Charlotte Yule
Christie’s childhood dollhouses
Throughout her childhood Agatha Christie was fascinated with houses, especially dollhouses. Writing in her memoir, she describes her dollhouses as her “principal source of indoor amusement” (An Autobiography 60). Christie’s first dollhouses were “odd rolls of wallpaper . . . cut and pasted over boxes” and houses fashioned from “the family building bricks” (60). As she grew older, her collection included a traditional dollhouse: “the usual type of painted affair, with a front door that swung open; revealing kitchen, sitting room and hall downstairs” (60). Christie decorated her dollhouses with scraps of fabric for carpets, and her pocket money was eagerly spent on furnishings, miniature food, crockery and dolls until the overstuffed house resembled “a furniture storehouse” (61). After much pleading, Christie was allocated a large built-in cupboard in the playroom, at the top of Ashfield House, the family’s home in Torquay. In her memoirs the cupboard house is described as “a wild success,” allowing the expansion of her dollhouse into a village or community which dominated the playroom (62).
The dolls that lived within Christie’s playroom village were curiously one-dimensional, bound to the dollhouse that housed them as much as the furniture and furnishings. She recalls “they never became people to me, they existed only to occupy the house,” writing that a house never looked “right” without the appearance of inhabitants (An Autobiography 62). The need to populate her houses implies a sense of ‘wrongness’ that is associated with empty buildings in Christie’s imagination (62). Despite the cast of characters with which she occupied her houses, the tranquillity of this domestic assemblage was haunted by a spectral figure who emerged from Christie’s nightmares to infiltrate the nursery and the dollhouse community Christie had established (Unfinished Portrait 29). “The Gunman” was a figure of male authority – tall, youthful and dressed in French military attire, finished with a three-pointed hat (36). In her dreams Christie recalls something “quite ordinary” like a tea party with her dolls or installing new curtains in the cupboard dollhouse which would become overshadowed by a sudden sense that there was someone present who “ought not to be there” (36). She writes that the Gunman’s “pale blue eyes would meet mine and I would wake up screaming” (63). Later, in her writing, that which ought not to be there would become the “Thing in the House,” an otherworldly and threatening presence which recalls the Gunman’s intrusion into the dollhouse world in Christie’s fictive settings (Worsley 19).
Christie’s “happy childhood” was mediated by this unwanted presence such that the nursery and her dollhouses became haunted and contested spaces, thresholds which “constitute a transition” from nightmare to waking world (Sensual City Studios 7). The Gunman’s presence became more insidious as Christie grew older, threatening not only the dollhouses but also the material borders of Christie’s siblings and mother in the waking world. Christie writes, “sometimes, as we sat around a tea-table, I would look across at a friend, or a member of the family, and I would suddenly realise that it was not Dorothy, or Phyllis . . . It was really the Gunman” (An Autobiography 36). In Christie’s depictions, the nursery setting and the children’s placement of the dolls at tea initiate the Gunman’s appearance, acting as a conduit for his presence to transgress the borders of dream and enter Christie’s waking consciousness. His presence, characterised by piercing “pale blue eyes” is only visible to Christie, remaining concealed from her siblings, nurse and mother (36). However, in time, that which ought not to be there relinquished the form of the Gunman altogether, appearing as “Elder Sister,” an “oily” voiced and “unnatural” creature who took bodily possession of Christie’s sister Madge (54). Christie’s memoirs describe days spent on edge, awaiting the arrival of the changeling creature, who appeared in Madge’s physical form, invested with the otherworldly voice which betrayed her “wrongness” (54).
Dollhouses also appear in Christie’s accounts of childhood self-perception, positioned as integral aspects of her understanding of female identity. In the foreword to her memoirs Christie depicts the self as a “house . . . in which the spirit dwells,” describing rooms within it which remain unexplored and unseen (An Autobiography 11). Christie miniaturises the structure within which she locates numerous doll selves: “little Agatha Miller, and big Agatha Miller, and Agatha Mallowan” all “line[d] up with the rest” (11). Christie’s uneasiness about the empty dollhouse is reframed in the imagery of a cast of ‘little Agathas’ ensconced within an unknown space where anxieties about unlocked doors and gaping windows may invite other unknown entities across thresholds. Christie’s notion of an unexplored house-self recalls Hélène Cixous, who theorised that woman “has never been able to live in her ‘own’ house, her very body” (68). Unoccupied rooms threaten self-perception, accentuated by an anthropomorphic house which develops “instincts and tastes and emotions and intellectual capabilities” that threaten to consume the “little Agathas” as the house “grows” and expands (An Autobiography 11). Christie’s notion of the self as an animate house places her miniature Agathas at the mercy of a power capable of closing off, or inviting in, other presences such that her miniature selves, afflicted by fear of the unknown, “haven’t gone exploring in their house” (Cixous 68). For Christie, dollhouses, much like the house-self, were spaces with vulnerable borders, where roofs could be removed and walls opened out to allow ingress across unstable thresholds.
