia to Massachusetts by their light.43
Into the nineteenth century, the use of effigies continued in response to unjust
government decisions, these burnings frequently taking place before the White
House, their target the president. In August 1841, for example, when President
John Tyler vetoed a second attempt by Congress to re-establish a Bank of the
United States, angry supporters of the bank gathered outside the White House
and burned an effigy of Tyler.44

The Civil War especially provoked the use of effigies for political protest, with
the anti–Northern focus centered on images of William Lloyd Garrison, John
Brown, and especially Lincoln. Newspaper accounts across the South and even
in Ohio and Oregon describe Lincoln burnt in effigy, sometimes with a double-
sided face, black and white, to shock viewers and highlight his inappropriate
allegiances.45 The Alexandria Gazette of March 20, 1861, reported on three such
occasions, including one orchestrated by students at Hampden-Sydney College,
the act occurring during a “calithumpian serenade,” a name given to an
undisciplined student event.46 On February 18, 2006, 141 years after General
William Tecumseh Sherman burned the city of Columbia, South Carolina, both
the general and Lincoln were hung in effigy on the steps of the South Carolina
state house as part of a weekend-long series of events concerning Sherman’s
invasion.47

Effigies have also been employed for and against social change in the twentieth
and twenty-first century. Leonard Gaston Broughton, a Baptist minister and
founder of the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1900 spoke in
his Altanta pulpit against lynching, and especially about one well-publicized
case: a black man, accused of a violent crime, had been caught and lynched,
thirty-five miles from the city, on a Sunday afternoon, with excursion trains
going out from Atlanta to see the event, all with no government response.48
Beginning the night of the lynching, as Broughton recalled on the tenth
anniversary of his church’s founding, he had spoken from his pulpit about this
“species of savagery.” When he did so, many congregants walked out of church,
the press villified him, and twice, as he recalled, “the lowest scum in our
community” held parades and burned him in effigy.49

This dramatic tactic also became part of the campaign to obtain woman suffrage.
National Woman’s Party (NWP) leader Alice Paul knew that burning an
opponent in effigy, especially an obstructionist president, was an accepted and
even lauded part of American history. In February of 1919, the Sixty-Fifth
Congress, meeting for its final session, voted against suffrage, with President
Woodrow Wilson not attempting to change the outcome. The NWP decided in
response to burn him in effigy, using a cardboard likeness to protest this betrayal
and highlight the frustration of so many failed attempts to obtain justice. On
February 9, a column of thirty-six suffragists left the NWP headquarters on
Lafayette Square and marched to the White House, speaking to the crowd about
Wilson’s treatment of women: “We burn not the effigy of the President of a free
people, but the leader of an autocratic party organization whose tyrannical power
holds millions of women in political slavery.”50 When suffragists put the “little
figure,” about two feet tall, into an urn, the crowd erupted in both praise and
protest. Police officers then arrested thirty-nine of the one hundred participants,
charging them with “varied and sundry” offenses, like building fires after
sundown.51 When the women appeared in court, the judge allowed them to
choose between five days in jail or a five-dollar fine, and they refused to pay.
They were taken to an abandoned workhouse, judged “unfit for human
habitation,” the effigy burning and their incarceration intended to draw attention
to women’s lack of full citizenship in a country purportedly making the world
safe for democracy.”52

Through the decades women protesters have continued to employ this means of
dramatizing their status in the United States. On September 7, 1968, more than
four hundred women demonstrated in front of the Miss America Pageant at the
Atlantic City Convention Center, the protest organized by New York Radical
Women, a group active in the civil rights and antiwar movements. They waved
signs with slogans like “No More Beauty Standards” and “Welcome to the Cattle
Auction.” At the center of it all, and attracting the most media attention, was the
“Freedom Trash Can”—a receptacle into which protesters tossed bras, girdles,
high heels, false eyelashes, wigs, curlers, and paper images of women from
Ladies’ Home Journal and Playboy. Rumor spread that the items had been set on
fire, though in actuality, nothing was burned: these law-abiding citizens had not
been able to get a fire permit. Still, reporters coined the phrase “bra burners” to
characterize these women and their protests. While Bert Parks was inside the
Atlantic City Convention Center rehearsing with the pageant contestants, he was
then hung in effigy outside. The demonstration, reported on by newspapers
around the country, was one of the first to bring national attention to the
emerging Women’s Liberation Movement.53

The use of effigies to protest politics has continued with recent presidents. Code
Pink and other groups burned George Bush in effigy as he invaded Iraq and
Pink and other groups burned George Bush in effigy as he invaded Iraq and
Afghanistan; during the “Pants on Fire Tour“ Ben and Jerry’s co-founder Ben
Cohen hit the road with a twelve-foot tall effigy of Bush, featuring fake flames
and smoke shooting out of his pants. Pakistanis, Afghans, and Americans all
burned effigies of President Obama. Women’s groups in India and other
countries as well as in New Orleans have recently burned effigy images of police
officials who refuse to prosecute rapists.

Through the arresting image of the paper figure hung up, burned, or thrown in a
trash can, violence can be threatened or prophecized, with the message that
ultimately, or perhaps quickly, power structures can change. The worst values
can be temporary, thrown away, a reign like George III’s or a set of values like
Woodrow Wilson’s not strong enough to endure. With the pantin, tabbed paper
doll, or effigy, the paper figure can focus on the ability of protesters to assert
their own values and their own agency in contrast with seemingly unchangeable
codes, thus associating supposedly insuperable men with that which can easily
be contained or destroyed.
 Chapter 3

Paper Characters and the Creativity of Toy Theatres

From their beginning in China and Japan through the current era, paper figures
have highlighted the change possible in power structures and in social values,
this ephemeral material focusing attention on that which does not have to be
permanent. Through the centuries, whether in service of a religious, communal,
or political meaning, these icons have primarily reached an audience of adults.
But as paper images crossed Europe and came especially into England and then
to the United States during the nineteenth century, they reached an audience of
children as well and became a common feature of their entertainment. One of the
first of these new product types, paper characters deployed within a toy theatre
to enact “juvenile drama, encouraged a special kind of liberating play.
Continuing the earlier emphasis on transformation, this sort of paper doll spurred
a great deal of adventure and fun as well as ongoing commentary on how
creativity, in childhood and in adulthood, can be lost and gained.

Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, claims that tiny things, like paper
dolls and the theatres that might house them, can spark the imagination: indeed
“the miniscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world … miniature is one of
the refuges of greatness.”1 Literary and social critic G.K. Chesterton considered
the miniature theatre as enabling meaningful creation, uncluttered by peripheral
concerns that can overwhelm the big. In the Daily News on February 2, 1907, he
wrote of the toy theatre’s small enclosure that “this strong, square shape, this
shutting off of everything else, is not only an assistance to beauty; it is the
essential of beauty.” As he maintained further in another essay concerning this
venue, “You can only represent very big ideas in very small spaces. My toy
theatre is as philosophical as the drama of Athens.”2 Diane Ackerman, essayist
and poet, speaks of play as an essential part of being human, awakening the
joyful part of our inner selves: “a refuge from ordinary life, a sanctuary of the
mind, where one is exempt from life’s customs, methods, and decrees.” She
continues by claiming that “there is a deeper form of play, akin to rapture and
ecstasy, that humans relish, even require to feel whole.”3 Such total engagement
can arise from toy theatres, in which the child or adult serves as the theatre
maker, playwright, director, and mover and voice of the characters: the agent
behind it all.

This immersion, as G.K. Chesterton noted, can involve a level of concentration

and engagement difficult for harried adults to achieve: “We have enough
strength for politics and commerce and art and philosophy; we have not enough
strength for play.” Chesterton claimed, in fact, that he often turned from
fashioning his toy figures and theatre to something easier, to writing biographies
of great men, for example, an occupation requiring less involvement.4

This toy that can reach to the highest levels of creativity can also teach the
practicalities of making art. Children are not tricked by “make believe,” they do
not confuse fact and fiction, G.K. Chesterton declared, but instead they
appreciate both: they want to learn how a site of art functions, as they can
through the toy theatre, while also becoming enthralled by the plots and
characters presented therein.5 In an article about a recent toy theatre renaissance,
film and theatre critic Melinda Barlow similarly describes the potent
combination of the imaginative with knowledge of fundamentals: “It is toy
theatre’s intimacy and ability to create illusions while exposing their
mechanisms—in part because the puppeteer is visible—that makes it such a
versatile and surprisingly disarming medium.”6

In the lives especially of men and boys, deemed in the Victorian era to be the
appropriate controllers of this challenging play form, this theatre represented
much more than a toy. In its actual presence and as symbol, it stood for the
ability to dream and think imaginatively. As many writers, directors, and actors
describe their childhood attraction to the toy theatre, consider the impact it had
on their own work, and wield it as artistic symbol, their reflections bring up key
topics: how various forms of discipline imposed upon children can alter them,
how much a change to their activities can matter, and how childhood might be
thoughtfully contrasted with adulthood.

The Paper Theatre and Its Characters

The extended reach of this innovative product began with cheap engravings,
given out at London theatres as mementos by publisher J.H. Jameson in 1811.7
These small paper figures, of particular characters in that night’s performance,
resembling the actors that played them, came with simple cardboard
reproductions of the sets. In the 1810s, William West became by far the most
active publisher of these theatre extras. He first began selling his sheets of
characters at the popular pantomime Mother Goose and then marketed paper
figures along with abridged versions, created without copyright payment, of
adventure plays that had been written for adults, including The Temple of Death
and Zoroaster. As these products soon became more complex and expensive,
they included up to eighteen sheets of characters and up to thirty background
sheets, rendered both in black and white and brightly colored forms. Customers
could also buy the parts to put an entire cardboard theatre together, including the
proscenium arch, stage boxes, and an orchestra space, the larger versions three
or even five feet squared.8 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when
most children played with jump ropes, spinning tops, marbles, and rag dolls, the
toy theatre was primarily an upper-class choice, unique in its size and grandeur,
a product that engaged adults as well as children.

After Jameson and West began producing this new item, other publishers
immediately joined in. I.K. Green began publishing plays and theatre sets in
1812; one of William West’s apprentices, he started his own business with
pirated versions of his employer’s designs. In 1818, Arthur Park published an
abridged version of Isaac Pocock’s The Miller and His Men (1813), which
became one of the most popular of toy theatre plays, issued by many publishers.
In addition, between 1822 and 1830, Hodgson and Company offered over
seventy sets based on productions at the Covent Garden Theatre.

Although many other companies entered the toy theatre business, it would be M.
& M. Skelt that beginning in 1835 would succeed in “transforming the toy
theatre into a national pastime.”9 This firm prospered by producing elaborate,
expensive theatre sets as well as much cheaper, smaller products: a wide
audience could thus purchase the Skelts’ huge variety of plays and scenery.
Popular among these offerings were exotic eastern stories like Aladdin and Blue
Beard, war dramas like The Battle of Waterloo, and adaptations of adventure
novels, such as Fenimore Cooper’s The Red Rover. In the first half of the
nineteenth century, from the Skelts and other publishers, more than three
hundred of London’s most popular plays appeared as toy theatre scripts.10

In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, this vogue continued, the
businesses often remaining within families. W.G. Webb’s firm hand colored
over twenty plays between 1847 and 1880: “highwaymen, smugglers, sailors,
soldiers, knights in armour, clowns and fairies tread the boards of Webb’s toy
theatres in good old-fashioned melodramas and pantomimes in which wicked
villains and dashing heroes battle for beautiful heroines culminating in love
triumphant.”11 John Redington, who worked with I.K. Green for many years,
acquired the bulk of Green’s plates in 1860 after his employer’s death. Benjamin
Pollock married Redington’s daughter and in the 1880s set up his own shop,
attempting to improve the product with more detailed and richly colored
costumes and sets. He added new plays to the repertoire and re-issued those of
earlier makers. After having several other owners, this shop became Pollock’s
Toy Museum in 1952, now operating at 1 Scala Street in central London,
producing 20,000 toy theatres a year.12

In the late nineteenth century, along with these publishers, children’s magazines
marketed toy theatres. In 1865, for example, Black Eyed Susan advertised free
sheets of scenes and characters as inducements to potential subscribers. In 1866,
Charles Stevens’ magazine, Boys of England, serialized Alone in the Pirates’
Lair, offering a sheet of figures and part of this adventure story in each issue.13
Other play scripts and characters appeared in this magazine, at various intervals,
until 1900.

To design these popular products, publishers sent artists to the theatres to take
notes on dramatic gestures, costumes, and scenery. Theatre management often
provided them with free seats since these toys served as free advertising. Over
time, different publishers created different innovations: with the attachment of
flat wooden sticks, characters could be moved from above; notched slots or
strings allowed them to slide across the floor; slots in the wings enabled quick
changes of settings. Some toy theatres contained orchestra pits and even paper
pit musicians; some had a space beneath a raised stage that allowed for the stage
business of a trap door.14

Certainly creating a performance with such a theatre demanded a high level of

concentration and inventiveness, with sets to be constructed, speaking parts
assigned and rehearsed, musical accompaniment planned. As historian Kenneth
Gross commented, with considerable effort, these toys enabled families “within
their homes to restage and reinvent in a private space works played on the public
stage.”15 But the theatre could be put to an array of other uses: enthusiasts could
exchange characters and backgrounds from one set to another; they could write
new plays and scenes, mounted with impromptu combinations of purchased and
homemade elements; or they might assemble the theatre and sets as their major
or sole project.

Across Europe, these theatres, called Kindertheater, or children’s theatre, in

Germany, and dukketeater, or doll theatre, in Denmark, became popular
products. In Germany, they housed plays by Goethe, Schiller, and their
contemporaries and operas by Wagner, Mozart, and Rossini. In Denmark, the
Jacobsen firm printed colored costumes and sets to depict Danish history and the
fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen.

In the United States, starting in 1870, these traditions—of dramatic scripts,

brilliant costumes and sets, and various combinations concocted at home—
would continue. The earliest known American toy theatre publisher was Scott
and Co., in New York, whose products sold in stores in several cities. Without
acknowledgment of sources, this firm republished toy-theatre hits from England,
including The Miller and His Men, The Red Skeleton, Redhead Jack, The Terror
of London, and The Boy Sailor, or the Pirate’s Doom. For many adaptations of
English plays, Scott chose new titles and place names to recast them in the
United States: The Fiend of the Rocky Mountains and The Pirates of the Florida
Keys were among this group. Beginning in 1880, McLoughlin Brothers, a large
manufacturer of paper dolls, also produced toy theatres, using high-quality color
printing. Additionally J.H. Singer began making these products in 1883.
Providing another venue for popularizing this toy, newspapers like the Baltimore
Sunday Herald published scripts, sets, and characters for a number of plays as
did the art supplement of the Boston Sunday Globe.16

In both England and the United States, this toy would become less popular after
1900. Nineteenth-century melodramas like The Miller and His Men had involved
an intensely emotional acting style, spectacular staging, and special effects that
smoke and a trap door could enable: the perfect genre for toy theatre adaptations.
But toward the end of the century, popular drama shifted to the realism of Ibsen,
Chekhov, and Shaw, not the stuff of toy theatre. Into the twentieth century some
companies continued making toy theatres with scripts provided just for
children’s stories and classic myths. In 1918, for example, the magazine The
Delineator included toy theatre sheets for The Wild Swans, based on a tale by
Hans Christian Andersen. In 1927, Harper & Brothers produced The Playbook of
Troy, with soldiers and the cutouts to make two Greek galleys, the Trojan Horse,
and a chaotic battle scene. Harper’s The Playbook of King Arthur, 1928, featured
a four-panel cardboard cover, which opened to reveal a tournament, with knights
jousting. This toy also included a short text about the Knights of the Round
Table, five pages of cut-out knights and ladies, and three pages from which to
construct the castle of Camelot plus the sword and the stone.

In their size, tie to a professional art form, adaptability, and use of a written text
along with performative figures, these theatres provide unique pastimes,
engaging their owners in a creative genre as did no other toy. And their impact
has extended from the actual to the realm of symbol. For many participants, this
theatre provided a powerful emblem of the imagination—and how it could
overcome the requirements of parents, the community, the church, and
ultimately of adulthood.

Recognizing What Children Need: Andersen, Dickens, Stevenson and Beyond

In the nineteenth century, the toy theatre, a talisman of creativity as a possession

and perhaps more so as a symbol, served as a counterweight to a prevailing view
of childrearing. Even though Jean Jacques Rousseau advocated a child-centered
approach by which to develop the innocent child’s natural capacities, his views
would not hold sway in the Victorian home. Parents were extremely concerned
with the task of disciplining their children, their efforts to “break the child’s
will” stemming from the prevailing religious belief that children were inherently
wicked and needed stringent training to overcome the evil within: “Spare the rod
and spoil the child.” Caning and whipping, as well as withdrawal of food or days
of isolation, might be employed to achieve strict control over children, both at
home and at school.17 Moritz Schreber, a prominent German doctor and author
of child-rearing guides translated into many languages, argued that after repeated
punishments “a single threatening gesture will be sufficient to control the child”
and to suppress a “proliferation of pernicious character traits.”18

At this time in which the Calvinist view of childrearing generally defeated the
Rousseauian, some of those who disagreed evoked the toy theatre to discuss the
true essentials of childhood.19 Several major writers of the period recognized
that these theatres had transformed their own childhoods, and they employed this
toy, this opportunity for “deep play,” as a symbol of what was needed to curb
repressive discipline.

The Danish fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen, who published more than
150 stories, many of which were dramatized by toy theatre makers like the
Jacobsen firm in Denmark, expressed his own creativity through paper figures
and used toy theatres in his stories to discuss art and maturation. As a boy living
in poor surroundings, three families in a house together, Andersen made his own
paper cuttings and theatre sets to stage plays. One of his favorite characters was
Pierrot from the commedia dell’arte, a subject also of pantins.20 At twelve,
Andersen was reading Shakespeare’s plays and acting them out with paper
figures and backdrops.

As an adult, Andersen continued making paper cut-outs, usually from white

writing paper, and telling stories concerning them, often surrounding his figures
with frames that made them resemble characters on a multi-level stage. In his
elaborate designs, many images appeared repeatedly: swans, palms, ladies with
fans, ballerinas, clowns, witches, angels, and a stealer of hearts hanging from a
gallows.
Hans Christian Andersen, Jumping Pierrot Odense City Museums).
Paper cutting, a continuing part of Andersen’s routine, had a major impact on his
writing. Sometimes he began developing characters for his stories while cutting
out paper shapes, as critic Kjeld Heltoft has noted: “The things and characters in
Andersen’s tales are basically so visually experienced one would think he had
drawn or cut them out first—as occasionally he did.”21 Critic Jens Andersen
connected this paper cutting to all that Andersen wrote, calling it “something
colourful, diverting and poetic that is extremely closely linked to his lyric poetry,
drama, fairy-tales, novels and travel books.”22 Hans Christian Andersen himself
noted this strong connection. “Cutting is the fledgling beginning of poetry,” he
wrote to a friend in 1867. He again made this connection in a poem that he
attached to cuttings created for a friend’s child:

In Andersen’s paper-cuts you see

His poetry!
A medley of diverting treasures
All done with scissors.23
Hans Christian Andersen, Paper Cutting.

These figures, and toy theatres in which they could come to life, also became a
particular theme in his writing, a symbol of the artistic nurturance that so many
children lacked. Andersen’s first book contains his versions of three traditional
tales as well as his own “Little Ida’s Flowers” (1835), in which he first wrote
about paper cutting, paper environments, and their connection to creativity. In
this story, a college student attempts to amuse Ida, a little girl, with designs
resembling those that Andersen made for children wherever he visited: “She was
very fond of him, because he knew the most lovely stories and could cut out
such amusing pictures—hearts with little dancers inside them, flowers, and great
castles with doors that opened. He was a very jolly student.” When Ida asks, the
student tells her that the drooping flowers in her family’s living room have
exhausted themselves by dancing, but that all the paper figures can dance and
play with her help.

Then an older attorney who comes to visit the family criticizes the student, for
making “stuff and nonsense.” This man argues that the child needs strict
discipline and not silliness: “Fancy filling a child’s head with such rubbish!”
That night in a dream Ida sees the flowers and dolls dancing in her living room,
a glorious scene that she realizes cannot last.24 Such transitory forms, like a burst
of creativity or pure play, can move the child or adult beyond staid emptiness:
the youthful student, a figure for Andersen himself, understands the
transformative power of such beauty, as dreamed about and participated in—
indeed the absolute need for it in achieving full adulthood. In a story offering
extremes of parental priorities, the paper cutter and the responding child speak
for real nurturance.

Thirty-four years later, Andersen similarly relied on a toy environment as a

powerful symbol of creativity and childhood. His fairy tale “Herrebladene” or
“The Court Cards” (1869) concerns an extravagantly produced paper
castle/theatre: “How many beautiful things may be cut out of and pasted on
paper! Thus a castle was cut out and pasted, so large that it filled a whole table,
and it was painted as if it were built of red stones. It had a shining copper roof, it
had towers and a draw-bridge, water in the canals just like plate glass.”
Andersen tells us that “The whole belonged to a little boy, whose name was
William,” the castle his most prized possession. With total fascination, William
moves the castle’s royal residents, made from playing cards, and revels in the
details of their costumes: “The kings held each a scepter, and wore crowns; the
queens wore veils flowing down over their shoulders, and in their hands they
held a flower or a fan; the knaves had halberds and nodding plumes.” One night
all the royal retinue comes to life, and William bumps his head on the castle as
he tries to enter it and join in the festivities. From a window, the four jacks tell
him stories of all their fun and misdeeds. They ask William to light a candle to
celebrate each escapade, and inevitably he lights the castle on fire and has to run
and get help, story telling thus appearing as something dangerous and potent—
that can set the child’s imagination and the world on fire.25 This total
involvement, this deep imaginative play, might last just for a moment and might
threaten the established home, but it is what the child most needs.

Charles Dickens also employed the toy theatre to discuss creativity, as the means
to move beyond Victorian discipline and the bleakness of poverty. Throughout
his life, Dickens had great affection for toy theatres. After acquiring his first one
as a nine-year-old, he based his own first tragedy, Misnar, the Sultan of India, on
James Ridley’s “The Enchantress,” an exotic Asian story that he read in his
father’s library. In his script, as Dickens later declared, the gracious young
prince could improve the audience’s morals even during battle scenes since he
had “a habit of uttering wise thoughts when surrounded by demons or
monsters.”26 And Dickens would maintain this interest: years later, a world-
famous author, he kept a toy theatre in the playroom at his home in Kent, where
he and his son assembled a prefabricated stage and produced The Elephant of
Siam.27

As a child with a toy theatre, Dickens could function as playwright as well as

actor, director, and producer.28 Exercising authority over his brothers, as
biographer Fred Kaplan comments, the boy “could conceive of and control the
entire world of performance, the clever child glowing with the satisfaction of
being center stage.” The careful planning included cutting out the sheets of
characters, pasting them onto cardboard, and gluing them to wires or sticks.29
Then the movements of these figures could begin:

These then would be pushed onto the small stage, with its backdrops, props
and scenes; in full costume, and in suitable postures, the tiny cardboard
creatures would then act out the play. Here it was that Dickens performed
The Miller and His Men and Elizabeth, or The Exile of Siberia; his brothers
 moved the little players, which sometimes had the unfortunate habit of
creasing up or becoming unglued, while Charles himself read and acted out
the scenes.30

Especially after his family’s transfer, because of his father’s financial

difficulties, to the depressing slum environs of Camden Town, London, the toy
theatre provided a much needed escape for a talented and worried boy.

In describing these toy-theatre performances, biographer Peter Ackroyd refers to

them as “an emblem of Dickens’s own relation to the world,” of his desire to
wrest significance and artistic structure from the grim “smallness” of people’s
situations, a means of responding to the destitution and restrictive discipline that
he encountered. Dickens frequently considers the fate of the harshly disciplined
or ignored child: unremitting discipline occurs in David Copperfield as “the
gloomy theology of the Murstones made all children out to be a swarm of little
vipers”; Arthur Clennam, in Little Dorrit, has his will systematically broken in a
childhood dominated by his supposed mother’s fanatical Calvinism; in Great
Expectations, selfish adults speak of Pip and other children as ungrateful and
“naturally wicious.” Kind, spontaneous children, like Oliver Twist and Little
Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, are certainly superior to so many people
exercising authority over them and point the way to a better society.31

Like Hans Christian Andersen, whom he met in 1847, Dickens employed the toy
theatre in his writing as a symbol of the best priority: not cruelty and rules but
creative play. In “A Christmas Tree,” written in 1850 when he was thirty-eight,
the older narrator’s reminiscence of holidays past features the child’s response to
the toy theatre. At the top of a tree banked with toys lies the best one of all: “Out
of this delight springs the toy-theatre—there it is, with its familiar proscenium,
and ladies in feathers, in the boxes!—and all its attendant occupation with paste
and glue, and gum, and water colours, in the getting-up of The Miller and His
Men, and Elizabeth, or the Exile of Siberia.” The narrator comments that far
below this “teeming world of fancies so suggestive and all embracing,” he
imagines seeing the “dark, dirty, real Theatres in the day-time,” improved by
their association with the finest of toys, the small and the childlike. With the
biblical “This, in remembrance of Me!,” with which he finally describes the toy
theatre at the top of everything, he speaks of the transcendent joys of his
childhood and the formation of the creative self, values also present in Dickens’
novels.32

Like Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson recorded his attraction to theatres
Like Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson recorded his attraction to theatres
and paper characters constructed by English publishers and, in his case,
especially by M. & M. Skelt. G.K. Chesterton, in his book on Stevenson,
discusses toy theatres as providing an “inner imaginative life” during a
childhood in which Stevenson was often ill and lonely. The theatre characters
and scripts that Stevenson collected at the family home in Scotland, Chesterton
continues, staved off these burdens while protecting him “in some degree from
the fully icy blasts of Puritanism which blew so high in public life,” his stern
Calvinist grandfather, a minister, objecting to most frivolities but not to Arabian
knights and other fables enacted via a child’s toy.

Chesterton claims further that the adventure dramas that Stevenson enjoyed as a
child, “a gay patchwork of colour combined with a zigzag energy of action,”
created a pattern that “runs through or underneath all his more mature or
complex writing,” a key to understanding his suspenseful, melodramatic
adventures like Kidnapped and Treasure Island.”33 Max Beerbohm, in Around
Theatres, also connects Stevenson’s years spent enjoying these theatres to his
playwrighting, in dramas such as Beau Austin, Deacon Brodie, and Admiral
Guinea, which he co-wrote with William Ernest Henley. The plotting of such
plays, Beerbohm claims, derived from juvenile drama: “The horrific scenes and
figures that the small boy Stevenson used to cut out from Skelt’s pages, and to
paste upright, and to manipulate on the stage of his own toy theatre, they are the
self-same figures that he projected in his prime.”34

In the autobiographical “‘A Penny Plain and Two-Pence Colored,’” from 1884,
Stevenson talks about the attractions of all of the juvenile dramas that he enjoyed
as a child: classics like the legends of Alladin and Robin Hood; adventures like
the story of Three-Fingered Jack, the Terror of Jamaica; histories like chronicles
of Richard the Lionheart. Toy theatres for these playscripts regularly appeared in
the windows of bookshops, Stevenson wrote, but he usually lacked the funds for
them: “Long and often have I lingered there with empty pockets.” When he
could make a purchase, he felt a “giddy joy” to obtain the scripts that contained
“gesticulating villains, epileptic combats, bosky forests, palaces and war-ships,
frowning fortresses and prison vaults.” He remembered all the characters as
looking vaguely English, even the Turks and Russians, the scenes starring them
composed of garish colors, every hill containing a castle. Depending on the play,
the captivating, dramatic costume accessories might include helmuts, plumes,
breastplates, shields, swords, and even chain mail. When Stevenson got home,
he enjoyed cutting and painting the figures, reading the play, and moving the
characters, but then he quickly searched out new titles. He thought of these
scripts, figures, and scenes, these “kaleidoscopes of changing pictures,” as
“evidences of a happy childhood,” the scenarios offering another sort of
existence during years constrained by illness, loneliness, and religious
restrictions. He viewed this creative outlet as enabling him to to become a
writer.35

For writers in an array of situations, constrained by illness, poverty, and

certainly Victorian discipline, the toy theatre represented the possibility of
transforming the environment. The toy theatre could bring the child into other
worlds, into the joy and even salvation of making art, a chance to develop the
freedom of imagination needed for a writing career. This use of the toy theatre as
a space for discussing creativity has continued. Set designer Heidi Landesman,
for example, based her designs for the musical The Secret Garden, which
premiered on Broadway in 1991 and ran for 709 performances, on toy theatres.
This story set in the early years of the twentieth century, adapted from the 1910
novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, concerns Mary Lennox, a young English girl
born and raised in India during the British Raj. Orphaned by a cholera outbreak
when she is eleven years old, she is sent from India to Yorkshire, England, to
live with a sickly cousin and uncle whom she has never met. There she and a
young gardener bring new life to a neglected garden, to themselves, and to her
relatives. The set resembled an enormous toy theatre with pop-out figures, large
paper dolls, and collage elements, what critic Frank Rich described as a “rococo
set, a pop-up, period toy-theatre that greets the audience upon arrival.”
Encompassing the action, this toy-theatre set reiterated claims made by earlier
writers, concerning the transformative effect of offering a child freedom, respect,
and love.36

Toy Theatre as Technique

For many writers, the engrossing action of the toy theatre led to thoughtful
discussion of creativity. It also served as a means of considering the
practicalities of art, the specific choices that making it involved. As a compact
world, toy theatre could encourage the habits needed by a careful craftsman
working within the confines of a particular genre.
G.K. Chesterton, who wrote about the influence of the toy theatre on Stevenson,
concentrated, in considering his own career, on this toy’s relationship to learning
the care and patience that a writer would need to succeed. In his autobiography,
Chesterton claimed that his earliest memory, indeed “the sight upon which my
eyes first opened in this world,” involved a toy theatre made by his father, in
which a paper hero stands on a bridge wearing a crown, holding a large key,
crossing from mountains to a castle, from whence at a high window a woman
observes him: presumably he plans to rescue her. Chesterton also remembered
the frustration of not being able to enter that small world: “I had a primary
tragedy at the age of two or three—it was that I could not get inside a theatre or
onto the stage, where things happen immeasurably more interesting than in the
real world.”37

Beyond that first memory was his recognition of the work required to create
such a stirring scene. He spoke in his autobiography of his uncles and father and
their dedication to hobbies such as gardening and woodwork: his father had
constructed the theatre by employing this same attention to detail. Through a
similar devotion to the effort, one of Chesterton’s best known characters, Father
Brown, solves murders by fully examining what the criminal did: “I had thought
out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in which style or state of
mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like
the murderer myself, of course I knew who he was.”38 Like his detective
carefully analyzing motive and method, Chesterton enjoyed fully entering into
the workings of a genre—using what it offers, soaring within its conventions and
limits, as he would do with the essay, newspaper column, biography, and
detective story, his careful craftsmanship a trait that began with toy theatre.

Other writers credited their technical expertise, especially in the writing and
mounting of plays, to their early work with this toy. Oscar Wilde, for example,
enjoyed toy theatres in childhood and employed this compact version of theatre
as an adult in staging his own plays. Planning the first production of The
Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde collaborated with Sir George Alexander of
the St. James Theatre, together utilizing a toy theatre and cardboard figures to
stage the action, going “line by line and move by move.”39 Working with this
toy, they eliminated characters, such as a solicitor who came from London to
arrest Ernest (Jack) for unpaid bills, and they combined elements of the second
and third acts to reduce the play from four acts to a quicker moving three, the
limits of the smaller space helping Wilde to appreciate the precision required
also by the larger.40

Playwright and screenplay writer Jean Cocteau recalled that the toy theatre,
brought home by his mother, led to his own salvation while he was ill and
increased his knowledge of the theatre. “She would bring home programs
covered with mysterious, important-sounding names,” he wrote in his
autobiography. “Sometimes I was sick—I had scarlet fever, I had measles like
all children. She would give me the programs to read in bed, and I had toy
theatres and would cut out scenery, and finally I caught an illness much more
serious than scarlet fever or measles—what I call the red-and-gold disease:
theatre-i-tis.” Of himself and a governess, he wrote, “We hammered, cut, pasted,
and painted; we made footlights out of candles, and a collapsing prompter’s
box.”41 And he concluded that he thus learned not just to appreciate the theatre
as a patron would do, but to recognize, within the narrow but liberating confines
of the toy stage, how words became character and action.

This understanding of the specific techniques required to enact creativity could

stretch from juvenile drama to other arts, from the theatre even to painting. Jack
Yeats, son of painter John B. Yeats and brother of poet William Butler Yeats,
loved toy theatre, collected old scripts, and as an adult wrote and performed
these juvenile dramas at Christmas for local children. As a boy, he began
working with this genre, beginning with a theatre and character sheets given to
him by his grandfathers, which he discussed in detail:

Indeed every successful play that appeared on the London boards and was
sufficiently exciting was immediately issued in sheets for the Miniature
Stage, at a penny plain and twopence coloured. And delightful the sheets of
characters are, magnificent pirates and robbers, and graceful lovely Nancies
with the smallest of hands and feet, and combats too. All done from copper
plates, and full of the real dignity and romance of the traditions of
theatricals.42

Yeats believed that the small stage worked better than regular theatres at
conveying some realities: “This shape lending itself better to my mind to the
artistic and realistic composition of the scenes, than the lofty style of the real
prosceniums which is responsible for the incongruity, which we sometimes see,
of the heroine and her little boy, starving in a garret with so much top room that
they could have floors put in and let the place out in flats.”43 Included in Jack B.
Yeats, Collected Plays is “My Miniature Theatre,” his introduction to plays that
he wrote as an adult for toy theatre, this essay chronicling his continuing
enjoyment of this genre: “As to the plays, I write them all myself. So what shall I
say of them, but that I admire them all but I like the piratical ones best.” As an
adult, he wrote several toy-theatre plays in what was by then the old manner,
including The Scourge of the Gulph, James Flaunty, Onct More’s Great Circus,
and The Treasure of the Garden. He crafted a town crier who could move his
arm and ring a bell via a string down his back and a clown who could smoke a
pipe with real smoke supplied through an rubber tube, but he generally crafted
very little action and sought instead, because of the awkward movement of the
figures, to “unfold the plot by the dialogue.”44 Yeats designed sets for the Abbey
Theatre, Dublin, which also produced many of his non-toy plays, including
Kathleen Ni Houlihan, The King’s Threshold, and The Land of Heart’s Desire:
he believed that writing and putting on miniature plays helped him learn to
concentrate on the essentials of dialogue and thus of his characters.45 Yeats’
involvement with the stilled moment also stretched to his paintings, like The
Riverside (Long Ago) (1922) and Morning after Rain (1923), which concentrate
on the inner life of unmoving figures, with action implied through the
background scene, as in a toy theatre. Yeats believed that his miniature theatre
plays and interest in small dramatic spaces also contained the “seeds of the great
theatrical canvasses,” such as his The Scene Painter’s Rose (1927), Romeo and
Juliet (The Last Act) (1927), The Player’s Dawn (1952), Entrance of Lady with
Attendant (1955), and The Student of (the) Drama (1955).46
Jack Yeats, The Riverside (Long Ago), 1922 (Estate of Jack B. Yeats, all
rights reserved, DACS/ARS 2016, National Museums Northern Ireland,
Ulster Museum).

Beyond these many genres of art, toy theatres and all the costumes worn by their
characters also had an impact on fashion designers and illustrators. As a child,
Cecil Beaton, Academy Award–winning costume and set designer, became
infatuated with the latest drawings of Bessie Ascough, who worked at the Daily
Mail as a fashion illustrator: “Soon I was in virtual paroxysms of impatience
while awaiting my father to bring home the paper in which this lady’s latest pen
drawing would be ready to be smeared with water colours or oddly smelling
silver and gold paints.” Beaton would cut out these figures to make dolls, his
favorites being those in ballgowns and wedding clothes, and create additional
costumes and theatre spaces to contain them. These pursuits worried his father:
“The truth was that my family deemed it unwise to allow these apoplectic
expectancies for Bessie Ascough’s artistry to continue: the child was becoming
peculiar.” But this activity prefigured a career: “My inward child’s eye even as
my adult vision, always sought out the detail rather than the conception as a
whole. A particular trimming on a dress seen in childhood could make a
profound impression on me, and certain details have remained in my memory to
this day, with acute combinations of colour that have influenced my own
creative work.”47

Bob Mackie, often called the “sultan of sequins” or the “rajah of rhinestones” for
his gown designs that led to nine Emmy Awards and three nominations for
Academy Awards, also attributed his career’s beginning to paper dolls and his
own toy theatres. While growing up in the 1940s in suburban Los Angeles,
living with his grandmother after his parents divorced, Mackie loved movies
starring Lana Turner, Betty Grable, and Rita Hayworth. Along with the films, he
loved celebrity paper dolls, which he soon judged as limited by their one skin
color—white—and by their dull wardrobes: “I had a set of Betty Grable paper
dolls that someone had given me, which came with clothes…. But I threw them
away and designed my own. One time I took one of my Betty Grable paper dolls
and painted her all brown and gave her black hair. I did all kinds of black lady
clothes for her. In the musicals, you’d see Lena Horne and she was always so
exciting. All those satiny dresses. Well, I just thought I’d make my own black
paper dolls because they weren’t making any. It wasn’t that I played with them
as dolls. It was just a way of designing clothes.” In their new clothes, Mackie’s
star dolls appeared within his own version of a toy theatre or movie set:
“Actually, what I used to do was put on shows on top of my dresser. I would
paint the scenery and everything, and then I’d get a 45 record and produce that
number on my dresser. I’d sit there all by myself. I never did it for anybody. I’d
look at it for a while, then pack it all away and think about doing another one.”48

Mackie began his professional career as a sketch artist for Jean Louis, who
crafted gowns for Marlene Dietrich, and then worked with Edith Head at
Paramount Studios, both designers encouraging Mackie’s flair for the dramatic,
initiated at the movies and with celebrity dolls. Beginning in 1969, Mackie
designed costumes for Diana Ross and then for Cher, Bette Midler, Tina Turner,
and many others, with his fashions now available to a larger audience through
QVC.49 Bob Mackie called Tom Tierney, who sold over four million paper dolls
and four hundred paper doll books, someone who “probably knows more about
glamour than anybody,” and like Tierney, Mackie recognized the power of the
paper doll in the development of his own distinctive approach to glamour.

Fashion illustrator Lynne Perrella, who additionally has worked as a collage

artist and art instructor, also collected and made paper dolls as a child. Her dolls
soon appeared in the most exotic of wardrobes influenced by cinema fantasy:
soon appeared in the most exotic of wardrobes influenced by cinema fantasy:

All throughout the ’50s, just about every penny of my allowance went to
buying paper dolls, and when I had collected every commercially available
set, I went on to create my own dolls and wardrobes. Another childhood
mania—the movies—dovetailed with my zeal for paper dolls, and every
trip to the movies was documented by new clothes for my paper dolls. In
the darkness of the Rowland Theater, I notated costume details from
“Sayonara” so I could duplicate the geisha robes, fans and wigs, using
colored pencils when I got home.

These exotically dressed dolls then inhabited settings that Perrella reproduced
from films, her own versions of toy theatres. Like Beaton and Mackie, she
recognized that these paper characters and sets influenced her future: “My
connection to paper dolls might have been the very thing that led me to try my
hand at fashion illustration, as I took my first art trainee job in New York in
1967.”50

And the Creativity of the Actor

Beyond this impact on writing, dramatic production, painting, and fashion, play
with toy theatres affected many actors, an oft discussed influence from
childhood that fostered engagement and confidence, especially for men, of
different generations.

Sir John Gielgud, from a family of actors, including his great-aunts Ellen and
Marion Terry and his uncle Fred Terry, went to many professional performances
as a child but had the opportunity to enter the business himself through his toy
theatre: “I had a model theatre, for which I used to design scenery, and my
brother and sister and I would make up the plays together and speak the lines
from behind the scenes.” In his autobiography, he described how “all day long
with dreadful seriousness” he worked on the sets:

I developed a passion for painting backcloths and designs in pastel for my

toy theatre. The colours, in spite of liberal applications of ‘Fixatif,’ which
smelt like pear-drops, would blow about all over the room and make chalky
smears everywhere. I used to prop my cardboard scenery on the
mantelpiece and get up in the middle of the night and turn on the light to
 mantelpiece and get up in the middle of the night and turn on the light to
look at it. (Already I had the stage illusion that everything looks twice as
good by artificial light.)

With a sister and brother, Gielgud also engaged in writing the plays and then
acting out the parts, by holding the figures from above:

We all made up plays and took turns in performing them, standing behind
the theatre, and moving the leaden figures about with our hands which were
plainly seen by the audience. Cardboard figures with wires were too flimsy
and difficult to manage, we decided, and in the strangely unquestioning
manner of children we accepted the giant’s hands moving about in every
scene, and simply ignored their existence.

At their performances, this threesome gave out programs that record some of
their plays’ exotic titles, such as Kill That Spy and Plots in the Harem. This
experience made Gielgud feel like a part of the theatre that engaged his great-
aunts and his uncle, aware of all that a show requires as he would be during his
own career: “I had a very strong feeling for space and colour on the stage from
the first, and the fascination of scenery, costume, and pictorial illusion has never
left me.”51

Ralph Fiennes also engaged with toy theatre characters and plays and credited
them as leading to an acting career; and like Jack Yeats, he appreciated this type
of theatre’s connection to painting. Fiennes’ mother Jini nurtured his passion for
the arts, and when he was seven gave him a Pollocks toy theatre with cardboard
characters operated by wires, then an old-fashioned gift. Ralph used it to put on
plays for his mother, brothers, and sisters. “Ralph had to play all the parts,” a
biographer quotes his sister Martha as remembering. “And we had to sit down in
front of and watch three-hour-long plays—like long versions of Treasure Island
or The Corsica Brothers. But to be fair, he did it brilliantly.”52 During an Inside
the Actor’s Studio interview, Ralph Fiennes told James Lipton about this favorite
toy and described its workings in detail:

It was actually a replica of a Victorian theater. It was very beautiful. You

could buy booklets of plays like Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk or
Treasure Island and you would cut out from the booklet the figures because
they were already printed and colored. You’d cut them out and stick them
onto cards and mount them onto little wire slides, and you’d stand behind,
 you’d have a little proceeding and pull the curtain up and you had
wonderful scenery which you’d also cut out and stuck on cards and put into
the theater, and I’d used to be obsessed by looking into this theater as well
as doing it.

This toy taught Fiennes the workings of the theatre and gave him the chance to
act if only before his captive siblings. Ultimately, it would become a key
element of the moment in which he chose a career in acting and not in painting.
When he studied at the Chelsea School of Art, creating an imitation of a
Velazquez painting, Las Meninas, he found its figures at different depths to
resemble “a stage picture,” and he proceeded by making “a very rough version
of what my toy theater was, which was cutting out the figure in two dimensions
and arranging them and then there was a very crude stage set based on this
painting.” As he worked, the toy theatre came to replace the Velazquez in his
thoughts, enabling him to decide on the one right career: “And then I suddenly
thought, this is a theater and I love the theater, or I thought I loved it, then I
thought about doing a stage design course and then I thought, no I don’t want to
be designing the stage I want to be on the stage.” Fiennes went from art school
to a theatre company and on to drama school. After describing this series of
decisions, he told Lipton about the Pollock’s toy theatre app: “A truly
wonderfully magic concept and beautifully designed app—genius and authentic
idea for a new generation of budding theatre lovers.”53

As a Complex, Often Negative, Symbol in Novels, Theatre and Film

Toy theatres and their cardboard characters have had a creative impact on many
artists and served for them as a potent symbol of art’s role in human life. Beyond
enthusiastic owners of these theatres who wrote in their autobiographies and in
stories about the triumph of the imagination emanating from toy theatres, other
artists have employed them to look more complexly at how children are actually
raised, indeed at the types of abuse that keep them from achieving full
adulthood. The toy theatre thus has become a symbol of so much loss as well as
gain—of so many ways in which caregivers can fail at giving care to children.

