Dawn Keetley

At the conclusion of her discussion of the miniature, which includes a fascinating section on the dollhouse, Susan Stewart concludes:

The miniature, linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination. (69; emphasis added)

Nick Murphy’s 2011 film The Awakening centrally features a dollhouse – an exact miniature of the house in which the main character, Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall), finds herself. Yet what makes this film an especially compelling cinematic representation of a dollhouse is that it contravenes all the functions of the miniature that Stewart so aptly lays out. The dollhouse Florence encounters in The Awakening is not “linked to nostalgic versions of childhood,” is not in the least bit “manipulable,” and is very far from being “domesticated and protected from contamination.”

The dollhouse Florence encounters in The Awakening is instead linked to a traumatic childhood – proposing, in fact, that the traumatic is the very opposite of nostalgic. The dollhouse she encounters is not “diminutive, and thereby manipulatable” but overflows and overwhelms. It is ‘wild’ and dangerous, threatening not “protected from contamination.”

A ‘time for ghosts’

Florence Cathcart is a ghost hunter in a world filled with ghosts. It’s 1921 in England and millions have just lost their lives in World War I: “This is a time for ghosts,” the opening title card proclaims. Florence’s fiancé was killed in the war, and her grief fuels her passion to debunk the claims of some that they are able to contacts the dead. She goes into situations in which charlatan “spiritualists” are exploiting the bereaved, pretending to communicate with them. Florence is a devoted atheist, and, as an investigator, she has all the new mechanical tools of the trade to help her unearth venial fakery and thus prove that the dead are really gone. She is a detective of sorts (and works with the police), but she investigates not who committed a murder but who seeks to exploit sudden and tragic death.

Things change, however, when Robert Mallory (Dominic West) invites her to a boys’ prep school, Rookford, in Cumbria, where, Mallory claims, they appear to have a ghost. Rookford has a rumored history of murder (a small boy was supposedly killed at the house at the beginning of the century, before it became a school) and a subsequent tradition of being haunted. Mallory tells Florence that a boy at their school in the present moment has just died, seemingly of sheer terror. Florence agrees to investigate – and, from the moment she arrives, she finds her convictions, her resolute skepticism, and her rationality slipping. Strange even inexplicable things happen. Finally, she too sees the ghost of the boy said to be haunting the school.

Approaching the dollhouse

Florence has three encounters with the dollhouse at Rookford – each quite different. In the first, she is moving through the house at night and runs across it, isolated within a room and in darkness. She approaches it, opens it, and find it is empty. As she looks, she sees, elsewhere, the figure of a boy and then a man she doesn’t recognize walking through a door holding a shotgun. Uncanny encounters that don’t conform to what’s ‘real’ at Rookford.

The second time Florence encounters the dollhouse, she is chasing a boy she thinks she’s seen – the ghost? – and he leads her there. The dollhouse is in a different location, and it is not in complete darkness, standing by a window that lets in some light – although the scene remains bathed in the grey/blue hue that characterizes the entire film, depicting the grief that saturates this “time for ghosts.” This time, when Florence opens the front of the house, it is peopled with dolls that uncannily replicate her world: she sees the school and events that happened since she arrived; she sees Robert – and, finally, she sees herself (as doll) looking into a miniature dollhouse-within-a-dollhouse and sees a boy behind her – the boy (ghost?) she had been chasing. In these scenes, we repeatedly cut from the dollhouse to Florence looking into the dollhouse, clearly on the other side of its walls and windows. The realities between inside and outside the dollhouse are blurring but they still hold. In shock at seeing herself as a doll looking into the dollhouse, Florence turns and sees the boy just as staged in the dollhouse: she chases him into a series of cupboards and small crawlspaces until she finds herself inexplicably at the dollhouse again only this time it’s in the cellar of the house.

These progressively more strange and terrifying encounters with the dollhouse take Florence from her investigative role – her position as rational, in control – to a place where she is bewildered and completely out of control. Steven Millhauser – like Stewart – has written that the primary function of the dollhouse is “to possess the world more completely, to banish the unknown and the unseen” (135). This is what the miniature represents only the first time Florence encounters it, however. By the third encounter, Florence is not in possession of her world (inner or outer) at all, as the borders between inner and outer become blurred – and as the “unknown and the unseen” refuse to be banished.

A ‘materialized secret’

In Florence’s third and last encounter with the dollhouse, this time in the cellar, she opens the dollhouse and, again, as in her second encounter, sees dolls inhabiting it. This time, Florence witnesses a crime: a man assaults and then shoots a woman; a man hunts a young girl and, mistakenly, shoots and kills a young boy; he then points the gun at himself and takes his own life. These scenes, played out in the dollhouse, slip into reality, however – and they slip specifically into Florence’s reality.

This scene shifts from conveying, at a distance, the violent scenes contained within the dollhouse, enacted by dolls, to their being playing out in the equivalent rooms in the house itself – and Florence (and the viewer) are terrifyingly plunged into the very middle of them. Stewart writes that the “locations of the miniature” are always “viewed from a transcendent position, a position which is always within the standpoint of present lived reality and which thereby always nostalgically distances its object” (69; emphasis added). But in this scene, Florence (and the viewer) is moved from transcendence to immanence, all distance lost.

It becomes increasingly clear, moreover, that the girl whom Florence sees witnessing this violence – who sees her mother and brother killed by her father, who sees her father shoot himself – is Florence herself. She repressed all memory of the events that happened to her as a girl, but coming to Rookford, a house that used to be hers, where she grew up, awakens those memories. They play out first in the “safe” – removed and controlled – miniaturized space of the dollhouse, but then they flood out into reality, into terrifyingly real memories.

