My dissertation examines the doll as a nexus between materialism and imagination in the literature and popular culture of the Victorian period. The emergence of the doll as we conceive of it today is a Victorian phenomenon. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that a dedicated doll industry was developed and that dolls began to find their way into children’s literature, the rhetoric of femininity, periodical publications and canonical texts. Surprisingly, the Victorian fascination with the doll has largely gone unexamined, and critics and readers have tended to dismiss dolls as mere agents of female acculturation and symbols of passivity. Guided by the recent material turn in Victorian studies and drawing extensively from texts only recently made available through digitization projects and periodical databases, my research seeks to provide a richer account of the way this most fraught and symbolic of objects figured in the lives and imaginations of the Victorians. Given this treatment, the doll emerges as an object celebrated for its remarkable imaginative potential. The doll, I argue, is therefore best understood as a descendant of Galatea – as a woman turned object, but also as an object that Victorians constantly and variously brought to life through the imagination.
The chapters of my dissertation examine how this imaginative potential was put to use but also how it was perceived as coming under threat by the pressures of materialism and commercialization. In my first chapter I examine how the “doll memoir,” a once popular subgenre within children’s literature in which dolls are endowed with subjectivity as the narrators of their own stories, co-opted the imagination to generate a sense of disciplinary surveillance in its young readers, threatening to reverse the power relationship between girls and their dolls. In chapter two, I examine the fanciful animation of dolls in play as a precursor to the animation of characters in literary production and, in particular, Dickens’s use of this trope to articulate a vision of the author that draws from the child’s more fluid relationship with the material world. In chapter three, I study the rise of the luxury doll industry and consider how the material excess and consumer promiscuity associated with this “doll of the period” was perceived not only as endangering childhood imagination but also used by writers like Eliza Lynn Linton and Mary Elizabeth Braddon to explore femininity as a commodified form. In my final chapter I turn to narratives of doll production in periodical publications to show how a visit to the factory could deconstruct the fantasy of the doll by reducing it to its material parts, but could also give rise to a more imaginative way of understanding commodities as objects shaped by their material histories. As a mediator between the real and the ideal, I argue, the doll embodies a new kind of imagination, one that operates in conjunction with, rather than against, materiality, and in which woman acts both as medium and as agent.