In this complex literature, the toy theatre might symbolize not the glories of
creativity but selfish, immature willfulness continuing into adulthood. In Vanity
Fair (1847–48), for example, William Thackeray describes heir George
Osborne’s trips, in the latest of expensive fashion, to all the theatres of the city.
As young men, he and his friend Master Todd had known “the names of all the
actors from Drury Lane to Sadlers Wells; and performed, indeed, many of the
plays to the Todd family and their youthful friends, with [William] West’s
famous characters, on their pasteboard theatre.”54 Ultimately, as an adult,
George becomes involved in all the melodramatic possibilities of such shows:
his rich father forbids a marriage with the poverty-stricken Amelia; when
George does marry her, he is disinherited; in Brussels where he goes to fight
Napoleon, George grows tired of his wife and becomes increasingly attracted to
her cunning friend Becky Sharp, choices that make Amelia unhappy as do his
losses at cards and billiards; at a ball in Brussels, George asks Becky to run away
with him, but then leaves for the Battle of Waterloo, where he is killed. In this
novel, the attraction to toy theatres and exotic plot elements does not point to a
positive view of childhood creativity; instead it serves as an harbinger of a
pampered young man’s selfish and cruel adult choices: he becomes a two-
dimensional, quick-change artist, like a costumed character moving through the
various sets of a toy theatre, embroiled in melodrama and farce.

In the modern novel, the toy theatre and its characters again appear as a less than
positive symbol, as a value from earlier generations that signals an inability to
adapt to a changing world. Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, from 1901,
chronicling the decline of a wealthy German merchant family over four
generations, uses the toy theatre to emphasize an ineffective escape from modern
life, a bankrupt form of inaction. This novel, Mann’s first, was the one cited
when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.55

In this narrative, the Buddenbrooks of successive generations, in a rapidly

industrializing nation, experience a gradual decline in their finances and family
ideals. Hanno, the last of the Buddenbrook males, cannot survive in an
aggressive, capitalistic culture, the arts an ultimately ineffective means of hiding
away. As a child, he had been “quite dazed” by the gift of a toy theatre, found
under the Christmas tree: “It was just as in the theatre, only almost more
beautiful.” With its red and gold curtain, shell-shaped prompter’s box, and stage
set for a popular opera, this gift “seemed larger and grander than anything he had
dared to dream of.”56 Hanno’s days spent with toy theatre lead to his playing
endless Wagnerian variations on the piano and ultimately to worsening health
and death from typhus, the early theatre obsession symbolizing upper-class,
nostalgic wastefulness.
In recent uses of the toy theatre to contrast childhood and adulthood, the
perspective has also focused specifically on the adult’s abuse of the child, on
creativity crushed by inattention or cruelty. Fanny and Alexander, a 1982 film
written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, set in early twentieth-century Sweden,
concerns siblings whose joyous childhood days come to an abrupt end when
their father dies and their mother remarries: their stepfather, a bishop, rules the
household through constant punishments, and the mother at first seems
indifferent to his effect on her children. The film begins with a lush toy theatre in
which paper figures appear on stands, the child Alexander there to manipulate
them. At the top of the proscenium, we read “Ei Blot Til Lyst (“not for pleasure
alone”), the motto of the Royal Theater in Copenhagen, here the phrase
concerning current realities, beyond a past homelife rooted in pleasure and love.
In documentary footage about this film, Bergman emphasizes this moment in
which a haunted child, alone in an empty house, plays distractedly, feeling a lack
of connection to his family.57 Then Alexander moves through each room of his
home, a complex set of backdrops for an actual, ongoing drama that he can’t
control but that he seeks to withdraw from into his own small creative spaces.
These scenes attune the reader from the beginning to the impact of adult choices
on the child.

In a more extreme way, Terry Gilliam’s 2009 film The Imaginarium of Doctor
Parnassus employs the toy theatre to chronicle the impact of the self-engaged
and cruel parent. The film starring Heath Ledger (his part also played by Johnny
Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law), Christopher Plummer, Lily Cole, and Tom
Waits follows a traveling theatre troupe through present-day London, their
stagecoach set resembling a toy theatre, with the classic proscenium arch,
additional sets seen from the wings, and real figures moving like cardboard. To
obtain immortality, Parnassus made a deal with the devil to turn over any child
of his at sixteen, and his daughter Valentina has reached that age. Exploited by
her father, she becomes arm candy for her friend Tony; this slick crook only
pretends to care about needy children and about Valentina. In a surreal landscape
in which the wonders of the imagination appear behind a magic mirror,
Valentina finally sheds herself of her father, suitor, and the devil and starts her
own life. At the end, in rags, Parnassus sells toy theatres to eager parents and
their children. Throughout the film this toy symbolizes the desire to hold the
young girl captive in a contained space, the parent and suitor seeking to make
her eternally theirs to keep, trade, or destroy.58

The toy theatre, from its Victorian beginnings, has offered young people the
opportunity to develop their imaginations and to thus become artists, small
opportunity to develop their imaginations and to thus become artists, small
leading to big. Later texts would also consider the results not of a nurturing
space but instead of discipline, disregard, and cruelty, this theatre thus
concerning human potential and various means by which it can be wasted.

And a Continuing Power

Love of miniature theatre is not just an exercise in nostalgia or tradition; indeed

it has experienced a renaissance in the last few decades.59 Toy-theatre
enthusiasts have recently produced Victorian plays while also pushing the form’s
limits, adapting the works of Italo Calvino and other established writers while
also staging the first efforts of current dramatists. Toy theatre festivals now
occur regularly throughout the Americas and Europe, offering an array of plays
that maintain the genre’s relationship to creativity and to the best forms of
nurturance.

Great Small Works in New York City, founded in 1995, as a collective of artists
who “keep theater at the heart of social life,” sponsors performances in theatres,
schools, galleries, and community centers. This group has produced nine toy-
theatre festivals featuring participants from around the world. Traveling versions
of these productions have appeared at the Jim Henson International Festival of
Puppet Theater in New York, the Full-On Puppetry Festival in Philadelphia, the
International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, the Hopkins Center at
Dartmouth College, the Fécamp Scène Nationale in France, and the
Papierteatertreffen in Preetz, Germany, a festival that since 1988 has drawn
more than a thousand participants each year.60

In 2013, for an audience of children and adults, the Great Small Works Tenth
International Toy Theater Festival featured stories that emphasized freedom and
creativity. Charlie Kanev’s The Curious Adventures of Morbid Melvin told the
story of a boy who runs away from home to evade his crazy mother; he uses
slight-of-hand tricks to seek freedom and to entertain those that help him.
Martina Plag and Lorna Howley’s Emma’s Parlor depicted Emma Goldman as
she learned to see the world for herself and to express her own judgments. Don
Chico con Alas, based on a story by Mexican writer Eraclio Zepeda, told the
story of the brave Don Chico who decides that he must build wings so that he
can reach the sky.
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, toy theatres have offered a space
of creativity. Many authors developed their own art through this adaptable and
stimulating genre and then employed it as a powerful theme in their writing.
These writers employ the small world of the toy figure and toy theatre to portray
what the adult rightly owed the growing child as well as the unfortunate results
of other choices—indeed to concentrate on the development of human potential,
the transformations that can be wrought through creative play.
 Chapter 4

Paper-Doll Books: The Movable Voyage of Education

The toy theatre employs paper figures in a special way, bringing to the child the
possibilities of art and to the adult a means of considering what it takes to be
creative. While this unique toy has long provided a space to advocate for
imagination, another genre involving paper dolls has allowed for further
discussion of education, especially for stark contrasts of purposes and methods
and for acknowledgment, in graphic terms, of the role of class in educational
opportunity. Paper figures have always concerned transformation, and paper-doll
books focus specifically on transformation through active education.

At the start of the nineteenth century, very few children in England and the
United States went beyond primary school. In the United States even by 1870,
only 55 percent had some elementary training, and less than 10 percent of
students attended secondary school, primarily boys headed for college. In the
United States and even more so in England, poor children worked: if they went
to school, their families lost the money they could earn. England passed the
Elementary Education Act in 1880, which mandated attendance from ages five
to ten, necessary because of very low participation rates, then estimated at 12
percent.1

Many primary schools, in both countries, occupied grim spaces, often with
windows high up so that children could not see out, with very little on the walls
except stern admonitions. Strict teachers focused on rules and memorization as
they concentrated on the three R’s of reading, writing, and arithmetic: the
reading lessons featured passages to memorize; writing instruction consisted of
practice in handwriting along with spelling; math involved memorization, of
times tables and formulas. Whether the student attended public or private school
or the very common Sunday schools, often the only education provided to the
poor child, the moral messages reflected the powerful fourth R of religion. A
nineteenth-century moral tale, Mary Martha Sherwood’s novel, The History of
the Fairchild Family, published in three volumes and many abridgments, offered
short units focused on moral improvement. Part One, for example, the story of a
family striving towards godliness, consists of a series of lessons, taught by the
Fairchild parents to their three children, regarding the proper orientation of their
souls towards Heaven as well as proper earthly morality: the ruination caused by
envy, greed, lying, and fighting could be warned against by teaching this text in
short bits and requiring students to memorize and recite the lessons thus
provided.2

In the nineteenth century, another quite different approach to education also

developed, from political and educational theorists who advocated for both
greater access to schooling and a more active form of instruction. John Locke
had postulated, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Some
Thoughts Concerning Education, that human beings are born without innate
ideas and that they gain knowledge by experience derived from sense perception.
In discussing a theory of the self, Locke writes that “the little, or almost
insensible Impressions on our tender Infancies, have very important and lasting
Consequences.”3 Locke impacted many writers who advocated for less
memorization and more active forms of study and for children’s development of
their own judgment. Influenced by Locke, John Clarke, an early eighteenth-
century educational theorist, wrote that “Children are Strangers in the World”
who learn through experience. The “first Acquaintance they make is with
sensible Objects. Those must store the yet empty Cabinet of the Mind with
Variety of Ideas.”4 Children’s literature developed beyond simple moral lessons
in response to this emphasis on experience, imagination, and personal judgment.
In fact, many of the writers who cherished the toy theatre as children and adults,
including Stevenson, Dickens, Andersen, Wilde, and Lewis Carroll, created an
explosion of texts for children focusing not on memorization of schoolroom or
church lessons but on entrance into larger—and imaginary—worlds.

In the nineteenth century, among the new texts attempting to engage the
imagination were “movable” books, a term that covered many types of three-
dimensional texts, such as pop-ups, volvelles, flaps, pull-tabs, and pull-downs.5
And this category includes paper-doll books, consisting of a storybook in verse
or prose sold along with an image of the main character printed on light
cardboard and placed with a variety of costumes and hats in an attached
envelope. In these books, the agency lies with the reader, who can use the
costumes or heads as prescribed or in other arrangements, a means of personal,
active learning. How Picturebooks Work discusses the possibility of a
“counterpoint in perspective” in books combining words and illustrations.”6
Offering a higher level of involvement than regular picture books, paper-doll
books encourage individual perspectives and decisions, combining what critic
Eric Faden calls “linear storytelling” with an unprecedented level of “visual
spectacle and surprise.”7 The format works against a set narrative since the
separate images are physically manipulatable at any time. As critic Gillian
Brown has noted, the “tactile” interaction with these movables, as in the
switching of a head or costume, signifies “the reader’s part in the making of the
meaning of the book.”8

These paper-doll books offered a chance to tell a story of restrictive traditional

education and of an outward voyage, with the reader involved in dramatizing,
indeed in materializing, the proper role of education. This genre has also
provided a unique site to consider the impact of class status on decisions
concerning instruction. The many costumes could quickly move the reader
between a strictly monitored and a freer sort of schooling, these books thus
focusing on change and ultimately on the positive transformation of human
beings through what they learn.

Within the Group of Movable Books

Movable books appeared as early as the fourteenth century, made for adults
primarily to accompany scientific narratives. One of the earliest examples, Ars
Magna (1305), by mystic and poet Ramon Llull of Majorca, involves revolving
discs or volvelles, layered circles of parchment held together at the center: one of
these discs moves the stars to allow the user to calculate time during the dark
hours of the night; another produces combinations of nine letters to represent the
nine names of God; and yet another allows for the classification of all things in
nature into superior and inferior groups, as indicated by letters of the alphabet.9

Throughout the centuries volvelles have served other scientific purposes. Peter
Apian’s Astronomicum Caseareum (1540) employs them to chart the history and
probable future dates of lunar eclipses. Andreas Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis
Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), from 1543, presents layered
models, highly detailed and intricate, to illustrate his anatomical findings, which
he also demonstrated in public dissections, overturning previous misconceptions
concerning organs, bone structure, and blood flow.10

Publishers developed many new types of movables by the end of the eighteenth
century, primarily for an audience of children and families. These products
include flap books, called harlequinades, their name evoking the popular
character of commedia dell’arte and of pantins. These books had tops and
bottoms that folded to make different pictures and create a story. Publisher
Robert Sayer in London began with Harlequin’s Invasion (1770) and
Harlequin’s Skeleton (1772), which he advertised as “metamorphoses.”11 Other
booksellers borrowed this idea, selling these products in both plain and
handcolored forms; they became highly popular in the early 1800s. One book
from 1873, about magic tricks, has a title that concentrates on the quick changes
involved: Transforming Performers with Surprise Pictures. Here through
various foldings, the reader sees all the magic of the circus, of acrobats, animal
trainers, and jugglers, movement of the various hinges creating action as the
text’s couplets indicate:

If you turn up the folds of this magical book,

And at its strange pictures attentively look,
You will conjure odd scenes which you ne’er saw before,
And which at each turn will amuse you more and more.12

Another type of movable, the panorama, features concertina-folded leaves that

unfurl to make a continuous image over a number of feet. In J.B. Aliquis’ The
Flight of the Old Woman Who Was Tossed Up in a Basket (1844), we see exactly
what the title describes, a long fanciful voyage. A panorama entitled The Doll’s
House (1890), from famed printer Lothar Meggendorfer, the panels unfolding to
over four feet, reveals five domestic scenes connected by doors that open and
close. The rooms include an in-home business with a three-dimensional counter
and a full range of construction supplies, a living room with a pop-up piano
holding a marble bust, and a kitchen with a stove and pop-up cupboard. On the
outside are a cart and a bicycle and, oddly enough, a woman serving wine.13

Still common today are movables that involve tabs or ribbons pulled to alter the
pictures seen. Books made by Ernest Nister’s printing business in London
employ slats that slide over each other when the reader pulls various ribbons,
thus positioning different pictures in the visible area.14 Nister’s Come and Go: A
Book of Changing Pictures (1890), published in Britain and America, includes a
verse about change and dream-like creativity to introduce its six dissolving
scenes:

And the pictures come and go

As the fire-flames rise and fall.
For the dreams of happy childhood
Are the sweetest dreams of all.15

E.P. Dutton promoted and sold over a hundred Nister titles in America,
including those with pull-tabs, many of these books having “transformation” in
the title, as do Beatrix Potter’s Changing Pictures: A Book of Transformation
Pictures (1893) and Clifton Bingham’s Pastime Pictures: A Book of
Transformation Scenes (1895).16

Additionally among these movables are various forms of pop-up books. Lothar
Meggendorfer’s International Circus features an accordion style: when the
reader pulls the base forward, the accordion folds stand up to make a three-
dimensional rendering with four depth layers. Each scene has a descriptor on its
base, such as “Mr. Funtolo performs on his horse as he leaps over a flaming
gate” and “Clara Springel leaps and somersaults through a hoop.” The final fold
reveals rows of spectators enjoying all the action.17

All of these movables involve quick change, surprise, and the agency of the
reader, as no other type of text could do. Paper-doll books would demonstrate
these traits of movables while advocating for the ongoing education of an active
life.

And Paper-Doll Books

As toy historian Antonia Fraser has commented, “akin to the pop-up books and
panoramas and paper toy theatres so popular at the time” were the books that
featured paper dolls.18 Since their beginning, these paper-doll books—about
children and adults and not the flowers, animals, or magic seen in other
movables—have involved the active reader in all the forms of alteration that
costumes can engender and indicate.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Samuel and Joseph Fuller, London
engravers and printsellers, produced a number of paper-doll books for children,
sold at their wonderfully named shop: the Temple of Fancy. Some of the doll
sold at their wonderfully named shop: the Temple of Fancy. Some of the doll
figures presented in an attached envelope can be stood up in front of a blank
page or leaned against another surface as the book is read; others consist of
heads on long slips that can be inserted into costumes within the text. As a third
option, costumes might appear throughout the text with holes in each page,
allowing the reader to see them all accompanied by the head printed on the last
page.

The first of the paper-doll books produced by the Fullers, A Lecture on Heads: A
Chimney Ornament for All Ages (1809), put the focus squarely on change and, in
a complicated world, on all the poor choices that the unthinking or uneducated
man might make. An envelope that comes with this book of verse contains a
single bald head that can be slotted into six cut-out costumes and topped by a
variety of hats to illustrate a series of satirical verses.19 This product derived
from George Stevens’ Lecture on Heads though the book contains no crediting
of this obvious source. Stevens, an actor who had played in many companies in
London and the provinces, began in April 1764 to present his lectures at the
Little Haymarket Theatre. His two-hour monologue, involving papier mâché
busts and wigs, satirized a variety of extreme and thoughtless, poorly educated
types: for example, a London fop with all manner of wigs for which William
Hogarth’s engraving The Five Orders of Perriwigs provided the inspiration; a
vain London lady with a similar number of extravagant hair pieces; a harpy
fishwife; a quack doctor; a conjurer; a Methodist parson; and a greedy
Dutchman.20 To provide entertaining satire, Stevens put on and took off wigs,
spoke through masks, recited relevant verses, and brought out paintings of his
characters in action. Within a year, he was doing big business in theatres, at
taverns, and at fairs, as were many imitators.21 In these lectures that Stevens
gave until his death in 1784, he was making himself into a paper doll, wearing
all manner of hats, wigs, and capes to poke fun at the foolishness of both men
and women.

In the 1810 Fuller text, the left or verso side of each page is left blank, so that a
clothed paper figure, into which the one included head would be inserted, might
be stood up against it. Given the label of “chimney ornament,” these figures
might have also been intended for separate placement, with head or headless, as
a decoration and amusement. As in Stevens’ lectures, the figures are types, in
this case just males, ones generally viewed as worthy of satire: a London dandy,
a self-important city alderman, and a swarthy Spaniard. At the beginning of the
verses, which appear on the right side or recto, the author describes the enclosed
head to indicate a lack of intellect and thoughtfulness: a “mere Bulbous
head to indicate a lack of intellect and thoughtfulness: a “mere Bulbous
Excrescence,” indeed “just to wear a Hat on or have the Hair Dressed upon.”
This description continues with the explanation that the changeable head is made
of pasteboard and not of wood since these men have “Paper Skulls as well as
Block-Heads.”

After these introductory verses, the recto sides provide commentary on all the
included satirical types. Within this treatment of the follies in which men are apt
to indulge, only the first man presented, the British tar or navy man, garners no
satire: the verses tell us that this serviceman is keeping Napoleon from invading;
he despises violence and danger yet demonstrates the heights of courage when
he must do so. These references concern Napoleon’s threatened invasion of
England, for which the English navy and army made defensive preparations
from 1803 to 1805. The navy man’s active purpose in defending his country as
well as his thoughtful response to the necessity of taking lives places him in a
different sphere from all the other men depicted here.

In 1811, the Fullers released a follow-up to the Lecture on Heads called

Metastasis, or Transformation of Cards, bringing to paper-doll figures two terms
focused on the possibility of change, which would subsequently appear in the
titles of many of these texts, such as The Protean Figure and Metamorphic
Costumes of that same year. Advertised as “a series of caricatures very
amusing,” these versions of playing cards, some with accompanying verses,
have the four suits incorporated into the artistic design, generally as faces of the
characters, including (not well liked) European kings and queens, fancy fops
eating fancy dinners, a pompous cleric at a christening, and a doctor who dies
after taking his own pills. On some cards, the suit marker appears not as the
shape of the head but as a prop, a club as a mirror, for example, and a spade as a
fan. With these doll cards, the Fullers again satirized pomposity and institutional
power wielded without true purpose. Just as these cards might be flipped, one to
the next, the viewer controlling the order, men could move quickly through
many varieties of ridiculousness.22

As publishers like the Fullers made books and cards of paper dolls, they
highlighted the silliness, the haphazard actions, and the lack of purposeful
education of many adults. The first of these books also sought to turn the
readers’ attention to the possibility of change, to show many choices as
temporary, indeed as performative. To quickly illustrate the varied lives that
could be led, the Fullers placed a number of their protagonists on the stage, the
focus here on the actor’s choices not on characters and scripts as in toy theatres.
In S. & J. Fuller’s Frank Feignwell’s Attempts to Amuse His Friends on Twelfth-
Night (1811), the hero performs at a party to move the group beyond “our
present pastimes dull.” Frank appears as several valiant characters, including the
Peruvian Rolla, a warrior from a popular melodramatic spectacle, Pizarro. He
also becomes Harlequin, wearing the traditional costume and carrying a magical
sword capable of creating “wond’rous change.” As the verse with this costume
indicates, Harlequin can make bad boys into donkeys, pigs, and monkeys, and a
good boy into a king.23

Young Albert, the Roscius (1811) provides another vivid example of staged
transformations. The hero here, a young actor, has a career similar to that of
William Betty, who played the great tragic roles at Covent Garden and Drury
Lane. In this book, Young Albert recreates Norval from John Home’s Douglas
(1756), Selim from John Brown’s Barbarossa (1774), and Richard III, Hamlet,
and Othello from Shakespeare’s plays. As Othello, Albert appears as a doll with
two heads, one white and one black. Readers place Albert’s boyish, rosy-
cheeked head above all the other costumes; it looks especially fantastical affixed
to Falstaff’s enormous body.24 On any given night, as this book dramatizes, the
same man or boy can move from one extreme choice to another, even taking on
two heads somehow as Othello. The paper-doll genre was thus uniquely suited to
celebrate such variations and involve the active reader in them.

While these paper-doll books primarily concern adults, the genre would soon
evolve into something for and about children, the focus still on quick
transformations, what the same person (or head) could turn into during the
ongoing Lockean educational voyage. In these short tales, the girl or the boy
leaves home because of disobedience, financial need, or the carelessness of
guardians: by some method that gets the child beyond the narrow confines of
home. This beginning often leads middle or upper-class children into the
separate world of the poor, allowing them to undergo trials that they would
otherwise never encounter. These adventures engage both girls and boys, though
with some gendered variations, the stage often providing a metaphor for lives
tried on, as in paper-doll books about adults. These texts end with a return to
home or an entrance into a chosen adult life, spurred by a changed view of
learning. Here, as reformers argued, children of all classes and costumes
improve as they read books and secure opportunities for intellectual growth.
Text and figures from Frank Feignwell’s Attempts to Amuse His Friends on
Twelfth-Night: Exhibited in a Series of Characters (London: S. & J. Fuller,
1811; courtesy Theriault’s).
The boy actor as Falstaff and as half of Othello, Young Albert, the Roscius
(London: S. & J. Fuller, 1811; The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford,
Arch. AA f. 77).

In 1810, S. & J. Fuller released The History of Little Fanny, a frequently

reprinted, innovative text that determined what the genre of the paper-doll book
would become. Critic Hannah Field has discussed the theme of this book as a
girl’s disobedience leading to misfortune and then to a penitent alteration of
conduct. But this story also concerns a positive change wrought through
experience, creating a Lockean message of growth and not just a simple paean to
obedience.25 Indeed, here the theme is similar to that of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, from 1792, in which she argues that women
need to move beyond adherence to simple-minded duty and modesty—through
education and experience out in the world.26

The History of Little Fanny features a single head with a long triangle that can be
inserted into a small slit at the back of the clothed images supplied in an attached
envelope. Told in heroic couplets, the story begins with “See Fanny here,” thus
engaging readers in their active role within this new genre.27 The verses indicate
her faulty character in part through her playing with dolls and doll clothes,
ironically what the reader is also being asked to do, albeit in a more purposeful
manner. Fanny’s thoughtless activities, called a “passion” and an “idleness,”
contrast with learning from books, which she eschews:

And in her arms a favourite doll she bears,

The only object of her hopes and cares;
Fanny with books will ne’er her mind employ
For play’s her passion, idleness her joy.

With intellectual pursuits thus contrasted to idleness and play, the story
continues as Fanny runs away after not being allowed to wear a new outfit in bad
weather. In a stylish white dress and colored sash, her own doll dressed
similarly, Fanny sneaks off to the park with her maid, only to be robbed of all
her possessions and separated from her companion. Out in the world without
protection, she becomes a poor street vendor, an errand girl, and finally a beggar.
The same head, thus the same mind and child, can face a very different reality
The same head, thus the same mind and child, can face a very different reality
without affluent parents; with no one to support and protect her, she has to work
and beg. At each stop along the way, Fanny appears in different clothes, finery
leading to rags as she is repeatedly buffeted by hard choices and a hard life.

At the end, having found her family, Fanny appears “modestly dressed in a
coloured frock,” without the elaborate sash of her first outfit, and she carries a
book instead of a doll, still seeking to educate herself and not to just become
obedient. In true Lockean fashion, she moves out into dangerous spaces that
most children can never escape, but she ultimately profits from the experience
and proves that the worker or beggar—a child with the same head—can also
change through the active education that reformers sought for all children. Fanny
returns home with less interest in fashion and more in the books that can further
what she has learned out in the world.

Fanny is not the only paper-doll character to undergo trials and ultimately be
improved by them. Like Fanny, the heroine of Ellen, or, The Naughty Girl
Reclaimed: A Story, Exemplified in a Series of Figures (1811) runs away on
account of clothes, this choice again an indication of silly willfulness, and
appears at the end holding a book: she is a “naughty girl reclaimed,” not by sheer
obedience or duty but by experience and learning. As she gets further from
home, readers are asked, “Now sadly alter’d Ellen’s seen; / What can this
transformation mean?,” a question to engage their attention and analysis. At the
beginning, readers learn that “although her face is fair and mild,” the mind
behind the face is an unknowable space. After she is sent away to school because
she won’t behave at home, she appears wearing a foolscap for being disobedient
there also. She leaves school and falls into the clutches of a gypsy who dresses
her in rags and makes her gather sticks, again the child entering the realities of
another social class. At the end, when Ellen returns home, she “makes a more
pleasing Appearance, in a neat Stuff Gown [of a thickly woven, plain cloth],
with a Book under her Arm,” her change figured in her choices: Ellen initially
appeared “with a Book at her Feet” and fancy clothes, but now she values
learning.28

As more of these books came out, theatre costumes continued to appear in them,
involving girls and boys in growth and the choices that shape adulthood. S. & J.
Fuller’s Lauretta, the Little Savoyard (1813), a longer text in prose, the title
involving a term for an actor performing at the Savoy Theatre in London,
concerns Lauretta’s early life in Switzerland with hard working parents who are
kind to everyone. After she forgets their “salutary admonitions” and goes too
near the river, the earth gives way, and she saves herself on a branch. She
doesn’t want to go home because she hadn’t listened, so instead she sleeps in a
cave where she consoles a mother goat whose baby fell off the cliff. Then
Lauretta milks the goat, by which she “satisfied her own hunger.” After four
days, English musicians pass by with their leader Marcello, decide to adopt
Lauretta given her “beauty and form,” and even allow her to bring the goat
along. In London, we see “Lauretta with Her Herdy-Gerdy,” a stringed
instrument, which she plays at the opera house. After Marcello dies and Lauretta
finds herself “in possession of an ample independence,” she returns home a
wealthy woman; she reunites with her parents and marries a kind young
merchant, her initial lack of restraint launching a naturally curious child into the
world where much would be learned and much about her would change.29

Not all of these educational adventures begin in some sort of willfulness; some
of these stories, about girls as well as boys, start with the child being forced out
into the world. In these tales, the outfits provide a means of concealment in a
dangerous environment as well as a chance to enter into a series of adventures.
In S. & J. Fuller’s Lucinda, the Orphan, or, The Costumes: A Tale: Exhibited in
a Series of Dresses (1812), Lucinda is a poor girl, left as an orphan at the death
of “most tender parents”: readers begin with a figure showing “Lucinda in the
Charity Dress.” She goes to school where a kind rich man makes her his
protégée. A grateful Lucinda then goes to his mansion, thrilled by the chance not
for fancy dresses but for a better education. She knows that her future will
depend on her accomplishments, and thus she works at learning language, music,
and drawing, and the narrator asks as a positive response, “What cannot industry
perform?”

Within this nurturing space, opportunities for growth stemming from her desire
to learn, Lucinda gets involved in political events and real danger, here the text
and the dolls related to events of the era. With the sponsor’s family, “Lucinda in
the French costume” goes to Paris, where the group experiences the horrors of
war, seeing people who act like “monsters not men and women.” Given that
Britain ended the uneasy truce that had been created by the Treaty of Amiens in
1802 and declared war on France in May 1803, again becoming a combatant in
the Napoleonic Wars, the French costume may have been a necessary disguise
for an English girl visiting Paris. After placing her in French disguise, readers
come upon Lucinda’s poem “Farewell to France,” continuing the text’s political
nature, as she addresses that country: “In thee nought but danger I find / Of the
Furies I hear the dire yell, / And the murders oft sadden the wind.” In Russia,
Furies I hear the dire yell, / And the murders oft sadden the wind.” In Russia,
where the group goes next, the narrator comments on the prejudice against
people with different skin colors. Lucinda finds her own rosy complexion
helpful as she assumes Russian and Circassian dress, enabling her to fit in and
feel safe at each stop.

As Lucinda travels beyond France, her political commentary continues, her visits
coinciding with the Russo-Turkish War (1806–1812) and its many alterations of
power and leadership. In Turkey, she comments on war causing “frequent
destructive fires” and “the easy use of the bow-string,” enabling “the familiar
murder of their monarch.” Here she seems to be referring to Selim III, the
reform-minded Sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1789 to 1807, who had been
deposed, imprisoned, and replaced by his cousin Mustafa, and then murdered in
1808 by his cousin’s hired assassins, with whom he was indeed “familiar.” As
guides take travelers just on quick tours of scenic baths and palaces, Lucinda
turns away from their beauty and instead concentrates on the women housed in
these harem spaces: “But what are situations, what are palaces, where an altar is
denied to Liberty, where the sale of the charming sex is as common as that of
cattle at a market! The ladies went more than once to view this degrading traffic,
and could only afford the poor festered prisoners their pity.” In these locations,
Lucinda recognizes that she must carefully dress as an upper-class Turk since
many Circassian or Russian women, whose clothes she had worn previously, had
been forced to become slaves there.

Then, in Bologna, where the group goes to get away from all they encountered in
Turkey, Lucinda praises the women living at a nunnery and tries on a nun’s
habit, the costume making her a desirable member of another new community:
“How much she eclipsed the sisters of the veil need not be told. The Lady
Abbess seemed delighted with her appearance, and would have been highly
pleased to gain such a charming acquisition to her Convent.” But Lucinda goes
back to her hotel: she is traveling and trying on possibilities—learning by doing
—but not yet committing herself to a particular life.

When the party next goes to Bath, Lucinda does make a choice: she meets a
young man that she will marry. This final excursion leads to a statement of the
tale’s meaning: “Such was the pleasing and unexpected occurrence in the life of
Lucinda, shewing that though Fortune may at first frown, yet, by a persevering
pursuit of intellectual endowments and attachment to the cause of virtue, her
favour may be regained.” As a girl, Lucinda realized that she needed a better
education and the further experience obtained through travel. Her Lockean
“persevering pursuit of intellectual endowments” and her analyses, as in Turkey,
in support of the “cause of virtue” have led her to adulthood.30

While the Lecture on Heads mentions the navy tar as a hero in uniform, better
than so many other English types, this uniform and experience also entered
paper-doll books about boys becoming men. The History and Adventures of
Little Henry (1810), which enjoyed great popularity in England for a generation,
concerns a well-born boy, “whose limbs and face the Graces did adorn.”31 When
his wealthy, doting parents entrust him to the maid Mary, a “careless guardian
… to idle habits prone,” she ignores the child, causing him to be captured by a
gypsy. The frantic Mary runs off and “dies of pungent grief,” a result here used
to teach: it “shews that nursery maids should well beware” of their
responsibilities. Like Fanny, Ellen, and Lauretta, Henry moves through many
threatening spaces, always persevering, the clothing choices representing the
possibilities for quick changes and adaptation, which for him include a career in
the military.

At each step Henry succeeds as, in a Lockean educational world, he naturally

seems propelled forward to something new. With no protector, he finds himself
taken up by a chimney sweep, the author employing second person to engage
readers and encourage them to position their dolls: “Now up the chimney see
poor Henry go.” And then Henry revolts, taking action to secure a better fate:
“But sick of scanty meals and frequent lashes, / In quest of fortune off our hero
dashes.” With the accompanying image of Henry in military attire, we learn that
“He now turns drummer to a soldier band” and earns “regimental fame.” He then
tires of this limited role, and the reader sees him next in striped naval pants, on
the shore with a boat behind him, demonstrating “patriot ardour warm.” “In
many a battle now the youth is seen,” the reader learns, as he seeks to “clip bold
Napoleon’s wings, and humble France,” much like the navy man from the
Lecture on Heads. In the narration, we learn further of his valor: “Heedless of
every danger, wounds and scars, / He fills with admiration all the tars.” In
Henry, we see the boy becoming man, taking on a variety of roles, asserting
himself with age: “Increasing now in stature, strength, and age, / He leads the
boats in battles to engage.” Henry operates in a larger space than Lucinda
perhaps, and the military certainly provides him with an opportunity to prove
himself, but both grow in wisdom and thoughtful choice through their active
progress.32
Similarly, in Dame Wonder’s Transformations: Of the Little Drummer, part of a
series published by Dean & Munday of London, one of the many firms that
joined S. & J. Fuller in issuing paper-doll books, the adolescent boy “much
wished to be a Soldier.” Inserting the head into slots on each page, into an array
of uniforms as this Henry progresses, the reader follows his path. Given his
experience and abilities, Henry advances quickly in the military. The reader sees
him in an officer’s uniform, a big ship behind him, arms crossed on his chest,
cannonballs at his feet as though he is on a boat’s deck, and then on the next
page the reader discovers that Henry has obtained the rank of midshipman, a
“reward of merit.” Growing in moral, intellectual, and physical strength, Henry
issues commands but is kind to his men, many of them having grown up in
difficult circumstances, as he did also: “The noble mind to merit opes the door /
’Tis cowards only that insult the poor.”33 As readers place the doll, they enter
into war’s glories along with Henry.

The title of the 1816 work Frederick, or, The Effects of Disobedience suggests
another character, like Fanny or Ellen, who runs away from the requirements of
obedience, but Frederick and his clothes go even further afield than characters in
the other books. The fourteen-year-old Frederick appears twice in women’s
clothes, transformed into an old woman and into “as pretty a little French girl as
had been seen a long time at Nantz,” and then ultimately he dons the uniforms of
an heroic sailor and soldier. This book also directly takes on a changing
appreciation of schoolwork, especially as seen by the end from a broader
perspective.

“Endowed with every good quality except perseverance,” Frederick begins as

rebellious, coming home from school for Christmas vacation and seeking not to
return because he hates studying Latin: “dead languages and sciences, which can
never be of any use to me.” He decides that “I will quit my father’s house
forever, rather than be obliged to return to such abominable drudgery.” Over
several days, he accustoms himself to the idea of leaving: with time, readers
learn, “the mind is brought to look upon vice without shuddering.” But Frederick
does not encounter the exciting adventure that he sought; instead, as a cabin boy
on a ship, he finds himself shockingly mistreated: “he discovered that the life of
a seaman was not quite so pleasant to a young gentleman, who had been
indulged in every comfort that money could procure.” Frederick must cope with
a bad storm at sea, capture by Algerian pirates, and enslavement to a merchant in
Algiers, but he continues to learn and persevere. Indeed, in Algiers, “he made
himself very useful to his master,” and he realizes that learning the language, the
type of study that he had left home to avoid, would give him more opportunity
for travel and thus for escape. When Frederick accompanies the merchant on a
voyage, an American privateer captures them, a cruel man with no interest in
helping the English Frederick, the United States then at war with England and
privateers from both sides attacking each other’s merchant ships.

Frederick’s involvement in war continues, combined with cross-dressing, when

the pirates land in France. An old woman first puts Frederick into her own
clothes to hide him after he manages to escape from the privateers. She urges
Frederick to get to Flanders and join the British army, which he does by dressing
for travel as a young French girl. He then again puts on his own clothes, and
English soldiers offer to take him home, but he wants to return with honor, not
with the shame of a run-away schoolboy. He fights at the Battle of Watterloo
where “the British arms, always conspicuous, shone with redoubled splendour,”
this bloody conflict occurring in June 1815, the year before the book was
published. Frederick is wounded there and returns to his parents as a war hero.
He apologizes to his Latin teacher because he has come to laud education—in
the classroom and out in the world.34

Into the United States

American publishers re-issued the English Fuller books right after their initial
printings.35 Throughout the nineteenth century, E.P. Dutton especially thrived
with these editions, of over a hundred texts. American firms also produced new
paper-doll books to depict the particular voyages and educational options of
Americans.

After 1850, the American publisher Crosby, Nichols released several new paper-
doll books and envelopes containing short tales, including Fanny Gray, Betty the
Milkmaid, Jack and His Pony, and Little Fairy Lightfoot, all designed by John
Green Chandler, creator also of a toy circus and a variety of games.36 This series
continues the focus on active education, and on class structure, from the English
books, but with emphasis on the impact of a much larger country, on class
divides and various means of bridging them, and on the necessity to act with
gumption and courage.
In a version of S. & J. Fuller’s History of Little Fanny entitled Fanny Gray,
featuring updated versions of the original costumes, the verses trace Fanny’s loss
of a secure childhood, indeed her destitution, brought about by the death of her
widowed mother, not by her misbehavior as in the original.37 The American
Fanny appears at the beginning as “a happy, loving, gentle child” and in difficult
circumstances she matures quickly: she becomes more assertive and able than
the Fanny in the English story. After her mother dies, an old woman takes this
Fanny in and employs her selling matches. Then, when this woman dies, she
makes the choice to live with a farmer, feeding his chickens. When he falls ill,
she collects flowers and goes out to sell them, her agency and skill growing with
each outfit that she puts on, moving her beyond the English Fanny’s required
drudgery as street seller and beggar. On a market day, she meets her uncle who
takes her in as his own child, but out in the world she has done more than
survive: she has made decisions, supported herself, and succeeded at helping
others.

Few paper-doll books published in the United States offered as full a story as
Fanny Gray, but many of them featured a short tale on the envelope that
contained the dolls. McLoughlin Brothers of New York, which produced more
paper dolls than all the other American publishers of these dolls combined,
provided such short narratives, and their competition quickly did so also. Indeed,
as historian Marian B. Howard notes, “publishers indulged in extravagant flights
of fancy in the stories they printed on the envelopes of some of their earliest
paper dolls.”38 These pointed accounts focus on gender, class, education, and a
lifetime of movement in the large modern world of the United States.

One envelope story from Clark, Austin & Smith, printed around 1860, concerns
Nellie, “a young lady of the ‘upper ten,’” a popular term for New York’s social
elite, here also referred to as “the blood.” She goes out from home, as in the
general way of these stories, but not because of disobedience or destitution but
because of busy parents who don’t have sufficient time for her, and she stays
away through her own independent choices. This large country cedes the
possibility of the child never coming back and the parents never knowing what
became of her:

Nellie has reached the age when mothers must “look out” for their
daughters, unless they wish some youngster to come along and take them
out West, or some where else, just as it happened to my friend Nellie.

A nice young man saw her, was captivated by her many charms—as well he
 A nice young man saw her, was captivated by her many charms—as well he
might be—and now she is gone. Her mother has just discovered that she
cannot spare her.

MORAL. Mothers must beware of “the beaux,” before it is too late.

These American paper-doll stories also frequently depict adventure and

opportunity through the lens of social class. Unlike so many other doll figures,
Betty the Milkmaid, one of John Green Chandler’s products from 1857, has just
one costume, consisting of well-worn farm clothes, apron, and kerchief, with a
variety of backgrounds that she can be inserted into, containing birds, cats, bees,
pigs, and cows. The several paragraphs on the envelope tell her story, all about
her hard work on each long day with all of these animals, as though this labor,
and this one costume, constitute her life.39

From the same year, Chandler’s Jack and His Holiday Companions concerns, in
contrast, the limitations and possibilities of the upper class. Here the affluent
young hero sports a variety of clothes, hats, and coats, including a tuxedo jacket;
he also has a pony and two dogs, animals intended for his amusement, not for
farm work. In the verses on this envelope, we learn that Jack is an older boy,
home from school for the holidays, seeking fun with his friends. Sometimes he
puts on rural attire and “plays at farming.” Though he is enjoying a vacation, he
becomes one of a group of “companions” who help Betty the Milkmaid. And
then the author provides a moral about Jack and about boys with the financial
wherewithal to seek amusements: “I advise all my little friends to follow his
example; if they amuse themselves in being useful, they will be much happier
than if they amuse themselves in doing mischief, as mischief is very apt to bring
sorrow.”40

Through the decades, the impact of social class on what the young person might
encounter continued to be a subject in American paper-doll tales. Rose O’Neill’s
Kewpie Kutouts first appeared in Woman’s Home Companion in 1912, the
figures accompanied by a page of verse about the Kewpies’ adventures: these
chubby fairies give aid to the lost and abandoned, teach boys to change their bad
ways, and rescue injured animals.41 In 1932, O’Neill published a small book,
The Kewpies with Ragsy and Ritzy Cut-Out Dolls, in which her characters,
during the Depression, take on more extreme versions of their established
roles.42 Ritzy, formerly appearing as a well-to-do but kind girl, wears the
costume of the haughty Wealthy Child, proud of her looks and her family’s
wealth, dismissive of anyone else’s needs. Ragsy, who had appeared in earlier
versions as a contented child in a poor working family, in this book becomes the
desperate Little Assunta, abandoned and near starvation. After Wealthy Child
makes fun of Little Assunta’s ragged dresses, the Kewpies dress these two in
each other’s clothes, this switch of costumes enabling Wealthy Child to see
Little Assunta as a perfect Dear and change her attitudes. Here in layers of
costumes and characters is the chance to learn, in Abraham Maslow’s terms,
about what all children need and what those living in poverty may lack: food and
shelter, safety, and the opportunity to build their characters and achieve self-
actualization. Many American paper-doll stories thus concern education as
influenced by the size, freedom, class divides, and uncertainties of a big country.

As a Feature of the Comic Strip and Comic Book

In the United States, as paper dolls began to appear rarely with little booklets or
with stories on their envelopes, narratives involving them continued to appear in
newer formats: the comic strip and the comic book. In this iteration of tabbed
paper clothes and paper dolls, there was a continuing emphasis on moving out
into the world, on trying on a variety of lives, thus an extension of a Lockean
genre.

