Reading Themes 

The Play of Toys
by Lois R. Kuznets

The marketeers got it right, no matter how they spelled it: Toys Are Us! I am convinced this axiom holds true whether we are children or adults actually playing with material toy like objects or humans creating and/or reading about them as characters in books (or viewing them on film). Moreover, I am continually struck with how compelling human issues play themselves out not just in the miniature world of “playthings” but in the actions and reactions of near life-size creations once called automata and now robots. Anthropomorphization is rife in life, literature, and film.
          Believe me, I lived intimately with such creations in the nine years it took me to bring to fruition a text entitled When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development (Yale University Press, 1994). There, early on I claim, “Animated toys as characters in literature transcend . . . ‘real-world’ uses in significant ways, representing not only human hopes, needs, and desires, but human anxieties and terrors as well” Since then, and especially after viewing films like Toy Story, Toy Story II, and AI: Artificial Intelligence, I find no reason to doubt this judgment, nor the ways in which I saw such human concerns playing themselves out in imaginative works.
          Looking back now, however, on my introductory outline of the major concerns I discerned in this literature (I touch on film very little in this book), I realize that some of these issues are more accessible and urgent to children than others. I find three particularly compelling for children (and hardly less so for adults) and one or more of these likely to appear in most children’s toy stories:
          1) concerns about the nature of being or becoming “real”—an independent subject or self—like those expressed in The Velveteen Rabbit (1922), Pinocchio (1883), and The Mouse and His Child (Harper and Row, 1967) where such development is clearly desired—or in A.A. Milne’s Pooh and Christopher Robin stories where perhaps arrested development is coveted;
          2) interest in and desire to know about what I dubbed “secrets of the night”—domestic intrigue and the adult world going on while children sleep; settings like closed toy shops, after- our museums, Christmas trees, and dollhouses at night seem to be sublimations of these desires (and fears that may accompany them), which are made explicit in a work like E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and Mouse King (c. 1800, origin of Tchaikovsky’s ballet);
          3) anxieties about vulnerability to, and the exercise of, power, either on oneself or by oneself on others—especially clear in works like The Steadfast Tin Soldier and Hans Christian Andersen’s many other tales of anthropomorphization (1830s); also found in works wherein toys are mistreated or mutilated by wicked toy makers (in loco parentis, so to speak) or by their child owners—the latter a theme prevalent in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century toy stories of the “didactic” type.
          The wicked toy maker is also representative of a fourth major concern. The last is perhaps more compelling to adults than children and appears especially in the literature and film about life-size creations like automata and robots. It is the troublesome question of replicating “divine” creation and giving life to artificial creatures that may eventually threaten “real” human beings. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,”(1800) later made into the ballet Coppelia, the traditional Golem stories, and, of course, films like Blade Runner and AI illustrate the persistence of these issues.
          Arguably most interesting to children is the question of what it means to be “real.” Certainly the continued popularity of The Velveteen Rabbit and Pinocchio suggest this. For critics, the most interesting aspects of these two classic works can be their relative realism about what “real” means. I have suggested elsewhere (as have others before me) that the Margery Williams (Bianco)’s story, charming as it is and evocative of all the pains of rejection, is realistically flawed in providing “nursery magic’s” cure for them. In the end, this beloved story (I once heard it quoted by the priest in a marriage ceremony!) swerves away from an understanding that a metamorphosis into flesh and blood means mortality and inevitable death. In another toy story, the eponymous doll character in Rachel Field’s Hitty, Her First Hundred Years (Macmillan, 1929) exalts in the fact she is made of “mountain-ash wood” and not flesh and blood for this reason. Conversely, The Velveteen Rabbit lets the toy rabbit become real yet live forever, for who wants to know about mortality when offered “nursery magic?”
          In contrast, Pinocchio’s realistic development—albeit also coming about through a fairy’s magic—is perhaps too realistic for some in dulling all the wonderful elements of Pinocchio’s good-bad-boy vitality in favor of becoming a real, and obedient, son. For those inclined towards Freudian analysis, each of these stories perhaps represents one of two contending psychic forces coming to the fore without adequate Ego development and individuation in either one. Becoming real in The Velveteen Rabbit appears to exalt the Id (which reflects primal urges), while the process in Carlo Collodi’s classic seems to exalt the Super Ego (which internalizes societal demands). These developmental biases in terms of messages given by the two texts may be characteristic not only of their differences as, respectively, twentieth century or nineteenth century texts for children, but also of differences in the relative ages of their projected audiences
          Similarly beloved texts, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), avoid the notion of toys entering the “real” world, or developing in any direction, by concentrating on unchanging animated toy characters who remain in a timeless setting. Meanwhile, their already “real” child friend, Christopher Robin, is inevitably developing. Alone subject to what Wordsworth calls the “shades of the prison house”—i.e., school—closing upon him, C.R. visits “100 Acre Woods” less and less. Although adult nostalgia for childhood in the Romantic mode may govern continual re-readings of The Velveteen Rabbit as it does re-readings of Milne’s texts, the nostalgia seems already embedded in the latter, as it is not in the former.
          Certainly the fact that toy characters are reflective of human needs is not surprising to psychoanalysts and psychologists. Those who treat children as clients employ toy play to find out about disturbed children’s directly inexpressible concerns. And at least one school of psychology, based on the work of British neo-Freudian, D. W. Winnicott, focuses on a special place for toys and/or other objects to which a child might cling from infancy on. Winnicott describes them as “transitional objects,” which function to maintain a bond between the child and its primary caretaker as separation and individuation occurs. For him, such objects exist in a kind of magical space created by intense emotion. Winnicott theorizes that the arts, including literature, also exist in this same kind of magical space. If this is true, the special, doubled, resonance that magical toys hold in literature is not surprising.
          To return to that literature: perhaps it is apparent from the above brief analyses that stories about toys, even when they deal with similar existential questions, provide many different answers to them. This is a statement one could make about children’s books in general, although some may think of works for children as simple and uncomplicated and without philosophical differentiation. Complex variation is indeed the order of the day, however. For instance, characters in these narratives may come from a variety of toy-like objects. Although dolls predominate, stuffed animals of many types beyond the teddy bear are also well-known toy characters, not to speak of non-cuddly creatures made from wood and metal. The father and son mice in The Mouse and His Child are attached as a wind-up metal toy (the prototype of which Russell Hoban brings to lectures to play with when he talks about his novel).