The dollhouse, then, which seemed at first to be a separate and external entity (though we realize belatedly that only Florence ever saw it) turns out to represent a profound interiority, Florence’s interiority. This dollhouse thus serves what Stewart lays out as one of the functions of the dollhouse:

Occupying a space within an enclosed space, the dollhouse’s aptest analogy is the locket or the secret recesses of the heart: center within center, within within within. The dollhouse is a materialized secret; what we look for is the dollhouse within the dollhouse and its promise of an infinitely profound interiority. (61; emphasis added)

Florence moves from ‘outside,’ from freely traversing the streets of London early in The Awakening, to entering a railway carriage that carries her to Rookford. Once she arrives at Rookford, Florence is confined inside, experiencing an almost unwilled movement toward dark rooms and increasingly small, dark spaces, and toward the dollhouse. And the dollhouse contains the “materialized secret” – the interior kernel Florence forced inside and down – the truth of what happened to her. And after drawing her in, the dollhouse forces that secret out. The secret it materializes is a crime Florence once witnessed and never wanted to see, never wanted to remember.

The scene of the crime

Florence is a “ghost hunter”: she has worked with the police to uncover crimes, and she is at Rookford explicitly to ‘solve’ an unexplained death as well as to prove the nonexistence of a ghost. She is in the position of “investigator.” When her investigation leads to a dollhouse where she sees an assault and a murder staged in one of its rooms, The Awakening rather directly evokes Frances Glassner Lee and the “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.” Florence Cathcart is a pioneer – a woman who is working to expose criminals who prey on the bereaved with a police force that is visibly all male. Frances Glassner Lee, too, was a pioneering woman in a virtually all-male police force. She was “the first female police captain in the U.S., [and] is considered the ‘mother of forensic science’ and helped to found the first-of-its kind Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard University when the field of forensics was in its infancy” (“Murder”). In the 1940s, Lee created multiple miniature crime scenes – dioramas – in intricate detail in order to educate crime scene investigators on how to recognize and interpret a crime. Lee was, in every way, detached from and master of these scenes: “The only thing that mattered was that every single detail was realistically and precisely executed” (Botz 33). Lee was also uninvolved, crafting scenarios in which she was personally not at all implicated in order to facilitate a specifically detached, forensic analysis.

Despite all their similarities as pioneering women investigators who scrutinize miniatures for clues, Florence Cathcart is a kind of inverted mirror image of Lee. In place of Lee’s distance from and mastery over her dioramas, Florence finds herself terrifyingly in the dollhouse – not only at the scene of the crime but part of it. The disorientation that both Florence and the viewers feel at witnessing the miniatures (the house and the dolls) swell and sweep over the boundaries that should confine them is one marker of the difference between a detective story and gothic horror. Florence believes she is the “detective” in a mystery, but instead she finds herself trapped in horror: that which should be small looms terrifyingly large; that which should be bounded is violently breached; that of which she should be master suddenly masters her; that which she should control wrests away her agency.

This comparison of The Awakening’s Florence Cathcart (and her three encounters with the dollhouse) to Frances Glassner Lee’s forensic use of the miniature also dramatically illustrates the difference between theories of the dollhouse as epitome of control and the very opposed way that the dollhouse actually features in horror: in the latter, every aspect of stability, containment and nostalgia is wrenched away – all the more terrifying because those elements are supposed to be there.

Lee’s “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death” transmutes into a very different kind of “unexplained” in The Awakening. Florence goes to Rookford to explore the unexplained death of one boy and is trapped in the terrifying inexplicable death of another. This latter death is profoundly and traumatically inexplicable to the young girl who witnesses her beloved little brother shot to death by their father. In The Awakening, the “unexplained” is also the unacknowledged – the thing Florence cannot even see and remember let alone explain. Just as Lee’s miniatures were designed to educate, though, and specifically to educate about crime, Florence’s encounter with the dollhouse is ultimately profoundly illuminating: she is finally able to see and begin to understand the deaths – the crimes – in her own life.

Conclusion

In every way, then, the dollhouse in The Awakening, along with the miniature scenarios that Florence Cathcart sees staged within it, belie the typical functions of the dollhouse. Nothing is contained, nothing is controlled. Its contents erupt with the terrifying and uncontrollable. The dollhouse embodies not the nostalgic childhood but the traumatic childhood.

I would argue further that what is true of Florence’s own experience reflects on the larger history of pre-World War 1 Britain – a time of ostensible decency, stability and order, remembered with nostalgia in the wake of the devastation and social upheaval of the Great War. Susan Stewart notes that Victorian dollhouses were “extravagant displays of upper-class ways of life that were meant to stop time and thus present the illusion of a perfectly complete and hermetic world”; they served as “a monument against instability, randomness, and vulgarity” (62). Except they never did. Florence Cathcart’s personal story is also a story of upper-class immorality and violence, of a wealthy man who committed adultery with his maid, who attacked and killed his wife and son and tried to kill his daughter. The upper-classes of pre-war England never approximated the illusion they projected, just as Florence Cathcart’s family did not. The illusion manifest in the Victorian dollhouse was never a projection of reality, and so the dollhouses of horror, which upset any “nostalgic versions of childhood and history” and which do not “domesticate” or “protect” from “contamination” (Stewart 69), are in fact a much more accurate measure of reality.

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Works Cited

Botz, Corinne May. The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. The Monacelli Press, 2004.

Millhauser, Steven. “The Fascination of the Miniature.” Grand Street, vol. 2, no. 4, 1983, pp. 128–35.

“Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.” Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press, 1993.