The first newspaper comic strips appeared in the United States in the late
nineteenth century. The slum-alley child Yellow Kid, for example, drawn by
Richard F. Outcault, debuted in 1895 in a strip called Hogan’s Alley. Rudolph
Dirks’ The Katzenjammer Kids followed, in the New York Journal, in 1897. Into
the twentieth century, colored comic strips expanded the audience for Sunday
newspaper editions. Some of the most popular ones, such as Thimble Theatre,
which introduced Popeye and Little Orphan Annie, either filled an entire
newspaper page or appeared on a page with a secondary strip by the same
artist.43

By the 1920s, these comic strips led to comic books. In 1922, Comics Monthly
reprinted popular syndicated strips, such as Polly and Her Pals, Mike & Ike,
Barney Google, and Tillie the Toiler. In 1929 Dell Publishing began issuing
small books, called Famous Funnies, featuring new comic strips instead of
reprints and four colors instead of a single color or black and white. Walt Disney
entered the comic book world too, beginning with the Mickey Mouse Book in
1930. And then the comic book genre spiked in popularity with the introduction
of Superman in 1938, leading to a squadron of superheroes.44

In comic strips and comic books, stories about children and adults, which
contained paper dolls, continued the emphasis on transformation, on education,
and on the often misunderstood needs and capabilities of children. In Sugar and
Spike, a comic book series created by Sheldon Mayer and published by D.C.
Comics from 1956 to 1991, the stories appeared along with paper dolls of the
two leads, on facing pages labeled as “Pint-Size Pin-Ups.” In these comic books,
the parents appear only from their knees down, issuing judgments and never
listening, exacting penalties without purpose, there just for the children to get
away from. Bernie the Brain, a child genius who is an accomplished scientist
and inventor, can speak “grown-up talk” to adults, but he prefers the special
language, creativity, and risk-taking of his young friends, and he draws them
into adventures: solving crimes, outthinking robots, and herding lions that escape
from the zoo, fearsome tasks that involve Bernie’s inventions as well as an array
of costume changes. Like other paper-doll characters, Sugar and Spike move out
into the world, away from narrow-minded disciplinarians, to learn about new
ideas and put them to use.

Like England’s Lucinda, the Orphan, some American comic strips and comic
books employing paper dolls brought adventure and quick changes not to the
child but to the young woman. With differences through the decades, these
comics offered a sense of what women might learn and achieve out on an active
voyage, these strips having an effect on readers beyond what might have been
expected.

In 1906, Fluffy Ruffles first appeared in the New York Herald. Adapting a
character designed by Wallace Morgan, poet Carolyn Wells created the strip
with stories in verse, printed on a full page of the Herald’s Sunday magazine
section and soon appearing by syndication in newspapers around the nation.
Fluffy paper dolls could also be purchased separately. Fluffy was an
independent, career-minded woman struggling to make it in a man’s world,
dressed in a variety of outfits in the latest styles.45 After Fluffy discovers that her
inheritance has been lost, each week she tries out a new career: dance instructor,
sales girl in a millinery shop, governess, even a teacher of bridge. But all of her
efforts fail when men gather to ogle and flirt, making it impossible for her to do
the job. Each week she is either dismissed by her overwhelmed employer or
resigns in frustration. In one strip, for example, she opens a candy shop but then
has to shut it in depair because it remains filled with men who come there to
gaze at her, not to purchase fudge or peppermints.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, only 18.8 percent of women worked,
few of them from the upper class like Fluffy but most of them resembling her in
being single.46 In this strip, her work, a minority choice especially for women of
the upper class, appears unnatural and humorous though the verses also satirize
the male reaction to her presence at a series of businesses. Despite her silly name
and limited work successes, Fluffy became a positive role model for real women.
Macy’s created a clothing line named after her, and the Herald held a contest to
find women that embodied her personality. As historian Hunter Oatman-
Stanford has claimed, “It’s really interesting how that particular comic strip and
paper doll captured the imagination of young women who identified with her
independence, even if they could not yet claim it for themselves.”47 On
Broadway, the musical comedy, Fluffy Ruffles, produced in 1908, Jerome Kern
one of the songwriters, featured Hattie Williams in the starring role; in this story,
Fluffy falls in love but also works to support herself and delivers an oration for
woman’s suffrage.
Fluffy Ruffles paper doll set, New York Herald, December 29, 1907.

In the 1920s, another comic strip with paper dolls focused not on a new job each
week and a workday easily prevented by male response, but on a woman making
her way in the world. Tillie the Toiler, by Russ Westover, began in January 1921
and by October 1922 included paper dolls published in the Sunday paper along
with a long Tillie strip, the combination taking up three quarters of a page, four
rows with paper dolls above them. Through syndication, Tillie appeared in
newspapers around the country from 1921 to 1959. This strip began by focusing
on the quickly changing world of the 1920s, when 22 percent of women were
gainfully employed, the emphasis in this strip, and with these dolls that further
engaged the reader, on the woman actually at work and receiving an ongoing
education in the world.48

In this strip, Tillie Jones lives with her mother but seems quite independent. She
“toils” for a fashionable women’s wear company run by tycoon J. Simpkins. She
sometimes quits the job, and during World War II joins the army, but she returns
frequently to Simpkins’ offices where as a secretary she deals with his changing
whims, as an office manager she decides on whom to hire, as a model she copes
with the boredom of just standing and smiling, and as a designer she mollifies
demanding aristocrats. Through the months and years, many stories concern her
friendship with Clarence “Mac” MacDougall, a short, overweight, big-nosed co-
worker who loves her and competes with other men for her affections. Of Mac,
Tillie says on July 14, 1935: “You’re not so handsome, but thank goodness you
don’t boss me.” At her job and on the town with the men who pursue her, Tillie
appears in all manner of dress, with simpler styles as she keeps her job through
the Depression, the reader thus accruing dolls and clothes while participating in
a somewhat fanciful though long-continuing work life. With various outfits,
Tillie puts on various choices and makes her own way: like heroes of paper-doll
books, she shapes her own adulthood and ultimately chooses to marry Mac.

The character of Tillie had an influence on many genres. Eight anthologies of

Tillie the Toiler comic strips came out between 1925 and 1933. Russ Westover
also wrote about Tillie in novel form, in Tillie the Toiler and the Wild Man of
Desert Island (1936) and Tillie the Toiler and the Masquerading Duchess
(1943). The character appeared in Tijuana bibles, also known as eight-pagers or
even Tillie-and-Mac books, palm-sized pornographic comic books popular
during the Depression. Tillie became a movie star in 1927 when MGM released
Tillie the Toiler with Marion Davies playing the title role. She became a movie
star again in 1941 when Columbia Pictures released a second film with the same
title, this time with Kay Harris playing the starring role.49 Unlike Fluffy, Tillie is
not an upper-class woman just attempting to work and getting fired each day:
she continually has a job and tries to get better ones. The strip presents a fun
environment but does so with some attempt at realism.

Starting in the 1940s with various iterations through 2005, another voyager and
learner in the tradition of paper-doll books, created by William Woggon, was
Katy Keene, a young woman making choices out in the world, often eschewing
obedience to traditional codes: in the 1950s, she violates the expected not by
working as a single woman but by steadily avoiding marriage at a time when the
median age at first marriage had dropped to twenty for women and only 18.5
percent of women were not married, as compared with 31.2 percent in 1900.50
Woggon first drew Katy for Wilbur Comics (#5) in the summer of 1945, a series
of stories about teenagers and especially about Wilbur, “America’s Son of Fun.”
Her stories entered other comic series in the 1940s, including Archie, Jughead,
and Betty and Veronica, and Katy eventually appeared in separate issues titled
with her own name in 1949, a series running for twelve years. Each installment
at the height of this character’s popularity, in the 1950s, sold over a million
copies, and later her character went through various reincarnations. In 1978,
Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City used huge blow-ups of Katy Keene covers
as a backdrop in a window display and thus instigated a resurgence of attention,
leading to conventions, newsletters, and fanzines. Then Archie Comics revived
the character in 1983, employing reprints of Woggon’s drawings as well as new
art. A paperback, Katy Keene Model Behavior, in 2008, featured Katy as a high
school student and aspiring model.51 She again secured attention in 2014 when
Rolling Stone and other publications began asking Katy Perry if she had copied
her look and her clothes from Katy Keene.52

Throughout the many years of this comic book, Katy Keene’s adventures
appeared along with cut-out dolls and clothes designed by fans, for Katy as well
as her male companions. Like Tillie, Katy engages readers in a world of
independence although the stories do not concern her work life but her surprising
determination to eschew wedded bliss: an issue in 1958 features “Katy Keene in
Kitchen Fashions,” paper-doll aprons and dresses that feature carrots and flour,
but her adventures reveal no interest in actual domesticity. She repeatedly
refuses to choose either K.O. or Randy, the two men who doggedly pursue her.
In an issue from January 1957, for example, she has a nightmare in which K.O.
sends a big snowball down the hill as she has a winter wedding with Randy, and
so she tells Randy that she can’t possibly marry either man. In a strip from
January 1958, both Randy and K.O. quiz her sister to find out what Katy is going
to wear to a costume party, and Sis tells both of them that Katy will be wearing a
convict suit. One goes to the party as a policeman and one as a convict. Though
they both plan to join themselves to Katy, by ball and chain, they get connected
to each other instead while Katy dances with someone else.53 In these comic
books, arrayed in the latest of tabbed fashions, the heroine and her young sister
seemingly care for themselves, attend school and work, travel together, and
repeatedly save the older sister from the trap that is marriage. Beyond the
expectations of the era, making her own choices, is Katy Keene.
Katy Keene ponders what boyfriend K.O. will do next, from Katy Keene 59,
May 1961 (Katy Keene TM & © 2016 Archie Comic Publications, Inc. Used
with permission).

The success of Katy Keene led to other independent paper-doll heroes in comic
books. They include Millie the Model (1945–1973) by Atlas Comics and Marvel
Comics; Patsy Walker, star of the Patsy and Hedy series by Atlas Comics (1945
to 1967); Hedy DeVine of Hollywood (Atlas Comics, early 1950s); and My Girl
Pearl (Atlas, 1955 to 1961). Like Katy, these adventurers make their own
choices at school or work and avoid frequent proposals of marriage.

In the heyday of these paper-doll comic books, there were few African American
characters, but Jackie Ormes’ Torchy series, introduced as Torchy Brown in
Dixie to Harlem in 1937, defied the trend with a realistic form of the educational
voyage. Ormes’ comic strips and paper dolls, appearing in the Pittsburgh
Courier and the Chicago Defender, influential African American newspapers,
concentrate on the struggles of African Americans leaving the South for urban
sites. Torchy runs away from her grandparents’ Mississippi farm to pursue her
dream of becoming a singer after meeting her friend’s cousin, entertainer Dinah
Dazzle from New York City. She sneaks aboard a whites-only train car to New
York City, seeks out instruction and work, and ultimately becomes a regular
performer at Harlem’s Cotton Club. The strip depicts many moments of crisis
that Torchy learns from as, for example, she evades a madam seeking to make
her into a prostitute and ultimately meets her mother, a “gay divorcee” who
never wanted to be a parent.

Ormes later revived Torchy’s story and again included paper dolls with the
strips, in Torchy Brown Heartbeats, 1950–1954, which appeared in the
Pittsburgh Courier and other newspapers. In this series, Torchy begins by
attempting to save a musical genius, her boyfriend who has gotten caught up in a
life of crime. Then she hops a freighter for a job on a Brazilian plantation, where
she must combat a cruel overseer who preys on Torchy and abuses his “native
workers.” There she meets Dr. Paul Hammond and they make their way back to
America where she works as a nurse in his rural clinic. Together, in Southville,
they battle a chemical factory polluting the only water available to African
American residents.

The regularly appearing doll section, Torchy’s Togs, features the Torchy doll in
underwear and bra and perhaps garters and hose, indeed spicy underthings, and
not the demure slips seen on many other dolls as the starting point. In text
accompanying the dolls and costumes, Torchy offers advice on colors, fabrics,
undergarments, and makeup. She comments on the latest gowns by Christian
Dior and other designers, sometimes including addresses for mail-order
purchase. She encourages readers to send in their own designs to be published
along with their names, and she addresses them directly: “Come on, girls! Get
out the scissors again and dress me up. Here are four neat little numbers for my
summer week-end trip.” Torchy also comments on what particular fashions can
do for the figure (“I’m showing my favorite curve-controls. Such are a must for
perfect grooming”) and describes the dresses specifically (“For that fabulous ball
… shirred lace bodice and side flounce create svelt silhouette sheer overskirt of
sky blue”).54
Torchy’s Togs, to accompany Torchy Brown Heartbeats, by Jackie Ormes,
March 17, 1951, Pittsburgh Courier (Center for Research Libraries,
Chicago).

In so many combinations of text and dolls, produced in England and America,

both the character in the story and the reader at home have active roles to play.
As no other genre could do, these paper-doll books recognize the changes of
character and situation, and thus of dress, that occur during the active voyage of
an education and public life. These products came to include books, envelopes,
comic strips, and comic books, about adults as well as children, but they always
stressed all that might be risked as well as all that might be gained from full
engagement with the larger world. At first portraying men leading the silliest of
lives, the genre moved to stories that focused on preparation for better choices,
on the need for upper-class children to move out into the world and for lower-
class children to have more than one path to pursue, and on the decisions men
and women might make as they negotiate work, family, and the restrictions of
gender and social class. For readers and main characters alike, the ongoing
education would repeatedly involve a “trying on,” of clothes, of living situations,
education would repeatedly involve a “trying on,” of clothes, of living situations,
and of new perspectives.
 Chapter 5

The Myth of the American Family

In the early nineteenth century, beginning in England, paper-doll books

concerned the girl or boy out on a voyage, the clothes symbolizing the many
lives that could be tried on, with so much learned from the experience. These
stories of independence and change would continue into the twentieth century,
especially in the visuals and texts of the comic strip and comic book.

By the late nineteenth century, the huge amount of inexpensive paper dolls
published without any narrative, the figures themselves conveying the message,
would also serve a very different purpose: representing not the voyage away
from the home but the values holding sway within it. In these dolls portraying a
myth of affluent happiness, the change did not concern the independent path of
the individual but a suggested or required accommodation to a particular vision
of the family and town.

A New Level of Cultural Saturation

In the last decades of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, paper dolls,
generally printed without any accompanying tale, would become cheaper and
ever more prevalent, their huge circulation spurred by changes in production
methods. To make pantins beginning in the 1720s, printers employed engraved
copper or steel plates, with hand coloring applied after the initial pressing.
Another early development involved the substitution of wood blocks for copper
or steel, engraving on wood being easier and faster and thus more amenable to
large-scale printing. When McLoughlin Brothers began producing paper dolls in
New York City in 1828, they employed these wood blocks.1

Following the substitution of wood blocks for copper or steel, color lithography
led to a further decrease in costs and a larger scale of production. Invented in
Germany in 1796, the lithographic process involved an image drawn with oil,
fat, or wax onto a smooth limestone plate while other parts of the plate were
etched away with acid. An oil-based ink would then stick to the original
drawing, which finally would be transferred to a blank paper sheet, producing a
printed page. Multi-color printing occurred through chromolithography, awarded
a French patent in 1837, with a separate stone employed for each color.2

In the late nineteenth century, employing this technology, McLoughlin Brothers

made popular paper dolls in huge numbers, including Dottie Dimple, Lottie
Love, and Jenney June, which sold for five or ten cents a set. These dolls
appeared in stores as uncut sheets placed in a decorated envelope, with
advertising on the back for other sets available for purchase. McLoughlin
succeeded with these dolls not only because of their low cost and bright colors
but because of the innovation of small tabs on the clothing: this company’s
simple, yet ingenious tabs replaced the sealing wax or pins or inclined planes
commonly used to hold outfits onto dolls. Many American publishing companies
followed McLoughlin in the production of paper dolls and costumes, including
Lowe, Whitman, Saalfield, Merrill, Selchow and Righter, and Western
Publishing though McLoughlin would continue to make more of these dolls than
all of its competitors combined, along with doll houses, paper furniture, and
children’s books.3 In the 1880s, the Dennison Manufacturing Company began
producing crepe paper, this invention adding dimension to costumes sold by
many other manufacturers as well as by Dennison. By 1900, millions of paper
dolls from an array of companies across the country appeared on the market each
year.4

Most paper dolls depicted babies, young children, and mothers, but American
companies also continued a European tradition of making paper soldiers.
McLoughlin, for example, issued them printed on cardboard, in single rows of
figures on long, narrow strips. Many other American companies followed in
making these images, generally to be mounted on wooden bases, ready for
instant deployment, in both colored and to-be-colored forms. These products
included infantry and officers from American and European armies as well as
cavalrymen fighting Indians.

After becoming an affordable toy in the late nineteenth century, paper dolls
would continue to have great popularity, especially in the 1930s through the
1950s, an era referred to as their Golden Age. The popularity of paper dolls
surged in the 1930s because they sold for a few pennies, some of the only toys
that many families could afford. When World War II led to rationing of the
materials used to make three-dimensional dolls and other toys, paper dolls kept
proliferating, albeit on lower-quality paper. By the 1950s, paper-doll printing
had become an art form for publishers while vinyl variations of paper dolls,
including Colorform sets, also became popular.5

Along with a continuing array of factory-made products, the 1900s saw an

explosion of paper dolls in women’s and children’s magazines: “scores and
scores” appeared from 1890 to 1935.6 Paper doll character Lettie Lane, designed
by Sheila Young, made her entrance in Ladies’ Home Journal in October 1908,
with additional costumes for her and her family published there through July
1915. This magazine printed paper dolls by a variety of other artists through
1948. Good Housekeeping was another major source of paper dolls, showcasing
the work of many designers. Betsy McCall debuted in McCall’s magazine in
1951, the first paper doll having appeared in this magazine in 1904.

Newspapers also provided a regular site for paper dolls, with various papers
within a single city such as Boston competing for family readers through this
feature. The Boston Herald began printing paper dolls in the 1890s, issuing two
lady dolls, one blonde and one brunette, with others available through special
order. Costumes in subsequent issues fit the dolls first shown. The Boston Globe
soon followed with its own selections, including in 1907 and 1908 a Teddy Bear
series and in 1910 an entire human family. In 1912, the Boston Post printed a
series entitled Polly’s Paper Playmates, in full color. The Sunshine Paper Dolls
appeared in the Boston American in 1916.

As these dolls surged in popularity, manufacturers of many kinds of goods began

using them to promote their wares: hundreds of such dolls, in fact, appeared as
advertisements from 1895 to 1920. A product’s packaging might contain one
doll from a set of ten or twelve, along with instructions on how to obtain the rest,
by purchasing more of the merchandise or by sending in boxtops and small
amounts of money. The dolls often featured the product’s name at the bottom
with more extensive advertising information on the back. Beginning in 1899, Dr.
Miles’ Medical Company of Elkart, Indiana, advertised a full line of home
remedies with paper dolls over twenty-one inches tall, each doll holding a giant
bottle of one of the cure-alls. These dolls, with “I talk for Dr. Miles Nervine,”
for example, inscribed on the base, served as store displays; customers could
order similar ones to take home. In the 1890s, Pope Manufacturing promoted
Columbia bicycles through a series of six dolls in bicycle costumes. Enameline
Stove Polish offered paper dolls of seven college students clothed for athletic
events, including a bicycler from Harvard and a baseball player from Princeton
as well as a tennis player from Bryn Mawr and a croquet player from Wellesley
College.7 Other products that employed paper dolls for advertising included
Lyon’s coffee, Pillsbury flour, Baker’s chocolate, Singer sewing machines,
Hood’s Sarsaparilla, and Fleishmann’s Yeast.

Around the First World War, paper dolls began especially to be used to market
clothing products. Department stores employed paper dolls to sell several
brands, such as Elsie Dinsmore ready-made clothing. A newspaper ad for the
Berry-Moses department store in Texas, in September 1918, for example,
targeted young readers: “Come in tomorrow and get your paper doll set. Bring
your mother to see the real dresses.”8 The Munsingwear company, a maker of
knitted underwear, promoted its products during and after World War I by
means of paper dolls distributed by department stores, each bearing the slogan
“Don’t say underwear, say Munsingwear.”9 From the 1930s to the 1950s, paper
dolls continued to advertise clothing items such as Springmaid fabrics, Quadriga
Cloth, and Carter’s clothing for children.

Along with so many dolls to buy, to cut out from periodicals, and to collect from
advertisements, American children made their own with help from popular
publications. The first American book on paper doll and costume construction,
Paper Dolls and How to Make Them: A Book for Little Girls, published by
Anson D.F. Randolph in 1856, included hand-colored dolls and costumes for
them as well as directions for making more. This book was so popular that it was
followed in 1857 by Paper Dolls’ Furniture and How to Make It or How to
Spend a Cheerful Rainy Day. Such books would continue to appear in each
decade through the 1950s. In 1939, for example, Edith Flack Ackley wrote
Paper Dolls: Their History and How to Make Them, claiming that this craft
could enable readers to entertain themselves and their friends, to complete
school projects, to create something to sell, and to secure fashion or drama
training. In 1949, Tina Lee, who designed paper dolls for magazines, published
Fun with Paper Dolls, with directions for crafting paper men, women, and
children along with an array of clothes as well as paper stands, stages, houses,
and games.10 Many pamphlets and magazine articles emphasized making dolls
for specific purposes: Good Housekeeping in 1911, for example, featured
directions to make a goose girl, one who herds geese, with costumes for her
work day and leisure.11
Along with printing directions for making dolls, family magazines published
stories to further engage readers in this activity. A story in St. Nicholas magazine
in 1882, “A Tragedy in the Garret,” for example, concerns the space where two
sisters play with magazine cut-outs as well as their own beautiful creations: “On
one side was the extensive array of dolls which the little girls had made for
themselves…. All kinds of dresses were devised for them. Pieces of pretty paper,
such as the bright gilt bands encircling packages of envelopes, the lace paper in
cigar-boxes, and bright blue-and-orange glazed paper that came from the stores
where their mother bought fancy goods, were eagerly seized by the children, and
converted into brilliant wardrobes.”12

With so many publishers, manufacturers, magazines, and newspapers producing

large quantities of dolls, joined by girls and boys at home, the images told a rich,
detailed, and ongoing story—no textual narrative needed. These dolls became,
wordlessly, an object and symbol representing a myth of family life. Beginning
in the late nineteenth century and going well into the twentieth, these images
incrementally constructed the appropriate American home, centered in the right
sort of motherhood and childhood.

A Changing Definition of Motherhood and of Family

During the second half of the nineteenth century, paper dolls would do work in
depicting a powerful, if vulnerable and changing, American myth of family. By
that time, separate men’s and women’s roles, and the best sort of middle- or
upper-class homelife, had taken on new power. Urbanization occurred most
quickly in the northeastern United States, which acquired an urban majority by
1880, with the other regions following.13 In earlier eras in a more rural America,
women had worked alongside their husbands in family businesses or on farms.
As the nineteenth century progressed, men more commonly commuted to their
place of work—the factory, shop, or office—with middle and upper-class wives,
daughters, and sisters remaining in the home to oversee domestic duties.

Many popular advice manuals considered women as physically weaker than yet
morally superior to men, which meant that they were best suited to the domestic
sphere, their job to keep the urban house and cope with children each day while
counterbalancing the moral taint of the public spaces in which their husbands
labored. In an oft quoted and widely applied sermon, the Reverend Frederick W.
Robertson declared that it was the wife’s responsibility to meet these
expectations, providing her husband with “the single spot of rest which a man
has upon this earth for the cultivation of his noblest sensibilities.”14 An
enormously popular 1862 poem by Coventry Patmore, “Angel in the House,”
further defined this noble responsibility:

Man must be pleased; but him to please

Is woman’s pleasure; down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings herself.

In an article written in 1966, Barbara Welter labeled this particular version of the
role and worth of women as the “cult of true womanhood,” involving piety,
purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Reiterated in advice books and
magazines, in sermons, and in school lessons, this code especially influenced
women, single and married, between 1820 and 1860.15

By the late nineteenth century, this view of womanhood would still wield power
as a belief or a goal even though it would by then belie the realities of many
women’s lives. In 1900, large numbers of women were not married: 43 percent
were single or widowed. In an increasingly urban nation, middle-class girls
studied at co-educational public high schools. While in 1850, there were fewer
than eighty such schools, in 1900, there were 6,005, and in 1920, 14,000. During
those years, middle and upper-class women also secured higher education, at
seminaries and then at private women’s colleges and co-educational state
schools. Women’s proportion of the college population rose swiftly: in 1870, 21
percent of college students were women; in 1910, 40 percent of them were.16
While young and single women sought an education, they also moved into the
work world, making up almost 30 percent of the work force by 1910.17 Between
1870 and 1900, twelve million immigrants entered the United States, expanding
the numbers of women workers as well as the percentages: in cities, married
women engaged in home hand-work, and immigrant daughters, especially
eastern European and Italian, dominated the factory work force. In 1900, in New
York City, over 40 percent of clothing industry workers were women.18 From
1880 to 1920, middle-class women secured white-collar positions, becoming
teachers, social workers, librarians, and nurses.19 Although young working-class
and middle-class women often trod separate school and work paths, the two
groups participated together in Progressive reform movements. After the
founding of the College Settlement Association in 1887, women from
Swarthmore, Radcliffe, Brooklyn’s Packer Institute, and Barnard began working
and living at settlement houses in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other
cities.20 Clubwomen joined in such efforts, extending their education through
study groups while addressing their communities’ needs for housing, adult
education, kindergartens, libraries, and parks.

Examining an array of data, critics have asserted that Welter was just speaking
about a code for white women, of the upper or middle class, and thus her
argument missed so many complexities of women’s work and family lives,
especially as it was applied beyond 1860. But this “cult” provided a public
image, a cultural goal, lasting well beyond 1860, regardless of the number of
women whose choices adhered to it. Thus like the depiction in the 1980s of the
superwoman, it was part reality and part mythic expectation. Women turning to
other choices, such as college, the suffrage campaign, or paid labor, felt the pull
of those values.21 As Welter argued concerning changing times, “the stereotype,
the ‘mystique’ if you will, of what woman was and ought to be persisted,
bringing guilt and confusion in the midst of opportunity.”22 Many women indeed
led lives far outside of such requirements, but a belief in traditional marriage, as
goal or requirement, continued to provide something to seek, something to
recognize as unattainable, something to rebel against.

The pressure of embarking on an appropriate sort of marriage extended in the

late nineteenth century to a pressure of enacting just the right sort of
motherhood. In the second half of the nineteenth century, women were having
fewer children: the average number decreased from five in 1800 to 3.42 in
1910.23 The mother in the home, instead of the father away at work, was largely
responsible for the child’s physical safety, intellectual development, and moral
grounding, this approach to child-raising depicted as almost a religious calling.
In 1888, Manford’s Magazine declared in an article titled “A Mother’s Love”
that “About every true mother there is a sancity of martyrdom—and when she is
no more in the body, her children see her with the ring of light around her head,”
a description lauding the woman who would sacrifice herself not just for home
and husband but for the holy cause of children.24

By the 1890s, the view of what children needed had been changed by this image
of the home and mother: “as motherhood gained in status, so did childhood.”25
Girls required ongoing instruction to prepare for entering the world of their
mothers, girlhood thus viewed as “womanhood in miniature.”26 With particular
goals for girls came quite separate ones for boys, involving competition, outside
play, healthfulness, and vigor, qualities enabling them to move into
entrepreneurial careers and renew the vitality of the nation. As Teddy Roosevelt
described the appropriate childhood of boys, it included the physical activities of
“the strenuous life” necessary to form the “kind of American man of whom
America can be proud,” the kind that could grow up and dominate the world.27

Paper dolls appearing without much narrative, available in huge numbers from
manufacturers and newspapers, told a story of the American family, involving a
“cult” of motherhood and childhood, with men generally located elsewhere. In
this ubiquitous toy could occur substantial cultural work, a transformative vision
of the appropriate life. Through this product, Americans sold the American
home and a carefully constructed set of values, to current and to future parents.

Taught by the Closeness of the Doll

In the late nineteenth century, as increasing attention was given to a separate

period of childhood, toys came to have a new, carefully monitored purpose: to
encourage child development and provide preparation for adulthood. Certainly
children could possess many more paper than three-dimensional dolls made of
bisque or a popular composite material concocted of sawdust and glue. Playtime
with paper dolls, involving what no other toys could offer—entire families with
a large array of event-inspired clothes—could provide fun as well as a powerful
instrument of family life.

This connection to the doll, it was believed, could enable the child to enact what
she learned in family life. In 1897, psychologist G. Stanley Hall, in a study that
involved survey responses from 845 children between the ages of three and
twelve, noted this effect. Dolls offered a chance especially for the girl to apply
the lessons on morality and discipline learned from the mother: “The doll is
taught those things learned best or in which the child has most interest. The little
mother’s real ideas of morality are best seen in her punishments and rewards of
her doll.” This toy could also provide a site for practicing social rituals and
events: “The features of funerals, weddings, schools and parties which are re-
enacted with the doll are those which have most deeply impressed the child.” As
Hall studied the link between child and doll, he noted that paper dolls held a
special power and attraction, especially for older girls since their costume
changes could easily reflect the complexities of social life: “As children grow
older paper dolls have a peculiar fascination.”28

Children used dolls to enact their values, but the dolls were also part of forming
those values. Some sets, like The Young Ladies School and The Industrious
Lady, had the stated intention of bringing out the latent womanliness in the girl,
preparing her for a secure, respectable home life. While many manufactured
images reiterated approved constructions of home and service, the products that
children concocted at home did also. The story in St. Nicholas magazine in 1882,
“A Tragedy in the Garret,” mentioned a popular source of the homemade
products with which the two sisters played: “They had cut from the fashion-
journals a number of stylish-looking girls and boys, and pasted them on card-
board to make them stiff.” Additionally, the Sears catalogue, that most American
of sources, enabled the cutting out of clothes that adhered to social expectations.
Designer Mica Rath, for example, wrote in the third person about her childhood
in the 1950s that “Once upon a time, in a small Gulf Coast town, there lived a
little girl who loved to draw paper-doll clothes.” A Sears catalogue, the only
fashion source available to her, inspired her designs. She perfected her dolls and
their clothes with a 64-box of crayons of which she took particular care: “She
hated tearing their paper, threw out the broken ones and never, ever used the
built-in sharpener.”29 In Good Toys, Bad Toys, Andrew McClary wrote about the
common use of the Sears catalogue in making paper dolls, its images of children
and adults, mounted on cardboard, decade after decade, creating the all-
American family, dressed in approved styles.30

For girls especially, the doll world could be something to emulate, a space to
enter, a dream of family life. In 1921, in Doris Davey’s often reprinted My
Dolly’s Home: Biddie’s Adventure, the story concerns a girl who receives a
paper doll as a present and magically finds that she has become small enough to
follow the doll into the miniaturized world. Many children indeed entered the
world afforded by paper dolls, which represented an alluring vision—of true
womanhood and true familyhood.31
Various Versions of Us versus Them: The Best American Family

In creating this vision of the best sort of American child and American family,
the paper doll proved a versatile genre, capable of forging an ongoing dream of
American normality. In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth
century, dolls from other countries and commentary about them provided a
popular means of differentiating the approved from the unapproved, indeed the
demarcation of a powerful Other. The company Anson D.F. Randolph, which
published the popular Paper Dolls’ Furniture and How to Make It or How to
Spend a Cheerful Rainy Day in 1857, released National Costumes: A New and
Instructive Amusement for the Young that same year.32 In this set, the single doll
head can be placed above dressed figures from different countries, presented
with notes on particular characteristics, many of them negative. While Germans
appear as “simple and affectionate, honest and industrious,” the Hungarian
nobles “are very rich, and oppress the poor” while in Russia “the peasants, or
serfs, who live upon the lands of these noblemen, are poor and ignorant and have
to work very hard; they are bought and sold with the land.” Additionally, “the
Italians of the lower classes are generally idle, ignorant, and superstitious” and
“the Greeks are a gay, thoughtless, uncultivated people.” This commentary
moves from negative remarks on the treatment of the poor and the general lack
of education to the treatment of women, with the focus on these countries’
departure from the values of true womanhood: in Turkey, for example, “women
are not respected by their husbands and sons.” So though the child here can
place the single head into all of these costumes, there are preferable dresses and
nationalities, the unrepresented American, like the one manipulating the doll,
providing the central point from which all else diverges negatively.

In the late nineteenth century, a powerful Other to contrast with the approved
American family, to manipulate at home through dolls and costumes, was the
circus freak. Various sorts of entertainers designated as freaks had exhibited
since the Renaissance, but it was an expanding middle class located increasingly
in urban centers, with shorter work weeks and more disposable income, that in
the nineteenth century led to their widespread American popularity.33 P.T.
Barnum perhaps best understood the fascination with freaks, which he mined
with Joyce Heth, presented as the 160-year-old nurse of George Washington;
with Chinese Siamese twins; and with General Tom Thumb, Barnum’s name for
Charles Stratton, who was 2 feet and 9 inches tall. At Barnum’s museum and
circus, gawking at such wondrous beings, as well as the fat woman, albino girl,
and living skeleton, provided family entertainment.”34

A Tom Thumb paper-doll series produced by McLoughlin Brothers in the late

1860s, displayed Stratton’s marriage in 1863 to another circus personality,
Lavinia Warren, an occasion that made front-page news. The wedding took
place at Grace Episcopal Church in New York City and the wedding reception at
the Metropolitan Hotel where the couple stood atop a grand piano to greet
10,000 guests. The best man at the wedding was George Washington Morrison
(“Commodore”) Nutt, and the maid of honor was Minnie Warren, Lavinia’s
even smaller sister. The paper dolls of the wedding party and others in Barnum’s
employ, printed from wooden blocks, with fronts as well as backs, involved
excellent color work: the men dolls were five inches tall, the women four,
smaller than many other McLaughlin dolls to provide a clearly contrasting
Other.35 In the set, the women have five dresses each, including their wedding
clothes, the bride’s dress of amber and silver taffeta featuring emblems of
different nations, a copy of an original designed by Ellen Demorest, a dress shop
owner who included dress patterns and paper dolls in her fashion magazine,
Mme. Demorest’s Quarterly Mirror of Fashion. These dolls and costumes
offered the excitement for children of manipulating famous figures, of putting
their little clothes on and off, but also of remaining separate from and much
bigger than them, indeed in control of these lesser beings.

Paper dolls also established a view of American history that included the
ongoing construction of Native Americans as another type of lesser Other.
Anson D.F. Randolph, for example, published a twelve-sheet set of Native
Americans and structures for their village, with fold-back stands and wigwams,
tepees, and canoes. These figures appeared on the war path in combat against
white soldiers outfitted in various natty uniforms.36 These depictions of Native
Americans intended for children at play could also concern particular raids and
atrocities. Paper dolls came out in 1923 representing an attack in 1704 at
Deerfield, Massachusetts, in which five white children were abducted, including
seven-year-old Eunice Williams and her brother Stephen, named in the doll set.
Along with paper models of the parsonage and of wigwams, this set represents
the moment of the attack in highly colorful lithography.37

Throughout the years, American paper dolls also dealt with other American
views of race, ceding the child the right to play games of domination with
African American figures. In 1863, McLoughlin Brothers of New York printed
Topsey, a fictional character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the first mass-produced
paper doll in the United States depicting an African American. Then in January
1896, over thirty years after the book appeared, the Boston Sunday Globe
provided a group of paper dolls, with Uncle Tom, Eva, Emily, Selby and others
included but no details of the story given. Children could cut out a well-dressed
white woman, a ringletted white girl in bed and then on the lap of an older black
slave who is also seen being whipped, a slave girl in rags who is crying, slaves
begging, and dogs who can be placed barking and growling behind these slaves,
chasing them after they have attempted to run away. This page provided, for
children who presumably did not know the novel, dramatic images to control
and easily make into a tale of white purity, domination of the Other, and
violence.

Instead of any character from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it would be Aunt Jemima who
would become a star paper doll, as “a twentieth-century cultural icon, the
prototype for the mammy, a plump, dark-skinned, selfless, asexual, perpetually
grinning house servant.”38 From the 1890s into the mid–1950s, this mammy
image would repeatedly appear in advertising, in film, in popular literature, and
as a special type of paper doll. After St. Joseph Gazette editor Chris L. Rutt, of
St. Joseph, Missouri, and his friend Charles G. Underwood bought a flour mill in
1888, they sold their excess flour as a ready-made pancake mix in white paper
sacks. Their choice of a name and advertising character came from a minstrel
show inspired by Billy Kersands‘ song “Old Aunt Jemima,” written in 1875.
This supposed inventor of the mix and renowned cook gained a family including
her husband, Rastus, whose name later changed to Uncle Mose to avoid
confusion with a Cream of Wheat character, and their four children, usually
named Abraham Lincoln, Dilsie, Zeb, and Dinah.

Members of the family appeared in 1894 as paper-doll cutouts on the pancake

box. As the boxtop on the mix indicated, larger versions of the dolls and a
double clothing set could be ordered for three boxtops and sixteen cents or four
boxtops and a dime.39 In this set, the doll family came barefoot and dressed in
tattered clothing but offered the possibility of being transformed from rags to
riches with additional “civilized” clothing cut-outs. Below the cut-out dolls in
their rags, a caption reads “before the Receipt was sold.” Then with an overlay
of elegant Victorian clothes, the line beneath says “after the Receipt was sold.”
This double group allowed children to decide on how much freedom they
wanted to give, to keep this family as field and kitchen slaves or give them the
stature and perhaps freedom that could be attained by marketing a pancake-mix
recipe.
This interest in the Mammy, a figure who appeared sometimes as slave and
sometimes as devoted servant, her presence indicating that the presumably white
family employing her is part of the right class, would continue with other paper
dolls. In the early 1900s, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, Woman’s
Home Companion, The Delineator, and McCall’s published doll sets of white
families, complete with African American maids, butlers, and children.40 The
Lettie Lane series, for example, appearing in Ladies’ Home Journal from 1908
to 1915, included Lettie, her friends, her family, and their African American
servants.41 Especially during World War II, in celebration of a history deemed
worth fighting for, many doll sets focused on the colonial period, with slaves
among the family group. Dolls with Williamsburg Colonial Dress, for example,
which came with a booklet by Mary Selby entitled A Williamsburg Family, a
Day in Williamsburg in the Eighteenth Century, featured a white family with
multiple suits of clothes along with Moses the footman-butler and Sukey the
cook, each wearing one required outfit.42 With the Civil Rights Movement of the
1960s, integrated paper doll sets and black pride paper dolls would be published,
following the precedent set by Jackie Ormes’ Torchy series in 1930s and the
1950s. By the 1970s, African American paper dolls included Cara and Curtis
from Mattel, sidekicks of the iconic white Barbie and Ken, who appeared in
three-dimensional and paper forms. Many paper dolls also depicted Diahann
Carroll as the star of Julia, on television from 1968 to 1971. But in earlier
decades, the black slave and black servant, like the foreigner, the Native
American, and the circus freak, provided a potent contrast to the white middle-
or upper-class normative represented in paper dolls.43

The Family’s Center: The Bride

Beyond these contrasts, these creations of the Other, paper dolls displayed all the
accoutrements of the affluent home. At the center of this mythical American
family is certainly the bride, the chosen one, the many events leading to the
glorious wedding day involving fabulous dresses for paper dolls. Available from
an array of companies as well as magazines and newspapers, these bridal dolls
often resemble young girls—as though children should be anxiously anticipating
this one key event.

Over the decades, some companies offered full bridal parties, the whole group
appearing with an array of clothes, but with the focus always on the bride. In
1857, McLoughlin marketed a paper doll set called The Bride, with white
underclothing and a wedding gown for the star figure. By 1875, McLoughlin
sold a bride and a bridesmaid, each with three outfits as well as a groom and
groomsman. The male dolls appear in tuxedos for the wedding; four other formal
and casual costumes fit the two men interchangeably.44

In many newspaper sets, the perfect bride appeared as part of the ongoing
narrative of the affluent family. Though the primary character in these sets was
generally the young girl, resembling the one who might be playing with the
dolls, her older sister might become a bride. Polly’s Paper Playmates, which ran
weekly for twenty-four weeks in 1910–11, in the Baltimore American, Boston
Post, and the New York Sunday American, constructed a flawless upper-class
family life, with Polly’s sister Prue appearing at the opera, at a ball, at church, as
a bridesmaid, and then as an elaborately costumed bride. Similarly, in the Lettie
Lane series published in Ladies’ Home Journal, Lettie’s sister had “one of the
largest and most beautiful wedding parties ever produced.”45

Through the decades, these bridal dolls reflected both ongoing values and
changing priorities of the American family. In the depth of the Depression, as in
escapist movies such as Gold Diggers of 1935, Naughty Marietta, and Top Hat,
paper-doll wedding sets offered a dream of affluence attractive in the hardest of
times. A Wedding of the Paper Dolls, from 1935, produced by Merrill
Publishing, focused in its 120 pieces on elaborate outfits for the women in the
bridal party. In this set, the bride is accompanied by four bridesmaids plus a
maid of honor, two flower girls, and a ring bearer. The groom, seemingly of less
importance, appears in just his wedding tuxedo. During World War II, the
valued space of the American home, with its traditional rituals, found a
reassuring space in wedding paper dolls. Clara Ernst’s Paper Doll Wedding,
1944, features a wartime wedding with bride and groom and a large wedding
party, with eight pages of fashions, including the uniforms that the men wear as
army lieutenants. Many bridal doll sets would appear in the 1950s, starring the
all–American couple on the way to suburbia. Bill Woggon’s Once Upon a
Wedding Day, for example, a coloring and cut-out book from Saalfield
Publishing, involves Terry, a cheerleader, who right after high-school graduation
is marrying Gary, a football player who arrives for dates with a corsage for her.
He also has a boating outfit and a home with a large lawn. The many other titles
from the 1950s include Bridal Party of 1950, Here’s the Bride, Here Comes the
Bride, The Pink Cloud Bride and Her Pink Wedding, and The Heavenly Blue
Wedding.

Throughout the years, paper dolls also featured the oddity of the bride looking
child-like as though even in elementary school the girl is preparing to embark on
traditional adulthood. A paper-doll advertisement for Ayer’s Sarsparilla in 1894,
for example, features a doll with a child’s face. Produced wearing a fancy
petticoat, she also comes with a wedding dress. In the 1890s, Clarks Spool
Cotton employed dolls whose dresses went over the head as though the best of
thread makers sold the best of paper costumes. One set of sixteen dolls includes
a bride, groom, four bridesmaids and groomsmen, best man, the parents of both
the bride and groom, and the minister, available for three 2-cent stamps, all of
the wedding party looking like children.46 Ads placed on the back of the dresses
say, “If the child who receives this doll is sent to the store for thread she should
ask for Clark’s O.N.T. spool cotton and see that she gets it.” Made by Craftways
and currently available in stores and online, Melissa the Bride Paper Doll also
looks like a child. With this kit, which includes a stencil, needle, and various
colors of thread, the child can make an embroidered doll of eighteen inches, with
white for the dress and other colors for her roses, cloak, gifts, and a cake.
Melissa the Bride Paper Doll, by Craftways (courtesy Herrschners, Inc.,
item 270054).

The Ever Present Mother

The next seemingly automatic step for the approved woman in the middle or
upper-class home, and the girl encouraged to participate in this progression,
involved going suddenly from bride to mother of several children. In paper-doll
families, the mother appears as the busy homemaker, the true woman who
continues to reign long after 1860, a vision of perfection beyond general
continues to reign long after 1860, a vision of perfection beyond general
experience perhaps but enduring as a cultural icon and pressure.

At Thanksgiving 1895, in the Boston Globe, the mother appears within the
perfectly constructed upper-class family, evidencing all of the approved values
of American life, everyone well dressed and happy. All of the family members
can be put into their appropriate chairs, including the happy boy, girl, and baby
seen along with mother holding flowers while the maid brings in the turkey,
which the father will carve, with of course no chair for the family servant in the
well-ordered, affluent home.