          Less well known, but extremely interesting in some of the same complex ways, is Margery Williams Bianco’s Poor Cecco (Doran, 1925), which features a wooden dog with a broken tail, as well as a naked wooden doll, as key characters. Indeed, here animation is extended well beyond them to a pillow and a toy bank. In this, Bianco is only following some of the earliest coming-alive narratives for children by Mary Ann Kilner, which feature a pincushion (1780) and a peg-top (1783). (Kilner, in turn, may be following contemporaneous popular stories for adults, which feature travels of personified bank notes and other adventurous objects in their own voices. These, in their turn, may harken back to ancient riddles in which objects describe themselves). Other “real” characters in these narratives may vary as well; not only can they be human children and adults but also talking animals of the non-toy origin—rats, dogs, and cats prominent among them. Each type of toy, each setting dwelt in, seems to introduce its own resonance—both psychological and social.
          Toy narratives also cannot simply be dumped wholesale into the broad generic category of fantasy but assume a variety of forms that are popular in other children’s fiction either realistic or fantastic, picture book or novel: family story, historical fiction, adventure, mystery, robinsonade (survival narrative), and/or bildungsroman (narrative of development). And, albeit nonrealistic at one level, children’s books where toy characters appear, again like children’s books in general, are likely to reflect not only their author’s own psychological understandings of development and change but also the social world at their time of publication. They thus convey messages about the nature of this world and attitudes towards it. This leaning is true not only in the areas of desired child development but in other areas as well. If a curious reader is interested in what these books seem to say, directly or indirectly, about gender, class, or race, as well as developmental issues, one finds much to discover.
          Stories about dolls and the doll houses they wish to inhabit—or refuse to inhabit (as is the case of Rumer Godden’s Impunity Jane [Viking, 1954], for instance) I have found especially intriguing in this regard. Field’s Hitty, mentioned above, can be seen not only as historical fiction but as a kind of picaresque tale of travels and near escapes through one hundred years of American history and widespread geography. Although ladylike and somewhat prim in her demeanor, Hitty’s status as an untraditional picaresque female hero and her part in leading her girl owners into mischief can be examined for suggestions about gender roles. Jensina, the naked wooden doll in Poor Cecco, is similarly adventurous and much more unconventional and volatile in demeanor; unlike Hitty, however, she exists in a world bare of human interaction. Jane of Impunity Jane rejects what she considers the dull life of the doll house for travels in the pocket of a shy boy who can use her to help him make friends with wilder characters. She is in contrast to the motley family of dolls, male and female, in Godden’s earlier The Dolls’ House (1947) who struggle—like characters in a “realistic” family novel—to keep their hold on a doll house inherited by their young owners when the resident family is intruded upon by a much more stately and valuable china doll who attempts to capture control from them.
          In the latter story, class aspects come to the fore in the contrasts between the china doll and an equally historical but humbler wooden doll, who is seen as the daughter in this family of dolls assembled from haphazard origins. This elegant intruder dressed in a traditional bridal gown is eventually banished from the doll house to a museum. In Godden’s works, the child characters who empower the dolls are equally important psychologically. Power struggles between a dominant older human girl and her younger sister govern the outcome in The Dolls’House and hold psychological interest along with the interplay among the dolls. In her Impunity Jane, Gideon, the boy in whose pocket Jane hangs out, is also going through developmental crises.
          A newer doll book by Ann M. Martin and Laura Godwin, The Doll People (Hyperion, 2000), interestingly illustrated by Brian Selznick, commanded my attention recently by getting itself mixed up on the library shelf of new adult fiction. It plays a variation on the doll class theme also depicted in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Racketty-Packetty House (1906), in which dolls from two doll houses are contrasted with each other in terms of adherence to class values. In Burnett’s version, the less conventional dolls win out. In the newer book, the traditional dolls and their Victorian doll house are central but require the cooperation of the plastic inhabitants of a similarly molded doll house. Through this cooperation with new “neighbors” of a very different class, the earlier dolls are able to reunite with one of their traditional family, long lost, and find a way for the more adventurous daughter of the traditional dolls to develop her interests in exploration. I find it amusing to think of the way in which Martin, Godwin, and Selznick have made implicit in this tale the adult snobbishness about traditional and nontraditional toys and possible adult prejudices against plastic toys often beloved by children.
          Class issues in the outside world come more explicitly into play in a picture book by Faith Jacques called Tilly’s House (Atheneum, 1979) wherein a maid doll, relegated to the ground floor kitchen of a traditional doll’s house, leaves to find a home of her own in an abandoned gardening shed and thus acquires a parlor of her own like the one her “mistress” stereotypically inhabited in the doll house. Doll maids or cooks who are distinguished by “race” as well as class are not usually so mobile in the toy narratives that feature them. Dinah is such a doll in Josephine Scribner Gates’s Story of the Live Dolls (1901), who consoles herself by singing, “Der’s a good time comin’ by and by!” Her stereotypical features are also true of “Beloved Belindy, a nice soft `mammy doll’ with lovely shiny pearl button eyes and a wide smiling mouth,” who appears in Marcella Stories (Donahue, 1929), part of Johnny Gruelle’s 1920s Raggedy Ann series.
          Another doll featured as the Golliwogg in Florence and Bertha Upton’s The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls—and a Golliwogg (1895) with his black skin, unruly hair and gentlemanly demeanor defies such racial stereotypes. It would take a much longer article than this to analyze the affect of this creation in his original form whose name at least has probably been taken over by racists for use as an epithet. Lynne Reid Banks’s The Indian in the Cupboard (Doubleday, 1980) and its sequels require similarly complex analyses to determine how the depiction of the animated figures of the Indian and Cowboy and the others summoned up from “history” in their doll-like forms convey various messages to child readers, especially in the latters’ probable identification with the boy protagonists, Omri and Patrick, who have power over these figures.
          Like the father and son mice in Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child, who long to be “self-winding,” children are perforce dependent creatures and may unconsciously identify with their toys, which are in turn subject to the child’s whim. Children, torn between identification and wishes to exert their own will on others, thus may have very ambivalent feelings towards their play things. Works for adults, like George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1890’s), D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), all depict children taking their frustrations out on dolls. Yet the toy character may also in texts for children make the plight of the powerless adult explicit and widen the child’s view beyond self to injustice in the world at large. I was especially intrigued to find this conversation between two dolls in the anonymous English A Doll’s Story (1852):