Dollhouses of dreams: Early writing and the thing in the house
In early adulthood, Christie explored these themes of fear and infiltration in “The House of Beauty.” Christie’s first short story, published in 1926 as “The House of Dreams,” depicts domestic bliss undermined by a narrative of female possession by the “Thing in the House.” The parallels between Christie’s playroom nightmares and the story’s narrative load the house with associations of Christie’s dollhouse: “It was the House, of course! The House he knew so well. Was it a real house, or did he really know it in dreams? He didn’t remember – but he certainly knew it – knew it very well” (“House of Dreams” 2). The narrator, John, describes the house as “strangely beautiful” – a “white house . . . independent of surroundings” (3). John encounters Allegra on the day following the dream of the house, and the two are intertwined in John’s mind from that moment. From the beginning of the story, both Allegra and the house are loaded with the otherworldly, the house dislocated from reality and Allegra “a being transitory and fugitive . . . fitful, capricious, like the will-o-wisps that of old lured men into the marshes” (8). The way in which the narrator associates Allegra with the “strange beauty” of the house binds her to it, such that she takes on characteristics of the house in John’s mind. He describes getting to know her as going “inside the House,” asking whether her “blinds are to stay down?” to his advances (14).
Allegra’s depiction as ethereal and aloof renders her one-dimensional, much like Christie’s dolls who existed solely to populate the dollhouse. Similarly, the narrative unfolds John’s exploration of the house in step with his obsession with Allegra, until the two converge. In his final dream of the house, he watches as “a hand draws aside the blinds,” enraptured by the “peace and beauty” of its shining “white walls” (“House of Dreams” 14). Gazing inside the house for the first time, John’s “joy” is disrupted by the “horror, the unutterable loathing of the “Thing” that had looked out at him” (14). For John, the “Thing” is made more “vile and loathsome” by the contrast between it and the “House of Beauty” (17). In the final pages of the story, Christie heightens the association between Allegra and the house, when an ‘other’ “looked out from her eyes” (17). John recalls that “it was gone in a flash – but he knew it. It was the Thing that had looked out from the House” (17). Throughout the narrative the creature’s presence undermines the “perfect” appearance of both the house and Allegra. However, this heightened sense of perfection only serves to reinforce the doll-like aesthetics of Allegra’s character, and the un-realness of the house, which, at the close of the story, opens up to John, like a dollhouse front pulled wide (22).
Assembling the dollhouse: “The Dressmaker’s Doll”
In his Afterword, Tony Medawar notes that Christie heavily revised the early version of “House of Dreams” before publishing it. Christie “toned down the otherworldliness of Allegra,” effectively concealing her bodily possession to permit readers the gradual and unfolding realisation that she was host to something that “ought not to be there” (Medawar 23). In “The Dressmaker’s Doll,” however, the doll herself is the unwanted presence, the “Thing” which intrudes upon Sybil and Alicia Coombe’s dress shop. This short story, published in 1958, reframes the horror of the “Thing in the House,” which, rather than appearing human, occupies the mute and lifeless form of the dressmaker’s doll that suddenly appears in the shop one morning. The subtle references to dollhouses in “The House of Dreams” are replaced with a space that actively becomes a dollhouse as the doll inhabits it, claiming room after room as her own. The doll, like Allegra, is bound to the physical space, this time through her clothing which Christie fashions from the same sage-green velvet as the chair in which the doll “sprawled” (“Dressmaker’s Doll” 111). Both the doll and her chair blend with the walls and the “curtains and the rugs” as though she had emerged from, or of, the room (111). Later, the women comment that she looked as though “she belongs here” and despite their best efforts they cannot remember when she arrived: “It was as if I’d never seen her before – only it didn’t feel like that. It felt as though she’d been here a long time but I’d only just noticed her” (117).
Unlike the creature in “The House of Dreams,” the doll in “The Dressmaker’s Doll” doesn’t conceal the “horror” of its presence behind idealised aesthetics. Rather, the doll is overtly threatening, transgressing material boundaries and physical borders to invade spaces and seize possession of rooms with languid lifeless “decadence” (“Dressmaker’s Doll” 111). From the opening lines, the doll is invested with a wrongness as her “limp” lifeless body is simultaneously “strangely alive” (111). The doll’s physicality codes it as a source of threat within the narrative, an uncanny “creature” with “long hanging legs” and a “slouched” appearance that agitate the dress shop’s customers, cleaning staff and the owners themselves (115). The “painted mask of her face” is ambiguously described as “cunning” (115) and “sad-looking” but also “sly and rather determined” (117). The narrative constructs tension between the determination of the lifeless doll and her languid form, heightened by the sense that the doll has “been here some time,” only becoming “visible” when she appeared on the chair (118). The doll’s status as neither alive nor dead, embodied yet limp, is exaggerated by its movements at night, appearing seated at a writing desk one morning or sat at the window, as though looking out, the next (119). The belonging which Alicia identifies between the doll and the shop turns sinister as the doll’s movements assert authority and ownership over the space.
