Rag doll

“ The solemnity left one chubby brown face, and one pair of chubby brown hands closed in glad possession round the despised rag doll. Old Premoo heaved a sigh of relief.
"Said I not so, brothers and sisters?" he cried exultingly. "My hand has not lost its art with the years. A doll is a doll ever to a child, as a child is a child ever to the man and the woman. As for glass eyes, they are illusion--they perish!" ”

“ The China Doll she really could not be on intimate terms with, because she had a crack across her cheek. Fancy being seen walking with a cracky person! Also, she must really decline being introduced to the Farthing Doll. A very good, worthy person, no doubt, but really she and a doll worth a farthing could not possibly have many tastes in common.
As to the Rag Doll, she was a pushing person. At a tea-party at which they had both been present, she had asked Claribelle if she didn't think that skirts were fuller. ”

“ The doll, as such, is dear to the little boy as well as the girl, but not as a baby. He likes his jumping-jack, his worsted Sambo, often a genuine rag-doll; but he is discouraged and ridiculed in this. We do not expect the little boy to manifest a father's love and care for an imitation child—but we do expect the little girl to show maternal feelings for her imitation baby. ”

“ But say, Rag Doll, now we're alone, let's do something."
"I know what we can do!" the Rag Doll exclaimed. "All my life I have wanted to play with the glistening things in a hotel bathroom. I want to work the shower, and turn the shiny handles. There are ever so many more than we have at home. Come on into the bathroom, and let's turn every handle we see!"
"All right," agreed the Plush Bear. "That'll be fun!"
And there is no telling what mischief he and the Rag Doll might have got into, only, just then, in came Nettie and Arthur, having finished dinner. ”

“ Now Lily's maid left the disgraced doll on a chair in the kitchen, and there Mary the cook found it. It had on a pretty muslin dress and sash, and nice embroidered underwear, just like any fashionable young lady. It was Christmas week, and Mary had bought a doll to give to her little niece on Christmas-day, and seeing at once what a treasure this costume would be, she took it off, did it up as fresh as new, and made the doll she had bought look quite like a princess in it. So the old broken-armed doll had not a rag left of its former glory. But luck sometimes comes even to dolls. ”

“ Rag Dolls:
We are such very useful dolls
I’m sure you must agree
That for the children everyday
No dolls are good as we.
We’re washable, we never break,
We bend quite anyway.
Just try us for a year or two,
We are the best you’ll say. French Doll:
I am an aristocrat,
A doll of high degree.
I came to you from far away
In France across the sea.
My name is Isabella,
I’m a most expensive doll
So you must treat me gently
[5] And never let me fall.
I shut my eyes so nicely
Just tilt me back and see. [Shop Woman tilts her and her eyes close.] ”

“ Dolls are being dressed by the score, not only your wax and paste-board beauties, such as may be seen in every toy-shop window, but also other members of the doll family which are wholly of domestic manufacture, such as those huge babies of cotton and linen, almost as large as the live baby in the cradle, with pretty painted faces, and soft, supple limbs. These “rag-babies,” as they are sometimes called in the nursery—Moppets, as we are instructed to name them by great dictionaries—are always pets with little mammas; no other dolls are loved so dearly and so constantly as these. ”

“ On the stall are baby dolls with bodies made of grey cardboard, smiling after the manner of idols, monstrous and serene as they. Little six-penny dolls, dressed like servant girls, stretch out their arms, little stumpy arms so flimsy that the least breath of air sets them a-tremble. But the little maid whose hair is made of liquid light, has no eyes for these dolls and puppets. Her whole soul hangs upon the lips of a beautiful baby doll that seems to be calling her his mummy. He is hitched on to one of the poles of the booth all by himself. He dominates, he effaces everything else. ”

“ They were alone together, and she was taking the opportunity to remonstrate with him on his unkind treatment of me.
'What was the harm?' said Geoffrey. 'A doll is nothing but wood or bran, or some stupid stuff; it can't feel.'
'Of course,' answered Margaret, 'we all know that. It is wasteful and mischievous to spoil a pretty toy; but I am not speaking now so much for the sake of the doll as of Rose. Rose is not made of any stupid stuff; she can feel. And what is more, she can feel for other people as well as herself. ”

“ Quickly in the rear of the white horses and the spirits, who all wore little round caps with tassels at the top, came a procession of dolls—wax dolls, wooden dolls, and saw-dust dolls, very finely dressed, with here and there a doll who had lost a leg, or an arm, or a head, while some were quite cripples, and had to be carried by a train of tiny girls in very short frocks and very long sashes. ”

“ A fury of resentment blazed through her, fury against this utterly incredible exhibition of a wax doll walking and squawking as though it were something intelligently alive that could utter syllables. Syllables, she felt convinced, in a language she did not know.
If the monstrous can paralyse, it also can affront. The sight and sound of this cheap factory toy behaving with a will and heart of its own stung her into an act of violence that became imperative. ”

“ The truth is, the doll illusion is one of the first to pass. There are, I believe, a few sentimental girls who make a point, when they attain the years of enlightenment, of saving their dolls from the general wreckage of toys. Yet I suspect that the pets, when thus retained, are valued more for the outside charm of pretty face and hair, and most of all of their lovely clothes, than for the inherent worth of the doll itself—of what we may call the doll soul, which informs it and gives it to the child its true beauty. ”

“ In the Gran Chaco metacarpal bones of the rhea are in use, wrapped in a blanket when they represent male, in a petticoat when they are female.
But little attention has been paid to the psychological side of dolls. Though many boys play with them, dolls are mainly confined to girls; and female dolls predominate in the proportion of twelve to one. The culmination of the doll instinct is between the age of eight and nine; but they are not entirely dropped till much later; in fact unmarried and childless women sometimes keep it up for years. ”

