DOLLS.
The love of dolls is instinctive with girl children; and a nursery without some of these silent simulacra for the amusement of the little maids is a very lifeless affair. But outside the nursery door dolls are stupid things enough; and, whether improvised of wisped-up bundles of rags or made of the costliest kind of composition, they are at the best mere pretences for the pastime of babies, not living creatures to be loved nor artistic creations to be admired. Certainly they are pretty in their own way, and some are made to simulate human actions quite cleverly; and one of their charms with children is that they can be treated like sentient beings without a chance of retaliation. 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 dolly is her only friend. 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. But, saving such structural differences, these women are as essentially dolls as those in the bazaar which open and shut their eyes at the word of command enforced by a wire, and squeak when you pinch them in the middle. There are women who seem born into the world only as the playthings and make-believes of human life. As impassive as the waxen creatures in the nursery, no remonstrance touches them and no experience teaches them. Their final cause seems to be to look pretty, to be always in perfect drawing-room order, and to be the occasions by which their friends and companions are taught patience and self-denial. And they perfectly fulfil their destiny; which may be so much carried to their credit. A doll woman is hopelessly useless and can do nothing with her brains or her hands. In distress or sickness she can only sit by you and look as sorrowful as her round smooth face will permit; but she has not a helping suggestion to make, not a fraction of practical power to put forth.
When a man has married a doll wife he has assigned himself to absolute loneliness or a double burden. He cannot live with his pretty toy in any more reality of sympathy than does a child with her puppet. He can tell her nothing of his affairs, nothing of his troubles nor of his thoughts, because she can impart no new idea, even from the woman's point of view, not from want of heart but from want of brains to understand another's life. Is she not a doll? and does not the very essence of her dollhood lie in this want of perceptive faculty both for things and feelings? What are the hot flushes of passion, the bitter tears of grief, the frenzy of despair, to her? She sees them; and she wonders that people can be so silly as to make themselves and her so uncomfortable; but of the depth of the anguish they express she knows no more than does her waxen prototype when little missy sobs over it in her arms and confides her sorrows to its deaf ears. Whatever anxieties oppress her husband, he must keep them to himself, he cannot share them with her; and the last shred of his credit, like the last effort of his strength, must be employed in maintaining his toy wife in the fool's paradise where alone she can make her habitation. Many a man's back has broken under the strain of such a burden; and many a ruined fortune might have been held together and repaired when damaged, had it not been for the exigencies and necessities of the living doll, who had to be spared all want or inconvenience at the cost of everything else. How many men are groaning in spirit at this moment over the infatuation that made them sacrifice the whole worth of life for the sake of a pretty face and a plastic manner!
The doll woman is as helpless practically as she is useless morally. If she is in personal danger, she either faints or becomes dazed, according to her physiological conditions. Sometimes she is hysterical and frantic, and then she is actively troublesome. In general, however, she is just so much dead weight on hand, to be thought for as well as protected; a living corpse to be carried on the shoulders of those who are struggling for their own lives. She can foresee no possibilities, measure no distances, think of no means of escape. Never quick nor ready, pressure paralyzes such wits as she possesses; and it is not from selfishness so much as from pure incapacity to help herself or to serve others that the poor doll falls down in a helpless heap of self-surrender, and lets her very children perish before her eyes without making an effort to protect them.
As a mother indeed, the doll woman is perhaps more unsatisfactory than in any other character. She gives up her nursery into the absolute keeping of her nurse, and does not attempt to control nor to interfere. This again, is not from want of affection, but from want of capacity. In her tepid way she has a heart, if only half-vitalized like the rest of her being; and she is by no means cruel. Indeed, she has not force enough to be cruel nor wicked anyhow; her worst offence being a passive kind of selfishness, not from greed but from inactivity, by which she is made simply useless for the general good. As for her children, she understands neither their moral nature nor their physical wants; and beyond a universal 'Oh, naughty!' if the little ones express their lives in the rampant manner proper to young things, or as a universal 'Oh, let them have it!' if there is a howl over what is forbidden or unwise, she has no idea of discipline or management. If they teaze her, they are sent away; if they are naughty, they are whipped by papa or nurse; if they are ill, the doctor is summoned and they have medicine as he directs; but none of the finer and more intimate relations usual between mother and child exist in the home of the doll mother. The children are the property of the nurse only; unless indeed the father happens to be a specially affectionate and a specially domestic man, and then he does the work of the mother—at the best clumsily, but at the worst better than the doll could have done it.
Very shocking and revolting are all the more tragic facts of human life to the smooth-skinned easy-going doll. When it comes to her own turn to bear pain, she wonders how a good God can permit her to suffer. Had she brains enough to think, the great mystery of pain would make her atheistical in her angry surprise that she should be so hardly dealt with. As dolls have a constitutional immunity from suffering, her first initiation into even a minor amount of anguish is generally a tremendous affair; and though it may be pain of a quite natural and universal character, she is none the less indignant and astonished at her portion. She invariably thinks herself worse treated than her sisters, and cannot be made to understand that others suffer as much as, and more than, herself. As she has always shrunk from witnessing trouble of any kind, and as what she may have seen has passed over her mind without leaving any impression, she comes to her own sorrows totally inexperienced; and one of the most pitiable sights in the world is that of a poor doll woman writhing in the grasp of physical agony, and broken down or rendered insanely impatient by what other women can bear without a murmur.
When she is in the presence of the moral tragedies of life, she is as lost and bewildered as she is with the physical. All sin and crime are to her odd and inexplicable. She cannot pity the sinner, because she cannot understand the temptation; and she cannot condemn from any lofty standpoint, because she has not mind enough to see the full meaning of iniquity. It is simply something out of the ordinary run of her life, and the doll naturally dislikes disturbance, whether of habit or of thought. Yet if a noted criminal came and sat down by her, she would probably whisper to her next friend, 'How shocking!' but she would simper when he spoke, and perhaps in her heart feel flattered by the attention of even so doubtful a notoriety. If she be a doll with a bias towards naughtiness, the utmost limit to which she can go is a mild kind of curiosity about the outsides of things—the mere husk and rind of the forbidden fruit—such as wondering how such and such people look who have done such dreadful things; and what they felt the next morning; and how could they ever come to think of such horrors! She would be more interested in hearing about the dress and hair and eyes of the female plaintiff or defendant in a famous cause than many other women would be; but she would not give herself the trouble to read the evidence, and she would take all her opinions secondhand. But whether the colour of the lady's gown was brown or blue, and whether she wore her hair wisped or plaited, would be matters in which she would take as intense an interest as is possible to her.