As the narrative builds, the women attempt to contain the doll, locking her into a room at night; however, her enclosure serves only to heighten her presence in the shop. The fitting room becomes the doll’s domain and, as it increasingly becomes associated with her presence, her agency too increases: “it was not only at night that the doll now moved. At any moment when they came into the fitting room, after they had been absent even a few minutes, they might find the doll in a different place” (“Dressmaker’s Doll” 127). The “horror” which Alicia and Sybil experience is reinforced by the fact that they never see the doll move or become animate and both women feel convinced that this “mess of rags” is “too strong” for them to control (128).
Christie’s authorship of the narrative implicates the dress shop women in a sinister game of dollhouses with an unwanted presence capable of overpowering them. Gathered around the “inert sprawling figure in its limp, soft velvet” the women contemplate whether they should “dispose of her,” either by fire, “like a witch,” or by throwing her in a “dustbin” (127). The fear of repercussion if the doll were to return leads them to lock her permanently into her room instead, where she remains undisturbed. The sealed door, and the awareness of a threatening presence behind it, draws parallels with the “Thing in the House,” and the notion of possessed spaces which Alicia and Sybil describe as a form of supernatural puppetry, or the actions of a “poltergeist” (132). Eventually, the doll emerges from the locked room, seemingly passing through the solid walls, unaffected by material borders: “’she’s got out!’ . . . ‘she wants this room as well’” (133). Much like Christie’s house-self which hungers and grows, the doll’s appetite cannot be satiated with a single room, laying claim to the showroom and ultimately “the whole shop” (133). The belonging which the doll was initially afforded becomes a form of ownership, laying claim to the spaces from which she emerged as a means of constructing her dollhouse around her.
At the close of the narrative, overcome with fear, the women hurl the doll out of a window. On the street below the doll lies “loose-limbed, face down” until she is discovered and picked up by a young girl (“Dressmaker’s Doll” 134). The women’s panic as they race to retrieve the doll is bound up in the sureness of the threat the doll poses: “that doll is dangerous – it’s evil. We’ve got to stop her” (135). However, when they reach the girl, she defiantly holds onto the doll, accusing the women of not “loving her” and throwing her away into the traffic (135). The final moments of the narrative close with the girl darting away, doll clutched in her arms. Outside, dislocated from her assembled dollhouse, the threat of the doll dissipates: “perhaps that’s what she wanted all along . . . to be loved” (136).
Conclusion
In both stories dollhouses are invested with the otherworldly possession, creatures that lay claim to empty rooms or which infiltrate and undermine the borders of the dollhouse world. Christie’s childhood terrors return in narrative form, intent on either infiltrating the self or housing unnatural consciousnesses within the dollhouse walls. For Christie, dollhouses remained contested spaces characterised by porous boundaries and gaping thresholds, open to ingress by presences which ought not to be there. Christie’s Gunman, Elder Sister and later the Thing in the House collectively infiltrate each dollhouse she authors, the very walls open to access by forces intent on possession and ownership. However, her dollhouse writing is also introspective, permitting her a means of conceiving the self and the troubling aspects of female identity concealed within the empty and unexplored rooms of the house-self. In narratives which trace infiltration, possession and the materialising of dollhouses in real time, Christie agitates perceptions of beauty and female identity with otherworldly femininities, doll-like aesthetics and ambiguous dollhouse inhabitants.
Works Cited
Cixous, Hélène. “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays.” The Newly Born Woman, edited by Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, Tauris, 1993, pp. 61–132.
Christie, Agatha. An Autobiography. Fontana Paperbacks, 1986.
Christie, Agatha. “The Dressmaker’s Doll.” Miss Marple’s Final Cases and Two Other Stories, 1979, HarperCollins, 2022, pp. 111–36.
Christie, Agatha. “The House of Dreams.” While the Light Lasts and Other Stories, 1997, HarperCollins, 2016, pp. 1–22.
Christie, Agatha (writing as Mary Westmacott). Unfinished Portrait. 1934. HarperCollins Publishers, 2017.
Medawar, Tony. “Afterword.” While the Light Lasts and Other Stories, by Agatha Christie, 1997, HarperCollins, 2016, pp. 23–24.
Sensual City Studios. A History of Thresholds: Life, Death and Rebirth: A Visual Narrative. Jorvis, 2018.
Worsley, Lucy. Agatha Christie. Hodder & Stoughton, 2022.