By the 1950s, home scenes evidenced less affluence and fewer servants, the
mother engaged in a middle-class world of child rearing, fathers presumably at
the office but rarely represented with the family. On a two-page spread, Jack and
Jill magazine, in April 1957, presented the paper-doll mother, with her cloak,
scarf, purse, and gloves as well as a baby carriage to hold boy and girl twins of
less than a year old; she comes supplied with an apron for home use and no other
props. The twins, shown with clothes, bonnets, and toys, grew up in subsequent
issues of the magazine while the mother stayed the same. This feature began
with an invitation to send in names for the twins to the designer, Ann Eshner,
who would pick the best ones for this boy and girl.47 The mother was never
named.

And the Perfect Family Life

So many moments of upper- and middle-class life would contain the mother and
would also feature a perfect dream of the nuclear family: girls happy in the
house and boys busy outside—and certainly no foreigners, Native Americans,
circus freaks, or anyone else who might pose real difficulties. These dolls
depicted as living in towns or cities did not come with the extended families that
might have lived together in earlier decades on the farm. St. Nicholas magazine’s
“A Tragedy in the Garret” in 1882, about upper-floor space where two sisters
play with their paper dolls, describes the dormer windows they use as a doll
house and furnish with spools and other objects along with cloth rugs and
hanging pictures, books separating the rooms. The story emphasizes all the
accoutrements and events, such as picnics and parties, of the affluent nuclear
family: parents and children might sometimes visit with relatives, but they do
not live with grandparents or cousins.48 The “tragedy” in the story occurs
through the thoughtless play of brothers; their roughhousing, which results in
balls hitting the dormer windows and the dolls that they contain, appears as the
expected form of male play.

This paean to a perfect, and gendered, upper-class family existence continued

with magazine dolls. In Polly’s Paper Playmates in 1910–11, without any
glimpse of the working father, the family goes to the seashore, to a horse show,
to a skating rink, to an afternoon tea, and to an art show.49 The young Polly has
fancy clothes and dolls; her brother Percy has a bat and ball, fishing gear, and a
sailboat; in the gym he wears the clothes and has the accessories for the active
male pursuits of fencing, working out with barbells, and boxing. The Lettie Lane
series includes Prue who becomes first a debutante, then a bridesmaid and bride;
a brother with lots of sporting gear, a sailboat, and eighteenth-century clothes for
a costume party; and a baby sister with her own nurse and a slew of toys. Like
Polly, Lettie participates in a grand upper-class existence, seen, always well
dressed, at the piano, at the circus, as Little Bo Peep at a costume party. The
Betty Bonnet series appearing in Ladies’ Home Journal between 1915 and 1918
features similar moments of affluent family glory. These homes represent not
what all readers could obtain but what they were supposed to admire and desire:
a secure life of capitalistic and moral success.

These paper-doll families would remain just as wholesome during the

Depression, just as focused on family events, though with fewer costly activities.
Though wedding paper doll sets involved grand costumes for a grand day,
family dolls featured simpler activities, like those in which readers might
engage. Grace Dayton’s famous paper doll Dolly Dingle first appeared in the
Pictorial Review in 1913, and then became as a regular feature of the magazine,
through 1933.50 Dolly also appeared as a separate product to purchase, available
in envelopes with several outfits. For advertisements, beginning in 1904,
Drayton had also drawn the Campbell’s Soup kids, and her Dolly resembled
them in her round face and stocky body. Heading into the 1930s especially,
Dolly’s family life involved not costume balls, sailboats, and fencing but
traditional scenes of Halloween and Christmas. Dolly has busy days involving
cute clothes and a few favorite dolls, jacks, and tops, and she even carries the
bouquet of a bride; her friends Sammy and Max appear in an outside world of
farm animals and skating, all with less affluence than in earlier decades but no
with less emphasis on the secure nuclear family.
In the 1950s, this dream of a perfect and gender-differentiated childhood would
achieve its apotheosis in Betsy McCall, her activities engaging the latest of
entertainments and products that signalled suburban affluence and nuclear-
family bliss. Introduced in the May issue of McCall’s magazine in 1951, first
drawn by Kay Morrissey and later by Ginnie Hoffman, Betsy is initially
described as “five, going on six, and she lives in a little white house with a porch
and a yard to play in. Her mother and daddy and Nosy, her puppy, live in the
white house too. Nosy is six months old. Betsy and Nosy and Betsy’s friends
play together all the time. And every month from now on they’ll come to play
with you too.”51 This introduction features a child model, referred to as a “cover
girl” in an accompanying article, who holds a Betsy paper doll that she closely
resembles. From this beginning, this doll became well known: in 1953 Rosemary
Clooney sang the popular “Betsy, My Paper Doll,” claiming that Betsy, “as cute
as she can be,” is “the only doll for me.”

Betsy’s monthly page constructed an approved lifestyle for the 1950s. With a
small group of friends and cousins, and often with her mother but rarely her
father, Betsy attends many wholesome events, such as a wedding, an Easter egg
hunt, a school party, and the circus. The full page sometimes includes a few
cartoon frames or a letter to a cousin to give the details of the event. Each year,
along with her cousin Linda for some adventures, she also engages in the fun of
a summer beach trip, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, Christian
holidays intermingled with other appropriate events. Two boys, friend Jimmy
Weeks and cousin Sandy McCall, accompany her on outside adventures, like a
picnic or a trip to a western ranch. The headings make the contents seem a bit
more edgy than they turn out to be, returning her through the specifics to the fold
of the good girl: in March 1952, when she “speaks her piece,” the short text
concerns her recitation of a poem at an Easter assembly; when in November she
“goes dancing,” she does so in her dreams. Interest is also maintained by games
and puzzles, like a maze that leads Betsy to her own doll.

In the era of 1950s prosperity, besides the magazine itself, Betsy promoted an
array of products as had no doll before. This icon’s image appeared on many
products, such as Valentine cards, pet beds, beach balls, and portable cameras.
Each month in the magazine, her outfits appear with a note about whether they
could be purchased as McCall patterns or as ready-to-wear dresses, by designer
Joseph Love or Jack Bergenicht, with lists on the side of the page telling where
in each state the retail dresses were available. Some month’s events also
promoted current television shows and movies. In November 1957, Betsy goes
to see Captain Kangaroo, and her dog Nosy hides in his big kangaroo pockets; in
1958, cousin Linda watches Romper Room, where she learns about the new state
of Alaska; in 1960, Betsy goes to Hollywood to meet Hayley Mills who is
starring in Pollyanna.

These family paper dolls displayed various levels of affluence, appropriate

activities, and necessary products, but all of these dolls provide images of a
pristine space, in which the father remains away at work, the mother dispenses
cheerful assistance, and girls and boys succeed at disparate activities, always
supported by enough money, a positive outlook, and a secure version of their
future. These dolls engaged children and especially girls in a myth of perfect
days and years, in contrast with lived reality, a dream of what a child and a
family were supposed to be.

And Boys Becoming Soldiers

Most paper-doll sets depicting home life featured girls and their mothers, with
rare appearances by fathers or by a sidekick male friend or cousin involved in a
rugged, outdoor boyhood. Extending the approved wholesome family scene,
another type of paper doll lionized the ultimate extension of this version of the
boy: the paper-doll soldier, which came into the United States from Europe. Like
bridal paper dolls, these figures often employed the heads of children with the
costumes and props of the adults that they would soon become.

The first sheets depicting paper soldiers, intended to be cut out and mounted,
were published in Strasbourg between 1776 and 1781. Five series issued by
Chevalier Pierre-François Isnard, a former cavalry officer, depicted all the
regiments of the French cavalry. By the 1820s and 1830s, the French Pellerin
firm, which also produced pantins, had enormous success in printing rows of
Napoleon’s soldiers, with uniforms and suits to take on and off, the soldier
printed wearing striped underwear that “bids fair to outshine the splendid
uniforms he stands ready to don,” according to Edward Ryan, a CIA station
chief in Europe who accumulated one of the largest collections of paper toy
soldiers. Pellerin also published sheets depicting Joan of Arc, with costumes
spanning “shepherdess to the crowning of a king, from a glorious victory in the
field to capture, trial, and death,” though we don’t actually see her being burnt at
the stake. Companies in Metz, Nancy, and other French cities made similar dolls
in the late nineteenth century along with games that employed them.52

In the United States, soon after they began making paper dolls in 1828,
McLoughlin Brothers marketed cardboard soldiers, with wooden bases for
mounting, ready for instant deployment, in both colored and uncolored forms.
This firm soon expanded its offerings to not just American but also British,
French, and German soldiers, with printed backgrounds of military bands and
parade grounds, as well as troops of cavalrymen who fought against Native
Americans, with more choices available in each year’s catalogue.53 In 1899, this
firm produced paper soldiers representing the Rough Riders, Filipinos, and
Cubans engaged in the Spanish American War.54 Following the lead of
McLoughlin, by the end of the century more than ninety American companies
produced paper soldiers, with some of them, like Milton Bradley and Parker
Brothers, creating games that employed them. The increasing popularity of these
products also led to medieval armored knights, Japanese samurai, Russians and
Japanese naval forces from the Battle of Port Arthur in 1904, and other
combatants that had achieved military glory.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the paper-doll encomium to perfect

upper-class family existence in magazines and newspapers also included the
natural, approved choice of the young man going from outdoor activities to the
army and war. In Polly’s Paper Playmates, brother Percy, who had appeared
with a bat and ball, fishing gear, and barbells, ultimately leaves for West Point
dressed in his cadet uniform.55 The Betty Bonnet series, in Ladies’ Home
Journal between 1915 and 1918, features many scenes in which young Betty
visits her handsome, well-dressed cousins who have joined the army and navy.
And, during World War I, the latest battle could receive almost instant
illustration in newspapers and magazines: in 1917, The Delineator printed
American soldiers and sailors along with battleships and a naval airplane; in
1918, the New York Herald featured dolls and costumes for the ally forces
engaged in World War I.

During both world wars, the toy makers that produced vast numbers of U.S.
Army and Navy personnel featured not just soldiers and uniforms but also
weapons, forts to assemble, and battleground backdrops, the products becoming
increasingly more complicated.56 Warren Paper Products offered the Built-Rite
Army Camp, with a fort, four trenches, six pup tents, and 108 soldiers. Victory
Punch-Outs included tanks and planes as well as soldiers and sailors. Some of
these toys, like Modern Warfare with Rapid Fire Gun, made by American Toy
Manufacturing Co., combined cardboard soldiers with actual toy guns for
children, modeled on what soldiers might be using.57 During World War II,
publishers also produced toy soldiers from other, generally distant and thus
unquestionably glorious wars: the Revolutionary War, for example, not World
War I.

Like some paper brides, many of these toy soldiers featured faces of little boys
as though the child should be dreaming of and preparing for a military future. In
the 1890s, included in the Boston Sunday Herald was a series entitled “Boy
Soldiers of All Nations,” with full uniforms and weaponry, and very young boys
as combatants. During World War I, American Colortype created The Patriotic
Dressing Dolls, a prize for selling subscriptions to Farm and Home magazine. In
this set, all of the dolls look like young children, including a girl dressed as a
Red Cross nurse. The young boy doll could don sailor and soldier outfits, both
accessorized with guns; he also could be dressed as an officer holding a sword
and as an army drummer.58 Similar dolls also appeared as advertising on
packages of cigarettes, candy, and other products.59 Auerbach’s Sweet Milk
Chocolates, for example, offered International Doll Cards, including warriors
from six countries, all of whom appeared colorfully costumed, with shields and
swords, and the baby face and red cheeks of a boy of three or four.60 Beginning
in the early 1920s, H.H. Company produced The Hobby Horse Cavalry, red-
cheeked little boys in soldier suits, with helmets and swords, riding on hobby
horses. Wooden mounts allowed them to stand upright and rock. This cavalry set
featured the allies of World War I, the base of each figure containing a verse in
first person, like this one for the British:

The bugle sounds, I mount my steed

And rush away at lightning speed.
I love to fight my country’s foe,
And when we meet I lay him low.61

While paper dolls could symbolize the war effort, engaging boys and men, they
could also celebrate its conclusion. After World War II, the doll also depicted
the man who could pull off the uniform and don the clothes of suburban life. On
the cover from June 16, 1945, right after the Allies agreed to divide Germany
into four areas of control, the war in Europe having ended on May 8, the New
Yorker featured a paper doll of a serviceman, drawn by Constantin Alajálov, a
painter and illustrator who had begun working for the magazine in 1926. Here
the New Yorker encourages the happy re-dressing of the soldier, released from
war service, in stylish work suits, formal wear, leisure wear for summer and
winter, and a bathrobe, all covering his uniform from the war.
Constantin Alajálov, cover, New Yorker, June 16, 1945.

In so many paper-doll sets depicting the entire family, which a child could make
In so many paper-doll sets depicting the entire family, which a child could make
and own in great numbers, the white Christian girl grows up within the home,
involved in a series of wholesome activities with the mother present but rarely
the father. The boy belongs only tangentially to that world, his defining activities
occurring out of doors. In this vision, the girl would become the next
generation’s bride and the boy the valiant soldier and then the husband, father,
and distant office employee. The family appeared as more affluent and formal at
the beginning of the twentieth century, the doll sets engaging children in
different activities and different products as the decades passed. In the depictions
of other races and nations, paper dolls further emphasized the one true racial and
cultural domain of the normal and right.

Paper-Doll Houses

The thousands of paper dolls published from the 1890s through the 1950s—
including brides that would become mothers, girls involved in the best of
homebound activities, and boys on their way from the gym or backyard to war—
constructed the right American life. And they needed their own special houses, a
product commonly made at home by mothers and daughters but also available
for purchase, from the 1860s to 1920 and beyond. The creation of an affluent,
ordered world for paper dolls involved Diane Ackerman’s state of “deep play,” a
“physical and emotional engagement with materials and process.”62 Unlike toy
theatres, paper-doll houses involved children in constructing not exotic battle
scenes or fantasy forests but spaces of beautiful, affluent normality: upper-class
utopias. These paper-doll houses served as a means of introducing girls to ideal
versions of their future roles: as devoted wives, mothers, and homemakers.63

This product was not the grand wooden doll house in which three-dimensional
dolls might be placed after a company or a father constructed it, but something
simpler that a child might make from an account book, photo album, or a phone
book, with separate pages for each room. The results could be quite creative and
ornate, as an article in American Art commented about some of these products
displayed at an antiques show: “Their array of domestic and decorative detail
was dizzying, while their flirtation with scale, space, texture, and pattern was
disarmingly picturesque.” The “full and evocative detail” reflected Victorian
decoration, a “visual banquet” of collage and beautiful paper objects.64
Around the country, women and girls constructed these small, affluent worlds by
covering album-size pages with bits of wallpaper, foil, crepe paper, and other
materials. The first pages might contain the front lawn and front door and then
the foyer of the well-appointed home; the last pages might lead out to a piazza
and garden. Inside, the pages generally presented the front parlor and then the
kitchen, dining room, bedrooms, study, and other spaces, with highly decorated
walls and floors, lines used to separate the two, as well as cut-out images of
furniture and crepe or tissue paper curtains. The results could be highly detailed,
with plants from florist catalogues, mantels and fireplaces, wardrobes and sofas,
dishes in the cupboards, and the essentials of a nursery.65

These houses featured many special means of accommodating the paper dolls
that lived therein. Some had images of the residents pasted into the rooms,
revealing that doll placement stemmed from gender, with men in libraries but
not in the nursery or kitchen. Other houses had spaces for inserting paper dolls:
slits in dining chairs could pose them as though they were seated for supper; a
spread attached to a bed could leave room for a doll to be slipped under; bands
attached to walls could allow the dolls to stand. Loose spaces in the tread of the
stairs could make the dolls seem to be walking up and down the staircase; a
small band on one side of a schoolroom could support a teacher while a larger
one on the other side could contain her unruly pupils.66

Many magazine articles discussed the appropriate life created for the dolls
contained within elaborate album homes. In Ladies’ Home Journal in 1902,
Marian Richards described herself as getting older, becoming tired of regular
dolls. The home project of a paper-doll house allowed her to form complete
families, dressed in the latest fashions and owning the latest of decorations for a
parlor, music room, playroom, and nursery. To bring the dolls into more events
and spaces, Richards also decorated album pages as stores, a zoo, a museum, the
father’s business office, and a railway station. In Harper’s Bazaar, in January
1904, Emily Hoffman provided suggestions to make “every little girl her own
architect.” Along with making albums, she had set up rooms throughout her
childhood home, commenting that “upstairs was Boston, and downstairs New
York; and the attic was Europe because it was such hard work to get there.”67

Some paper-doll furniture did not come from magazine or catalogue pictures, but
from manufacturers of paper dolls that produced three-dimensional cardboard
furniture and houses for paper dolls as well as flat pieces for albums. Clark,
Austin, and Smith’s The Girl’s Delight, from 1850, included dolls and furniture,
ceilings, floors, and walls along with costumes for three dolls.68 In 1896, Milton
Bradley offered, in A Home for Paper Dolls, not just furniture but three sizes of
cardboard homes, from six to fourteen rooms, with dolls to slip into cut slits.69
The drawing room featured nine pieces to celebrate the affluent home, “four
chairs, two fancy rockers, one sofa in maroon brocatelle, one marble-top table,
and one piano,” according to the company catalogue.70

Instead of the elaborate Victorian furnishings displayed in most of these books,

The Doll’s House That Glue Built, by Clara Andrews Williams, from 1910,
contains seven rooms of Arts and Crafts furniture, with detailed directions of
where to place each item within the cardboard rooms. This book includes
reproductions of many pieces of Stickley furniture as well as the accessories of
this architectural movement, including Niloak pottery from Benton, Arkansas,
which had a swirling zebra pattern created by baking the area’s clay in a
traditional kiln. The story concerns two girls, stand-ing for the reader, who are
carefully crafting this space for Mr. and Mrs. Glue. This series continued with
sixteen other Glue books, such as Williams’ The Ships That Glue Sailed, all of
them marketed as an aid to active learning.71

Many books that provided information on paper-doll furniture for album or

cardboard houses clarified the upper-class values involved. Randolph’s Paper
Dolls’ Furniture and How to Make It or How to Spend a Cheerful Rainy Day,
from 1857, tells the reader that “You must now furnish your kitchen, as your
mamma will probably tell you all good housekeepers do, at first; and I will give
you a list of articles necessary to make your kitchen a comfortable place for
Bridget, your doll servant, to work in.” Other sections of this book concern the
dining room and the servant etiquette therein: “Now I am going to give you a
design for the Butler’s Tray. A Butler’s Tray is intended to place the soiled
dishes upon after the removal of the first course, but if you prefer, and as your
dining room is to communicate with the kitchen, Bridget could remove the
dishes after the first course directly to the kitchen and the dessert could be nicely
arranged upon the Butler’s Tray before the ringing of the dinner bell.”72

Class status was also involved, complexly at times, in books that provided
extended narratives about dolls and their homes. The Mary Frances
Housekeeper, or, Adventures among the Doll People from 1914 describes the
upper-class expectations of these dolls, with some humor applied thereto. This
text concerns two sets of characters, both a paper-doll family and a real-live girl,
Mary Frances, whose father makes a cardboard house for her dolls, getting them
off the playroom floor after they complain that they can’t live there among the
other scattered toys, the first of their unending requests for upgrades as they
move up the class structure. When the doll family gets its own paper-doll house,
Mother Doll immediately wants carpets and rugs, a “wish for more” that she
discusses with her son:

“I’m just as grateful,” interrupted Mother Doll, “as if I didn’t express my

wish for more, but—“

“Never mind, Mother, that’s the way of a woman,” laughed Tony,

pretending to be very grown-up.

Then Mother and Tony debate paint or wallpaper and insist on getting stencils to
make roses on the walls of a bedroom. They need new furniture for every room
and a cabinet full of china. And then Mother wants a piano: “‘The French dolls
have one,’ she sighed. ‘Not that I envy them, of course.’”

With all of these rooms and furniture to clean along with children to tend, the
family then must have a servant, as Mother Doll makes clear: “‘I don’t see how
we can do the work of this house ourselves,’ she continued. ‘We’ll have to have
help now we’re getting so much beautiful furniture. A half-grown girl could tend
the baby and wait on the table.’” The discussion about securing this help,
involving the doll daughter Hazel, her mother, and Mary Frances, culminates in
a young African American servant as part of a grocery list of things to obtain:

“There was a colored girl at the grocery store this morning,” said Hazel.

“Ahem,” thought Mary Frances. “It’s good that I saved that colored paper
doll Aunt Maria gave me.”

“They said she had run away from the Colored Home for Homeless
Children—or was it the Colored Refuge for Orphans? Anyway, she was
looking for a place.”

“So, then!” exclaimed Mother Doll. “Why didn’t you bring her home? Go
right away and find her, Hazel. And, Hazel, don’t forget to bring home a
chicken, and a fish, and a ham, and a pound of butter, and half a dozen shoe
buttons—and oh, Hazel, bring two loaves of bread.”

“Mercy, Mother!” cried Hazel, “I’m afraid I’ll ask for half a pound of
 “Mercy, Mother!” cried Hazel, “I’m afraid I’ll ask for half a pound of
colored girls, two loaves of chicken, and half a dozen fish-buttons!”

Then the “comical looking creature,” Cinda, a young African American girl, is
brought home where she seems to the dolls to be exasperatingly slow at learning
about formal waiting on table, at becoming quiet and polished. The family
critiques her accent and her vocabulary as well as her lack of skill, belittling her
as a “real old-fashioned child of the South.” Right after Mother gets this servant,
she begins giving large, fancy parties where she appears as the best dressed
hostess though she keeps bemoaning her lack of adequate help. And then the
double commentary, of doll and girl, continues:

“Ah,” sighed Mother Doll, “servants are such a trial.”

“Oh, where did she learn to put on such airs?” laughed Mary Frances to
herself.

As the mother makes repeated upper-class additions to the home, she does so
with little mention of the father who has not been there, as though he matters less
than things. When Father finally appears, he tells his family that “There I was all
these days—caught behind the radiator where I could see your comings and
goings and doings every day.” That morning Mary Frances’ mother had done a
thorough sweeping and found him. And he immediately continues their
collection of accessories, concentrating on the best male purchases for beyond
the house: the family now needs a sleigh and horses and an automobile, with an
African American doll in the front seat as a chauffeur, and a separate garage.73

Of course even as Mary Frances makes fun of these acquisitions, she is the one
creating a paper-doll estate. And for years, paper dolls produced by toy makers,
newspapers, magazines, and companies like Singer sewing machines and
Baker’s chocolate sold middle or upper-class life, all wholesome and right,
starkly contrasted to the foreign, non-white, non-normal Other. The best
participants included boys in active, outdoor spaces, with a glorious military
future, and girls engaged in a happy home life that would naturally segue into
the bridal moment and the next generation of perfection involving attentive
mothers and distant fathers. Into the 1950s, paper dolls, more than any other type
of toy or family purchase, did cultural work in defining and defending a
powerful myth of American life, the transformations that individuals and
families should strive to achieve. Perhaps doll owners could not actually
experience such insulated perfection in their own lives, but the cult of true
experience such insulated perfection in their own lives, but the cult of true
familyhood provided a goal to aspire to, a situation to envy, a secure, contained
world that could be participated in, at least through these toys.
 Chapter 6

Fashion Paper Dolls: The True Woman’s “Evil Twin”

Through the ages, paper figures have contributed to religious and social
traditions, political satire, education, and the image of appropriate family, with
the focus on transformation. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, one
powerful representation involved a vision of bridemaids and brides moving
immediately into the supportive role of busy if capitalistic mothers,
accumulating all the furniture and servants and perfect children of an affluent
lifestyle.

But adult women paper dolls did not just appear as unnamed mothers within the
family unit. Another sort of figure created a separate life for women: not as
mothers who donned apron and housedress immediately following their bridal
moments, but as quintessential lovers of the best clothing, these figures
surrounded not by kitchen ware or children but the accessories of an upper-class
existence out in the world. The fashion paper doll, at first circulated by dress
designers and then in high-priced magazines, soon attained an almost constant
presence. In 1895 paper dolls in the Boston Sunday Herald, which also appeared
by syndication in newspapers in New York, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Saint
Louis, and other cities, depicted the preparation for key moments of a woman’s
well-coiffed and well-dressed, upper-class life: Ladies’ Toilette or Evening
Toilette, Yachting Toilette, Garden Party Toilette, Walking Toilette, Driving or
Dust Coat, Opera Cloak, Ladies’ Day Reception Toilette, Ladies’ Matinee
Toilette, and Ladies’ Luncheon Toilette. In the Herald, similar dolls continued to
appear in the Sunday supplement along with more than fifty costumes within a
year. In the nineteenth century, depictions like those in the Herald and other
newspapers, of a separate world that involved class structure and social pressure,
the male (and female) controlling gaze, but also personal freedom, appeared
before women readers along with ongoing criticism of such dresses and such a
spirited lifestyle. Here was the “true woman’s evil twin,” as one paper-doll
character has been labeled, enveloped in a beautiful, engaging, and stress-
inducing world beyond the traditional dictates of marriage and family.1
Origins of the Fashion Paper Doll

From France and England initially, the fashion paper doll, placed within
elaborate scenes of affluence, would repeatedly reveal all the latest styles,
engaging women in superior clothing and a superior life. The paper doll with
perhaps thirty, readily changeable outfits, what might be required or preferred in
any given month or year, certainly differed from a magazine layout that might
feature two or three outfits. The origins of this product, as cultural historians
Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh have claimed, “should be
understood in terms of an emerging middle-class ‘consumer society’ in which
marketing is directed towards the female consumer.”2 Ever since their
introduction, high-fashioned paper dolls have created a special, transformational
form of both objectification and personal empowerment.

Several steps over the centuries led to the fashion paper doll, which could reach
a larger audience than the wooden and engraved forms that preceded it. In 1391,
the French court sent the English queen a miniature wooden mannequin dressed
in the latest French style. From this beginning, for four hundred years, French
and Italian designers and their devotees at the French court shipped “wooden
mademoiselles,” elaborately coiffed and richly dressed, to serve an elite
aristocratic clientele. These handpainted images of aristocratic ladies not only
modeled the latest in extravagant silk-and-lace gowns but also headdresses,
corsets, and accessories. Made quite small, half size, and even life size, and also
called pandoras or couriers de la mode, they passed from ladies to their
dressmakers to spur the production of the latest fashions.3 These dolls went from
Europe to the American colonies, where they sometimes appeared in exhibits, to
be viewed for a fee. Women not only borrowed or purchased these dolls, but also
had wooden miniatures made of their own figures, to send off to the designers
who created the latest additions to their wardrobes.

By the end of the eighteenth century, wooden mademoiselles gave way to the
fashion magazine, featuring highly decorated fashion plates that marketed the
right garments to an upper-class audience. Beginning in 1788, two Parisian
printsellers, Jacques Esnauts and Michel Rapilly, created colored prints of
contemporary fashion, which appeared in the high-priced magazine La Galerie
des Modes. In 1794, Nicolaus Wilhelm von Heidelhoff, a Paris-trained engraver,
began the Gallery of Fashion in London, with exquisitely hand-tinted fashion
plates, often metallic-embellished. By the early nineteenth century, numerous
French, English, and German periodicals included these illustrations. In the
1830s in England, for example, The Ladies Cabinet of Fashion, Music and
Romance, The Ladies Magazine of Fashion, and The Ladies Museum reached a
few select readers with lush images of the latest gowns.4

Given the high price and infrequent publication of such magazines, dress
designers and stores sought more regular means to communicate with clients. To
reach a larger audience, French designers began using paper cards into which an
accompanying head could be slotted, the customer thus involved in making
personal choices. Designer Denis-Antoine of Paris, for example, issued a set of
four drawings of heads framed in medallions, reminiscent of portrait miniatures,
with twelve gown options decorated with gauze handkerchiefs, ruffles, and
bows. Many French publishers, such as Pellerin, a company that made pantins,
produced sheets of fashion paper dolls, advertised in the fashion magazine
Journal des Luxus und der Moden beginning in 1791.5 In 1822, the paper doll La
Psyche, about five inches high, made for a popular French dress shop, Le Petit
Magasin de Modes, had an extensive wardrobe of seven outfits, three hats,
shawl, and coat, all representing items in the new spring line: the doll could be
taken home, along with a wooden stand, for further perusal.

To expand their customer reach quickly, English designers and booksellers also
released their own versions of French fashion dolls. Cut out of cardboard,
generally eight inches high, and soon called English Paper Dolls or poupées
anglaise, they created a “subgenre of fashion illustration,” touting men’s clothes
as well as women’s.6 Initially priced at three shillings or more, after a quick
boost in popularity and production they sold for just a few pence.7 In one set
from 1790, the lady owns eight different elaborate hats and four full costumes
along with five additional skirts. The gentleman owns seven jackets, a vest, a
suit, three ruffled shirt fronts, four pairs of pants, boots, a sword, and a hat. The
rose-colored envelopes containing these costumes and dolls, all appearing in
profile, reveal several countries’ involvement in these English Paper Dolls: they
are labeled “La Pouppee anglaise a diversified modes, Habillement, Coifures et
port dåhabits” and sold by “J.L.Stahl, Nurnb,” the abbreviation for Johann
Ludwig Stahl, owner of a large publishing firm in Nuremberg.

English printers soon produced similar detailed sets. One product from 1791,
published by J. Wallis, a printer of maps, song lyrics, religious tomes, and
histories, featured the heads of a lady and gentleman attached to long paper
strips, a format soon to be used in S. & J. Fuller’s The History of Little Fanny
(1810) and other paper-doll books. The lady owns four gowns, and the
gentleman five suits. Each outfit is hand-drawn and delicately water-colored
with detailed accessories, including caracos (thigh-length, peplum-shaped gown
covers), chemises, furs, and hats that “could be tilted or set back at will.”8 As
dressmaking moved from private businesses to factories, similar dolls appeared
in English and French department stores, the new commercial palaces in London
including Harding, Howell & Co’s Grand Fashionable Magazine at 89 Pall Mall,
which opened in 1796.9

Paper Dolls and American Fashion Merchandising

Fashion paper dolls came into the United States as dresses and accessories began
changing quickly and dramatically. In fact, at the end of the nineteenth century,
paper would be the perfect material to represent the new priorities of the
industry, a concern for selling clothing items as something temporary, to own in
large numbers, to dispose of as the choices of the next season come in. The end
of the nineteenth century would witness a tremendous shift in the middle class’s
estimation of the proper maker of clothing, moving away from the mother in the
home or the private dressmaker and to thousands of workers in factories. This
change would offer much more variety to women, certainly more personal
choice, while also inundating them with ever-changing priorities.

Before the end of the century, fashion styles changed slowly. In the 1830s, the
predominant dress style featured layers of laced collars, huge puffed sleeves, and
wide bell-shaped skirts with ground-clearing hemlines; in the early 1860s, the
approved look remained similar.10 After the Civil War, however, dress styles
began to change more rapidly. Dresses from the 1870s featured an exaggerated
and ornate bustle for leaving the home. Skirts often fell in multiple layers of
ruffles and flounces, with overskirts and small trains, a narrower cut becoming
more fashionable toward the end of the decade. Women also soon began wearing
loose tea gowns, with no stays or loosened stays, to receive friends at home. And
then women’s suits became popular, borrowing fabrics, padding, and styling
from men’s wear.11

Fashion changed even more quickly during the rest of the century and into the
Fashion changed even more quickly during the rest of the century and into the
1900s. As women bought mass produced and cheaper goods, for which the profit
margin came from sales volume, advertising and magazine articles encouraged
them to discard last year’s fashions and purchase the new lengths and tucks
marketed for the next winter and spring, the kinds of alterations that could easily
be made on a production line. Social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman
commented on the growing pressure to acquire new, impractical styles each
season, regardless of the cost and pain involved:

In modern cities the proud lady wears robes of brown and burnt orange, or
of green, blue, violet, indigo, and all additions to our fabricated rainbow,
because “this year they are wearing it”! And there is no more to be said.
You may hear complaints, many voiced, from the sufferers. When tight
sleeves restricted us or big sleeves inflated us, when the tape-tied pull-back
showed every line of the body in front, or the intentional pull forward of the
recent skin-tight skirt showed every line in the rear, when hats land over our
noses or block the vision of all behind us, many there be who complain
with bitterness, but there is no deliverer.12

As Gilman concluded in another essay, by the end of the century women had
become involved in a “weird, fantastic, whirling flood of fashion.”13

The breakthrough garment for women’s ready-made, one immediately sold in

changing shapes and with different skirts, was the shirtwaist, a blouse
resembling a man’s shirt. It was mass produced beginning in the 1890s, and its
popularity peaked between 1909 and 1914. In 1895, there were no more than a
half dozen shirtwaist factories in New York City, but in 1900 there were 472.
With workers toiling in factories instead of doing piecework in their own homes,
designers and department stores could quickly create new styles of pleats and
collars, new undergarments to emphasize the designs, and new lengths and
widths of skirts to wear with the changing shirts.14 For an array of magazines,
the omnipresent model woman, wearing the latest of ready-to-wear apparel, was
powerfully created by Charles Dana Gibson, an illustrator working for Life,
Collier’s, The Century, Scribner’s, and Harper’s. Beginning in 1890, Gibson
drew a tall woman in a shirtwaist and skirt, her hair in a large, loose chignon, her
lips small and pouty, her nose a button or straight, her skin the whiteness of the
paper.15 She looked confident and a bit aloof, her gaze generally not on those
around her but off to the side. This face created an epitome of distant perfection
—of “glamour”—as she appeared at the theatre, on the golf course, and in lavish
drawing rooms, sporting the latest shirtwaist and skirt styles.16

Beyond the first years of the shirtwaist and the Gibson Girl who wore it, extreme
changes kept occurring. In 1905, for example, the S-curve provided the reigning
shape, this new “in” look resulting from the female figure being tightly corseted,
with the shirt bloused over at the waistline and the skirt gathered in the back
over a protruding rear end. Ziegfeld star Anna Held epitomized this S-curve, her
chest pushed forward “so that the whole looked like a ship’s figurehead, carved
to fit the prow of the vessel.”17 As Cecil Beaton, English photographer, painter,
and set designer, noted, “The women who leaned over my crib had not yet
foregone the lines of the hourglass and were laced into corsets that gave them
pouter-pigeon bosoms and protruding posteriors.”18

With fashions changing at ever faster speeds, women had to be encouraged to

participate, to move beyond a few professionally made or homemade dresses
that would suffice with small alterations through the years or even decades.
Paper dolls, not just the few paper images in high-priced magazines, would be
essential to bringing fashion to women of all classes and bringing women to a
new view of their wardrobe.

As in France and England, dressmakers in the United States gave out paper dolls
to their customers, showing the possible combinations of merchandise choices.
As in Europe also, paper dolls made their way into American department stores
to offer creative involvement first with dressmakers and then with ready-to-
wear. At stores like the Marble Palace, Macy’s, and Lord & Taylor in New
York, Wanamakers and Gimbels in Philadelphia, and Marshall Field in Chicago,
women could first examine the mannequins, which could display only a few
outfits, and then leave with complimentary paper dolls with which they could
consider a wider range of possibilities.19

As part of this marketing of changing fashion, paper dolls also appeared in

monthly publications, a common means of becoming engaged in “trying on” an
array of choices. From 1830 until the late 1860s, Godey’s Lady’s Book was one
of the nation’s most popular journals, serving as a leading authority on fashion:
editor Sarah Hale hired local artists to redraw fashions from European
publications, which appeared along with poetry, short stories, and piano sheet
music. In November 1859, this magazine printed engraved figures of paper dolls
followed by a full-color page of the latest fashions for them, the color a rarity in
a magazine at that time.20 In 1866, Frank Leslie’s Lady’s Magazine published
pages of dolls with up-to-date costumes, this collection including the front and
back of the dolls and of their outfits.21 Specially designed dolls also soon
appeared in other women’s magazines such as The Delineator, Good
Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, Ladies’ World, McCall’s, Pictorial
Review and Woman’s Home Companion, promoting dress manufacturers and
their latest designs.22 All of these sites sold quickly changing fashion, at varying
prices, for an audience becoming accustomed to the possibilities of ready-to-
wear, each doll extending participation with fashion merchandizing.

Becoming the Doll: The Demorests and Christmas Eve

In an era of increasingly rapid fashion change and of regular advertising in stores

and through magazines, William and Ellen Demorest perhaps went the furthest
in their employment of the paper doll: as a giveaway in their store, a feature of
their magazine, a marketing tool for selling their dress patterns, and ultimately as
a means of constructing the actual women that worked for them.

Ellen Demorest, who designed the dress in which Lavinia Warren married Tom
Thumb, began her career as a milliner in upstate New York and then built a
fashion empire along with her husband, William. He had originally opened a
women’s dressmaking shop in Philadelphia but lost it in the financial panic of
1857. Together they started a Madame Demorest’s store on Broadway in New
York City, where they sought to meet the clothing as well as the hat needs of a
sophisticated clientele, working along with Ellen’s sister Kate, a skilled tailor. At
the store, to secure customers, they gave out paper dolls of their latest dress and
hat designs, especially when the business was new.

The fashion magazine that the Demorests began in 1858, Mme. Demorest’s
Quarterly Mirror of Fashions, later titled Demorest’s Monthly Magazine,
featured color plates and paper dolls of elegant women in the latest attire, to sell
the magazine and the fashions of their advertisers. It also featured tissue-paper
patterns so that women across the country could sew, or have sewn, the latest
designs from New York or Paris. This new product would transform the fashion
industry. Dressmakers had used the “pin-to-form” method, pinning paper or
inexpensive material to the customer’s body before cutting the material for the
gown. Sized paper patterns promised to simplify this elaborate and expensive
process. By 1875, magazine ads and Demorest sales agents had sold three
million paper patterns to professional and home sewers.23 To further this effort,
both the magazine and sales agents offered paper dolls, giving readers the
chance to experiment with the dresses, shawls, and cloaks shown in the patterns.

To further publicize the magazine, store, and patterns, the Demorests gave a
well-documented party in 1868 in which they made women into paper dolls. For
a Christmas Eve celebration, they provided paper costumes for a hundred
women employed by the New York store and magazine, along with pattern
agents from around the country: these carefully costumed workers represented
women of many eras, from queens and duchesses to peasants. The elaborate
tissue-paper dresses, with hoops and trains, all firmly gummed to a thin muslin
base, as well as paper bonnets, handkerchiefs, plumes, and fans, recreated “all
the striking features of fashions of the different eras for centuries back,” as the
Demorests’ magazine noted.24

Ellen Demorest herself appeared as Queen Elizabeth, wearing paper made to

resemble a rich black brocade, the dress featuring an underskirt of royal blue and
an enormous hoop. Columnist Jennie June, who wrote for the Demorests’
magazine, appeared as Margaret of Provence, Queen of France in the 1200s,
wearing a cerise colored, velvet-like gown edged with paper ermine.25
Additionally, the queens of France appeared along with “ladies of rank” from
across Europe, the costumes having been carefully studied in paintings by
Rubens and Van Dyke, the results being, as the New York Tribune commented,
“beyond the power of masculine mind to compass or conceive.”26 English,
French, and Swiss costumes made up the majority, but members of the group
also sported Spanish, Irish, Turkish, and Italian paper costumes while others
appeared as Pocahontas and Martha Washington to represent the United States.27
Other costumes depicted night, morning, and the four seasons, the combination
of all the centuries and symbols creating a great rustling noise as the women
circulated among the hundreds of guests. Among the New York newspapers that
covered the event, only the New York Herald responded harshly to this
unprecedented paper display, claiming that the women wore “the most grotesque
and abominable fashions that have helped to craze the female mind during the
past three hundred years.”28

Before the late-night supper with which the evening ended, the papered women
sang songs and did dances from the various time periods represented by their
costumes. The evening also featured an orchestra and general dancing of
employees and guests. The New York Evening Mail described this part of the
proceedings by noting the odd combinations of eras, as some women danced
together and others joined with male partners: “The fashionable women of all
ages met and shook hands; 1740 danced with 1614, and 1802 smiled at 1580.
Mrs. 1860 chatted with Miss 1515, and 1700 trod under the toes of 1260.” This
reporter also noted the often uncontrollable movement of the delicate paper
accessories during the dancing: “All the butterflies, birds of paradise, flowers of
Eden, macaws of Brazil, and artificial flowers of a whole street of French
milliners’ shops seemed to have been heaped up into one vast pile, which
suddenly, at the strains of music, formed into quadrilles, and whirled, like a
thousand flying dervishes … covering the carpets and furniture with a perfect
shower of débris.”29

While commenting at length on the unprecedented costumes and dances seen on

that special paper-party night, these newspaper articles also featured, in highly
gendered and racial terms, the surprisingly civilized and tolerant behavior of the
participants. The New York Tribune commented that these women who most
naturally would be spreading cruel gossip, “for once in their lives forebore to
criticize each other’s garb.” These articles note that the party involved all of the
Demorests’ New York employees, including “many intelligent-looking and lady-
like negro girls.” The New York Daily Times also commented on this shocking
aspect of the evening: “A noticeable feature in the affair was the perfect good
will with which the fair ones of the company mingled with their associates of
color.”30

Becoming the Doll: The Fad

By the 1870s and later, after paper dolls in the most sophisticated outfits
appeared in fashion magazines and after the oft described Christmas Eve party,
women making themselves into fashion paper dolls came into general vogue:
indeed, paper costumes became part of relaxation choices as well as civic efforts,
creating what a recent issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly has deemed “wearable
rhetorics.”31 As cultural historian Beverly Gordon has commented, many women
“cultivated what I call a ‘saturated’ quality, a kind of heightened experience
(state, reality) that was aesthetically and sensually charged and full. These
women created self-contained, enchanted ‘worlds’ that helped feed or sustain
them.”32 Such a “heightened experience” or escape, as Gordon notes, often
involved paper costumes that could foster various creative identities.

New developments in materials and color printing helped to fuel this craze.
Dennison Manufacturing first made tissue paper in a few colors, primarily for
lining drawers and jewelry boxes. With a crinkling machine imported from
England in 1892, Dennison also began producing crepe paper, a tissue paper
coated with a glue-like substance, creased to create gathers, a material with more
strength than tissue paper and an interesting texture.33 By 1896, along with 134
shades of tissue paper and designs like floral patterns, the firm marketed thirty-
one hues of the newer crepe paper, hyping its use in making summer curtains,
covers for walls and furniture, and shimmering lamp shades. As discussed in the
pamphlet Dennison’s Crepe Paper and Its Uses from 1911 and more fully in
How to Make Crepe Paper Costumes from 1920 and How to Make Paper
Costumes from 1922, crepe paper was also an excellent material for making
costumes. Both Dennison and E. Butterick & Co. provided patterns as well as
general directions for these crepe-paper creations, both for simple designs
intended for children and quite complicated styles for adults, which might be
pinned onto a plain dress or slip or made as a separate garment to be placed over
the head.34

As magazines and newspapers indicated, paper costumes could transform a

children’s party into an event that others might envy. In the magazine article
“The Story of a Paper Ball,” from 1901, Harriet Adams Ganahl describes upper-
class costume parties that could be created “in a way befitting the general
wonderfulness of the only child.” At a party for five-year-olds, for example,
each child could appear as a Mother Goose character or as a Kate Greenaway
illustration. To ensure a “thorough and overwhelming success,” Ganahl suggests
that mothers hire a “paper artist” to help plan a roomful of fanciful paper
costumes.35 An article in the Minneapolis Journal in December 1906,
republished in newspapers in many cities, concerned “Fanciful Costumes of
Paper” for children. The article notes that flower costumes for girls create a
charming effect, especially for the proud parent of several sisters who can thus
fashion “a real animated flower garden.” Costumes for boys did not include
flowers but instead “middy suits, man-’o-war and various Russian styles.”36 An
article in Good Housekeeping in February of 1925 helped mothers plan for a
Valentine’s Day party, with paper costumes like Clover and Squash Blossom as
well as Pierrot and Pierrette and a ballerina and shepherdess.37

But paper costumes were certainly not just for children’s parties, as Beverly
Gordon has indicated. Turn-of-the-century party invitations often asked adult
guests to come to parties in themed costumes. Beginning in 1927, Dennison
published a party magazine to offer advice for planning fanciful adult fêtes. Its
1929 Party Book featured Merna Kennedy and Glenn Tryon, Hollywood stars of
that year’s film Skinner Steps Out, a story in which a dress suit enables an
unemployed man to get acquainted with wealthy people and make a big business
deal: in the party book, Kennedy and Tryon sport crepe-paper costumes and
claim that they seek “to show the world that one can look like a million in a one
dollar rig.”38
A Well-Dressed Daisy, from “Fanciful Costumes of Paper,” Minneapolis
Journal, December 30, 1906.

