Just as doll-making meant a way for these families to reverse the process of poverty, the dolls they created also represented the extremes of the human condition in various ways. The most common variant of these dolls were those that contrasted happy and sad, awake and asleep, young and old, male and female.
Other dolls went through more symbolic transformations from poverty to wealth, from good to evil, tame to wild, or virginal to married. These dolls were known as storybook dolls and were meant to accompany the reading or telling of common fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
The rags to riches Cinderella doll contrasted the extremes of abuse and deprivation with wealth and reward by featuring a tattered and dirty girl on the one side and a glamorous and exquisitely dressed woman on the other. Similarly, the Princess and the Pea doll appeared an average girl on the one side and, after having demonstrated her worthiness of marrying a prince, in full bridal gear on the other. Both of these designs reflect a shared cultural expectation or hopefulness that one day the poor will cross over into wealth, that the unloved will one day be found worthy of love.
Other themes touch on the opposition between good and evil, tame and wild. While some storybook dolls sported only two heads, many had three, possibly even four to accommodate the number of characters in a story. Little Red Riding Hood dolls featured a little girl, a grandmother, and a very hungry wolf waiting to gobble them all up. Similarly, the innocent Hansel and Gretel would reverse to reveal an evil witch, Goldilocks was pursued by the three bears, and Snow White was always on the flip side of her malevolent stepmother.
Although the Topsy-Turvy doll had changed substantially in design since the pre-war years in the American south, it retained its essential capacity to emphasize the differences between the powerful and the powerless. For this reason, it is a doll uniquely able to detect and reflect cultural tensions as they changed with the times and economic conditions. As if a looking glass into the American social order, the two-headed, reversible, upside-down doll is able to turn things, well…, topsy-turvy. In this sense, it is more than a doll – it is a symbol of power, of resistance, of secrecy, and of revolution.
Go To Page: 1 2