“ But the child has had its hour of play and make-believe sentiment of companionship and authority; and so, if the doll can do no good of itself, it can at least be the occasion of pleasantness to others.
Now there are women who are dolls in all but the mere accident of material. The doll proper is a simple structure of wax or wood, 'its knees and elbows glued together;' and the human doll is a complex machine of flesh and blood. ”

“ When the little ones caught [6] sight of them, remembering that they had not heard the wonderful news, they shouted:
“Let’s tell our mammas!” and quickly disappeared.
Janie Bell’s home was the nearest. She fairly flew up the steps and tumbled into the door as she said:
“O mamma, it’s going to begin to-morrow! Won’t it be lovely! A doll came in a gold carriage and she threw this bill, and a boy doll drove the white kittens all covered with ribbons and bells, and it was too pretty.... Do you think my dolls could come alive?” ”

“ Of the ready-made toys, toy furniture for the house, the sand pile for outdoors and the doll for both are most useful. “The doll,” as Sully tells us, “takes a supreme place in this fancy realm of play. The doll is an all-important comrade in that solitude à deux, of which the child, like the adult, is so fond.” The complete adaptability of the doll makes it an ideal means for the puppet play of idealism. “A good, efficient, able-bodied doll, like the American girl’s,” says Joseph Lee, “is at home in any situation in life, from princess to kitchen maid, to which she may be called. ”

“ Both varieties of dolls are attired in the costume of the people; but the négresse is usually dressed the more simply. Each doll has a broidered chemise, a tastefully arranged jupe of bright hues; a silk foulard, a collier-choux, ear-rings of five cylinders (zanneaux-à-clous) , and a charming little yellow-banded Madras turban. Such a doll is a perfect costume-model,—a perfect miniature of Martinique fashions, to the smallest details of material and color: it is almost too artistic for a toy. ”

“ The rudest doll has the great advantage of stimulating the imagination by giving it more to do than does the elaborately finished doll. It can also enter more fully into the child’s life, because it can be played with more freely without danger of being soiled or injured. With rude dolls, too, the danger both of hypertrophy and of too great prolongation of the doll instinct is diminished. ”

“ But the instinct that "dollifies" new or most unfit things is gone, as also the subtle points of contact between doll play and idolatry. Before puberty dolls are more likely to be adults; after puberty they are almost always children or babies. There is no longer a struggle between doubt and reality in the doll cosmos, no more abandon to the doll illusion; but where it lingers it is a more atavistic rudiment, and just as at the height of the fever dolls are only in small part representatives of future children, the saying that the first child is the last doll is probably false. ”

“ This breathing of life into playthings is seen in all its magic force in play with dolls. A doll, broadly conceived, is anything which a child carries about and makes a pet of. The toy horse, dog or what not that a little boy nurses, feeds and takes to bed with him has much of the dignity of a true doll. But adopting conventional distinctions we shall confine the word to those things which are more or less endowed by childish fancy with human form and character. ”

“ But just when the doll had been disrobed and only wore the poppy flower on her head, the boy grasped the doll, and threw it high into the air. The girl, though, with loud plaints jumped to catch it, and the boy again caught it first and tossed it again and again, the little girl all the while vainly attempting to recover it. Quite a while this wild game lasted, but in the violent hands of the boy the flying doll now came to grief, and sustained a small fracture near the knee of her sole remaining limb. And from a small aperture some sawdust and bran began to escape. ”

“ Such dolls are well dressed, and look so life-like,—little slanting eyes, shaven pates, smiles, and all!—that as seen from a short distance the best eyes might be deceived by them. Therefore, in those stock photographs of Japanese life, of which so many thousands are sold in the open ports, the conventional baby on the mother's back is most successfully represented by a doll. Even the camera does not betray the substitution. ”

“ The more imaginative children prefer the flower dolls which fade or die quickly and then go to take their places in the sky to which they give the beautiful colors on sunset evenings. Others, natural little gad-a-bouts, always play “come to see,” while in some practical little souls the spirit of motherhood is so strong that, to them, every doll is a baby doll, and everything they play with, from a clothes-pin to a poker, must be mothered—sung to and cared for, petted and rocked. ”

“ They can be scolded for being naughty; put to bed in broad daylight for a punishment; seated in the corner with their impassive faces turned to the wall, just as the little ones themselves are dealt with; the doll all the time smiling exactly as it smiled before, its round blue beads staring just as they stared before; neither scolding nor cornering making more impression on its sawdust soul than do little missy's sobs and tears when nurse is cross and 235 dolly is her only friend. ”

“ Very carefully he cut the strings from the last and largest package and, tenderly removing the wrappings, revealed a doll almost as tall as the little girl herself. It was as large, at least, as a real flesh and blood baby.
The wifeless, homeless, man who has never purchased a doll for some little child mother has missed an educational experience of more value than many of the things that are put in text books to make men wise. ”

“ One had a hopeless crack in its head, because its mamma got cross and threw it up to the ceiling. Some of them were naked, and most of them were very dirty. Her eyes filled with tears as she spoke of [53] the poor little dead one; and she said she could always tell what kind of heart a little girl had by the way she treated her doll. Those who made the sweetest and tenderest mammas were those who had taken the most loving care of their dollies when they were little girls. ”

“ D. I do not say it can speak yet; it has not been taught; but you shall hear its voice, and you shall see it breathe; your doll does not breathe. [Eliza took her doll and placed her hand upon its waxen bosom, as if she expected to feel it heave.] And the clothes you will make will warm it too. A wax-doll is not warmed by its clothes. Your doll is as cold when she is wrapped up in a quilt and placed in the cradle as if she were laid naked upon a marble slab. ”