Many of the elaborate costume styles offered special features to attract adults. In
the 1920s, a common costume addition was paper streamers, which swayed
gracefully during dancing. Layered paper outfits adorned with trinkets might
rustle and begin to tear, providing an extra bit of excitement because of their
fragility.39 Historical costumes could create beauty or mystery: especially
popular was colonial and plantation dress-up as well as gowns of long-ago
queens and togas of Greek goddesses.
Merna Kennedy and Glenn Tryon, 1929 Party Book, by Dennison (courtesy
Avery Dennison).

While paper dress-up parties might involve paper kimonos for a trip to Japan or
hoop skirts for a sanitized version of plantation life, they could also refigure and
glorify the most mundane of activities, thus playing with class distinctions. In
1929, for example, directions for a Spring Cleaning Party, appearing in the party
book Here’s for a Good Time, began with an invitation featuring pails, soap, and
scrub brushes. As the party started, a male and female guest together would be
given crepe paper from which to make a dust cap for him and an apron for her,
with a contest ensuing for the best set. In a cake-walk marching game, the
contestants without the right cleaning and painting supplies got branded with a
wet-paint sign. Other contests involved games in which the group hunted for
hidden spiders made of cardboard and wire, a sign of an ill kept home.40 Here
certainly was the party as reassuring fiction or carnival, these guests just playing
at the housework rightly done by servants.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, this making and wearing of costumes
involved more occasions than the party. Popular home entertainments included
theatricals that engaged children or adults.41 Families could purchase books of
scripts, such as the oft reprinted Drawing-Room Plays and Parlour Pantomimes,
which includes suggestions about rehearsals, scenery, and paper costumes. In
Home Fun in 1910, Cecil Henry Bullivant gave advice concerning short plays as
well as a wider range of home theatricals: magic acts, ventriloquism, juggling,
fortune telling, tableaux vivants, masquerades, and home circuses. This book,
like the many magazine articles about planning such performances, provides
directions for making the paper costumes and cardboard accessories that each
character would need.42

Activities taking place beyond the home, especially involving women, also
included impressive paper costumes. Community pageants, for example,
flourished from 1905 to 1925, many of the women organizers being settlement
house workers, playground organizers, and educational reformers. These
performances often occurred on an epic scale in open spaces before large groups,
on civic holidays such as the Fourth of July or a Founders’ Day. In these
performances, the stories, generally concerning American history, folklore, and
legends, appeared in a series of episodes, usually three to seven, covering a span
of 200 to 2000 years and involving large numbers of fancifully rendered
costumes. As Progressive-era events that encouraged ongoing education of the
citizenry, pageants were ultimately stories of values like peace, progress,
education, and liberty—that played out in colorful crepe paper displayed on a
grand scale.43 In Boston’s Cave Life to City Life in 1910, for example, the scenes
featured cavemen, Native Americans, and early colonists, all, at least
symbolically, working together to build the city. For the New Bern, North
Carolina, Bicentennial Celebration and State Firemen’s Convention, also in
1910, the pageant at the center of a several day celebration, The Founding of
New Bern, featured a similar array of explorers, city founders, and cooperative
native peoples. A primary ingredient of these pageants and many others was the
tableau, a frozen image of a key historical moment for which paper costumes
could create a riot of colors and details, with or without historical accuracy.44

Along with planning and starring in these pageants, women might appear in
paper costumes for town parades, church events, community bazaars, and
community sings. At a Fair of Good Fairies, featured in Ladies’ Home Journal
in October 1916 as a means of raising funds for a school or organization, booth
vendors appeared as “flowers, Grecian maidens, or romantic gypsies,” their
exhibit spaces festooned with paper decorations.45 At such community events, as
at parties within the home, women took advantage of the magic of dressing up, a
source of sensual stimulation and delight, a means of “playing with ideas and
identities through their own bodies.”46

Powerful Satires of the Drive toward Fashion

In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, women did not just function
as bland mothers in a paper-doll world of children and homes: paper figures—
and real women dressed in paper—appeared quite publicly as fashion icons. In
the home, at public events, in newspapers and magazines, and in commercially
produced doll sets, paper costumes of the latest fashions could enable women to
assert their right to beauty and freedom, as they moved beyond the self-
sacrificing domain of true motherhood. But not every writer describing fashion
and fashion dolls did so positively. In 1798, a famous critique from Practical
Education, a treatise begun by Honora Sneyd and finished by her step-daughter
Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, praises the doll as a “means of
inspiring girls with a taste for neatness in dress” but cautions that “a watchful
eye should be kept upon the child, to mark the first symptoms of a love of finery
and fashion.”47 In fiction and poetry, also, as women wearing the latest fashions
received detailed attention, the characters involved in this discussion made a
quick transition to paper dolls and thereby spurred judgments of women and
their attraction to clothes: indeed, a complex judgment of decoration moved
from literary characters to paper dolls.

Many sets of paper dolls produced in the late nineteenth century in the United
States and England took their complex naming from a Dickens’ character, Dolly
Varden, from Barnaby Rudge, a novel published as a serial in 1840 and 1841.
This historical novel concerns the Gordon Riots of 1780, a protest in London
against the Papists Act of 1778, intended to reduce official discrimination
against Roman Catholics. Dolly, the daughter of a locksmith, loves John Willet,
who leaves to serve as a soldier. She is imprisoned by anti–Catholic rioters; they
want to force her father to help them enter Newgate Prison and free their
comrades who had protested against the Act. Dolly’s husband, who returns from
the American War of Independence with just one arm, ultimately rescues her and
her father. Caught up in hard events, Dolly helps those who are less fortunate
and remains steadfast to her family: indeed, she is a true woman following
standards set by her mother, whom she describes as the “mildest, amiablest,
forgivingest-spirited, longest-sufferingest female as ever she could have
believed.”

Though Dolly is a minor figure within the novel, she is also an heroic one,
demonstrating the traits of a good daughter and wife. As part of her
characterization, Dickens also remarks on her lively, flirtatious demeanor and
attire, indicative of youthful high spirits. Dolly appears as “a pretty, laughing,
girl; dimpled and fresh, and healthful—the very impersonation of good-humour
and blooming beauty.” In one scene, she wears “a little straw hat trimmed with
cherry-coloured ribbons and worn the merest trifle on one side—just enough in
short to make it the wickedest and most provoking headdress that ever milliner
devised.” Repeatedly readers hear of her ribbons and mantles that flutter as she
walks, her skirts swishing, her hair bouncing, all part of a “thousand little
coquettish ways” that, we are told, can take her husband “clean out of his
senses.”48

In popular-culture representations of this character created throughout the rest of

the nineteenth century, there remains not a trace of Dolly’s dedication to family
and perseverance in difficult times. This poor locksmith’s daughter became well
known beyond the novel only for her love of fashions that she can barely afford,
known beyond the novel only for her love of fashions that she can barely afford,
indeed for cheaply putting together a vulgar come-hither look. The term “Dolly
Varden” called up a country version of city clothes: a brightly patterned, usually
flowered, dress with a polonaise overskirt gathered up and draped over a
separate underskirt, of printed cotton or chintz. The look also involved the
infamous hat from the novel and a gaudy parasol. In several popular songs, in
fact, she appears as fetching but unrefined and loutish. George Washington
Moore, a New York music-hall impresario, succeeded with the song “Dressed in
a Dolly Varden,” from 1872, which made the following claims about a young
woman who has come to the big city:

Her Dolly Varden look’d like silk,

Or London mild, which is finer than silk,
She said “Sir, it’s out of Ma’s bed quilt
I’ve made a Dolly Varden.”

Alfred Lee and Frank W. Green, composers of music hall songs, wrote their own
song “Dolly Varden” in 1872, again about making clothes from bed covers as
well as Dolly’s “monstrous” hat with cherry ribbons:

Have you seen my little girl? She doesn’t wear a bonnet.

She’s got a monstrous flip-flop hat with cherry ribbons on it.
She dresses in bed furniture just like a flower garden
A blowin’ and a growin’ and they call it Dolly Varden.49

Typified by multi-layered, flowered dresses and floppy hats, these Dolly Varden
outfits lent their name to paper dolls, indeed to entire sets of them. These popular
sets featured Dolly’s garish fabrics, hats, and parasols on the outer envelopes,
with various outfits and dolls within, this symbol of beauty as well as vulgarity,
excess, and covetousness adding a bit of satire and complexity to all that was
there to be enjoyed.

A similar sense of rebuke and of celebration occurred in configurations of

another popular icon of fashion and paper dolls. Embracing ridiculous excesses
on a grander scale, the much wealthier Flora McFlimsy became a famous
character in the poem “Nothing to Wear,” written by William Allen Butler,
though without byline. First appearing in Harper’s Weekly in 1857 and then as a
short book with illustrations, this poem “practically swept the country during the
Civil War period.”50 As the text informs the reader, Flora, from Madison
Avenue, goes to Paris where she spends “six consecutive weeks without
stopping, / In one continuous round of shopping,” for an array of what she deems
to be completely necessary clothes:

For bonnets, mantillas, capes, collars, and shawls;

Dresses for breakfasts, and dinners, and balls;
Dresses to sit in, and stand in, and walk in;
Dresses to dance in, and flirt in, and talk in;
Dresses in which to do nothing at all;
Dresses for winter, spring, summer, and fall.

Though her father “stormed, scolded, and swore,” she “footed the streets, and he
footed the bills.” On her way home from Europe, she cheats the customs agents
by boarding the ship wearing layers of clothes: she enters New York looking
“enormously stout for an actual belle and a possible bride.” Three months later,
after twelve additional carts of clothing had gone from Fifth Avenue stores to
her home, she cries out in “utter despair, because she had nothing whatever to
wear!” Then she agrees to marry the poem’s narrator, an upper-class marriage
clearly a requirement, undertaken “without any romance, or raptures, or sighs …
one of the quietest business transactions, / With a very small sprinkling of
sentiment, if any, / And one very large diamond imported by Tiffany.” While she
shows off the ring and buys more clothes for the right parties, her fiancé finally
recognizes that she is addicted to things and feels no real love beyond her love of
fashion, and he reneges on his offer of marriage.
A Dolly Varden outfit for a paper doll, McLoughin Brothers, 1876.

Though Flora might be judged, as one critic has remarked, as the “‘true woman’s
evil twin,” she became a celebrated figure and the subject of a paper doll made
by many companies.51 Produced in 1889, Peter G. Thomson’s version featured
elaborate gowns, lace shawl, caracos, coat, hats, pocketbook, and a fan; other
companies made similar elaborate products. As with Dolly Varden, this
character of literature provided a complex label for a paper doll since she was a
much criticized “un-true” woman, but also the owner of fabulous clothes for
every posh occasion: as a label and character for paper dolls, the name of Flora
McFlimsy advertised the excess that could be the fun and shame of fashion.52

This use of the paper doll to represent the fashion-crazed woman would appear
over a hundred years later in John Mayer’s “Paper Doll” (2013), thought to
concern his former flame Taylor Swift, a song in which he further developed the
depiction of a Flora McFlimsy.53 The narrator claims that he was good to his
beloved but she did not want anything other than black chiffon. Then he
continues by claiming that she needed dresses for every season, both tight and
loose, with mint green for spring. His love was free but she was too caught up in
the consumerism of wearing all the right clothes and being at all the right places
to value it. These twenty-two dolls in one that she made herself into, frantically
donning and removing the most expensive scarves, dresses, and heels, running
and running, thought of choosing one love as a mistake that might remove her
from the daily assignations of the in-crowd. In this song, the actual woman,
caught up in things and not love, has made herself into a paper doll, unwilling to
choose a real and lasting, actually human, connection. While Mayer may be
speaking of a specific love lost and voicing his own bitterness, he is also reacting
to the tyranny of the latest fashions, his depiction of the “evil twin” emphasizing
a lack of the true woman’s values.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, fashion and especially the fashion
paper doll, inexpensive enough to be brought into the home to show so many
quick changes, bombarded American women and girls. Having first been a token
provided by dress designers or dress stores to acquaint women with all the
possibilities for clothes that could be ordered or purchased ready-made, they
began appearing regularly in American magazines and newspapers, doing a type
of work and offering a type of role model very different from Betsy McCall’s
mother. These dolls can appear donned in the latest designs, girls and women
able to change the clothes and accessories and thus control the up-to-the-moment
look, as could occur with no other format. Women themselves also quite
commonly became these dolls as they gave fanciful parties within the home and
planned civic events beyond it. With paper especially, they could quickly
become heroic figures of history or symbolic representations instead of
become heroic figures of history or symbolic representations instead of
homemakers. As they donned paper costumes, becoming life-size paper dolls,
they did so with this joy of apparel occupying a controversial status, leading
them away from the confines of the true woman situated within the home,
perhaps to become her evil twin. Into the twentieth century, fashion would take
on an ever greater power in an array of magazines and stores and internet sites,
offering women a creative outlet, a way to express themselves and move beyond
the home, even as it promoted youth, beauty, and cash.
 Chapter 7

Transformation and the Celebrity Paper Doll

Paper dolls continued into the twentieth century to involve the excitement of
fashion and change. In the decades of these dolls’ highest popularity, beginning
in the 1890s and extending through the 1950s, a special sort of fashion doll sold
especially well: likenesses of the latest celebrities, especially of actors, first from
the New York stage and then from Hollywood. In the early decades of film, with
stars under contract to all-controlling studios that “owned” their images, such
dolls provided a cheaply printable, ongoing means of increasing fan involvement
and thus revenue. These dolls, purportedly representing the private and public
lives of actors as well as their latest and most popular film roles, placing all the
adventure and triumph under the control of their owners, provided a special form
of transformation, to another world. The best sellers have been those that offer
the most extreme of transitions, showing all the change that can occur, in the
lives and careers of these actors and of those that purchase their likenesses. This
special form of engrossing play can involve what Diane Ackerman has described
as “a refuge from ordinary life, a sanctuary of the mind, where one is exempt
from life’s customs, methods, and decrees.”1 With such dolls, the child can
suddenly leave her own room and neighborhood and participate in the most
fantastic of tales, clothing Judy Garland for Kansas and Oz, for example, as well
as entering a carefully depicted version of the actor’s adult life. This realm of
imagination and excitement still exists on paper and now also on the internet,
engaging layers of stories and creative transformations.

The Arrival of Celebrity Dolls

Celebrity dolls, as well as some of the first stars thus portrayed, came to the
United States from Europe. One of the first, published in the 1830s, represents
the renowned ballerina Marie Taglioni in several of her best known roles.
Though she did not dance in the United States, she was known for starring in La
Sylphide at the Paris Opéra, her graceful movement en pointe influencing the
technique of many dancers and creating a “cult of the ballerina.”2 A similar
paper-doll set from 1840 depicts ballerina Fanny Elssler. From Vienna, she
appeared across Europe, gaining fame for the precision of her small, quick steps
and the sensuousness of her dancing, especially in her performance of the
Spanish Cachucha. In 1840 she came to New York for a highly successful two-
year American tour, her starring roles inspiring an array of paper dolls.

Marie Taglioni doll with her famous fairy outfit from the ballet La Sylphide
(collection of Laurie W. McGill).

The first celebrity paper-doll set to gain widespread popularity in the United
States represents Jenny Lind, an opera singer known as the “Swedish
Nightingale.” In 1850, Lind came to America at the invitation of P. T. Barnum,
where she gave over ninety concerts under his auspices and then continued to
tour under her own management. Barnum’s advanced publicity made her a
celebrity even before she arrived, tickets for some of her concerts in such
demand that Barnum sold them by auction. The enthusiasm of the public was so
strong that the American press coined the term “Lind mania,” which made paper
dolls depicting her into a popular means of playing with and even controlling an
internationally known star.3 Made by color lithography, one popular set from
that time contains ten of her opera costumes, including gowns, capes, hats with
wigs attached, stage props, and extra doll arms for making various gestures.
Printed numbers on the backs lead to a list of the characters and works printed in
German and English on the inside of the box holding the costumes. The outside
cover features an illustration of Lind wearing a white and pink gown and holding
sheet music.
Jenny Lind paper dolls, 1850 (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design
Museum/Art Resource, NY).

After this start with ballet and opera stars, paper dolls began to feature not just
fancy dress costumes, but more extreme possibilities. In the search for celebrity
dolls that could involve transformations for their owners, publishers portrayed
well-known actors, in theatre and then in film, whose images could lead to the
most radical changes in costumes and accessories. Raphael Tuck in London
made the first paper dolls of actor Maude Adams, featuring her in grown-up
stage roles. Then after Adams’ New York successes, the New York Sunday
American, one of the major Hearst newspapers, published Paper Dolls of
Famous Players in 1911, featuring Adams as human and non-human, woman
and boy. In a doll depicting Adams in The Masked Ball, she appears regally
costumed in an ermine cape; The Little Minister cast her, as character and then
doll, as a bride and as a mysterious gypsy seen only at night; she also appeared
in doll form as the main character, a rooster, in Chantecler, with a supporting
cast of farmyard animals; and as Peter Pan in a green leotard and tights.4 These
beautiful dolls soon appeared in other Hearst papers, and Peter Pan became a
paper-doll subject through the decades.
Maude Adams as Chantecler, New York Sunday American, Paper Dolls of
Famous Players, 1911.

With the growing popularity of film, paper dolls would switch over to movie
stars, especially those who offered the most dramatic of transformations. Mary
Pickford’s first films at Biograph portrayed her as an adult lead: in Fate’s
Interception (1912) she lives with a man out of wedlock; in Hearts Adrift (1914)
she has an illegitimate baby on a desert island. As Pickford gained more control
over her work, however, she embraced a different, more lucrative formula, an
unrealistic one, of playing younger and younger girls. She began this new part of
career in 1916 with The Foundling, in which, in a flashback, she appears as the
child version of her grown-up character. Afterwards, as her publicity maintained,
her friend and fellow actor Lillian Gish advised her to always play “the adorable
little girl.” In 1917, at age twenty-four, she began fully experimenting with this
persona in The Poor Little Rich Girl, adopting a complicated public pretense, as
she wrote: “In the old days stars were glamorous—and they worked at
maintaining the illusion they presented on screen. If fans came to see me on the
set and I wasn’t dressed for a role, I’d run into my dressing room, let down my
curls and put on the little-girl dresses they expected me to be wearing.”5

In Ladies’ World, in September of 1916, to launch a new monthly feature of

celebrity paper dolls, Pickford appeared in her roles as a young adult: as
Cinderella, as a Japanese woman in Madame Butterfly, as a queen falling in love
and shedding conventions in Such a Little Queen.6 In 1919, however, a paper
doll of Pickford, which appeared as the first of a Movy-Dol series in Photoplay, a
movie magazine that in 1918 had a circulation of 200,000, took advantage of her
transformation from woman to girl. On this doll sheet, she appears as a child in
The Little Princess, an adolescent in Hulda from Holland, and a young woman
in The Lass of Killean. The sheet also features her dressed in the latest fashions
as “Mary Pickford herself.” Subsequent paper-doll sheets portray the star as
adult along with her girlish costumes for Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and The
Poor Little Rich Girl as well as the clothes of a rich and poor boy for Little Lord
Fauntleroy.

After Mary Pickford dolls launched the series, Photoplay presented Movy-Dols
of many other stars, like Norma Talmadge, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas
Fairbanks. Chaplin especially served as a fine subject for transformations,
involving various roles and costumes. On this sheet, he appears in a soldier’s
uniform in Shoulder Arms; as The Tramp, his well-known character, in A Dog’s
Life; in prisoner’s garb from The Adventurer, in which he plays an escaped
convict; and in a suit as “Charlie Chaplin Himself.”

The many celebrity paper dolls that sold during the 1930s continued to
emphasize transformation. In paper dolls, Deanna Durbin could represent the
transition from girl to young woman, with costumes from movies in which she
played a young girl, from concert performances for which she wore the most
elaborate of gowns, and from various scenes of “her own life.” The Judy
Garland paper doll set from 1945 also followed in the tradition of quick changes:
she wears the gingham dress of The Wizard of Oz while also appearing as a
teenager headed to a prom, as a young starlet in beachwear, and as a busy adult
in suits, an evening gown, and a negligee. This grouping gives the paper-doll
owner the ability to participate with, indeed to control, these stars as child or
adult or some combination of the two.
Charlie Chaplin Movy-Dol, Photoplay Magazine, September 1919.
Judy Garland Cut-Out Dolls, by Whitman, 1945.

The 1950s and early 1960s would usher in another huge array of celebrity paper
dolls, their subjects including Barbara Hutton, Ava Gardner, Doris Day, Jane
Powell, Connie Francis, Sandra Dee, and June Allyson. A Patty Duke doll,
issued by Whitman in 1964, offered the possibility of dressing Duke as an adult
actor and as the almost twin cousins that she played on television beginning in
1963. Five paper doll sets issued in the first two years of Julia, from 1968 to
1970, showed Diahann Carroll as a nurse on the television show and as an actor.

Into the 1970s, fewer publishers issued celebrity paper dolls as many other types
of toys became available, television competed for children’s time, and individual
stars exercised more control over their images. But from that decade to his death
in 2014, more for an audience of adults than of children, Tom Tierney extended
the reach of celebrity dolls in his four hundred paper-doll books, most of them
for Dover Publications. This “undisputed king” of the paper-doll world, as the
New York Times noted in 1999, created an array of celebrities, including movie
stars from various eras. Like earlier makers of celebrity paper dolls, Tierney
preferred to portray those that evoke dramatic—and humorous—
transformations.7 From 2012, his Life’s a Drag!, subtitled “a campy salute to the
cross-dressing stars of film and television,” features Milton Berle in pink ruffly
undies as well as a cocktail dress and a Cleopatra costume; Tim Curry dressed
for both Home Alone 2 and The Rocky Horror Picture Show; Jerry Lewis as
Carmen Miranda in Scared Stiff; Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria, with a
separate head for Robert Preston who also appeared as The Shady Dame from
Seville; Eddie Murphy as his own mother in Nutty Professor II; and Tyler Perry
as Madea in Diary of a Mad Black Woman.8 His other paper-doll books include
Vampire Paper Dolls, in which Bela Lugosi appears in the 1931 classic
Dracula; William Marshall as the first black vampire star in Blacula; and
Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan in Twilight.9

During the decades that Tierney created paper dolls, other artists also made
transformative celebrity paper dolls, primarily for an adult audience. The cover
of Trio (1987), an album featuring Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou
Harris that sold more than four million copies and won two Grammy Awards,
presents a picture of these three in western gear on the front and in white
Victorian dresses on the back. For the inner sleeve, Andy Engel created paper
dolls of these stars, with clothes for all three that move them through time and
transform them into a country-western unit.

Other stars have seemed just right for dolls featuring celebrity transformations.
For Ziggy Paperboy! (2014), Mel Elliott designed two cut-out David Bowie
dolls and many wild outfits: for glam rocker Bowie, his alter-ego Ziggy Stardust,
the Goblin King in the film Labyrinth, and Nikola Tesla in The Prestige. As an
ad for the book proclaims, “this doll is here to re-create and dress up Paper
Bowie in the most iconic looks of his career.”10

Kyle Hilton, who transformed the lead characters of Downton Abbey, Girls, and
Breaking Bad into paper dolls, also created Art History Paper Dolls to feature
the most innovative of transformations: of artists. Leonardo da Vinci appears in
drag makeup and long hair so that he can enter his own painting as Mona Lisa.
About his choices for Degas, Hilton commented in an interview that “you can
put a ballerina tutu on him, although I doubt that is historically accurate.”11
Picasso, who appears shirtless, can be dressed in his signature Breton stripes, “an
instant icon.” Two additional tinted heads represent his blue and rose periods; he
also appears in an African mask. In paper-doll form, van Gogh stands unsmiling
against a Starry Night–inspired background, ready to be cut out and accessorized
with the ladder-back chair from his Arles bedroom, his vase of sunflowers, and
his severed ear along with additional heads with ear, without it, and with a
bloody bandage on the wound. Many artists, like M.C. Escher, appear with
heads portraying them at different ages from their long careers while Jackson
Pollack comes with a second head to represent him as a “brooding artist.”12

This concentration on owning, manipulating, and becoming a bit of the celebrity

world has also secured a place for paper dolls on the internet, luring both
children and adults. Movie Star Princess Makeover, one of the many popular
sites, for example, involves a “makeover salon” in which the player can choose
one of three “real-world” or “regular” characters, Hannah, Emily, or Madison,
and then give her a head-to-toe makeover, involving makeup, hairstyle, and the
latest of dresses. The player can thus make one of these girls, whom she might
resemble, into her favorite singer, movie star, or character, such as Cinderella,
Elsa from Frozen, or Ariel from The Little Mermaid. As the advertising makes
clear, “From makeup to clothing, you have the tools to give each character a
beautiful movie makeover! Becoming a princess has never been so easy. Choose
the perfect makeup and dress in pretty costumes to bring your favorite movie
star or singer to life.” After the player dresses her chosen character, she can enter
a movie set, shop on Rodeo Drive, strut down a fashion runway, cruise the
Mediterranean Sea, or even vacation on a farm. Other similar games include
Movie Star Wedding Makeover, Celebrity Beauty Salon, Make Me a Princess,
and Movie Star Makeover. On all of these apps, the doll is two-dimensional, flat,
a digital paper doll, a carefully clothed makeover that places the young girl in
the most exciting celebrity scenes.

Many other online paper doll sites offer a chance to participate in a particular
celebrity’s world. The most successful of these online dress-up apps is certainly
Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, from 2014, involving a transformation into
affluence, success, and zaniness. With this site, players can choose the clothes in
which digital paper-doll Kim can attend openings and award ceremonies,
vacation in Las Vegas and Miami, buy condos and furniture, hire and fire agents,
and, as the advertising claims, “DATE AND DUMP CELEBS at the best parties
and hottest clubs!” From the launch of the app, as Kardashian has indicated,
players have been able to match their wardrobes to what she is wearing and
where she is: “I actually didn’t know the date of the launch, but I happened to be
going to Mexico on the same day. Once I started posting pictures through
Instagram that I was in Mexico, everyone was playing along [and saying], ‘I just
updated my game, and I’m in Mexico with you.’ They would literally get a
bikini like the one I had Instagrammed in a photo.” In further response to the
extended popularity of this app, Kardashian claims that digital participation with
a large cast of characters, all in the latest of designer fashions, had made the app
“lifelike” and harder to resist: “I think that adding my family members and a
bunch of cameos will get people excited. I started with adding my mom and now
my sisters. Even my pets that I’ve had either now or in the past are in it. I want
to make it as lifelike as possible.”13

While the basic game that involves all these family characters can be
downloaded for free, a credit card enables players to upgrade their fashion,
home, agent, and trip choices. In 2016, for example, these extras included Karl
Lagerfeld’s fairytale-inspired collection for Fendi. Along with the right look and
accoutrements, players can also purchase special Kardashian-branded K stars
used to “charm” an agent or a director, allowing them to rise from E-lister to A-
lister, aided by “real-life” Kim, who sends encouraging texts to players after they
leave the app. With all these “personal” features, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood
became the fourth highest grossing app in the iTunes Store: from July 2014 to
March 2015, it had 28 million downloads and 11 billion minutes of play, earning
at least seventy-four million dollars.

In each decade, whether in paper or digital form, celebrity paper dolls have
created a version of heightened reality, a chance for communicating with and
even controlling the greatest of stars, and thus participating in a glamorous un-
reality. Through paper dolls, players can suddenly be involved in an array of
movies and Hollywood events, not just engaging with a single film, but
movies and Hollywood events, not just engaging with a single film, but
expanding their own lives by a connection to a much larger and more exciting
world.

A child’s room might contain paper dolls of Polly Prue or Betsy McCall and all
the accoutrements of the perfect home as well as the fashion and celebrity dolls
offering entrance into a world seemingly not so far away. As celebrity dolls went
from dance to theatre to film and television, this product offered the chance for
transformation, for excitement, an entertainment choice that has remained
popular for adults, in Photoplay magazine and on the internet, as well as with
children and adolescents. These dolls offer the chance to see into another world,
engendering envy perhaps but also the possibility of freedom.
A pantin of Harlequin from the commedia dell’arte.
Hans Christian Andersen, Jumping Pierrot (copyright Hans Christian
Andersen Museum/Odense City Museums).
Cybèle Young, Where Do You Find Those? (courtesy the artist).
Angel Zárraga, La Femme et le Pantin, 1909 (Wikimedia Commons).
Kyle Hinton, Justin Trudeau Paper Doll, New York magazine, November
2015 (courtesy the artist).

Melissa the Bride Paper Doll, by Craftways (courtesy Herrschners, Inc.,

item 270054).
Text and figures from Frank Feignwell’s Attempts to Amuse His Friends on
Twelfth-Night: Exhibited in a Series of Characters (London: S. & J. Fuller,
1811; courtesy Theriault’s).
Fluffy Ruffles paper doll set, New York Herald, December 29, 1907.
Torchy’s Togs, to accompany Torchy Brown Heartbeats, by Jackie Ormes,
March 17, 1951, Pittsburgh Courier (Center for Research Libraries,
Chicago).

Marie Taglioni doll with her famous fairy outfit from the ballet La Sylphide
(collection of Laurie W. McGill).
Constantin Alajálov, cover, New Yorker, June 16, 1945.
Maude Adams as Chantecler, New York Sunday American, Paper Dolls of
Famous Players, 1911.

Jenny Lind paper dolls, 1850 (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design

Museum/Art Resource, New York).
Heather Crossley, Interactive ATC (Artist Trading Card) Dolls (courtesy the
artist).
Rory Midhani, Kiyomi McCloskey Fashion Doll, 2013, from the website
Autostraddle (courtesy the artist).
Jane Maxwell, Praha Standing Girls (courtesy the artist).
Charlie Chaplin Movy-Dol, Photoplay Magazine, September 1919.
Judy Garland Cut-Out Dolls, by Whitman, 1945.
Rebecca Sefcovic Uglem, Lucy (courtesy the artist).
Doll figures by Julie Arkell (courtesy the artist).

Cut Up Shopping Spree Game, Milton Bradley, 1968.

Catherine Moore, Toy Theatre of Dreams (courtesy the artist).
 Chapter 8

Paper Doll as Symbol: Vulnerability and Medical Care

Paper dolls have long inhabited an imaginative space, both lauding and
critiquing “regular” life. As an actual artefact, paper dolls have been used to
speak about religion, community, politics, education, home life, fashion,
freedom, and celebrity. During recent decades in which they have not been the
most popular of toys, they have also taken on a creative status as symbol in texts
aimed at different races and ages, the focus continuing to concern the
vulnerability of human beings and the ephemerality of life, expressed in new
terms to develop new perspectives. A highly creative connection between the
symbol and actual has occurred, for example, in health care. The paper doll
employed in poetry and fiction as well as in scholarship, aimed at a variety of
audiences, has frequently stood for the ignored, even erased human being—the
fetus, the child, the adult lost in the health care system.

In a collection from 2014, Paper Doll Fetus, award-winning poet Cynthia Marie
Hoffman created images of women and children treated as less than fully human
by the health care system. One poem in this collection, her “The Paper Doll
Fetus Speaks to the Viable Twin in Utero,” concerns the phenomenon known as
fetus papyraceus: the body of a twin who has died in utero, referred to in
medicine as the “vanishing twin,” becomes flattened like a sheet of paper against
the wall of the womb by the force of its growing twin. The poem is a letter
written by the dead twin, whose existence might be dismissed by health
providers: “There was not enough time to rehearse a graceful pose before I was
wedged against the wall. I am splayed like a weather vane. Your head is
enormous. When did it happen that I am no bigger than your footprint?”1 Here
with this twin speaking, Hoffman focuses on a child that dies, on the effect of
this death on the surviving child, and on the loss experienced by the mother,
consequences that may be ignored in a health care system in which “no one
understands.”

This image of the ignored child, the forgotten life, has appeared in poetry
concentrating not just on pregnancy but on childhood. In 2012, for example,
Jeremy Glazier, whose poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Quarter After
Eight, and The Beloit Poetry Journal, wrote “The Paper Doll,” about alienation
and separation, the child alone and unheard, injured and “crumpled,” in a world
of violence, like a helpless paper doll: “From some forgotten corner it clamors /
to uncrumple itself. It hammers / its paper fists against the walls, but the blows /
are futile.”2

Dramatists have also compared the disabled or incurable child to an unrepairable

paper doll. Near the beginning of The Miracle Worker, William Gibson’s play
about Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, we see Helen at age six on the porch
playing with two children, Martha and Percy. She appears less than human while
jerking like a pantin: “her gestures are abrupt, insistent, lacking in human
restraint, and her face never smiles.” Martha and Percy sit in “a litter of paper-
doll cut-outs,” using their scissors on them as if to operate, taking off a doctor’s
arms and legs and then his head to cure a cold and then finding that the parts
cannot be put back together. While they play, as the children say, Helen is
“pokin’” her fingers into their mouths and “tryin’ talk” while biting at her own
fingers. When handed the scissors, Helen attacks Martha, cutting off some of her
hair, and Helen’s mother Kate has to come and take her inside, as though “for
the thousandth time.” This scene with torn and scattered paper dolls provides an
introduction to the Kellers’ home situation, their lives undone by Helen’s health
problems, this reality like the paper seemingly not fixable by the family or by
doctors.3

In young-adult novels also, paper dolls appear as a marker of health dangers,

especially for young women. The paper doll indeed can provide a a potent
symbol of anorexia, for the young woman fading away, thin and vulnerable.
Anne Snyder’s Goodbye, Paper Doll, for example, concerns Rosemary Norton,
who repeatedly promises her parents that she will begin eating more while she is
secretly thrilled that her boyfriend Jason likes her emaciated body and that her
friends at school are jealous over her weight loss. Finally hospitalized, she finds
a doctor with whom she can talk about her fear of sex, her lack of self-worth, her
desire to binge and purge, and the pressures placed upon her by her parents, help
that finally enables her to move away from paper doll to “real girl” status.4

This connection between the ill, the wounded, or the ignored and the paper doll,
long a part of poetry and fiction, has also become part of the treatment of
children and adults. The California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, for
example, a coalition representing over a thousand advocates for children and
their organizations, uses paper dolls in its training sessions concerning the
impact of domestic violence. In this activity, caregivers receive paper dolls of
children to color and decorate; session leaders call out denigrating things that
might be said to a child while participants tear off a piece of their dolls after each
remark; next the group members have two minutes to work on mending their
dolls. The discussion that follows emphasizes that it is easy to insult or harm
children, but it is much more difficult to heal them (“put them back together”)
after they experience abuse.5

Paper dolls can be an essential learning tool not only for caregivers working with
abused children but for the children themselves. In some therapeutic exercises,
the child and therapist together make a chain of paper dolls, labeling them with
the names of people who interact with the child, including family members,
teachers, friends, and often the abuser. Then the child receives band-aids and
stickers with dots, stars, and happy faces: the band-aids can be put on the doll
that represents the child, indicating where she was hurt; dots affix to people who
are to blame; stars are for brave people who offer help, perhaps including the
child herself as she speaks about the trauma; happy faces are placed on those
who know that the child is not to blame. As children display the dolls, they begin
to talk. These exercises with dolls can be returned to, used and revised, through
ongoing therapy.6

Paper dolls have appeared not just in exercises for children but for abused
women. In New York City, where each year there are over 250,000 domestic
violence incidents, at the Battered Women Resource Center survivors work
together to hold abusers accountable for their actions, change the system to
better meet the needs of battered women, and prevent violence. Lynne
Yamamoto, who has employed paper dolls in her own art, helped this
organization to plan activities in which women share their stories while making
paper-doll chains and ritualistically burning tiny holes in the dolls, thus visually
acknowledging the wounds to which they are giving voice.7

While so many of these symbolic and actual uses of the paper doll in medical
care concern the patient who may be ignored or insufficiently treated, they also
concern the attitude of doctors within this system. In “Living Doll Paper Doll,”
in the journal Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, from June 2004,
Dr. David C. Taylor argues that many doctors don’t want to put enough time into
understanding their patients’ “infinite variety,” and instead “they settle for a
more static and reliable version of the human condition.” As these doctors seek a
diagnosis through quick questions and not much more, they really hope for “the
earliest possible closure of the issue,” a technique that Taylor claims “is really
best for Paper Dolls” but is all too common especially in the treatment of chronic
neurological and psychiatric conditions: this method can quickly devolve into
just dispensing drugs. Here Taylor uses the paper doll to describe the patient
who has been rendered less than three-dimensional, as a simple cut-out of a
human being, treated quickly without attention paid to human complexity.8

In poetry, plays, and novels and in professional discourse, the paper doll has
provided a symbol of the disregarded or discarded in American health care,
including vulnerable children, adolescents, and adults who may be transformed
by medical institutions into the less than human. The fragility of the doll enables
it to represent essential features of humanity that systems tend to ignore, that
victims themselves may have to overcome, if they can do so, through their own
strength and resilience.
 Chapter 9

Paper Doll as Symbol: The Male Desire for the Not Real

While providing a symbol of medical care and the lack thereof, the paper doll
has also depicted relationships between women and men, and between
adolescents, artists of both genders employing it as they consider sexual realities.
As a modern symbol of male attitudes toward women, the power of the paper
doll began with a song. In lyrics by Johnny Black that would be recorded over
and over and used in an array of media, the paper doll has stood for the male
desire for the perfect woman, for something not quite real at all, a craving that at
its extreme might be an appropriate ingredient of horror movies. Recently, along
with male writers, women songwriters have adopted the same title, their lyrics
forming a feminist response to Black’s powerful verses, to the male desire to
transform women into malleable playthings.

Lyrics by Johnny Black

The complex use of paper doll as symbol can be seen in the ongoing popularity
of the song “Paper Doll,” by John Stewart Black, a pianist and boxer who said
that he wrote the lyrics after being jilted by his girlfriend.1 Written in 1915, the
song as recorded by the Mills Brothers in 1943 spent twelve weeks on the
Billboard singles chart as number one, selling more than ten million copies, and
was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame as a Song of the Century.2 The
success of the song extended the career of the Mills Brothers after a few years of
declining sales. Harry Mills recalled that he and his brother Herbert did not
initially like it although their brother Donald did. However, Harry said, “as we
went along rehearsing it, we got to feeling it.”3

As written by Black and recorded by the Mills Brothers and others, the lyrics,
addressed to men, as certainly made clear in the lines “I’ll tell you boys” and
“Say boy, whatcha gonna do?,” concern preferring a paper woman over the more
difficult to control real one. The song begins with the declaration that “I’m
difficult to control real one. The song begins with the declaration that “I’m
gonna buy a paper doll that I can call my own” so that she can’t be stolen by “the
flirty, flirty guys with their flirty, flirty eyes,” the narrator’s anger caused by Sue
having left him “just like all dolls do,” in fact a million by his count:

I’m gonna buy a Paper Doll that I can call my own

A doll that other fellows cannot steal
And then the flirty, flirty guys with their flirty, flirty eyes
Will have to flirt with dollies that are real…
I guess I had a million dolls or more

I guess I’ve played the doll game o’er and o’er

I just quarrelled with Sue, that’s why I’m blue
She’s gone away and left me just like all dolls do.
I’ll tell you boys, it’s tough to be alone

And it’s tough to love a doll that’s not your own

I’m through with all of them
I’ll never ball again
Say boy, whatcha gonna do?

While this misogynist diatribe indicts the “fickle-minded real live girl” and
declares that “I’m through with all of them” and “I’ll never fall again,” it also
compares the loyalty of the unreal doll to that of the real women the narrator has
known:

When I come home at night she will be waiting

She’ll be the truest doll in all this world
I’d rather have a paper doll to call my own
Than have a fickle-minded real live girl.

In this song, the narrator thus concentrates on this desire to possess the paper
doll, a simplistic vision of loveliness and passivity, the model choice for
someone who has developed a hatred for regular, presumably independent and
thus difficult women.4

Beginning right after the Mills Brothers’ recording came out, the song became a
part of many sound tracks for films about the homefront during World War II. In
1944, for example, in Cowboy Canteen, about men in a theatrical troupe
vacationing at the Lazy B Ranch, where they compete for the same seemingly
perfect woman, the Mills Brothers sang the song, appearing as part of the revue
cast. That same year, in Two Girls and a Sailor, about two vaudevillians, played
by June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven, Lena Horne sang the song even though
she felt inappropriate doing so: as she explained, “it’s a boy’s song.”5 After the
war, this popular song remained as a symbol of the time. It appeared, for
example, in 1974’s The Execution of Private Slovik, a television movie about a
man executed by the army in 1945 for desertion, and in 2007’s A World without
War, a television documentary mini-series concerning World War II’s
immediate aftermath.

These song lyrics would also enter plays and films, including recent ones, to
evoke not just a time period but the view of women in the song. Like Johnny
Black’s lyrics, many of these works contrast expectations and realities, with a
focus on what men would like to require.

Stage directions for the third scene of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named
Desire (1947) reference this song to emphasize the contrast between the two
sisters and especially Stanley Kowalski’s desire to control both his wife and his
sister-in-law. In this scene, Blanche DuBois enrages Stanley by winning the
affections of his close friend Mitch. After Mitch has been absent for a while,
alone with Blanche, Stanley erupts and storms into the bedroom where they are.
When Stella yells at Stanley and defends Blanche, Stanley begins beating his
wife. The men pull him off, the poker game breaks up, and Blanche and Stella
escape to a neighbor’s apartment. As they run to take refuge, entertainers at a
bar-room around the corner play Black’s song, as the stage directions indicate, in
a “slow and blue” tone. At the same time, Stanley cries out, “My baby doll’s left
me!,” further emphasizing the control that he had exercised over his complacent
paper-doll wife and his home before her sister arrived.

In some plays about competition and control of women, this song provides not
just a key part of the sound track or the stage directions but a plot device when
sung by a main character. In Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1955), it
serves as a means of introducing a character and placing conflicts over women,
and about manliness, at the center of the action. Rodolfo, a cousin coming from
Italy into the home of Beatrice and Eddie on the Brooklyn waterfront, likes to be
the center of attention. As soon as he arrives, Rodolfo entertains everyone with
his jazz version of Black’s “Paper Doll.” When he starts singing about wanting
an “easy” American paper doll, Beatrice and Eddie’s friend Catherine finds
herself mesmerized by his body movements, voice, and charm and seeks to be,
in the words of the song, the paper doll that Rodolfo would want to call his own.
As he sings, he enrages Eddie with his boldness and his flirtation with Catherine,
but Eddie also dislikes lyrics like “the flirty, flirty guys with their flirty, flirty
eyes,” which make Rodolfo seem feminine and perhaps gay, a piece of trashy
European fluff. From that moment, animus erupts between these men, grounded
in Eddie’s insecurities and in their competition for the young woman that they
both seek to cast as the perfect, malleable doll.