“It is not pleasant to be sold, is it?” said little Minna; “so like slaves, of whom Emilie often tells me tales as I sit in her lap.

“I never heard much about slaves. To be sure you don’t mean blacks?” said Fanny. “I hope you don’t mean to compare pretty wax dolls to negroes? There was a doll or two of that sort in the Exhibition, but we never took any notion of them.”

“Did you not? Why, they were made of wax, I suppose, just like ourselves, and Emilie says black slaves are made of flesh and blood just like herself, and that no one has a right to buy or sell a fellow creature.”

          As a reminder to children, subject themselves to the whims of the powerful—if not usually to buying and selling—this didactic passage seems to do well.
          Those interested in the perennial question of choosing books for children to read and, in particuliar, books for the so-called reluctant boy reader will probably not purchase doll stories but perhaps accept conventional wisdom and look for toy characters of the animal or soldier variety. If so, they will be missing winners like Godden’s Impunity Jane with its boy protagonist or her Home is the Sailor (Viking, 1964), in which a sailor doll goes accidentally to sea and meets a young boy who needs him as well. They might not choose Poor Cecco (unfortunately now out of print and rarely in libraries) despite the fact that, like The Mouse and His Child, it is an adventure story with exciting conflict with enemy Rats! Although boys may indeed enjoy these choices, nevertheless, among the older books, a narrative like Pauline Clarke’s The Return of the Twelves (Coward-McCann, 1963) is probably a better if more conventional bet. In it, eight-year-old Max Morley discovers the coming alive in his attic of the twelve toy soldiers that originally belonged to Branwell Bronte (and which inspired much of the Bronte juvenalia) and manages, with the help of his siblings and their own endeavors, to get them safely to the Bronte museum at Haworth. Toys that require their owners’ care do bring out the nurturing instincts of male protagonists, and their stories usually defy more violent gender stereotypes.
          If The Doll People of recent publication is any indication, new coming-alive stories are anxiously awaiting discovery. Like The Doll People and many of the narratives that came before it, their illustrations may be charmingly inspired by the toy characters depicted. Although some of these works will simply be dull and unimaginative repetitions of popular toy stories of the past, others will provide new insights in their evocative and exciting variations on the theme of toys are us.

Lois R. Kuznets is professor emerita of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. She has served as president and board member of the Children’s Literature Association. She has written many articles on realistic and fantastic fiction for children and another book, Kenneth Grahame (Twayne, 1987). When Toys Come Alive earned several scholarly book awards.