Other depictions of the 1950s have also relied on this song to portray attitudes
toward that era’s focus on woman as either self-sacrificing wife or sex kitten.
The Way We Were (1973), for example, a film about the 1930s through the
1950s, uses the song to provide a contrast between the difficult, political activist
Katie (Barbra Streisand) and the seemingly placid second wife that Hubbell
ultimately chooses. Katie gives up her involvement in radical politics for
Hubbell, but when he begins to compromise his literary talent by abandoning
novel writing for Hollywood screenplays, their marriage begins to collapse.
Years later, when they run into one another in New York, Hubbell has a
typically pretty, smiling, young blonde wife with him, the kind of woman Katie
could never be. Katie says the famous line to him, “Your girl is lovely,
Hubbell”: and perhaps he has obtained the un-real woman of Johnny Black’s
lyrics.

Another more recent depiction of the 1950s uses this song to enhance the
depiction not of the trophy wife but of the sex kitten. In 2004, a documentary,
Dean Martin: The One and Only, about a man who flaunted his relationships
with a million paper dolls, employed the song as it considered the desire for ever
younger, ever more complaisant women in Las Vegas Rat Pack culture. For his
nightclub act, Martin had copied the style of Harry Mills: and his womanizing
persona led him to adopt and glorify the attitudes of the Mills Brothers’ famous
hit, as an indicator of all that was seemingly deemed as cool.

In the last decade, with less acceptance given to callous attempts at sexual
dominance, the song “Paper Doll” has been featured in horror films that concern
violence against beautiful and vulnerable women, indeed that probe the extremes
of the male desire to play with women as dolls, to position and dress them, and
ultimately to throw them away. In the film Captivity (2007), top fashion model
Jennifer Tree is drugged and taken by a sadist, held captive in a cell, and
subjected to terrifying, life-threatening tortures to prove that he can manipulate
her at will. Black’s lyrics fit this choice made by the worst of men: “I’m gonna
buy a Paper Doll that I can call my own / A doll that other fellows cannot steal…
/ When I come home at night she will be waiting/ She’ll be the truest doll in all
this world.” In Hick (2011), with Juliette Lewis, Eddie Redmayne, and Alec
Baldwin, the song lyrics again point to the terrors of male control. The story
begins in a small Nebraska town where Luli deals with drunken, violent parents
and her own loneliness. After her mother leaves with a boyfriend, Luli takes off
for Las Vegas where a man ties her up and rapes her, attempting to form the lost
girl into “a Paper Doll that I can call my own.”

Johnny Black’s “Paper Doll,” and expecially the Mills Brothers’ rendition of it,
often appeared as emblematic of a time period as well as a symbol of a
continuing view of women, as too difficult to deal with, as so much better when
they are beautifully superficial and fully controlled, as something for men to
conquer and keep. In plays and films about the 1940s, 1950s, and today, this
song could also convey judgments about homophobia, the search for the trophy
wife or sex kitten, and sexual violence.

As Symbol in Recent Songs: By Women

While for a century male singers have used the image of the paper doll to portray
their anger toward women, indeed their misogyny, women singers and song
writers have recently also availed themselves of the same image—for radically
different purposes. Kittie, an all-female Canadian alternative metal band, rose to
fame in 2000 with their gold-rated debut album Spit, selling 1,250,000 copies
worldwide. Appearing on that album, “Paperdoll” is their own graphic and brutal
response to women being viewed as blowup dolls, degraded and used by men as
beautiful baubles. As Morgan Lander, lead vocalist and guitarist, declares, “We
want to break that, because we’re better than that.”6 In what seems like the flip
side of Johnny Black’s song, the narrator first speaks of the dressed-up doll who
looks easy to crumple or burn but perhaps has more substance. As the doll gets
dressed up, the narrator knocks her down because this perfect paper figure,
perhaps an image in a magazine or on a fashion runway, harms the woman who
sees her. Then the narrator takes on the paper doll’s perspective, examining how
the woman deemed desirable for her body and clothes, and perhaps for her
passivity, would actually feel. Then attention shifts to a specific “you” that has
sought complete dominance over the doll woman. With “you” causing her body
to be raw and her soul dead, the paper doll is totally controlled: you who could
wash away her pain, the song declares, may be more likely to eat her remains.
This view of ownership, this making of women into dolls, concerns nothing that
could be deemed funny or playful but instead a common form of brutal
consumption.

Like the band Kittie, other women artists have employed the paper doll to
respond to male domination and misogyny. An American singer, songwriter, and
actor, Bea Miller released her debut album, Not an Apology, in 2015, on which
the song “Paper Doll” appeared. Here the first-person narrator, the doll-woman
herself and not someone speaking for her, responds directly to the controlling
man, who like the narrator in Johnny Black’s song seeks the erasure of the
woman’s individuality and self-image, seeks to seem tall by making her seem
small. But she rejects the man’s manipulation. Indeed, she tells him that she will
stand up for herself instead of lying down as he so much prefers.

In the next verses, this narrator reveals her ability to analyze the source of the
man’s insecurity and cruelty. She posits that someone made him feel invisible or
hurt him badly, but then concludes that his problems ultimately provide no
creditable excuse. And ultimately, she asserts that, regardless of his motives or
actions, he will not make her feel invisible.

In other songs, female artists have recognized that this tendency of “hurt people
to hurt people,” in Miller’s terminology, this desire for control, can lead not just
to manipulation and cruelty but to rape. Sierra DeMulder, a Pushcart-nominated
performance poet and author of sung poems, expresses this extension of male
domination in her own “Paper Dolls.” The narrator begins by using the image of
“collapsible paper dolls” to describe the passivity and vulnerability in which
women are so often schooled, indeed what the narrator in Johnny Black’s song
had sought:

We are taught
from the moment we leave our pink nurseries
we are collapsible paper dolls:
light to hold, easier to crumple.

The narrator then segues to the statistical and personal realities of violence—that
one in three women will be raped or sexually abused and that she is one of three
daughters. She next reviews the common paper-doll responses to this horrendous
daughters. She next reviews the common paper-doll responses to this horrendous
act: denying that anything happened, giving in to self-blame, becoming the
piteous victim, concluding that the self has been crumpled. Though she fully
recognizes the horror of rape, she argues that ultimately a woman does not have
to be altered by the assault, does not have to collapse, like a paper doll would,
and can demonstrate strength with help from others:

I know it’s hard to feel perfect

when you can’t tell an Adam’s apple from a fist.
Some ashtray of a man picked you to play his Eden
but I will not watch you collapse.7

In the hundred years since Johnny Black wrote “Paper Doll,” songs about this
figure have certainly spoken about male desires. Many songs with this title have
been sung in concerts, on the stage, in film, and at poetry slams, perhaps to
evoke a time period, like the World War II years or the 1950s, but also to reflect
on a code of behavior. Through the dressing up of paper dolls—the ability to
hold beautiful, vulnerable bodies in your hands and choose what they should
wear and where they should be housed—a variety of artists have considered the
search for a perfect, unassertive, paper-thin accessory-woman, the unreal toy. As
Lena Horne declared of the Mills Brothers’ hit, “It’s a ‘boy’s song,’” and it
certainly is, but recently women writers have relied on the song’s terminology to
reject its code. In songs and slam poetry, artists like Kittie, Bea Miller, and
Sierra DeMulder have employed the same title and image to respond to the
tradition of woman as pliable paper doll.
 Chapter 10

Paper Doll as Symbol in Feminist Films and Novels

While the paper doll has appeared repeatedly in song titles and lyrics, it has also
occurred as a title and symbol in fiction, autobiography, and film. Many recent
books by male authors have employed this symbol to discuss the exploitation of
young women. Paper Doll (1993) by Robert B. Parker, for example, concerns
the brutal street slaying of an upper-class woman, Olivia, whose desire for
money and affirmation ultimately leads to her death. In Paper Doll (2015), Joe
Cosentino writes about the abuse that a former child star ultimately recalls from
her years in Hollywood.1 Feminist writers working in an array of genres have
also availed themselves of this title and symbol to create their own complex
views of American culture and of gender, moving beyond what can be conveyed
in song lyrics to concentrate more fully on values that are in need of change.

In Feminist Film

Cindy Sherman, an American photographer and film director, studied the visual
arts at Buffalo State College, where in 1975 she made two films, Doll Clothes
and Paper Dolls. During the two previous years, feminist scholars had turned
their attention to women in film. Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus: Women,
Movies and the American Dream (1973) surveys movie history, analyzing the
attitude toward women in an array of films as well as their connection to the era
in which they appeared. She considers the flapper and vamp from the 1920s, for
example, as well as actors depicting “mammary madness” in the 1950s and
flower children of the 1960s. As Rosen wrote in her preface concerning this
approach, “I have chosen to explore parallel interrelated trends within each
decade. Trends in film. And in the way women have opted, or been encouraged,
to view themselves.”2

Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the

Movies (1973) also analyzes stereotypes depicted in film from the 1920s through
the 1960s, concentrating on the extent to which the women appeared as active or
passive and the amount of screen time given to them. One particularly influential
chapter discusses the “woman’s film,” what could be a compensation for “all the
male-dominated universes from which she has been excluded,” such as the
gangster film, the Western, and the war film. “That love is woman’s stuff is a
hoary Anglo-Saxon idea,” Haskell claims, and what she finds in this genre is not
affirmation of individuality and strength but just “soft-core emotional porn for
the frustrated housewife.” In movies like Dark Victory, Back Street, and
Madame X, Haskell contends, “the domestic and the romantic are entwined, one
redeeming the other, in the theme of self-sacrifice, which is the mainstay and
oceanic force, high tide and low ebb, of the woman’s film.”3

In 1975, British film theorist Laura Mulvey published her “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema,” arguing that films generally depict women in a passive role
that promotes scopophilia, the pleasure of looking, presenting them as objects of
the “male gaze.”4 At the end of that year, Sherman used film to move beyond the
traditional binary oppositions of woman as either vamp or sacrificing mother,
beyond acceptance of the male gaze or perfect passive woman, beyond the
traditional woman’s film, to visually analyze the real and unreal, the free and the
controlled. Here she serves as the director, cinematographer, and main character,
rendered as paper doll, her focus on the realities encountered by the young
woman, the pressures of parents and of cultural designations. Marjorie Rosen
spoke of the possibility of women forging “a cornerstone on which to build,” and
Sherman sought to create such a structure in Doll Clothes and Paper Dolls.5

Doll Clothes involves Sherman’s own image as a cut-out paper doll. The film
begins with a shot of the cover of an album, decorated with a flowery border and
photographic cut-outs of women wearing old-fashioned hats and clothes, quite
Victorian, like a traditional paper-doll album house. Inside the book, as a
glimpse within a flowery construction of womanhood and home, the left-hand
side contains the photographic image of Sherman in her underwear, housed in a
laminated sleeve underneath the label “Doll.” On the right-hand side underneath
the label “Clothes” are plastic sleeves containing tabbed cut-outs of various
outfits, labeled as for play, casual, school, outdoor, and dress. When the doll
ventures out, she struggles to turn the sleeves holding all the tabbed dresses, her
movements revealing her own white back. Once attired in a casual dress, the tabs
bent, the doll leaves the book and moves to the adjacent surface of a dressing
table, featuring a hair brush and make-up. She checks her appearance in a mirror,
reveling in her sudden freedom and vividness. Then large human hands enter the
frame, take off the doll’s outfit, and put her and the clothes back into their
sleeves. Returned to just her underwear, the doll appears frustrated as the book
closes. In the film’s credit sequence, multiple overlapping cut-outs of the doll in
different poses line up across the frame to produce “an accordion-like string of
images” that resemble Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.6
The abstract movement and body parts create repeated images of the girl,
literally stripped of her own choices, moving like a machine or object.7

In this short work from 1975, Sherman questions the truisms of the traditional
woman’s film: the dutiful, carefully clothed daughter seguing into the sacrificing
wife and mother. Critic Francesco Stocchi describes Doll Clothes as a “film
about self-representation,” focusing on the lack of control that the adolescent
may feel.8 As Sherman herself said of her work, “The hand is like the parent
telling the child that she is misbehaving and has to stay in the book.”9 With the
confines of the Victorian album, the categories of clothes, and the imposed
discipline, as Catherine Morris notes, Sherman addresses an audience primarily
of women to critique the “stereotypical femininity” that would lead to the
traditional path of duty.10

In her Paper Dolls, also filmed in 1975, Sherman uses not the hands from above
but a male foot to crush the moving photographic image of a girl in her
underwear, a more violent version of control. This stomping foot, as Gabriele
Schor describes Sherman’s themes, calls up “the norms, morals, and dispositives
of a repressive culture whose society strives to impede a woman’s vitality,
creativity, and otherness.”11 In both films, as Schor notes further, Sherman
voices her own fears as she depicts the controlling hand or stomping foot that
young women must overcome as they seek to abandon manipulated paper forms
and become three-dimensional persons.

As Sherman considers the requirements of patriarchy, she seems to court the

female and not the male gaze, using paper dolls to critique the making of the
perfect male-oriented girl and the expectation of self-sacrifice, thus contributing
to new “trends in film,” to use Marjorie Rosen’s phrase. While Sherman turned
her artistic interests away from film, she continued to use many of the techniques
with which she first experimented; indeed in photography she has often made
herself into a movable paper doll for dramatic effect. As a photographer, she
often uses her own likeness as “a backdrop for an imaginary construction,” a
performative act.12 For Bus Riders, she photographed herself as representing
societal archetypes, tired working people and harried parents, what she referred
to as “troubled” figures. In her series Complete Untitled Film Stills, Sherman
appears as B-movie, film-noir characters that call attention to the stereotyping of
women. In these and later photographs for which she costumes herself assuming
various roles, as critic Amelia Jones has noted, she makes “incisive critiques of
the visual construction of the feminine.”13 Sherman highlighted the relationship
of Doll Clothes to her career in photography in an Art21 interview for PBS: “It
completely ties in to everything I’m doing now because I decided that I liked the
cut-out figures more than the film.”14 Though Sherman’s characters in her early
films are not victorious, she became the victorious artist, engaged with feminist
film and photography, wielding a potent means of depicting stereotypical
expectations and making her own assessments of them.

As Employed in Women’s Autobiography

Women’s autobiography is certainly not a new form: Margery Kempe in the

early 1400s wrote about her religious pilgrimages, visions, and daily life. This
genre, however, has only recently been deemed worthy of serious study, perhaps
because it generally doesn’t concern historically prominent battles or political
upheavals that might be described in autobiographies or biographies of men. In
1974, Anaïs Nin wrote about the special connection that autobiography could
have to the goals of thoughtful women: it could be a key part of “the process of
peeling off false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our
families, our culture, our religions.”15 Scholar Estelle Jelinek helped to launch
more extended study of this form by labeling it as distinctive in three ways: the
focus being on personal life more than public issues; with irony, humor, and
understatement commonly employed; and textual structures like the
associational or fantastical made use of rather than the strictly chronological.16
These techniques help create what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have labeled
as this genre’s special subjectivity, what Elizabeth Baer has similarly described
as a “journey inward.”17 In such women’s autobiographies, the paper doll can
provide an apt symbol of passive exterior beauty that can be juxtaposed with
what the interior journey may teach.

In Gypsy Bags & Traveling Jackets from 2013, Mica Rath describes a life
journey spanning twenty-three years, including an obituary for her early paper-
doll self: “Paper Doll Girl passed quietly into memory on November 1, 2008.
She died from suffocation. Paper Doll Girl wore her clothes well, each tab
meticulously held her outfits in place. Always ready for an adventure, well-
dressed in the proper attire, she waited expectantly for the tattered shoebox to
open. She is survived by her longtime friend and designer, Mica Rath.” In this
book, Rath also includes poetry featuring the image of paper to describe what
she had desired as a young woman: “Fragile tissue-paper dreams / hold proper
attire in place with folded tabs, / gasping for air.” In this non-chronological
structure, Rath repeatedly considers many parts of her life, as she chronicles the
means by which she sought to lose her “superficial disguise,” abandoning the
flimsy tabs that in her youth held her “self-importance and false security” in
place as she made the mistake of waiting passively for an exciting life to begin.18

In Paperdoll: What Happens When an Ordinary Girl Meets an Extraordinary

Girl, from 2009, Natalie Lloyd employs paper-doll imagery as she weaves her
own story with a biblical tale. She admits being envious of the flawless faces on
magazine covers and television, “modern-day paperdolls,” and making mistakes
to achieve their lifestyle: “Sometimes I go paperdoll,” she declares, turning
herself into “nothing more than a walking billboard for materialism.” She asserts
that “those paper dolls whisper a tempting secret, ‘my worth is based on what I
own,’” and that they recognize the power wielded by the man who might “own”
them: “We wrap our worth in the guy holding our hand.” In a non-chronological
presentation, Lloyd weaves in the story of a woman in Samaria who, as told in
the Gospel of John, meets Jesus at a well. There Jesus tells the woman, who had
been unhappy with five husbands, that he could offer her “living water,” or
eternal life, so that she would never thirst again. As this autobiography depicts
Lloyd’s inward journey, it employs this biblical encounter to dramatize the
choice of abandoning the superficial paper-doll life and choosing a better path.19

In women’s autobiography, to engage readers in key moments of a life, the paper

doll may appear as a figure of humor or irony or judgment, providing a
shorthand version of societal expectations and of the means by which to make
other choices.

Fiction
Like autobiography, women’s fiction may focus on what the Women’s Fiction
Writers Association has labeled as “layered stories that are driven by the main
character’s emotional journey.”20 Many women’s novels support the feminist
goals of defending equal rights and identifying the definitions and expectations
that can limit women’s lives. African American writing has especially probed
the ways in which sexism, class oppression, and racism are inextricably bound
together, what Kimberlé Crenshaw has labeled as “intersectionality.” Feminist
fiction writers often create contrasts of characters or of parts of a life, employing
the paper doll to question traditional assumptions of what might be superficial
and what should be lasting.21

Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), her second novel, contrasts friends Nel and Sula.
Nel is the product of a traditional family while Sula’s grandmother and mother,
who provide a home for three orphans and several boarders as well as Sula, have
reputations as being loose and untrustworthy. Despite their differences, Sula and
Nel maintain a close friendship until a neighborhood boy, Chicken Little, falls
and drowns in a river when Sula swings him near a cliff’s edge, a horrible
accident that they keep secret and that pulls them apart. After high school, Nel
marries and settles into a conventional home life. Shortly after the wedding, Sula
leaves and stays away for ten years, having affairs with many men and
ultimately, after she returns, with Nel’s husband, Jude, who then abandons his
wife.

Sula’s need for a man whose attraction to her might stem her insecurities, arising
from her upbringing and from the accident, is powerfully rendered through her
obsession in her youth with Ajax, actually Albert Jacks, and through the symbol
of paper dolls. After Sula returns home, she realizes that she had not even known
the name of this unavailable man who loved airplanes and air shows more than
any woman. She discusses her paper dolls as she reflects on her own
vulnerability to Ajax, indeed to men who use her and discard her instead of
helping her to feel more secure: “‘When I was a little girl the heads of my paper
dolls came off, and it was a long time before I discovered that my own head
would not fall off if I bent my neck. I used to walk around holding it very stiff
because I thought a strong wind or a heavy push would snap my neck. Nel was
the one who told me the truth. But she was wrong. I did not hold my head stiff
enough when I met him and so I lost it just like the dolls.” With this symbol,
Morrison indicates Sula’s fears, her lack of self-confidence, her belief that at any
moment a heavy push might snap her neck. She “lost her head,” for Ajax, a
memorable instance of a frantic craving that would continue when she left home
and when she returned there.22

In this novel’s paralleling story of Shadrack, who had returned to town mentally
disabled after World War I, Morrison employs paper dolls to portray the effect
of war on veterans who had been hospitalized along with Shadrack and from
whom he can’t seem to get away as he continues to be entrapped by the past:

They were thin slips, like paper dolls floating down the walks. Some were
seated in chairs with wheels, propelled by other paper figures from behind.
All seemed to be smoking, and their arms and legs curved in the breeze. A
good high wind would pull them up and away and they would land perhaps
among the tops of trees.

Shadrack took the plunge. Four steps and he was on the grass heading for
the gate. He kept his head down to avoid seeing the paper people swerving
and bending here and there, and he lost his way.23

With these images of paper dolls, Morrison joins Shadrack and Sula as two
characters suffering from a type of post-traumatic stress, with Sula certainly not
a war veteran but haunted by fear and insecurity and frantic need, unable to get
beyond her insecure childhood, her guilt over Chicken Little’s death, her
abandonment by so many men. Both battle their fear that caregivers, lovers,
family, and indeed themselves are no more than paper figures. With this
comparison and this symbol, Morrison considers the intersectionality of sexism
and institutional power, concentrating on the various forms of power that men
could exercise over women and that a country could exercise over its men.

In Feminist Versions of Romance

The Romance Writers of America’s definition of romance fiction features its tie
to other genres that have women as the majority of their audience: “a
commercial novel about a woman on the brink of life change and personal
growth. Her journey details emotional reflection and action that transform her
and her relationships with others, and includes a hopeful/upbeat ending with
regard to her romantic relationship.” This focus on romantic love between two
people and this happy ending in which “lovers who risk and struggle for each
other and their relationships are rewarded with emotional justice and
unconditional love” are essential features of this version of the personal
journey.24 Considering what she labels as “the most popular, least respected
literary genre,” Pamela Regis contends that romance can fulfill feminist goals
when it features “a definition of society, always corrupt” that its hero’s actions
can reveal and reform. This sort of romance involves a “point of ritual death”; in
facing this crisis, the hero obtains something greater than love: “She cheats ritual
death, symbolically or actually, and is freed to live. Her freedom is a large part
of what readers celebrate at the end of the romance. Her choice to marry the hero
is just one manifestation of her freedom.”25

As in other forms of fiction, the paper doll has become a potent symbol in
romance novels, of expectations placed on women and of their own choices.
Within the genre of historical romance, which allows for key contrasts between
the past and present, Janet Woods wrote Paper Doll (2010), the story set in the
1920s, concerning Julia Howard, a perfect daughter to her father, a bankrupt toy
manufacturer who envisions her as his paper doll. Indeed, his toy company sells
a doll made in her image, slim-hipped and small-breasted to wear the styles of
the 1920s, available with all the latest dresses. Julia longs for freedom, and she
cares for her father’s new business manager, Martin Lee-Trafford, a doctor who
had a breakdown during the world war and returned home. But when her father
becomes ill and asks Julia to marry his old friend Latham Miller, she dutifully
obeys. Latham turns into a different man after marriage, no longer kind but
instead possessive and controlling, treating her like his plaything to use and then
cast aside when he wants to pursue other women, the powerful father and
husband both creating strong representations of patriarchal domination. Julia
starts an affair with Martin, but when she gives birth to a child, she faces a heart-
wrenching decision, a “point of ritual death,” for if she runs away with Martin,
she’ll be forced to leave her son with Latham since she lacks equality before the
law: she stays with her husband until his death. Afterwards, she opens a home
for needy children and goes back to Martin, this relationship, involving love and
respect, being a “manifestation of her freedom.”26

This figure of the paper doll also appears in contemporary romance. Paper
Dolls: Love, Romance and Sisterhood in South Beach (2015) by Sienna Mynx
concerns three African American women caught up in the excesses of fashion
and entertainment, “the celebrity scene of junkie pop-stars and egomaniac
starlets,” in a romance that creates another vivid “definition of society, always
corrupt.”27 Each of the three must face her own point of ritual death: Raven, an
agent to the stars through her company Paper Dolls, is dealing with a divorce
and possible bankruptcy; Valentina, once a lead singer, is now without a band;
Zephyr has been harmed by unworthy lovers and is struggling to care for a
mother ill with cancer. These three are looking for better sorts of men, control
over their own careers, and self-respect, and they achieve their goals, their
freedom from the surface glitz of paper-doll reality, through strength gained
from growing friendship.28 This book further develops themes of self-definition
found in Elaine Jackson’s play Paper Dolls (1983), concerning how African
American women deal with the pressures of beauty and beauty pageants and the
entertainment world: paper-doll “demons of beauty” that should be exorcised
from the black woman’s consciousness.29

In feminist romances, as in the genre generally, women come to embrace real

love, but they also obtain, through ritual death, a release from controlling men,
self-doubt, and passivity. The values to reject find apt description in the paper
doll, a symbol of affluence and of obedience to codes imposed by others, that
which is ultimately unsubstantial and defeatable.

Speculative Fiction: Science Fiction and Fantasy

In 1948, 10 to 15 percent of science fiction writers were female; in 1999,

however, women comprised 36 percent of the Science Fiction and Fantasy
Writers of America. Second-wave feminism in the 1960s, along with a new view
of science fiction as a literature of ideas, led to an influx of female science
fiction writers. In the 1960s and 1970s, authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin in The
Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Joanna Russ in The Female Man (1975), and
Marge Piercy in Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) began to consciously
explore feminist themes in science-fiction narratives. In 1974, Pamela Sargent
published an influential anthology, Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories
by Women, About Women, the first of many such collections created by Sargent
and other editors. Science fiction offered women writers the opportunity to
engage with different worlds, to consider various possible sets of rules, to speak
of relationships among women as occurring within a new space, and to avail
themselves of technology in surprising manners—thus to consider vastly
different societies than the ones in which they live.30
For these authors, the paper doll has provided a strong symbol. In 2015, Rue
Volley published Paper Doll, a feminist cyberpunk novel, concentrating on
technology and extreme social change, the plot concerning an invasion by aliens
who bring a virus that wipes out the male population, leaving the women to free
themselves from the control of these aliens who thought they would be
completely vulnerable without male defenders. Within this story of a future time,
with extremes of technology and warfare, Volley’s themes include ecofeminism,
the view that paternalistic society, indeed the power exhibited by the men no
longer there, had been harmful to the environment as was the domination of the
aliens that followed them. The story also concerns the young women’s conflicts
with their own radical mothers. The young first-person narrator of the story,
Hope, becomes a pilot in the women’s battle fleet, including planes called Paper
Dolls, rejecting her mother’s claims that she is reckless and unqualified, that she
lacks the strength and independence of her mother’s older feminist group. The
battle to move beyond alien control and to curb alien pollution requires that
these two women and the larger group seek freedom together, recognizing their
weaknesses and their ability to overcome: “There is a vulnerability to paper, and
yet, when set free, it floats on the wind.”31

Through science fiction, women writers create different visions of possible

societies while commenting on the relationships and requirements of this one,
the paper doll pointing, as in Rue Volley’s work, to a negative view of the young
woman but ultimately to her ability to move beyond such judgments and soar off
into a creative future. In the genres of feminist film, autobiography, and novels
that include romances as well as science fiction, women have employed the
paper doll, certainly for different purposes than those conveyed by Johnny
Black’s song. In this literature, which concerns women recognizing and moving
beyond restrictive gendered definitions, the paper doll continues to provide a
potent symbol of abandoning a thoughtless allegiance to the traditional. These
paper icons of the traditional home and family, of the bride, wife, and mother,
like those that appeared in so many doll sets made by McLouglin Brothers and
other manufacturers and in magazines like McCall’s, have wielded power as
women have responded, in their own narratives, to such expectations and have
advocated for powerful modes of change.
 Chapter 11

Paper Doll as Symbol: For the Young Adult Audience

Beyond songs, poetry, and fiction aimed at adults, it is young-adult fiction or

young-adult literature, often abbreviated as YA, that has made the most use of
the paper doll as symbol, an amazing amount, in fact, given that members of this
audience may have never played with this toy. The modern classification of
young-adult fiction originated during the 1950s and 1960s, especially after the
publication of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967), a novel that featured a dark
side of adolescent life.1 In the 1980s and 1990s, YA publications, such as Laurie
Halse Anderson’s Speak and Catherine Atkins’ When Jeff Comes Home, began
to consider more serious topics, such as rape, kidnapping, suicide, and drug use
as well as love and sex. In 1997, beginning with Harry Potter and the
Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling’s series led to other complex and dark works,
such as The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins and The Twilight Saga by
Stephenie Meyer. Recently published YA literature, such as Becky Albertalli’s
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda and Tim Federle’s The Great American
Whatever, also probes the highly materialistic and diverse culture that now
engages young adults.2 Like other novels, these texts often employ archetypal
moments, such as a hero’s journey, a test or trial, and an abyss or risk of
annihilation, with science-fiction settings signalling the possibility of extreme
changes in everything.3 Within this category of fiction, the prevalent and potent
symbol of the paper doll, quite often a book title, illustrates so many traps into
which a young person can fall.

In Paper Dolls, by Cory Toth, the adolescent is lost, without a clear sense of
purpose. Eleven-year-old Landon Daniels is found wandering, disoriented, late
at night. The girl he was last seen with, Emily Rose, has disappeared from a
nearby town, and Landon is not sure of what had happened between them when
they were last together. Like many other writers of YA fiction, Toth depicts
young people who lack control over their circumstances, who are involved in a
frightening journey, in fear of annihilation.4 And here Toth uses paper dolls to
depict children buffeted by so many pressures, tossed around by seemingly
uncontrollable forces, including their own fears.

In YA fiction embued with imagery of paper dolls, the adolescent can become
the victim of an all-controlling parent. This fiction often relies on the image of
the paper doll to discuss parental extremes for dramatic effect, a much more
developed version of the hands seen in Sherman’s Doll Clothes. In her YA novel
Paper Doll, for example, Elizabeth Feuer depicts, through a first-person
narrative, a senior in high school, Leslie Marx, who lost her legs in a car
accident ten years earlier. Leslie studies the violin, encouraged by an
overprotective mother and more openly controlling father, but she wants to break
away from this discipline and finds “shelter too unbearably lonely.” When she
begins to care about Jeff Penner, a classmate, the relationship lessens her
devotion to the violin, causing her father to lash out at both Leslie and Jeff.
Though she considers giving up the violin as a means of rebelling, she ultimately
finds her own reasons to continue her studies and the strength to get away. Here
the image of the paper doll relates to sundered limbs, to Leslie’s vulnerability
and what an accident can so quickly take away, but ultimately to what a parent
takes away from a child that he attempts to own and for which he assumes the
right to choose clothes, accessories, and activities.5

In this literature of extremes experienced by adolescents, involving alienation

and judgment and loss, John Green employs towns that disappear from the map
to describe the worst suburban blanks in which to grow up. His Paper Towns,
which won the Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Mystery and became a New
York Times bestseller, was made into a movie in 2015. Quentin loves Margo
from next door, years after she had spurned him to become the leader of their
high-school’s cool kids. While Margo has grown more rebellious, the dutiful
Quentin, whose parents are therapists, describes himself as continuing to be so
“goddamned well adjusted.”6

In their home town outside Orlando, where the landscape includes the ghosts of
planned but unbuilt neighborhoods, suburbia appears as a superficial, extreme
paper town, an abyss from which to journey. As a School Library Review
summary of the story declares about this stark environment, “Florida’s heat and
homogeneity as depicted here are vivid and awful.”7 As Margo describes all that
goes on there, she employs the imagery of paper: “all the paper kids drinking
beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone
demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-
frail. And all the people, too. I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I have never
once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.”8

A self-described “paper girl” swallowed up by a bleak paper environment,

Margo devises a revenge mission focused on a group of people who hurt her
during high school, with Quentin a willing accomplice. After their night of
retaliation, she decides to run away, causing Quentin to search the many
abandoned subdivision projects or “pseudovisions” around Orlando, a further
opportunity for the reader to survey a bankrupt landscape. He then discovers
from a hidden map that Margo is hiding in a fictional town in New York called
Agloe, its streets created as a “copyright trap” by mapmakers, a non-existent
area used for the purpose of “trapping” potential map copyright violators.
Quentin and his friends skip graduation and find her in Agloe, living in an old,
dilapidated barn.

At this point, a further complexity occurs as Quentin comes to save Margo, to

bring her home and help her to feel loved. She is not waiting to be saved like a
passive Sleeping Beauty in a fairy tale. In fact, she argues that Quentin has an
egotistical motivation: to be the hero who saves the helpless girl. In the last lines
of the novel, Margo and Quentin vow to keep in contact as she leaves for New
York City. Here the family and town are certainly constraining but so is the love
of a boy who wants to save a girl and thus earn her eternal allegiance and
gratitude.

Other YA books move the image of the paper doll from the lost paper child and
paper town into science fiction, involving mysterious connections among girls
from different eras. Anya Allyn published Paper Dolls, part of a Gothic series
called The Dark Carousel, a top ten e-book bestseller in the teen section of the
Amazon Kindle store. When Cassie’s best friend, Aisha, vanishes during a
school hike, Cassie sets off with Aisha’s boyfriend and their friend Lacey,
determined to find her. Instead, the three teens fall into a carefully-laid trap at
the terrifying nightmare Dollhouse. Wresting her way out of a serpent’s cave and
an ice world, with people that she thought she knew changing before her, Cassie
recognizes the ephemeral nature of so much that she has seen: “Life was a
pastiche, a patchword of paper scenes cut out and glued by a small child.
Nothing fit together. Everything was out of sequence. Everything was rips and
tears and jagged edges.”9

Another science-fiction use of the paper doll to describe pressures on

adolescents occurs in a series written by Stacey Kade called Project Paper Doll:
The Rules, The Hunt, The Trials.10 These books concern Ariane Tucker, a
teenager engineered by the Department of Defense’s Project Paper Doll, an
experiment in combining human and extraterrestrial DNA to create the person as
weapon. As someone completely removed from human society, she is taught to

1. Never trust anyone.

2. Remember they are always searching.
3. Don’t get involved.
4. Keep your head down.
5. Don’t fall in love.

Adriane escapes from the genetics lab, GTX, where she was created, attempting
to blend in at a high school in a small Wisconsin town, feeling that she is
vulnerable and invisible: made of paper. Being a test subject here reveals the
adolescent challenges of trying to fit in while not standing out. As GTX searches
for her, Adriane is certainly the girl as object, manipulated by corporations, but
ultimately not succumbing to a corporate and government structure attempting to
keep her as a paper doll.

Over and over in YA literature, writers employ paper dolls, as title and symbol,
to effect an audience of readers who may have had little experience with them as
toys. These dolls portray the lack of connection that adolescents may feel to their
families and communities, indeed to their own lives. All around them the values
that they encounter may seem paper-thin, with parents, schools, other teenagers,
and corporations attempting to control them, everything floating in a transient
un-reality well described by paper figures and towns.
 Chapter 12

Paper Doll as Symbol: LGBTQ Culture

In recent decades, paper dolls have repeatedly appeared as symbols to speak

about the realities facing women and adolescents and the manner in which they
might respond. The perfect doll and clothes seen in magazines, in publishers’
sets, or on the internet have created a potent contrast or foil for considering the
fate of the less than perfect—the vulnerable, the used, the thrown away—as well
as various means of moving beyond that status. As the paper doll gained
currency as symbol, it also came to provide commentary, with a tone both
humorous and serious, on the rights of LGBTQ citizens. This toy has provided
an apt representation of the ability, indeed the need, to change clothes or even
personalities—a means of securing protection and establishing an identity for
many Americans who may be regarded as Other.

The label has a history, in San Francisco, for example, of celebrating the
possibility of change, with different costumes to conceal or reveal different
realities. Paper Doll was a gay bar there, owned by a North Beach baseball
legend Dante Benedetti during the 1950s era of sexual repression. This bar held
Halloween parties to which drag queens came from across the country,
competing for the best costume awards. Benedetti got busted in a purge of gay
bars in 1960, the city’s police labeling these establishments as degenerate. He
pursued appeals but finally lost the battle, and his club, in 1961.1

The “undisputed king” of paper dolls, Tom Tierney, transferred this celebration
of costumes and identities into book form, in his Attitude: An Adult Paper Doll
Book (1979). It allowed readers to choose glamorous outfits for drag queens and
other doyens of New York’s LGBTQ community for a Greenwich Village
cocktail party. First we meet our hostess, Auntie Mary, who likes motorcycling,
fashion models, actors, and Larry her hairdresser. Other guests include Harry, a
truck driver with pretty tattoos; a cook with “tasty buns” and “taste it and see”
well situated on the front of his apron; General Ike Howell with “a natural
aptitude for strong flank movements and penetrating the adversary’s rear”; and
Dickie, a well-muscled physical culture expert who is “busy in the steam
room.”2

The paper-doll label as celebratory and satirical has continued in recent books.
In Imperfect Wedding Paper Dolls (2006), Lynn Chang-Franklin includes ten
dolls, with a variety of tabbed outfits, to make five happy couples. The resulting
combinations could create a gay wedding, with one option being a mustached
man in a traditional wedding dress; a straight wedding that might be an inter-
racial, bi-religious, multi-cultural event; a shotgun wedding, the bride looking
quite pregnant and the man expecting strippers at his bachelor party; or the tony
ballroom nuptials of an older man with the young trophy bride. The accessories
include a marriage license and prenuptial agreement valid in (almost) every
state.3

While such paper dolls can celebrate the putting on of various clothes and
situations, they can also reveal successful ways of coping with and adapting to
many sorts of events. In 2003, in Expectations, described as “a split zine about
lesbian fertility, conception, and pregnancy,” for example, Elizabeth Howell
published her paper doll, Pregnant Butch. Here she shows how to make
pregnancy outfits for Sydney from what might already be in her “butch closet,”
the tone resembling a Style magazine makeover article, with the whole to “cut
and color.” Proud of her pregnancy, Sydney can wear all of these choices and
many others as she continues to be herself.

In 2013, the website Autostraddle, a “progressively feminist online community

for a new generation of kickass lesbian, bisexual & otherwise inclined ladies
(and their friends),” began featuring paper dolls made by Rory Midhani to
celebrate heroes. As the artist describes her work, “I steal the clothes off queer
style icons’ backs. Metaphorically, that is. I’ll try to figure out just exactly what
makes queer style icons tick by breaking down their look into itty bitty bite size
pieces. I get a lot of questions about how to look like different
celebrities/characters, so I’m finally tackling the question ‘How the hell do I
dress like that?’” Three of Midhani’s most popular paper dolls are of Kiyomi
McCloskey, Janelle Monae, and Carrie Brownstein. She found it especially
challenging to create a paper doll of McCloskey, the lead guitarist and vocalist in
the band Hunter Valentine, whose 2006 tour appeared on season three of the
television series The Real L Word on the Showtime channel: “Unfortunately
Kiyomi’s style is hard to pin down. One day she’s in head to toe menswear and
the next she’s wearing a women’s tanktop. It’s not that her look is gender-free,
it’s that she embodies androgyny in such a way that she seamlessly blends butch
and femme.” To create McCloskey as a paper doll with a versatile wardrobe,
Midhani includes a tanktop, vest, and tailored shirt as well as a cross on a chain
and a tailored jacket that would cover tattoos.

The paper doll as symbol has also been employed for more serious studies of the
outsider status, the judgment of being Other, experienced in the LGBTQ
community. Paper Dolls, a 2006 documentary by Israeli director Tomer
Heymann, follows the lives of five transgender migrants from the Philippines,
working in Israel as health-care providers for elderly Orthodox Jewish men,
Hasidim, whose religious rules forebid their being touched by women. These
Philippines are among 300,000 foreign immigrants who came to Israel in the
wake of the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against Israel that started in
September 2000, to fill lowly jobs that had been held by Palestinians. Their
status is precarious because they cannot file for citizenship, and their visas will
be revoked if they lose their jobs. A main story told in the documentary, shot
over a span of five years and edited from 320 hours of videotape, first used to
create a five-part television show, concerns a caretaker, Sally, employed by
Chaim, who lost his voice due to throat cancer. At night, after working hard all
day for a minimal salary, helping a man who is all alone, Sally joins her
compatriots in donning exotic paper dresses and performing in Tel Aviv
nightclubs as a drag group called Paper Dolls.4
Rory Midhani, Kiyomi McCloskey Fashion Doll, 2013, from the website
Autostraddle (courtesy the artist).

Reviewers of the flim concentrated on its depiction of a group of outsiders—

marked as different in Israel by their religion, country of origin, and sexual
preferences. A.O. Scott of The New York Times stated that Paper Dolls “seeks to
illuminate a subculture without allowing its curiosity to become exploitative or
prurient.” Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe also lauded the documentary,
claiming that it concentrates on “the discrepancy between the (subjects’) self-
image and their neighbors’ failure to see them as more than freaks and
foreigners.” Michael Booth of The Denver Post declared that the documentary
underscores the subjects’ role as “eternal outsiders.”5

A stage adaptation of the same name by Philip Himberg, with music supplied by
Nigel Lilley and Ben and Max Ringham as well by the Paper Dolls from their
act, played in London in 2013. Himberg adapted the documentary for the stage
to emphasize its themes: as a “story about immigration, about crossing borders,
both literal and metaphorical, which has been a hot button issue in the States.
Also the clashing of cultures—the idea of Asians, Filipinos, living in Israel felt
so unlikely. And the generational thing, that these younger Asian men were
caring in a very beautiful way for these older men who had been, frankly,
abandoned by their families.” For Himberg, the story of these paper dolls related
to what other “vulnerable outsiders” might encounter.6

In texts concerning LGBTQ culture and rights, the paper doll can stand for
vulnerability and insecurity as well as the desire for freedom and the joy of self-
definition. Through the decades, paper-doll manufacturers have constructed
some groups, by their race for example, as lesser outsiders: many LGBTQ artists
have used the same symbol to illuminate their own status as Other and respond
to it.

Concerning an array of subjects, across the genres of film, visual art, song lyrics,
novels, autobiography, and scholarship, beyond the years of their greatest
popularity as toys, paper dolls have flourished as symbol. They cede a complex
view of how gender, age, sexual preference, and physical health can render a
person as vulnerable, with only paper-thin security, separate from the seeming
perfection seen in magazines and doll sets, dogged by judgments of the
acceptable and unacceptable. These dolls as symbol can also focus attention on
the person who chooses to make other choices, walking away from the
attractions of the paper-doll world and toward a larger view of what three-
dimensional women and men can be.
 Chapter 13

The Paper Figure in the Twenty-First Century

In the current period, paper dolls have power as a symbol of American

perfection and the vulnerability of the Other. Across so many novels and films,
to an amazing extent, this symbol has related to the insecurities felt by so many
Americans and the means by which they have attempted to establish their own
three-dimensional status.

While use of the paper doll as symbol seems to be at a high point, so is the
making of the actual figure. These dolls have recently been appearing in both
paper and digital forms for children, and new technology enables them to inhabit
almost every page of the latest fashion magazines. Additionally artists of all
kinds have begun working with paper cutting, continuing its cultural and
symbolic purposes, moving these dolls into new realms for adult audiences as
they have also continued to serve as a toy for children.

The Newest Styles of Paper Dolls for Children

While paper dolls are not as popular a toy for children as they were in earlier
decades, they are still being made and sold in toy stores and bookstores and on
the internet. Paper-doll sets from 2016 and 2017 include the characters for
classic tales, as in King Arthur Paper Dolls, and choices for particularly young
children, such as Johnny, Janey, and Judy in Storybook Land Paper Dolls as
well as collections that engage a new generation of children in the latest
offerings from designers: All Dolled Up: Creating a Fashion Wardrobe for
Paper Dolls, Fashion Doll Fashion Workshop, and Disney Imagicademy: Disney
Princess, Create Your Own Paper Dresses. Celebrity dolls also continue to be
issued in text form, in books like Dressing the Yeezy Way: The Kanye West
Paper Doll. Dover Publications has extended its reach in the paper-doll world,
beyond the many books by Tom Tierney, with Dover Little Activity Books
Paper Dolls, including Around the World Paper Dolls and Fun Fashions Paper
Dolls.

Parents looking for an alternative to video games and internet sites have recently
embraced paper dolls as part of an active involvement in crafts for their children.
They can purchase new books of instructions, including popular imports from
England, like, from 2016, Mini Makers: Crafty Makes to Create with Your Kids
and How to Unplug Your Child: 101 Ways to Help Your Kids Turn Off Their
Gadgets and Enjoy Real Life.1

Some of these new books concentrate on engaging both children and adults, as
does Emily Winfield Martin’s The Black Apple’s Paper Doll Primer: Activities
and Amusements for the Curious Paper Artist (2010). Martin, a visual artist and
illustrator of children’s books, has commented that paper dolls, “unique,
alchemical sorts of things,” have a special import now for families: “These
blank, people-shaped canvases represent the ultimate back-to-basics toy, and
with all the modern gadgets and expensive thingamagigs we’re inundated with
today, there’s something to be said for that.” Like toy theatre sets, this book
contains some definitely odd paper characters, their traits and backgrounds
given: “Tom is a mystery, even to his own wife. He might vanish for days at a
time and then suddenly appear at the very diner where you just so happen to be
having a cup of coffee and a piece of pie. It is rumored that his past occupations
include cobbler, rat-catcher, and ringmaster.” Violaine “is happy only in the cool
darkness of her black-and-white photography lab. There, with nothing but her
photochemicals and trays of partially developed images for company, she can
listen to her music and wonder why no one reads poetry anymore.” Children
Oliver, Jane, and Baby live on an unremarkable street and “spend a great deal of
time imagining that they live aboard a pirate ship or in a forest populated by
elves and monsters.” The book offers tabbed costumes for all these characters as
well as directions for constructing paper armoires to contain all the clothes;
spaces for these dolls to inhabit, including a school and circus tents; and paper
theatres to act out plays involving these dolls as characters.2

Beyond these creative extensions of paper dolls in a new century, they are
flourishing on the internet, and not just in celebrity doll games such as Kim
Kardashian: Hollywood. Web sites like Printable Paper Dolls allow children to
print dolls and costumes that they can then color or enjoy in colored forms. This
site has 256 dolls, and other sites also provide a myriad of other choices. The
lifestyle games starring digital dolls include not just stories about celebrities but
many other exciting grown-up possibilities: choosing the best dress for the prom,
many other exciting grown-up possibilities: choosing the best dress for the prom,
going down the runway at a fashion show, and vacationing at the beach. These
digital games include Paperdoll Heaven and Stardoll, with Paper Doll Delight
providing dolls for each grade level.

Paper Dolls, for Adults, Now in the Fashion Magazine

While paper dolls still provide a play form within families, women have also
continued to be made into well-costumed paper dolls. The Demorests included
“wearable rhetoric” at their party, in their magazines, and in the marketing of
their patterns and dresses, launching a connection of real women, paper dolls,
and fashion that has certainly continued in the construction of sellable dolls
today. As a composite of body features and clothing and accessories, what the
viewer of fashion magazines encounters each month is a current iteration of the
well-crafted paper doll. A recent article states the facts starkly: in fashion
magazines, “every single image you’re seeing is an illusion.”3

Many techniques can make the woman into a perfect image, a manufactured
form to display fashion. While touching up pictures, especially by air brushing,
is not a new, computers and ever changing software have transformed the
process. “What once took days or even weeks can now take less than an hour,”
says Nathan Lang, a computer graphics designer who works for the top fashion
magazines. “It is not that you couldn’t make the changes before, but you
wouldn’t. It was too expensive and took too much time. Now it’s cheap and
getting cheaper.”4 As Margo Maine and Joe Kelly, analysts of fashion imagery,
have written, “Most of the female images in ads and on the screen are not even
real; they are airbrushed or computer ‘enhanced’ (more accurately, computer
distorted). Many of these mythical images are composites of several people,
featuring the best feature of each.”5

In 2011, fashion chain H&M admitted that swimwear models in its latest online
catalogue were indeed not real; like nineteenth-century paper-doll books, this
catalogue featured one body placed in an array of clothes, this time with the
heads semi-real. An H&M spokesperson, in fact, declared about their “virtual
mannequins” that “We take pictures of the clothes on a doll that stands in the
shop, and then create the human appearance with a program on [a] computer”—
no extraneous curves, no tiny flaws. Then individual heads from real women,
many of them “beautified” by computer enhancement, appeared on the same doll
body.6

Fashion magazines and catalogues not only create women as paper dolls, but use
the term itself to engage readers with the transformations thus achieved. Cosmo
Girl, for example, a spin-off of Cosmopolitan magazine that from 1999 to 2008
targeted teenage girls with its articles about fashion and celebrities, employed
the title “Paper Doll” for an article that engaged readers in creating combinations
of accessories, including high-heel sandals from Chinese Laundry, a leather belt
from Fossil, and sunglasses from Tommy Hilfiger Eyewear, all to be added to a
beautiful paper doll initially clothed in a black blazer, white shirt, and blue jeans.
The subtitles used to describe these expensive choices include Dress It Up and
Dress It Down. The accompanying narrative engages a sense of play from
childhood transferred to adolecent ownership of clothes: “We made getting
dressed with three great basics as easy as child’s play—now snip to it!”7

Modern Making of Paper-Doll Art

In recent years, paper dolls have not only appeared anew as a toy for children
and as a high-fashion gimmick. They have also entered into a new realm, in
works by many professional artists, a trend that has its roots in research about
paper as well as in the artists’ own childhood experiences.

Starting in the late 1970s, the back-to-nature movement, which led to

investigations of do-it-yourself possibilities, sparked new interest in traditional
methods of making paper. Many books focused on this handicraft, such as Jules
Heller’s Paper-Making (1978), Marna Elyea Kern’s The Complete Book of Hand
Crafted Paper (1980), Bernard Toale’s The Art of Papermaking (1983), and Ralf
Weidenmüller’s Papermaking: The Art and Craft of Handmade Paper (1984).
These texts discuss what their authors label as a “worldwide renaissance,” and
they adapt traditional Chinese, Japanese, and European methods in their
directions for printmaking, sculpture, stationery, book plates, and placemats.8
After the re-issue of Dard Hunter’s groundbreaking Papermaking: The History
and Technique of an Ancient Craft in 1978, other books focused not on making
paper but on learning about its history; these include Alfred Henry Shorter and
Richard Leslie Hill’s Studies on the History of Papermaking in Britain (1993);
Richard Parkinson and Stephen Quirke’s Papyrus (1995); and Nicholas A.
Basbanes‘ On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History
(2013).9

Many current artists, influenced by this heightened interest in both making paper
and studying its history, have spoken not just about the impact of this research
but about their continuing connection to the paper dolls from their own
childhoods. Marian Dudley Richards, doll enthusiast, proclaimed about her
special relationship with one well-costumed paper doll: “All my emotions were
freely poured into her, and she was I, and I was she.”10 Reiterating the same
themes in 2014, Barbara Cash-Cooper, in Paper Dolls: Cut from My Own
Hands, discusses a supportive community of doll enthusiasts, her friends from
childhood who played with paper dolls as they envisioned their own futures:
“Each of us cut out clothes for our paper dolls that we wanted them to wear,
which actually represented what we each wanted to look like, not knowing that
all the time we were indeed cutting out pieces, shaping our own lives; from our
own hands.”11 Like Cash-Cooper, other artists found that this youthful creativity
and positive space became formative to their art.

As they discuss their careers, many artists, influenced by scholarship and by

childhood experiences, have commented on their choice of paper for figure
making. Artist Elsa Mora, for example, in a 2014 interview at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, remarked on the enchantment and possibilities of six
years’ work in this medium:

Before paper, there was painting, ceramics, drawing, photography. Those

are mediums that I love and will never stop practicing, because having the
freedom to jump from one medium to another is important to me. But paper
is such a fascinating thing. It’s like a mysterious room with a door, once
you open that door and enter the new room, you keep finding new doors
and new rooms. It’s an infinite world that never ends. I will try to keep
opening as many doors as I can, for as long as my hands allow me.12

Artist Rob Ryan’s preface to the collection Paper Cutting Book: Contemporary
Artists, Timeless Craft (2011) discusses the type of artist who has recently been
drawn to paper as a medium: one “who wants to freely explore a material so
light and fragile and easy to work with, with which she or he can create small
worlds for us as light as our lives are themselves.”
Many artists connect the current making of paper figures to the themes of
vulnerability and impermanence that have been fundamental to paper art since
its beginnings in China and Japan. “The artist creates silhouettes in which we are
mirrored,” Rob Ryan has written, “for after all in the larger scheme of things,
our brief lives really leave so little behind after all the living has been cut out of
them, that we are but shadows ourselves.”13 On her website, All about
Papercutting, Elsa Mora also comments on similar themes in her own art: “In my
work, paper tends to be a metaphor for transmutation. Ever since I discovered
the eloquent nature of this material, I have continued to obsessively explore its
potential.” On her website, artist Su Blackwell states similarly that she uses
paper to “reflect on the precariousness of the world we inhabit and the fragility
of our life, dreams and ambitions.”14 For these artists, this ability of paper to
depict the ephemeral, the transformational, has special purpose in the current era.
Art critic Owen Gildersleeve has commented that in the digital age, a “new wave
of tactile image-making” chronicles “the importance of human interaction and its
inherent imperfections” as well as the desire to step back from the tyranny of the
digital to portray the simple, and the impermanent, nature of the real.

This recent widespread involvement with the creativity of paper has led to many
art books and exhibits. Terry Taylor, bestselling author of Altered Art, released
Artful Paper Dolls: New Ways to Play with a Traditional Form in 2006, with
sections that connect works by modern artists to the earliest of antecedents. In
2006 also, Lynne Perrella published Beyond Paper Dolls: Expressive Paper
Personas Crafted with Innovative Techniques and Art Mediums, for which she
invited over fifty mixed media artists to contribute imaginative paper
interpretations of the human form. Laura Heyenga’s Paper Cutting:
Contemporary Artists / Timeless Craft from 2011 provides another collection of
artists’ paper works, preceded by a history of the paper figure that ties the recent
renaissance to the earliest examples of the medium.15

An exhibit, Paper Doll, curated by Anne Koval in 2011, at the Owens Art
Gallery in New Brunswick, Canada, featured paper dolls created by Sylvia Plath
when she was twelve. As one critic described them, “each small, ink coloured
rendering glows with colour,” the silhouettes, textures, and patterns revealing
Plath’s “early skills as a visual artist and designer,” her feminine dolls and
dresses influenced by Hollywood glamour.16 The exhibit also displayed the work
of many current artists engaged in crafting high-art paper dolls in a variety of
styles.
These books and this exhibit give a sense of what has been happening in recent
decades, of the various forms of paper figures now being created that reflect the
history of the medium. On the web, in galleries, and in other exhibit spaces,
viewers can find an amazing array of techniques and themes played out in paper
dolls.

Fanciful Drama Spaces: The Toy Theatre Anew

Some artists have used the paper doll to celebrate the performative of life, these
paper pieces evocative of stage costumes and even the toy theatre. Paper artist
Catherine Moore, for example, has combined the historical with the fanciful to
celebrate women on the stage, her work extending her connection to figures that
engaged her attention in childhood: “I suspect that the thing that has drawn me
back to dolls is some kind of code imprinted in my DNA. Something innate. Part
of my ancestral memories. Something intangible. Asking ‘Why dolls’ is like
asking will I connect to or love my new baby. It’s automatic, like breathing. You
simply have no control.”17 “Inspired by ideas from some of the most excessive
and inventive eras in costume design,” she employs the backstage dressing
room, theatres with additional stage sets in their wings, and soaring paper
characters in vintage theatrical finery to bring her audiences into a most creative
space.18

Some of Moore’s pieces display paper dresses as though they are housed in a
theatre trunk, opened up for a quick look at all the creativity of stage
performances. In her Silhouettes, representing the two sides of one such case, the
more conservative Victorian dress appears combined with perhaps a dancer’s
garb, pictures of the same woman hanging from both dresses as though she could
don both choices. Additional hangers indicate that other choices are also
possible. In Night at the Opera (or Notte all’opera), another one of Moore’s
paper figures, highly decorated, clothed in an eighteenth-century dress with
pannier, has what appears to be a proscenium arch opening up upon her skirt,
offering a fantastic space in which characters can create and recreate themselves.
Moore also made a collection of toy theatres, including Toy Theatre of Dreams,
inhabited by floating paper dolls, with the doors open and doors closed, solar
figures observing it all from the top. As an artist, Moore revels in the creativity
of paper and paper spaces, her works, like toy theatres and paper-doll books of
the nineteenth century, displaying actors and acting as a metaphor for the
possible options and excitement of life.19

Catherine Moore, Silhouettes (courtesy the artist).

Catherine Moore, Night at the Opera (or Notte all’opera) (courtesy the
artist).
Catherine Moore, Toy Theatre of Dreams (courtesy the artist).

Out from the Book

Another recent art type involves making paper dolls of book characters,
displayed as if coming out from the page, to dramatize startling moments in a
narrative that can change everything, a new variation on paper dolls appearing
with books. Su Blackwell, for example, discusses the critical moments from
fiction that she has focused on in her own art since 2003: “For the cut-out
illustrations, I tend to lean toward young-girl characters, placing them in
haunting, fragile settings, expressing the vulnerability of childhood, while also
conveying a sense of childhood anxiety and wonder. There is a quiet melancholy
in the work, depicted in the material used, and choice of subtle colour.” One of
her pieces that conveys “childhood anxiety and wonder” within “haunting,
fragile settings” is her Alice: A Mad Party, in which the child’s figure comes out
from a page in Alice in Wonderland that depicts the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.20

Su Blackwell, Alice: A Mad Tea Party (© 2007 Artwork by Su Blackwell).

To create a much more menacing vision, Wolfgang Matzl, a visual effects

director working in the film industry, brings an old-fashioned book to life in film
by employing paper cut-outs coming out from pages of this text. His book as
stage set reveals how quickly sweet moments of childhood can turn into the
horrific: children throw balls and then the head of a child; girls jump rope until
the rope cuts through the waist of one of them; another group plays a rope-pull
game in which one child comes apart. Then a skeleton teacher uses the blood of
a child, with part of his head removed, to write the ABCs of Death, the title of
this film, the first in a series.21 In this work, Matzl uses the old-fashioned—a
leather-bound book and classic childhood scenarios—to segue into what can
become nightmare. Like other artists, he is employing the paper figure to expand
the boundaries of the book and of what might happen to children and adults.

Paper Doll Dresses without the Doll

This new creation of paper dolls includes not just the doll coming out from the
theatre or the book, clothed in the most fanciful of dresses, but also the paper-
doll dress itself, exhibited without any figure wearing it for various symbolic as
well as commercial purposes.

Rebecca Sefcovic Uglem, for example, makes framed rooms involving paper-
doll outfits with tabs.22 The work employs “retro imagery on archival paper” to
comment on the history of appropriate femininity, the dress and the room
seeming to make the woman. As a museum catalogue for an exhibit featuring her
Lucy noted, “This quirky and fun multimedia work by Rebecca Sefcovic Uglem
utilizes feminine imagery in conjunction with craft and hand-made techniques.
Vintage paper dolls are whimsical and recall personal memories for both the
artist and the viewer…. The result is a fun, yet quietly poignant, comment on
femininity today.”23 Uglem creates a room and dress for Lucy, calling up the
past and focusing on the control that furnishings can exercise. The person is just
named on the chest, which also contains candy, a silhouette, and perhaps a
jewelry box on its top, bright wallpaper behind displaying a frame that contains
no particular image. Uglem wrote that “although I was born in the 1980s my
heart belongs in the 50s. I love vintage and mid-century everything, from the
delicious look of atomic furniture to the magazine articles and illustrations. I
love creating and designing in the retro style. It is like an extension of my
personality.”24 Here an unoccupied retro dress and room provide a poignant
vision of what the 1950s inscribed for the absent Lucy and for other
unindividualized girls and women.
Rebecca Sefcovic Uglem, Lucy (courtesy the artist).
Cybèle Young, Where Do You Find Those? (courtesy the artist).

Paper miniatures by Cybèle Young, a book illustrator, also display the paper
dress without the woman. She creates images of beautiful dresses being taken
apart by scissors or even a hole puncher, well-made, perfect gowns, which can
be altered by common tools that easily cut paper. As Young’s website notes,
“My practice consists of making miniature sculptures from fine Japanese papers,
some of which are embellished using etchings and other media. I create exact
miniature replicas of real life objects and abstract shapes.” As she further notes,
“objects imply human interactions,” and here she documents both the power of
the dress and its lack of permanence. In “It Was an Improvement,” a hole
puncher has removed the bottom of a pristine white gown, creating an appealing
jagged hem with holes above it; in “Where Do You Find Those?,” the scissors
seem to be quickly crafting a more fun version of the dress. Critic Decima
Mitchell calls these dresses “paper miniature fashion ironies,” and they seem
ironic indeed as they deny the permanence of these fancy gowns.25

Barb Hunt has also frequently created the dress devoid of its doll. She visually
references feminine, patterned fabric, but works in large-scale cut steel, using a
plasma-arc cutter, what she calls “sewing with fire,” to contrast the fragile with
the strong. Of her dresses, Decima Mitchell comments, “Monumental in size
they infuse the paper doll vernacular with an emphatic dignity.”26 Hunt’s Small
Dresses displays similar white dresses, in light and shadow, that make up a
larger garment, very little distinguishing the choices thus offered to women. Part
of a series that Hunt created on death and mourning, her Heart’s Ease presents
two dresses with holes at the top and bottom, creating fissures in the garb or in
the life of the woman who remains, these circles seen along with shapes of a new
existence. As Barb Hunt has indicated, Heart’s Ease is “both a flower reputed to
give solace, and a small outport community on the island of Newfoundland
where I live.” In Root Dress, which depicts a dress shape crafted of overlapping
branches, Hunt reveals the connections, the roots, that might hold a woman
down or help to hold her up.27
Barb Hunt, Small Dresses (courtesy the artist).

Barb Hunt, Heart’s Ease (courtesy the artist).

Paper can also be used to show the excitement of dress, of soaring possibilities,
as in the work of Zoe Bradley, who creates store and museum displays. As Laura
Heyenga notes, Bradley’s works exhibit “craftsmanship combined with dramatic
silhouette.”28 Her website, discussing her work in the third person, describes her
“journey of sculpting in paper,” which began in 2005:

She discovered her love of paper whilst making a showpiece for the
designer Michiko Koshino. The paper dress grew organically from hand
pleating large pieces of paper. This started her on a progressive and
continuing journey of creating intriguing sculptures in unexpected
 materials. Through Bradley’s skills as a fashion designer, she works like a
tailor and applies her artistry using the paper form. Her works involve her
folding, cutting and stitching paper. Bradley says “you need a sensitivity to
the paper, a patience, otherwise the creations are ruined and you have to
start again!”29

Bradley uses her large paper forms, often attached to a manikin, to display the
excitement of color and shape, the moving out from the conventional that is
possible in fashion and art. Her ceiling-to-floor Little Black Dress is anything
but little, combining paper with shopping bags and boxes, a final large box
appearing as a hat, to create quite a presence; and her Platform 21, a window
installation for Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue, featuring a skirt of overlapping paper
sheets that sweeps from the torso of a seated manikin into a large U-shape
reaching to the roof, makes the ballgown soar. Like other artists, Bradley
demonstrates the power of the dress—as the clothes that make the woman or that
at least provide vibrant possibilities for her.

Collage Figures

Current artists employ the paper figure to bring new life to books and to
celebrate the glories of performance while also testifying to the power of dress;
they are also using collage to comment on current realities, depicting what
museum curator Daniel Herrmann has labeled as “a sort of cut-and-paste
culture,” through snippets from magazines, newspapers, artwork, books, colored
papers, and photographs, all glued to a piece of paper or canvas. Many other
artists and collectors have recently commented further on the power of these
figures: collage can enable viewers “to experience information simultaneously,”
says Laura Hoptman, a curator in the department of painting and sculpture at the
Museum of Modern Art. Pavek Zoubok, a New York art dealer and gallery
curator, has also investigated the causes of a current resurgence in collage and in
paper art: “Culture has become increasingly collagelike, thanks largely to the
Internet. The idea of thinking in layers and seeing in layers has become common
currency. Some of it also is about a kind of increased appreciation for paper.”30

Ricё Freeman-Zachery, author of Living the Creative Life and many other books,
uses collage figures to celebrate the artist making art, indeed the possibility of a
large number of people becoming engaged in making multi-layered, complex
images that matter. One of Freeman-Zachery’s collages, a pantin with brads,
declares on its chest, “take time to do art.” Another female figure made from a
cut-up check, her head banded by both a clock and wings, by deadlines and
flights of imagination, holds a placard declaring that “where the spirit does not
work with the hand there is not art.”

In the last decades, paper collages have enabled artists not just to celebrate art
but to reflect on many complexities of women’s lives. To construct her own
rows of pantin figures, Heather Crossley has used collage, going back to an
older tradition of the paper doll to show all that might be jointed together in a
life: games like dominoes, birds and butterflies, duncecaps, clocks, the powerful
word “dream,” interior organs, and certainly the heart. Crossley labeled this
work as Interactive ATC Dolls; they can serve as Artist Trading Cards (ATC),
with the heads and limbs contracted, and then they can be unfolded to create full
body forms.

Along with employing paper collages to celebrate connections between the past
and present, recent artists have used the power of cut and paste to reflect on
cultural constructions of women. The website for Jane Maxwell, whose work
appears in galleries around the country, indicates that her artistic voice and
commitment to collage “grew out of a passion for vintage materials, modern
fashion and design—mingled with a deep fascination for pop culture and female
icons.” She probes the power of “body image and perfectionism,” this subject
stemming from her own “ambivalence and frustration, chasing the elusive myth
of beauty.”31 Her Praha Standing Girls, for example, focuses on dresses, with
advertisements written upon them, worn by lines of thin, similar women without
faces, with “praha” naming the city of Prague where Maxwell asked a man
taking down billboard paper for the thrown-away strips. These figures give no
clue to the women’s individuality. As Maxwell says of this art, “I used the doll
cutout icon to explore the message that being thin and perfectly dressed is the
desired norm and a societal expectation of young women.”32
Heather Crossley, Interactive ATC (Artist Trading Card) Dolls (courtesy the
artist).
Jane Maxwell, Praha Standing Girls (courtesy the artist).
Doll figures by Julie Arkell (courtesy the artist).

Julie Arkell uses papier-mâché as the basis of her humorous collages, building
up images of older women along with all that could alter their expected look,
creating her own version of complexity through this medium. In one piece, for
example, she combines bows, polkadots, necklaces, gloves, and makeup,
traditional elements of an appropriate look, with surprising additions such as
writing across the women’s faces and ice skates. Behind these figures is peeling
paint from boards, a jarring combination that renders the pearls and heels a little
unexpected.

Lynn Whipple uses collage, combining cut elements with her own drawings, to
make detailed paper figures that move further into the fantastic, techniques that
she teaches in two-week classes and in her book The Joy of Collage. Whipple
states on her website, “Play and discovery are my dearest and most constant
companions”: her “play and discovery” lead to startling combinations in built-up
paper forms.33 “Using her knack for putting surprising elements together,” as
Lynne Perrella contends about Whipple’s work, “she does a fine job of story-
telling, allowing the viewer to fill in the descriptive details.”34 In Bonnie the
Bird Girl, a figure in a traditional old-fashioned dress appears with the surprising
attributes of huge ears; in The Spider Woman, the depicted character appears not
as the superhero from Marvel Comics but as an older woman, again with a cut-
out face, a spider hanging from a string on her hand and others around her head
and skirt. Whipple also turns a man into a dog, indeed into My Sweet Doggie,
Miss Tail Wagger. Like other artists, Whipple employs collage to probe the odd
possibilities of people and things, the transformations of daily life that the
imagination makes possible.

Modern Pain

While the paper figure can reinterpret the book, celebrate the connections among
women of various eras, focus on the power of the dress, and reach to the
fantastic, it can also depict vulnerability to pain. In her Silhouettes, Lynne
Yamamoto, a Hawaiian-born artist of Japanese descent who designs paper dolls
for therapy exercises, creates figures that have no grounding; they flutter in the
air, in combinations of flesh tones and grays. As Decima Mitchell has described
this artwork, “In Silhouettes Lynne Yamamoto has arranged rows of cut-out
dolls in paper chains. Each figure is fastened with a dressmaker’s pin to the wall.
Hanging away from the surface, these delicate silk paper girls tremble in the
slightest breeze. Each one is distinguished by tiny burns and the scorched paper
reminds how words can illuminate, shine and ultimately cause pain.”35
Lynne Yamamoto, Silhouettes (courtesy the artist; photograph by Roger
Smith).

Other paper-doll pieces by Yamamoto go further in providing stories of strength

as well as vulnerability. Her The Long Twilight, exhibited at the Whitney
Museum of American Art in New York City, depicts the disappearance of two
women whose biographies appear in the catalogue for the exhibit: Ayame was
born in the 1860s, in Japan, to a family of the merchant class. Sent to the United
States as a girl, she lived with an American family on the east coast for several
years and then attended Vassar. One of her friends, Rose, returned to Japan with
her, where they both taught English and wrote for feminist journals. In the 1930s
they simply disappeared, with no record of their death. In this gallery-size
installation, Yamamoto uses “artifacts, photographs, furniture and a slew of
tissue-paper dolls to suggest the circumstances of Ayame’s life while aiming to
throw light on more universal problems of femaleness and cultural identity.” A
Victorian parlor, as the catalogue indicates further, “is hung round with
thousands of translucent silk-tissue paper dolls, chains of vaguely twinned little
girl shapes (traced and cut from one figure in an old school photograph),
delicately moth-eaten with tiny burn holes that further complicate the veiling.”
The center wall has a peephole, through which can be seen a photograph of the
two women, their faces slightly blurred as history has blurred their existence.36
In the story of Ayame and Rose and the chains of many more dolls, viewers see
the possibility of women becoming lost, because of violence perhaps or at least
because of a lack of respect, as they find themselves stymied by an inability to
change the societies in which they live.
Lynne Yamamoto, The Long Twilight (courtesy the artist; photograph by
George Hirose.

Other artists have used the paper image to highlight suffering. On her website,
All about Papercutting, where Elsa Mora comments that paper “tends to be a
metaphor for transmutation,” she exhibits a cut paper depiction of a woman
adorned with flowers, but also with vines entwined around her arms and bulbs
coming out of her hand, some kind of long-tailed rodent inhabiting her head, and
red-marked genitals, resembling a heart, with blood drops below it and
disconnected red veins above. Here is certainly danger, a woman taken over by
vines, a hidden figure, and a misplaced heart.

Ed Pien, who teaches art at the University of Toronto and whose works appeared
in the Paper Doll exhibit in New Brunswick, creates highly detailed works that
resemble Hans Christian Andersen’s paper cuts; some show human beings
enjoying themselves within contained spaces, but others construct them as
trapped in current circumstances and attempting to free themselves.

Pien’s Luft, the title being the German word for air, made of hand-cut 3M
reflective film laminated on inked Japanese paper, seems to suspend natural
laws. Figures balance on rings and webs, as though at the circus, a purple
backdrop behind them. Being launched into the air here seems to be freeing, not
constraining: viewers can almost imagine crowds of people below gazing up in
awe at the gravity-defying ballet.37 In A Forest of Thorns, however, the pair
looks lost, caught within tendrils and vines, thorns and brambles, bent over as
they try to make their way forward to the blue. There seems to be no clear path
out of this containing maze.
Ed Pien, Forest of Thorns, 182 cm w × 137 cm h, ink on hand-cut 3M
reflective film, laminated on Japanese paper, 2008 (courtesy the artist).

Three Pien works that create a series called Suspend, as one reviewer has
commented, engage the concept of in-between-ness to depict urban motion:
“What happens when things do not come down, but merely pause like a freeze-
frame, or hang empty like silence inserted into a piece of music? It is this state of
‘in-between-ness’ that acts as a potent metaphor for our current urban condition.
Living in cities in a globalized world we are constantly in a state of suspension
—on the move, from one apartment to another, from one neighborhood to
another, moving to a different city or even country. We are beings in a state of
perpetual motion—feet high off the ground, not ever feeling fully grounded, a
mutable sense of time, space and place.”38 These pieces show figures in
between, making their way through a web maze but also hung up within it, far
from the ground, the term “suspend” describing their mid-air locale.

Paper dolls are still a toy for children, available on paper as well as on the web,
and additionally a means of constructing perfect beauty, as in fashion magazines
and catalogues. And current artists are also employing paper not only to provide
a canvas for oil paint or watercolors, but to create paper figures—placed within a
a canvas for oil paint or watercolors, but to create paper figures—placed within a
constraining frame or a web, floating within a toy theatre, built up from
fragments of various eras and media—with the results shown in museums, in
books, in stores, and on web sites. This art continues a long tradition of paper
figures representing the performances and choices of human life, what might be
hidden and what might be lost, the traps that might or might not be easy to break
through, the constant transformations that engage past and present.
 Conclusion

The film Joy (2015), about a self-made millionaire who launched a business
empire with a new style of mop, begins and ends with her creating paper dolls
and paper spaces to house them, the dolls for writers Annie Mumolo and David
O. Russell providing a symbol of what centuries of artists have found in paper
figures: a world of creativity and possibilities and transformations.

With a history stretching from China and Japan to the internet and current art
exhibits, this flimsy material has offered generations of adults and children the
means of depicting the insubstantial of life along with substantial human values
and strengths. Created by a company or by an individual artist, the paper figure
has come to represent so much about us as members of a group and as
individuals: about our need for community, our attraction from childhood to
freedom and creative expression, our yearning to rid ourselves of sin, our
ingenuity in fighting back against cruel aristocrats and politicians, our desire to
move out from home to wider worlds as well as our desire to live inside of safe
and meaningful spaces. In all of these depictions, paper has led to basic contrasts
concerning who we are.

Paper dolls have had a strong attraction and array of messages for children. For
boys they have signalled a place in the secure home, but also their role as the
supposed kings of the outdoor world and willing soldiers. For girls, the doll has
depicted, as preferred choices, those made for Betsy McCall, who was securely
ensconsed in the home and presumably moving from there to marriage and to the
protected status of middle-class mother. But these dolls, as they appeared in
paper-doll books and comic books and toy theatres, have also testified to other
possibilities. While paper dolls would speak to the attractions of the home, they
could also feature, while engaging the far reaches of the imagination, what could
be achieved and enjoyed by leaving it.

Girls certainly have also been engaged not just with home-bound figures like
Betsy McCall but also with the exotic fashion paper dolls presented to their
mothers in stores, magazines, and newspapers. In 1968, when Milton Bradley
released the Cut Up Shopping Spree Game, a race to cut out money and then
purchase the clothes to dress a doll held up on a spike, this game for an audience
of young girls certainly giving primacy to clothes and winning through fashion.
As the directions indicate, “Imagine! You spend all the money you cut out of a
money sheet to shop for clothes for your own model. A spinner tells you how
much time you have for cutting. You race against a time clock and must be fast
with the scissors to be the first player to ‘Cut-Up’ enough money to completely
outfit your model.” This game surely offered speed, money, and outfits, lauding
the value of transformation through the latest clothes, with all to be obtained by
competing against other girls. Gaining control over fashion cut-outs might
engage the girl in the larger world of the H&M fashion paper doll and of
computer-generated models in magazines, symbols of both freedom and control,
of self-definition and societal definition.1

In their depictions of women also, paper dolls have pointed to basic

contradictions. These images have depicted the perfect mother within the home
as well as the beautifully attired fashion icon situated beyond it. While paper
dolls lure women as well as girls into magazine and celebrity unrealities, they
have also offered the freedom of Tillie the Toiler and Katy Keene to generations
of women who may have felt trapped by both judgments of their working or of
their avoidance (delay) of marriage. Kim Kardashian has made millions of
dollars from her site perhaps because of envy but also because of the fun to be
had in a space beyond conventional codes.
Cut Up Shopping Spree Game, Milton Bradley, 1968.

With paper dolls constructing many means of achieving an insider status, they
have also been employed, as symbol as well as actual figure, to comment upon
the status of Other. In texts, such as plays and novels, about people classified as
outsiders, the paper doll has pointed to inadequate health care, the restrictions
placed on women, the insecurities of adolescents, and the fears of the LGBTQ
community. As symbol, the paper figure has also depicted those, like the gay
person or the adolescent, who might seek not just to withstand but to embrace
the status of Other, whatever the risks.

As part of the renaissance now occurring with paper as a creative material, artists
are availing themselves of these possibilities and more. In many collages and
other forms of paper art, especially women artists are now considering the full
lives of book characters, dresses and the messages that they convey, powerful
connections between the past and the present, and the varied priorities of busy
modern life as well as its insecurities and violence.

In the hands of so many artists, in projects that appeal to adults as well as

children, the simple material of paper relates to basic human creativity and to the
constant state of change. As it did from its beginnings in China and Japan and in
the movie Joy, paper acquaints us with the insecurities and vulnerabilities of
human life, powerfully conveying the fragility of existence as well as the gains
and losses of achieving a more secure status. This art, both personal and
corporate, involving children and adults, has not always been taken seriously by
historians or art critics or scholars of material culture, but it has remained a
potent means of representing what we have and desire, what we can control and
cannot, what we seek to change and to keep.
 Chapter Notes

Introduction

1. “World Record Attempt Looks for a Chain Reaction,” October 15, 2015, BBC
Arts Get Creative, accessed December 4, 2015,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles; Paper Doll Chain, accessed June 7,
2016, http://www.paperdollchain.com.

2. Judy M. Johnson, “A Brief History of Paper Dolls,” in The Doll Sourcebook,

ed. Argie Manolis (Cincinnati: Betterway, 1996), 255.

3. Agnes Halsey, “Cardboard Lover—1811; with Some General Remarks on the

History of Paper Dolls,” The Magazine Antiques 48 (August 1945): 90.

4. Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2011), 1.

5. Dominique Buisson, The Art of Japanese Paper: Masks, Lanterns, Kites,

Dolls, Origami (Paris: Terrail, 1992), 7.

6. Ramona Jablonski, The Paper Cut-Out Design Book (Owings Mills, MD:
Stemmer House, 1976), 8.

7. Eric Kenneway, Complete Origami: An A-Z Facts and Folds, with Step-By-
Step Instructions for Over 100 Projects (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 82.

8. The word Other appears capitalized in this book as a borrowing from Simone
de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, in which she declares that “No group ever sets itself
up as the one without at once setting up the Other over against itself.” The
outsider category, “primordial as consciousness itself,” has been an essential
feature of paper dolls. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M.
Parshley (1949; repr. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), xl.

9. Dominique Buisson, The Art of Japanese Paper, 179.

10. The Protean Figure and Metamorphic Costumes (London: S. & J. Fuller,
1811); Antonia Fraser, A History of Toys (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1966), 92.

11. Agnes Halsey, “Cardboard Lover—1811.”

12. Mary Hillier, Dolls and Dollmakers (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1968), 47.

13. Gerry Canavan, “Anything Could Happen (and We Would Believe It),” New
Orleans Review, 41 (2015): 226.

Chapter 1

1. Suzanne Aker, “Data on the Dangerous Pantin, Paper Doll That Dances,”
Dance Magazine 41 (December 1967): 51.

2. Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft

(1947; repr. New York: Dover, 1978), 5.

3. Josep Asunción, The Complete Book of Papermaking (New York: Lark,

2003), 12; Peter Green, Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the
Hellenistic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 168; Ronald
Reed, The Making and Nature of Parchment (Leeds: Elmete, 1975); 1–9;
Michael L. Ryder, “Parchment: Its History, Manufacture and Composition,”
Journal of the Society of Archivists 2, no. 9 (1964): 391–99.

4. Dominique Buisson, The Art of Japanese Paper: Masks, Lanterns, Kites,

Dolls, Origami (Paris: Terrail, 1992), 13; Josep Asunción, The Complete Book of
Papermaking, 9–14.

5. Tu Fu, “Ch’ang an Ii,” in The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, trans. David Hinton
(New York: New Directions, 1989), 29, ll. 1–4. Reprinted by permission of
David Hinton.

6. Dominique Buisson, The Art of Japanese Paper, 35.

7. Demaris C. Smith, Preserving Your Paper Collectibles (Crozet, VA:

Betterway, 1989), 148; Blair Whitton, Paper Toys of the World (Cumberland,
MD: Hobby House, 1986), 92.

8. Max Van Boehn, Dolls and Puppets (New York: Cooper Square, 1966), 84.

9. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, ed. Hugh Murray (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1845), 247–48, 137–38.

10. Haiwang Yuan, The Magic Lotus Lantern and Other Tales from the Han
Chinese (Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, 2006), 175–77.

11. Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1991),
61–62.

12. These figures can be further studied in The Eight Immortals of Taoism:
Legends and Fables of Popular Taoism, trans. Man-ho Kwok and Joanne
O’Brien (New York: Plume, 1991); Eva Wong, Tales of the Taoist Immortals
(Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2001); and T.C. Lai, The Eight Immortals (Hong
Kong: Swindon, 1972). See also Loretta Holz, The How-To Book of
International Dolls: A Comprehensive Guide to Making, Costuming, and
Collecting Dolls (New York: Crown, 1980), 80.

13. Lillian Too, Total Feng Shui: Bring Health, Wealth, and Happiness into
Your Life (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2004), 227–29.

14. Legend of the Eight Immortals, television show (Singapore: Toggle

International, 1998–99).

15. Stan Liu, Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix, Video game (Pasadena, CA: Kronos
Digital Entertainment, 2001).

16. Andrew Gosling, Asian Treasures: Gems of the Written Word (Sidney:
National Library Australia, 2011), 72; Eric Kenneway, Complete Origami: An
A-Z Facts and Folds, with Step-By-Step Instructions for Over 100 Projects (New
York: Macmillan, 1987), 82.

17. Alan Pate, Ningyō: The Art of the Japanese Doll (Boston: Tuttle, 2005), 10.

18. Eric Kenneway, Complete Origami, 82; Blair Whitton, Paper Toys of the
World, 92; Edith Flack Ackley, Paper Dolls: Their History and How to Make
Them (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1939), xiii.
19. Steven T. Brown, Theatricalities of Power: The Cultural Politics of Noh
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 62–64; Demaris C. Smith,
Preserving Your Paper Collectibles, 148; Loretta Holz, The How-To Book of
International Dolls, 100.

20. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, vol. 1, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1977), 245–46.

21. Dominique Buisson, The Art of Japanese Paper, 40.

22. Steven T. Brown, Theatricalities of Power, 64.

23. Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1969), 130.

24. Dominique Buisson, The Art of Japanese Paper, 166; Alan Pate, Ningyō, 10,
82–84; Terry Taylor, Artful Paper Dolls: New Ways to Play with a Traditional
Form (New York: Lark, 2006), 8.

25. Alan Pate, Ningyō, 83; Max Van Boehn, Dolls and Puppets, 206–08.

26. Carl Fox, The Doll (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 93; Loretta Holz,
The How-To Book of International Dolls, 101; Taeko Yamanaski, Japanese
Paper Dolls (Tokyo: Toto Shuppan, 1964), 3.

27. Loretta Holz, The How-To Book of International Dolls, 235; Josep Asunción,
The Complete Book of Papermaking, 13; Karl Herbert Mayer, “Amate
Manuscripts of the Otomí of San Pablito, Puebla,” Mexicon: Journal of
Mesoamerican Studies 34, no. 6 (December 2012): 130–35.

Chapter 2

1. Josep Asunción, The Complete Book of Papermaking (New York: Lark,

2003), 9–15; Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an
Ancient Craft (1943; repr. New York: Dover, 1978), 139–69.

2. Maurice Rickards and Michael Twyman, The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A

Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector,
Curator, and Historian (New York: Psychology, 2000), 186; Blair Whitton,
Paper Toys of the World (Cumberland, MD: Hobby House, 1986), 92–93.

3. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Essays on Dolls, ed. Kenneth Gross

(London: Notting Hill, 2012), 22–50.

4. Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Tree,” 1850, in Christmas Stories (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, nd), 4–5.

5. Edmond Jean François Barbier, Chronique de la Régence et du Règne De

Louis XV: 1718–1763 (Paris: Charpentier, 1857), 212. Translation ours.

6. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Encyclopédie Ou Dictionnaire

Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, vol. 11 (Paris: Société des Gens
de Lettres, 1765), 827, translated in Esther Singleton, Dolls (New York: Hobby
House, 1927), 44–45; Max Van Boehn, Dolls and Puppets (New York: Cooper
Square, 1966), 131.

7. François Boucher, 1703–1770 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,

1986), 25.

8. Rose Georgina Kingsley, A History of French Art, 1100–1899 (London:

Longmans, Green, 1899), 210; Katie Scott, “Reproduction and Reputation:
‘François Boucher’ and the Formation of Artistic Identities,” in Rethinking
Boucher, ed. Melissa Hyde and Mark Ledbury (Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute, 2006), 93.

9. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, The Political, Social, and Literary History of

France (Paris: Jarrold, 1878), 264.

10. Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp, Ballet Art: From the Renaissance to the
Present (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1978), 41; Allardyce Nicoll, The World
of Harlequin: A Critical Study of the Commedia Dell’ Arte (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1963), 84–107; Winifred Smith, The Commedia
Dell’arte (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964), 141–69; Michele Bottini, “You
Must Have Heard of Harlequin,” in The Routledge Companion to Commedia
Dell’arte, ed. by Judith Chaffee and Olly Crick (New York: Routledge, 2015),
55–61.

11. Pierre Laujon, “Chanson Sur Le Pantins,” in Oeuvres Choisies De P. Laujon,

Membre de l’Institut (1811; repr., Charleston, SC: Nabu, 2012), 415. Translation
ours.

12. Quoted in Esther Singleton, Dolls, 44. Translation ours.

13. Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp, Ballet Art: From the Renaissance to the
Present (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1978), 41; Allardyce Nicoll, The World
of Harlequin: A Critical Study of the Commedia Dell’ Arte (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1963), 84–107; Winifred Smith, The Commedia
Dell’arte (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964), 141–69; Michele Bottini, “You
Must Have Heard of Harlequin,” in The Routledge Companion to Commedia
Dell’arte, ed. by Judith Chaffee and Olly Crick (New York: Routledge, 2015),
55–61.

14. Quoted in Jo Hedley, François Boucher: Seductive Visions (London:

Wallace Collection, Paul Hoberton, 2004), 95.

15. Quoted in Dorothy Margaret Stuart, Molly Lepell, Lady Hervey (London:
George G. Harrap, 1936), 198–99.

16. Horace Walpole, “To Miss Anne Pitt,” in The Letters of Horace Walpole,
Fourth Earl of Orford, vol. 6 (London: University of Oxford, 1904), 400.

17. Jack Lindsay, Hogarth: His Art and His World (New York: Taplinger,
1979), 119; Frederick Antal, Hogarth and His Place in European Art (New
York: Basic, 1962), 66, 136.

18. Frederic George Stephens, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British
Museum: Division I. Political and Personal Satires (no. 1 to no. 4838) (London:
British Museum, 1877), 730–31.

19. Quoted in Max Van Boehn, Dolls and Puppets, 131.

20. Mary Hillier, Dolls and Dollmakers (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1968), 46.

21. Esther Singleton, Dolls, 41.

22. Esther Singleton, Dolls, 42.

23. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, The Political, Social, and Literary History of
France, 263.

24. “Frenchwomen of the Eighteenth Century,” in The Spectator: A Weekly

Review of Politics, Literature, Theology, and Art, Literary Supplement 72 (30
June 1894): 881.

25. Esther Singleton, Dolls, 41.

26. Parlement du Canada, March 13, 2012, accessed December 12, 2015,
http://www.parl.gc.ca/default.aspx?Language=F. Translation ours.

27. Mary E. Lewis and Dorothy Dignam, The Marriage of Diamonds and Dolls
(New York: Lindquist, 1947), 36.

28. Bernard Dan, “Angelman Syndrome: Current Understanding and Research

Prospects,” Epilepsia 50, no. 11 (2009): 2331–39.

29. Carolyn Kastner, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith: An American Modernist

(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013), 5.

30. Carolyn Kastner, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, 52–58.

31. Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives of PostIndian Survivance

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 83.

32. Carolyn Kastner, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, 54, 72, no. 11.

33. Carolyn Kastner, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, 56.

34. Ward Churchill, Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of
American Indian Residential Schools (San Francisco: City Lights, 2004), 14–16.

35. Jon Allan Reyhner, “Indian Boarding Schools,” California Indian Education,
accessed January 5, 2016,
http://www.californiaindianeducation.org/indian_boarding_schools/.

36. Sean Meredith, Paul Zaloom, and Sandow Birk, Dante’s Inferno, Film,
directed by Sean Meredith (Hollywood: Dante Film LLC, 2007).

37. Kyle Hilton, “Bonjour, Monsieur Le Premier Ministre,” New York,

November 2–8, 2015, 59.

38. Kevin C. Cole and Briana Haynie, “The President Donald Trump Doll,” in
The Annual, September 18, 2015, accessed November 1, 2015,
http://theannualonline.com/tag/donald-trump-paper-doll/.

39. Alice K. Early, English Dolls, Effigies, and Puppets (London: B.T. Batsford,
1955), 29.

40. David Cressy, “The Fifth of November Remembered,” in Roy Porter, Myths
of the English (Boston: Polity, 1992), 71–79.

41. Rose Troup Buchanan, “Ukrainians Burn Effigy of Russian President

Vladimir Putin,” The Independent, February 24, 2015, accessed December 8,
2015, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe.

42. John Hampton Hazelton, The Declaration of Independence: A History (1906;

repr., Charleston, SC: BiblioLife, 2015), 256, 575.

43. Thomas Fleming, The Great Divide: The Conflict Between Washington and
Jefferson That Defined a Nation (Philadephia: Da Capo, 2015), 209.

44. R. Daniel Monroe, The Republican Vision of John Tyler (College Station:
Texas A&M University Press, 2003), 210.

45. Bruce Chadwick, Lincoln for President: An Unlikely Candidate, an

Audacious Strategy, and the Victory No One Saw Coming (Naperville, IL:
Sourcebooks, 2010), 162.

46. “Lincoln Was Burnt in Effigy,” three news items from the Alexandria
Gazette, March 20, 1861, accessed November 12, 2015,
http://edu.lva.virginia.gov/online_classroom/union_or_secession/doc.

47. W. Thomas Smith, Jr., “The ‘Forget Hell!’ Crowd,” February 27, 2006,
accessed December 9, 2015, townhall.com.

48. William Robert Glass, Strangers in Zion: Fundamentalists in the South,

1900–1950 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001), 41, no. 29.

49. L.G. Broughton, “Sunday Night’s Sermon,” The Golden Age 4, no. 4 (March
11, 1909): 2.

50. “Suffragists Burn Wilson in Effigy,” New York Times, February 10, 1919,
1+.

51. “The Demonstration of February 9,” Suffragist, February 22, 1919, 10.

52. “The Suffrage Trial,” Suffragist, February 22, 1919, 13; Katherine H. Adams
and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 236–38.

53. “People and Events: The 1968 Protest,” Miss America, American
Experience, PBS, accessed December 9, 2015,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/missamerica/peopleevents/e_feminists.html.

Chapter 3

1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (1958; repr.,
Boston: Beacon, 1994), 155.

2. Quoted in Denis J. Conlon, introduction to The Collected Works of G.K.

Chesterton, vol. 11 (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989), 24; G.K. Chesterton, “The
Toy Theatre,” in Tremendous Trifles (1909; repr., London: Methuen, 1927), 184.

3. Diane Ackerman, Deep Play (New York: Vintage, 2000), 6, 12–13.

4. G.K. Chesterton, “The Toy Theatre,” 176, 181.

5. G.K. Chesterton, The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton (San Francisco:

Ignatius, 2006), 44.

6. Melinda Barlow, “Size Matters,” American Theatre (February 2005): 61.

7. Mary Hillier, Dolls and Dollmakers, 47; Suzanne Rahn, Rediscoveries in

Children’s Literature (New York: Routledge, 1995), 25; George Speaight, The
History of the English Toy Theatre (London: Studio Vista, 1969), 40.

8. George Speaight, The History of the English Toy Theatre, 34; Peter Baldwin,
Toy Theatres of the World (London: Zwemmer, 1992), 17–22.

9. Peter Baldwin, Toy Theatres of the World, 22–36.

10. George Speaight, The History of the English Toy Theatre, 53–90.

11. “W. G. Webb and the Victorian Toy Theatre Festival and Exhibition,”
Theatre Notebook 59, no. 2 (2005): 114.

12. “John Kilby Green and the History of the Toy Theatre,” accessed December
27, 2015, http://www.toytheatre.net/JKG-History.htm.

13. Peter Baldwin, Toy Theatres of the World, 52–56, 73–74.

14. Christine Cariati, “The Play’s the Thing: A History of Toy Theater in Three
Acts,” accessed December 13, 2015, http://venetianred.net.

15. Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2011), 13.

16. Peter Baldwin, Toy Theatres of the World, 136–40.

17. Priscilla Robertson, “Home as a Nest: Middle Class Childhood in

Nineteenth-Century Europe” in The History of Childhood, ed. Lloyd deMause
(New York: Psychohistory, 1974), 414–20; Linda A. Pollack, A Lasting
Relationship: Parents and Children Over Three Centuries (London: University
Press of New England, 1987), 166.

18. Quoted in Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-
Rearing and the Roots of Violence, trans. Hildegarde Hannum and Hunter
Hannum (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 5.

19. Henry Jenkins, The Children’s Culture Reader (New York: New York
University Press, 1998), 18.

20. Kjeld Heltoft, Hans Christian Andersen as an Artist, trans. Reginald Spink
(Copenhagen: Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1977), 112.

21. Kjeld Heltoft, Hans Christian Andersen as an Artist, 8.

22. Jens Andersen, “Scissor Writing,” accessed October 25, 2015,
http://wayback01.kb.dk.

23. Quoted in Beth Wagner Brust, The Amazing Paper Cuttings of Hans
Christian Andersen (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1994), 53.

24. Hans Christian Andersen, “Little Ida’s Flowers,” in Eighty Fairy Tales,
trans. R. P. Keigwin (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 29–31.

25. Hans Christian Andersen, “The Court Cards,” accessed October 25, 2015,
http://hca.gilead. org.il/li_ida_f.html.

26. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, Lippincott,
1882), 28–31; Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 38.

27. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, 37–38; Philip V. Allingham, “The Toy Theatre and
Charles Dickens,” The Victorian Web, accessed December 15, 2015,
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/toytheatres.html.

28. Philip V. Allingham, “The Toy Theatre and Charles Dickens.”

29. Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography (New York: William Morrow, 1988),
27–28.

30. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, 38.

31. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849–50; repr., Ware: Wordsworth

Editions, 1992), 50; Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (London: Bradbury and
Evans, 1857); Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861; repr., Boston: Estes
and Lauriat, 1881), 45; Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (London: Richard Bentley,
1838); Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (London: George Cattermole,
1841); Paul Schlicke, ed. The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21, 87–90.

32. Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Tree,” in Christmas Stories (1850; repr.,

Oxford: Oxford University Press, nd), 10–11, 18; George Speaight, The History
of the English Toy Theatre, 98–99.

33. G.K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Sheed and Ward,
1954), 35–37.
34. Max Beerbohm, Around Theatres (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954),
148; Wilbur Macey Stone, A Showing of Paper Dolls and Other Cut-Out Toys
from the Collection of Wilbur Macey Stone (Newark, NJ: Newark Museum,
1931), 22.

35. Robert Louis Stevenson, “‘A Penny Plain and Two-Pence Colored,’” in
Memories and Portraits (1887; repr., New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1904),
214–16.

36. Frank Rich, “‘Garden’: The Secret of Death and Birth,” New York Times,
April 26, 1991, C1+.

37. G.K. Chesterton, The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton, in The Collected

Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. 16 (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006), 40; Peter
Baldwin, Toy Theatres of the World, 147.

38. G.K. Chesterton, The Secret of Father Brown (Cornwall: House of Stratus,
2000), 6.

39. Peter Raby, The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 162.

40. Headnote to The Importance of Being Ernest in Delphi Complete Works of

Oscar Wilde (East Sussex, UK: Delphi Classics, 2013), Kindle edition.

41. Jean Cocteau and Robert Phelps, Professional Secrets: An Autobiography of

Jean Cocteau, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1970), 22–23; Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau: A Biography (Boston: Nonpareil,
1986), 14.

42. Jack B. Yeats, “My Miniature Theatre,” in The Collected Plays of Jack B.
Yeats, ed. Robin Skelton (London: Secker & Warburg, 1971), 17.

43. T.G. Rosenthal, The Art of Jack B. Yeats (Santa Clara, CA: Andre Deutsch,
2003), 3.

44. Jack B. Yeats, “My Miniature Theatre,” 17–19.

45. Peter Baldwin, Toy Theatres of the World, 155.

46. T. G. Rosenthal, The Art of Jack B. Yeats, 3–5.

47. Mary Hillier, Dolls and Dollmakers (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1968), 53;
Cecil Beaton, “Take One Hundred Larks,” in The Age of Extravagance: An
Edwardian Reader, ed. Mary Elisabeth Edes and Dudley Frasier (New York:
Rinehart, 1954), 126–30.

48. Cathy Horyn, “Bob Mackie and the Aesthetic of the Fabulous,” Washington
Post, February 19, 1991, accessed June 19, 2016,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1991.

49. Lance Avery Morgan, “Bob Mackie: Man of Design,” November 10, 2010,
The Society Chronicles, accessed June 19, 2016,
http://societychronicles.com/legendary/bob-mackie-man-of-design.

50. Lynne Perrella, Beyond Paper Dolls: Expressive Paper Personas Crafted
with Innovative Techniques and Art Mediums (Laguna Hills, CA: Stampington,
2006), 134.

51. John Gielgud, Early Stages (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 14–18; John
Gielgud, John Miller, and John Powell, Gielgud: An Actor and His Time (New
York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1980), 44–45.

52. York Membery, Ralph Fiennes: The Unauthorised Biography (London:

Chameleon, 1997), 9.

53. “Inside the Actor’s Studio Transcript—Ralph Fiennes,” accessed December

20, 2015, ralphfiennes-corner.net/forums/index.php?topic=513.0;wap2.

54. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero, vol. 2
(Paris: A. & W. Galignani, 1849), 188.

55. Charlotte Woodford and Benedict Schofield, The German Bestseller in the
Late Nineteenth Century (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), 95.

56. Peter Baldwin, “Toy Theatres of the World,” 154; Thomas Mann,
Buddenbrooks, trans. H.T. Lowe-Parker (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1983), 434–
35.

57. Ingmar Bergman, Fanny and Alexander, Film (Uppsala, Sweden: Europa
Studios, 1982); The Making of Fanny and Alexander, accessed May 2, 2016,
https://mubi.com/films/the-making-of-fanny-and-alexander; Stig Björkman,
“Fanny and Alexander: In the World of Childhood,” The Criterion Collection:
Current, accessed October 12, 2015, https://www.criterion.com/current.

58. Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown, The Imaginarium of Doctor

Parnassus, Film, directed by Terry Gilliam (London: Infinity Features), 2009.

59. Christine Cariati, “The Play’s the Thing.”

60. “About Great Small Works,” Great Small Works, accessed December 11,
2015, greatsmallworks.org; Melinda Barlow, “Size Matters,” American Theatre
(February 2005), 61.

Chapter 4

1. Thomas D. Snyder, 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait

(Washington, D.C: National Center for Education Statistics, 1993), 27; Derek
Gillard, “Education in England: A Brief History,” accessed January 18, 2016,
www.educationengland.org.uk/history.

2. Mary Martha Sherwood, The History of the Fairchild Family, vol. 1 (London:
Hatchard, 1818), with two other volumes published in 1842 and 1849; Donnarae
MacCann, “Moral Tales,” in Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, vol.
3, ed. Jack Zipes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 95; Siobhan Lam,
“Be Good, Dear Child … or Else,” The Victorian Web, accessed January 3,
2016, http://www.victorianweb.org/genre/childlit/moraltales.html.

3. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693; repr., New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1934), 1.

4. John Clarke, An Essay Upon the Education of Youth in Grammar-Schools

(London: Charles Hitch, 1740), 2–3; Samuel F. Pickering, John Locke and
Children’s Books in Eighteenth-Century England (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1981), 10.

5. Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, “Harlequin Meets the SIMS: A History of Interactive

Narrative Media for Children and Youth from Early Flap Books to
Contemporary Multimedia,” in The International Handbook of Children, Media
and Culture, ed. Kirsten Drotner and Sonia Livingstone (Los Angeles: Sage,
2008), 73; Margaret Higonnet, “Narrative Fractures and Fragments,” Children’s
Literature 15 (1987): 41; Hannah Field, “A Story, Exemplified in a Series of
Figures: Paper Doll Versus Moral Tale in the Nineteenth Century,” Girlhood
Studies 5, no. 1 (Summer 2012): 37–56.

6. Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott, How Picturebooks Work (New York:
Garland, 2001), 25.

7. Eric Faden, “Movables, Movies, Mobility: Nineteenth-Century Looking and

Reading,” Early Popular Visual Culture 5, no. 1 (April 2007): 71–77.

8. Gillian Brown, “The Metamorphic Book: Children’s Print Culture in the

Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 (2006): 358. This making
of meaning is also discussed in Hannah Field, “The Magic of Finger and Thumb:
Early Movable Books for Children,” in Magical Tales: Myth, Legend and
Enchantment in Children’s Books, ed. Carolyne Larrington and Diane Purkiss
(Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2013), 152–76; and Hannah Field, “A Story,
Exemplified in a Series of Figures,” 37–56.

9. Ramon Llull, Ars Magna (1305; repr., Madrid: Publiafinsa, 1990); Sten G.
Lindberg, “Mobiles in Books: Volvelles, Inserts, Pyramids, Divinations, and
Children’s Games,” trans. William S. Mitchell, The Private Library, 3d series, 2,
no. 2 (1979): 51.

10. Peter Apian [Petrus Apianus], Astronomicum Caesareum (Ingolstadt: Apian,

1540); Andreas Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body, trans. W. F.
Richardson and J. B. Carman, 5 vols. (1543; repr., San Francisco: Norman,
1998–2009).

11. Harlequin’s Invasion, a New Pantomime (London: Robert Sayer, 1770);

Harlequin’s Skeleton (London: Robert Sayer, 1772); Peter Haining, Movable
Books: An Illustrated History (London: New English Library, 1979), 10.

12. Transforming Performers with Surprise Pictures (London: Dean and Son,
1873), np.

13. J.B. Aliquis, The Flight of the Old Woman Who Was Tossed Up in a Basket
(London: D. Bogue, 1844); Lothar Meggendorfer, The Doll’s House (1890;
repr., New York: Viking Juvenile, 1989).

14. Peter Haining, Movable Books, 45.

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24. Young Albert, the Roscius, Exhibited in a Series of Characters from

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28. Ellen, Or, the Naughty Girl Reclaimed: A Story, Exemplified in a Series of
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33. Dame Wonder’s Transformations: Of the Little Drummer (London: Dean &
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Chapter 5

1. Terry Taylor, Artful Paper Dolls: New Ways to Play with a Traditional Form
(New York: Lark, 2006), 16.

2. Constance E. King, The Collector’s History of Dolls (New York: St. Martin’s,
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4. Frederick Converse Beach, “Toys,” in The Americana: A Universal Reference

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23. Mary Lynn Stevens Heininger, “Children, Childhood, and Change in

America, 1820–1920,” in A Century of Childhood, 1820–1920, ed. Mary Lynn
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29. Mica Rath, Gypsy Bags & Traveling Jackets: A Journey of Sorts
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30. Andrew McClary, Good Toys, Bad Toys: How Safety, Society, Politics, and
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31. Doris Davey, My Dolly’s Home: Biddie’s Adventure. London: Arts and
General, 1921.

32. Marian B. Howard, Those Fascinating Paper Dolls: An Illustrated

Handbook for Collectors (New York: Dover, 1981), 28–33; Paper Dolls’
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33. Rachel Adams, Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural
Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 11; Robert Bogdan,
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34. Edward Hingston, The Genial Showman, Being Reminiscences of the Life of
Artemus Ward (London: Hotten, 1870), 16.

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from the Collection of Wilbur Macey Stone, 10.

36. Marian B. Howard, Those Fascinating Paper Dolls, 30.

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Eighteenth Century (New York: Samuel Gabriel, 1940); Marian B. Howard,
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46. Terry Taylor, Artful Paper Dolls, 49.

47. “Playtime Pages,” Jack and Jill Magazine, April 1957, 33–35.

48. Gertrude Huntington, “A Tragedy in the Garret,” 467.

49. Jo Barraclough Paoletti, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in
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56. Marian Howard, Those Fascinating Paper Dolls, 27.

57. Edward Ryan, Paper Soldiers, 241–65, 312–14.

58. Cynthia Erfurt Musser, Precious Paper Dolls, 129.

59. Loretta Holz, The How-To Book of International Dolls, 28.

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61. Edward Ryan, Paper Soldiers, 270–74.

62. Diane Ackerman, Deep Play (New York: Vintage, 2000); Beverly Gordon,
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63. Rodris Roth, “Scrapbook Houses: A Late Nineteenth-Century Children’s

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Chapter 6
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Preserving Your Paper Collectibles (Crozet, VA: Betterway, 1989), 149.

6. Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, Researching Children’s Popular

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39. Beverly Gordon, The Saturated World, 107–08.

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41. Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth, American Home Life, 1880–1930: A
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46. Beverly Gordon, The Saturated World, 138; Carol Mattingly,

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50. Marian B. Howard, Those Fascinating Paper Dolls, 43; William Allen
Butler, “Nothing to Wear,” Harper’s Weekly, February 7, 1857, 84.

51. “Nothing to Wear,” U.S. Women’s History Workshop, accessed July 7,

2016, http://www1.assumption.edu/WHW/workshop/NothingToWear.html.

52. Marian B. Howard, Those Fascinating Paper Dolls, 43–44.

53. Maria Vultaggio, “Did John Mayer Write ‘Paper Doll’ About Taylor
Swift?,” International Business Times, June 19, 2013, accessed June 25, 2016,
http://www.ibtimes.com.

Chapter 7

1. Diane Ackerman, Deep Play (New York: Vintage, 2000), 6, 12–13.

2. Francis Sparshott, “Why Philosophy Neglects the Dance,” in What Is Dance?:

Readings in Theory and Criticism, ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 94–102.

3. Terry Taylor, Artful Paper Dolls: New Ways to Play with a Traditional Form
(New York: Lark, 2006), 10; Lesley Gordon, Peepshow into Paradise: A History
of Children’s Toys (New York: John de Graff, 1953), 219; Wilbur Macey Stone,
A Showing of Paper Dolls and Other Cut-Out Toys from the Collection of
Wilbur Macey Stone (Newark, NJ: Newark Museum, 1931); Amy A. Weinstein,
“Children’s Toys,” The Magazine Antiques 167 (January 2005): 190; Clara H.
Fawcett, “A Paper Doll Find,” Hobbies 58 (April 1953): 52–54.

4. Bruce K. Hanson, The Peter Pan Chronicles: The Nearly 100 Year History of
the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (New York: Birch Lane, 1993), 65; Phyllis
Robbins, Maude Adams: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Putnam, 1956), 143–
44; Armond Fields, Maude Adams: Idol of American Theater, 1872–1953
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 120–243.

5. “Mary Pickford Wins New Laurels in ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’—Remarkable

Film,” Exhibitor’s Trade Review, March 10, 1917, 976; Robert Windeler,
Sweetheart: The Story of Mary Pickford (New York: Praeger, 1974), 104;
Katherine H. Adams, Michael L. Keene, and Jennifer C. Koella, Seeing the
American Woman, 1880–1920: The Social Impact of the Visual Media Explosion
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 31–41.

6. Peggy Dymond Leavey, Mary Pickford: Canada’s Silent Siren, America’s

Sweetheart (Toronto: Dundurn, 2011), 96–103.

7. Margalit Fox, “Tom Tierney, Who Made Paper Dolls an Art Form, Dies at
85,” New York Times, July 18, 2014, accessed July 28, 2016, nytimes.com;
Danielle Dubin, “Foot Notes Solutions,” New York Times, August 22, 1999,
accessed July 28, 2016, nytimes.com.

8. Tom Tierney, Life’s a Drag! Paper Dolls (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2012).

9. Tom Tierney, Vampire Paper Dolls (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010).

10. Mel Elliott, Ziggy Paperboy! (Hastings, UK: I Love Mel, 2014).

11. Stephanie Murg, “Art History, Now in Doll Form,” Artnews 113, no. 10
(November 2014): 40.

12. Kyle Hilton, Art History Paper Dolls (San Francisco: Chronicle), 2014.

13. Aly Weisman, “Kim Kardashian Reveals the ‘Accidental’ Reason Why Her
Mobile Game Is Such a Huge Success,” Business Insider, March 3, 2015,
accessed June 2, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com; Lauren Johnson, “After
Conquering Reality TV, Kim Kardashian Is Taking the Mobile World by Storm:
How She Built a $74 Million App Addiction,” Adweek, March 1, 2015, accessed
March 17, 2016, www.adweek.com/topic/kim-kardashian.

Chapter 8

1. Cynthia Marie Hoffman, “The Paper Doll Fetus Speaks to the Viable Twin in
Utero,” Paper Doll Fetus (New York: Persea Press, 2014), 5. Copyright © 2015
by Cynthia Marie Hoffman. Reprinted by permission of Persea Books, Inc. (New
York).

2. Jeremy Glazier, “The Paper Doll,” Beloit Poetry Journal, 63, no. 1 (Fall
2012): 37. Reprinted by permission of the author.

3. William Gibson, The Miracle Worker: A Play for Television (1956; repr. New
York: Knopf, 1965), 8–10.

4. Anne Snyder, Goodbye, Paper Doll (New York: New American Library,
1980).

5. “Paper Doll Activity,” Impact of Domestic Violence on Children and Youth,

Module 5, California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, accessed 19 April
2016, https://cpedv.memberclicks.net/assets/docs.

6. Geraldine Crisci, Marilynn Lay, and Liana Lowenstein, Paper Dolls and
Paper Airplanes: Therapeutic Exercises for Sexually Traumatized Children
(Charlotte, NC: Kidsrights, 1998), 27–37.

7. Voices of Women Organizing Project, Battered Women Resource Center,

accessed July 15, 2016, http://vowbwrc.org/.

8. David C. Taylor, “Living Doll Paper Doll,” Developmental Medicine and

Child Neurology 46, no. 6 (June 2004): 363.

Chapter 9

1. Jack London Riehl, Heart and Soul: An Inspiring Collection of Light Verse on
Life, Love, Faith, and the Military (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2012), 61.

2. David A. Jasen, A Century of American Popular Music (New York:

Routledge, 2002), 155.

3. John Pop Chronicles the ‘40s: The Lively Story of Pop Music in the ‘40s,
Radio Documentary Series, 1994. Tape 1, side A.

4. Johnny Black, “Paper Doll,” accessed June 22, 2016,

http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/themajestic/paperdoll.htm.

5. Gail Lumet Buckley, The Hornes: An American Family (New York: Alfred
Knopf, 1986), 191.

6. “Kittie Bio,” HFStival, accessed April 27, 2016, washingtonpost.com.

7. Sierra DeMulder, “Paper Dolls,” Ars Poetitca, accessed July 9, 2016,

https://ashlynnfenton.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/paper-dolls-by-sierra-
demulder/. Reprinted by permission of the artist.

Chapter 10

1. Robert B. Parker, Paper Doll (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1993); Joe
Cosentino, Paper Doll (Charleston: CreateSpace, 2014).

2. Molly Rosen, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream
(New York: Avon, 1973), 9.

3. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the

Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974), 157.

4. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3
(Autumn 1975): 6–18.

5. Molly Rosen, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream, 404;
Gabriele Schor, Cindy Sherman, the Early Works 1975–1977: Catalogue
Raisonné (New York: Metro Pictures, 2012), 23.
6. Catherine Morris, “The Education of Cindy Sherman,” in Cindy Sherman:
Working Girl (St. Louis: Contemporary Art Museum, 2005), 11–12.

7. Cindy Sherman, Doll Clothes, Film (Buffalo: Buffalo State College, 1975).

8. Francesco Stocchi, Cindy Sherman, trans. Richard Sadleir (Milan: Mondadori

Electa, 2007), 20.

9. Gabriele Schor, Cindy Sherman, the Early Works 1975–1977: Catalogue

Raisonné, 55.

10. Catherine Morris, “The Education of Cindy Sherman,” 11–12.

11. Cindy Sherman, Paper Dolls, Film (Buffalo: Buffalo State College, 1975);
Gabriele Schor, Cindy Sherman, the Early Works 1975–1977: Catalogue
Raisonné, 55, 132–33.

12. Catherine Morris, “The Education of Cindy Sherman,” Cindy Sherman:

Working Girl, 11.

13. Amelia Jones, “Postfeminism, Feminist Pleasures, and Embodied Theories

of Art,” New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action, ed. Joanna Frueh,
Cassandra L. Langer, and Arlene Raven (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 24.

14. “Cindy Sherman,” Interview Notes, Art21, accessed March 18, 2016,
pbs.org.

15. Anaïs Nin, “Eroticism in Women,” in In Favor of the Sensitive Man and
Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976), 4.

16. Estelle C. Jelinek, “Introduction: Women’s Autobiography and the Male

Tradition,” in Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1980), 1–20.

17. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, “Introduction: Situating Subjectivity in

Autobiographical Practices,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed.
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1998), 3–52; Elizabeth Baer, “The Journey Inward: Women’s Autobiography,”
American Library Association, 1987, accessed May, 18, 2016,
www.okhumanities.org/websites/ohc/images/.
18. Mica Rath, Gypsy Bags & Traveling Jackets: A Journey of Sorts
(Bloomington, IN: WestBow, 2013), 258, 276, 309.

19. Natalie Lloyd, Paperdoll: What Happens When an Ordinary Girl Meets an
Extraordinary God (Ventura, CA: Regal, 2009).

20. Women’s Fiction Writers Association, accessed March 19, 2016,

http://womensfictionwriters.org/index.php.

21. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A

Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and
Antiracist Politics,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (January 1,
1989): 139–67.

22. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1973), 136.

23. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1973), 11.

24. “About the Romance Genre,” RWA: Romance Writers of America, accessed
May 12, 2016, https://www.rwa.org/Romance.

25. Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), xi, 14–15.

26. Janet Woods, PaperDoll (New York: Severn House, 2010).

27. “Paper Dolls by Sienna Mynx: Reviews,” Goodreads, accessed May 21,
2016, http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25495996-paper-dolls.

28. Sienna Mynx, Paper Dolls (Atlanta: Divas Pen, 2015), Kindle edition.

29. Elaine Jackson, Paper Dolls. In Nine Plays by Black Women, 351–423. Ed.
by Margaret B. Wilkerson. New York: New American Library, 1986.

30. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Ace, 1969);
Joanna Russ, The Female Man (New York: Bantam, 1975); Marge Piercy,
Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Knopf, 1976); Pamela Sargent, Women
of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women, About Women (New York:
Vintage, 1974); Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, introduction to Sisters
of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology, ed. by Ann
VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer (Oakland, CA:PM, 2015), 1–2.

31. Rue Volley, Paper Dolls (Hot Ink and Steamworks Ink, 2015), Kindle
edition.

Chapter 11

1. S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders (New York: Viking, 1967); Jon Michaud, “S. E.
Hinton and the Y.A. Debate,” New Yorker, October 14, 2014, accessed July 10,
2016, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment.

2. Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999);
Catherine Atkins, When Jeff Comes Home (New York: Putnam, 1999); J.K.
Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (London: Bloomsbury,
1997); Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic, 2008);
Stephanie Meyer, The Twilight Saga (New York: Little, Brown, 2006); Becky
Albertalli, Simon Vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (New York: Balzer and Bray,
2015) and Tim Federle, the Great American Whatever (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2016).

3. Michael Cart, “From Insider to Outsider: The Evolution of Young Adult

Literature,” Voices from the Middle 9, No. 2 (2001), 95–97; David Lubar, “The
History of Young Adult Novels,” Alan Review, Spring 2003, accessed May 27,
2016, https://Louis.Hosts.Atlas-Sys.Com/Illiad/LLM; Carl M. Tomlinson and
Carol Lynch-Brown, Essentials of Young Adult Literature (Boston: Pearson
Education, 2007), 4–7.

4. Cory Toth, Paper Dolls (New York: Warner House, 2014).

5. Elizabeth Feuer, Paper Doll (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994), 185,
156.

6. John Green, Paper Towns (New York: Dutton, 2008), 6.

7. Johanna Lewis, Review of Paper Towns, School Library Review, 2010,

accessed May 11, 2016, barnesandnoble.com.
8. John Green, Paper Towns (New York: Dutton, 2008), 58.

9. Anya Allyn, Paper Dolls (Amazon Digital Services, 2014), Kindle Edition.

10. Stacey Kade, Project Paper Doll: The Rules (New York: Disney-Hyperion,
2013); Stacey Kade, Project Paper Doll: The Hunt (New York: Disney-
Hyperion, 2014); Stacey Kade, Project Paper Doll: The Trials (New York:
Disney-Hyperion, 2015).

Chapter 12

1. Dick Boyd, “Before the Castro: North Beach, a Gay Mecca,” Semaphore 189
(Winter 2010), accessed May, 23, 2016, http://foundsf.org.

2. Tom Tierney, Attitude: An Adult Paperdoll Book (New York: Parody, 1979),
7–94.

3. Lynn Chang-Franklin, Imperfect Wedding Paper Dolls (San Francisco:

Imagineering, 2006).

4. Tomer Heymann, Paper Dolls, Film (Culver City, CA: Strand Releasing,
2006).

5. A. O. Scott, “Paper Dolls (2005): In Search of a Better Life, and a Place to Be

Accepted,” New York Times, September 6, 2006, accessed July 28, 2016,
nytimes.com; Wesley Morris, “Paper Dolls Cuts Below the Surface,” The
Boston Globe, September 8, 2006, accessed April 13, 2016, archive.boston.com;
Michael Booth, “Transsexuals Find Tolerance in Israel,” Denver Post, October
12, 2006, accessed July 28, 2016, denverpost.com.

6. Nick Curtis, “Boys, Boas and a Big Issue: Writer Philip Himberg on His New
Play Paper Dolls,” London Evening Standard, February 20, 2013, accessed May
22, 2016, http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/theatre/.

Chapter 13
1. Laura Minter and Tia Williams, Mini Makers: Crafty Makes to Create with
Your Kids (Norwich: GMC, 2016); Liat Hughes Joshi, How to Unplug Your
Child: 101 Ways to Help Your Kids Turn Off Their Gadgets and Enjoy Real Life
(Chichester: Summersdale, 2016).

2. Emily Winfield Martin, The Black Apple’s Paper Doll Primer: Activities and
Amusements for the Curious Paper Artist (New York: Potter Craft, 2010), 10–
31.

3. “100 Percent of What You See in Fashion Magazines Is Retouched,” Ideal

Bite: Getting Healthy One Bite at a Time, accessed March 22, 2016,
http://idealbite.com/100-percent-of-what-you-see-in-fashion-magazines-is-
retouched/.

4. Laura Wangenheim, “‘Perfect’ Fashion Models Get Computer-Assisted

Allure,” August 22, 1993, Columbia News Service, accessed May 17, 2016,
latimes.com/1993-08-22/news.

5. Margo Maine and Joe Kelly, The Body Myth: Adult Women and the Pressure
to Be Perfect (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2005), 181.

6. Liz Jones, “Why Does the Fashion Industry Hate Real Women,” Daily Mail,
December 9, 2011, accessed March 1, 2016, DailyMail.com; Katie Kindelan,
“Clothing Giant H&M Defends ‘Perfect’ Virtual Models, “ December 6, 2011,
accessed August 3, 2016, http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/entertainment/2011/12.

7. “Paper Doll,” Cosmo Girl, 8, no. 3 (April 2006): 152–57.

8. Jules Heller, Paper-Making (New York: Watson-Guptill), 1978; Marna Elyea

Kern, The Complete Book of Hand Crafted Paper (New York: Coward, McCann
& Geoghegan, 1980); Bernard Toale, The Art of Papermaking (Worcester, MA:
Davis Publications, 1983); Ralf Weidenmüller, Papermaking: The Art and Craft
of Handmade Paper (San Diego: Thorfinn, 1984).

9. Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft,

2nd ed. (1947, repr. New York: Dover, 1978); Alfred Henry Shorter and Richard
Leslie Hill, Studies on the History of Papermaking in Britain (Hampshire,
England: Valorium, 1993); Richard Parkinson and Stephen Quirke, Papyrus
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Nicholas A. Basbanes, On Paper: The
Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2013).
10. Marian Richards, “Fun with Paper Dolls,” Ladies’ Home Journal 41
(September 1902): 41.

11. Barbara Cash-Cooper, Paper Dolls: Cut from My Own Hands (Bloomington,
IN: Xlibris, 2014), Kindle edition.

12. Carolyn Kelly, “Meet Artist Elsa Mora at the MoMA Design Store Soho,”
Inside Out, a MoMa/MoMa PS1 Blog, November 7, 2014, accessed July 5,
2016, http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2014.

13. Rob Ryan, Preface, Paper Cutting Book: Contemporary Artists, Timeless
Craft (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2011), 7.

14. Elsa Mora, All about Papercutting, accessed July 5, 2016, http://www.
allaboutpapercutting.com; Su Blackwell, Su Blackwell Studio, accessed July 5,
2016, http://www.sublackwell.co.uk/.

15. Terry Taylor, Artful Paper Dolls: New Ways to Play with a Traditional Form
(New York: Lark, 2006); Lynne Perrella, Beyond Paper Dolls: Expressive Paper
Personas Crafted with Innovative Techniques and Art Mediums (Laguna Hills,
CA: Stampington, 2006); Laura Heyenga, Paper Cutting: Contemporary
Artists/Timeless Craft (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2011).

16. Decima Mitchell, “Paper Doll,” Selvedge 43 (November/December 2011):

90; Joan Borsa, “Paper Doll,” Border Crossings 31, no. 3 (September 2012):
111–13.

17. Catherine Moore, The Art Doll Chronicles: A Collaborative Journey of

Discovery (Laguna Hills, CA: Stampington, 2003), 105.

18. Lynne Perrella, Beyond Paper Dolls: Expressive Paper Personas Crafted
with Innovative Techniques and Art Mediums (Laguna Hills, CA: Stampington,
2006), 75.

19. Catherine Moore, Character Constructions, accessed August 3, 2016,

http://www.characterconstructions.com/.

20. Su Blackwell, Su Blackwell Studio, accessed July 5, 2016,

http://www.sublackwell.co.uk/; Laura Heyenga, Paper Cutting: Contemporary
Artists / Timeless Craft (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2011), 57.
21. Wolfgang Matzl, The ABC’s of Death. Film. Directed by Kaare Andrews and
Angela Bettis (Auckland, NZ: Timpson Films, 2012).

22. Terry Taylor, Artful Paper Dolls: New Ways to Play with a Traditional Form
(New York: Lark, 2006), 53.

23. “Rebecca Sefcovic Uglem,” Plains Art Museum, accessed July 11, 2016,
http://plainsart.org/exhibits/2012.

24. Rebecca Sefcovic Uglem, Beckamade, accessed July 11, 2016,

http://www.beckamade.com/about.

25. Cybèle Young, Artwork, accessed July 5, 2016, http://www.cybeleyoung.ca;

Decima Mitchell, “Paper Doll.”

26. Decima Mitchell, “Paper Doll.”

27. Barb Hunt, accessed August 3, 2016, http://www.barbhunt.com/; E-mail

communication with Barb Hunt, August 29, 2016.

28. Laura Heyenga, Paper Cutting: Contemporary Artists / Timeless Craft (San
Francisco: Chronicle, 2011), 19.

29. Profile, Zoe Bradley, Handsculpted in Paper, accessed July 11, 2016,
http://www.zoebradley.com/profile/.

30. Rachel Wolff, “Cut-And-Paste Culture: The New Collage,” ArtNews,

December 12, 2013, accessed June 29, 2016,
http://www.artnews.com/2013/12/12/the-new-collage; David Wallace-Wells,
“Pavel Zoubok on Collage,” Paris Review, March 28, 2011, accessed July 5,
2016, http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011.

31. Jane Maxwell, web site, accessed July 5, 2016, janemaxwell.com.

32. E-mail communication with Jane Maxwell, August 20, 2016; Terry Taylor,
Artful Paper Dolls: New Ways to Play with a Traditional Form (New York:
Lark, 2006), 19.

33. Lynn Whipple, Web site, lynnwhipple.com, accessed September 15, 2016.
34. Lynne Perrella, Beyond Paper Dolls: Expressive Paper Personas Crafted
with Innovative Techniques and Art Mediums (Laguna Hills, CA: Stampington,
2006), 22–25.

35. Decima Mitchell, “Paper Doll.”

36. Full Text of “The Long Twilight: An Installation by Lynne Yamamoto,”

accessed June 30, 2016, https://archive.org; Grace Glueck, “Art in Review:
Lynne Yamamoto,” New York Times, March 12, 1999, accessed July 28, 2016,
nytimes.com.

37. Margaret Bessai, Paper Doll: March 30 to June 10, 2012, Mendel Art
Gallery, Saskatoon, Galleries West, accessed May 9, 2016,
http://www.gallerieswest.ca/artists/previews.

38. Flights of Fancy: The Universe of Ed Pien and Karin van Dam, accessed
May 9, 2016, www.ovgallery.com/exhibition/suspended-gravity/flights-of-fancy.

Conclusion

1. Terry Taylor, Artful Paper Dolls: New Ways to Play with a Traditional Form
(New York: Lark, 2006), 58.
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 List of Names and Terms

advertisements (featuring paper dolls)

Aker, Suzanne

Alajálov, Constantin

Allyn, Anya

amagatsu dolls

Andersen, Hans Christian

Andersen, Jens

Angelman, Harry

Apian, Peter

Arkell, Julie

Aunt Jemima (as paper-doll character)

Bachelard, Gaston

Barbie dolls

Barbier, Edmond Jean François

Beaton, Cecil

Bergman, Ingmar

Betsy McCall (paper-doll character)

Black, Johnny
Black, Johnny

Blackwell, Su

Boucher, François

Bowie, David (as paper doll)

Bradley, Zoё

brides as paper dolls

Buisson, Dominique

Bullivant, Cecil Henry

Butler, William Allen

Cai Lun (T’sai Lun)

California Partnership to End Domestic Violence

Canavan, Gerry

Cash-Cooper, Barbara

celebrity paper dolls

Chandler, John Green

Chang-Franklin, Lynn

Chesterton, G.K.

Chinese paper figures

Clarke, John

Cocteau, Jean
Cole, Kevin C.

comic strip paper dolls

commedia dell’arte characters

Cosentino, Joe

Crossley, Heather

Cuzner, Rodger

d’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond

Dame Wonder’s Transformations: Of the Little Drummer

Demorest, Ellen

Demorest, William

DeMulder, Sierra

Dennison Manufacturing Company

Dickens, Charles

Dolly Dingle (paper-doll character)

Dolly Varden (novel and paper-doll character)

Drayton, Grace

Dutton, E.P.

effigies

Eight Immortals
Ellen, or, The Naughty Girl Reclaimed: A Story, Exemplified in a Series of
Figures

Elliott, Mel

English paper dolls (poupées anglaise)

Fanny and Alexander

Fanny Gray

fashion history

Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix

Feuer, Elizabeth

Field, Hannah

Fiennes, Ralph

flap books

Flora McFlimsy (poem and paper-doll character)

Fluffy Ruffles (comic strip and paper-doll character)

Frank Feignwell’s Attempts to Amuse His Friends on Twelfth-Night

Fraser, Antonia

Frederick, or, The Effects of Disobedience

Freeman-Zachery, Ricё

Fu, Tu

Gibson, Charles Dana

Gibson, Charles Dana

Gibson, William

Gielgud, John

Gilliam, Terry

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

Glazier, Jeremy

go-hei

Gordon, Beverly

Great Small Works Festival

Green, John

Gross, Kenneth

Hall, G. Stanley

harlequin images

Haskell, Molly

Haynie, Briana

Hervey, Lady Mary

Heymann, Tomer

Hilton, Kyle

Himberg, Philip

The History and Adventures of Little Henry

The History of Little Fanny

hitogata

Hoffman, Cynthia Marie

Hogarth, William

Howell, Elizabeth

Hunt, Barb

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

internet paper dolls

Jack and His Holiday Companions

Jackson, Elaine

Japanese paper figures

juvenile drama

Kade, Stacey

katashiro

Katy Keene (comic strip and paper-doll character)

Kewpie Kutouts (comic strip and paper-doll character)

Kim Kardashian: Hollywood

Kitchen God Zao Jun (Tsao Chun)

Kittie (band)

Laujon, Pierre

Lauretta, the Little Savoyard

A Lecture on Heads: A Chimney Ornament for All Ages

Lettie Lane (paper-doll character)

Lind, Jenny (as paper doll)

lithographic processes

Lloyd, Natalie

Llull, Ramon

Locke, John

Louÿs, Pierre

Lucinda, the Orphan, or, The Costumes: A Tale: Exhibited in a Series of Dresses

MacGregor, Paula

Mackie, Bob

magazine paper dolls

Mann, Thomas

The Mary Frances Housekeeper, or, Adventures among the Doll People

Matzl, Wolfgang

Maxwell, Jane
Mayer, John

McCloskey, Kiyomi (as paper doll)

McLoughlin Brothers (paper doll producer)

medical texts

Meggendorfer, Lothar

Meredith, Sean

Metastasis, or Transformation of Cards

Midhani, Rory

Miller, Arthur

Miller, Bea

The Miller and His Men

Mills Brothers

Mitchell, Decima

M. & M. Skelt

Moore, Catherine

Mora, Elsa

Morris, Ivan

Morrison, Toni

movable books

Movie Star Princess Makeover

Mulvey, Laura
Mynx, Sienna

newspaper paper dolls

Nister, Ernest

O’Neill, Rose

Ormes, Jackie

Otomi paper images

Page, Alain

pageants with paper costumes

pantins

paper costumes for parties

paper-doll books

paper doll houses

paper doll subject types

paper dress patterns

paper production

paper soldiers

papyrus

parchment
Parker, Robert B.

Patmore, Coventry

Pellerin publishing

Perrella, Lynne

Pien, Ed

Pollock’s theatres

Polo, Marco

The Protean Figure and Metamorphic Costumes

Rath, Mica

Richards, Marian Dudley

Rosen, Marjorie

Ryan, Edward

Ryan, Rob

S. & J. Fuller

The Secret Garden

Sherman, Cindy

Sherwood, Mary Martha

Singleton, Esther

Smith, Jaune Quick-to-See

Snyder, Anne

Stevenson, Robert Louis

Sugar and Spike

tabs for paper dolls

The Tale of Genji

Tan, Amy

Taylor, David C.

Thackeray, William

Tierney, Tom

Tillie the Toiler (comic strip and paper-doll character)

Topsey (as paper-doll character)

Torchy Brown (comic strip and paper-doll character)

Toth, Cory

toy theatre festivals

True Womanhood (and paper dolls)

Uglem, Rebecca Sefcovic

vellum

Vesalius, Andreas
Volley, Rue

Volvelles

Walpole, Horace

wearable rhetoric

Wells, Carolyn

Welter, Barbara

West, William

Westover, Russ

Whipple, Lynn

Wilde, Oscar

Williams, Clara Andrews

Williams, Tennessee

Woggon, William

Wollstonecraft, Mary

women’s writing and the paper doll as symbol

wooden mademoiselles

Woods, Janet

X-Men comic books

Yamamoto, Lynne

Yeats, Jack

Young, Cybèle

Young Adult fiction (YA) (paper doll as symbol in)

Young Albert, the Roscius

Zao Jun (Tsao Chun), the Chinese kitchen god

Zárraga, Angel