Lindsey Scott

Anyone who loved the iconic ABC television sitcom, The Addams Family (1964–66) will remember Wednesday’s headless doll, Marie Antoinette. In episode one, six-year-old Wednesday (Lisa Loring) is shown guiding a truant officer around the house when her brother Pugsley (Ken Weatherwax) enters with her doll, saying, “I fixed it for you” (“The Addams Family Goes to School”). The truant officer is alarmed to see this doll is headless, but Wednesday calmly explains the situation to him: “It’s Marie Antoinette. Grandmama told us about the French Revolution and Pugsley chopped off her head.” She makes a slicing motion across her own neck, after which Pugsley chirps, “Meet you out in the cemetery.” Later, Wednesday tells her mother she intends to bury Marie Antoinette, while Pugsley is heard offscreen making his sister a large dollhouse. Wednesday, it turns out, will dig up Marie Antoinette after burying her and go on to collect a whole household of headless dolls. (This is very much in keeping with Charles ‘Chas’ Addams’ original 1938 comic strips, in which Wednesday’s character ‘decorates her dollhouse with a black wreath of mourning or a skeleton’ [Miserocchi, 2010, 83]).

Marie Antoinette’s frequent screen appearances in the TV sitcom have provoked some criticism of her absence from the Netflix Addams Family spin-off, Wednesday (2022–present). In The Spiritual Magic of Dolls, Najah Lightfoot writes: “What happened to Marie Antionette? Why are we not given an explanation or backstory to the doll’s location? […] Wednesday Addams would never discard her doll without telling us what happened to her. Are you listening, Netflix writers?” (87–8). For Lightfoot, Marie Antoinette matters because she matters to Wednesday: “her loving and constant companion” (87). Marie Antoinette also matters because she demonstrates Wednesday’s rejection of idealised normative girlhood. In a later episode, Wednesday is mortified when her amnesia-suffering father wants to buy her “a lovely golden-haired doll”; regarding his offer as a form of punishment, she asks, “But what have I done?” (“Amnesia in the Addams Family”). Part of The Addams Family appeal is the subversion of restrictive social constructs such as the nuclear family, which Wednesday’s executive producer/director, Tim Burton, readily reinforces: “true horror, as it perhaps always has been for a director like Tim Burton, is what American society deems ‘normal’” (Scott 240). But if Marie Antoinette is so in keeping with The Addams Family ethos, why does she stay buried in the Netflix series?

Firstly, Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday might be considered too old to be playing with dolls – unless they are voodoo dolls for punishing her enemies. The Netflix series reboots The Addams Family as supernatural teen drama, focusing on Wednesday’s late-adolescent years at Nevermore Academy, a boarding school for outcasts, rather than her childhood in an oddball family household. Secondly, Wednesday’s headless doll might be perceived as an unsuitable companion for a twenty-first-century feminist icon challenging oppressive systems and the tyrannical pilgrim patriarch, Joseph Crackstone (William Houston). Drawing on Hélène Cixous’ famous feminist essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” to explore the concept of female decapitation, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz writes: “male fears about losing their manhood (and their power, which is much the same thing) are frequently dealt with by removing or covering the female head, that is, by denying women the power of identity, language, thought, and selfhood” (8). Marie Antoinette loses her head because the children learn about the violent execution of a real woman in eighteenth-century France. Pugsley then re-enacts this punishment on a doll that closely resembles his sister (Marie Antoinette wears the same dress as Wednesday). While this type of play might be in keeping with the macabre humour of Charles Addams’ original comic strips, it threatens to disempower Wednesday’s character in the Netflix series, since her doll, functioning as a type of uncanny Gothic double, is symbolically linked to female castration, objectification, and a lack of voice, identity, and intellect.

That is not to say that, in leaving Marie Antoinette buried, Wednesday does away with dolls. Leaning further into horror conventions than any of its textual predecessors, Wednesday utilises the genre’s tropes whereby childhood toys become possessed and frightening objects. Rather than attaching these meanings to dolls, however, the series attaches them to Wednesday herself, presenting her as a type of living human doll in search of her identity, as she attempts to control her supernatural powers and resist those who seek to control her. Paying tribute to Marie Antoinette, I examine here the ways that dolls and dollhouses are reconfigured in Netflix’s Wednesday, highlighting how the series provides new forms of subversive pleasure for child and teen viewers through the acquired agency of its doll-like protagonist.

“Let’s play dolls”

In many ways, Wednesday Addams has always resembled a doll, with her small stature, Peter-Pan-collar dress and trademark long pigtails. The first ‘real’ Wednesday doll appeared in 1962, two years prior to the TV sitcom. Inspired by Addams’ artwork and produced by Aboriginals Ltd., it didn’t sell particularly well; fast-forward sixty years to the release of the first Netflix season, and Wednesday dolls have exploded in the show’s merchandise, with models available from Mattel (Monster High series), Posh Paws, Fisher Price, and many more. Wednesday’s doll-like appearance is maximised for creepy effect by Burton, as Ortega’s Wednesday hardly ever blinks. Staring at other characters with fixed intensity, she turns her head in slow, exaggerated fashion like a doll in a horror movie come to life. In season one, Wednesday dresses in many different costumes: a grey-striped school uniform, fencing outfit, bee-keeper suit, cat costume (for the Poe Cup tournament), pilgrim costume (for Pilgrim World), and a (now iconic) black dress for the Rave’N ball. The dress waits for her on a headless mannequin behind the window of Uriah’s Heap, an antiques shop in Jericho town (“Woe What a Night”). The model is a clever headless nod to Wednesday’s doll and her love of the macabre, but it also alludes to the vulnerability of her character: in a segregated world of ‘normies’ and outcasts, Ortega’s Wednesday must find her identity, learn to process her emotions, and protect herself against those who wish her harm.

Although Marie Antoinette is absent from the series, Ortega’s Wednesday remains the proud owner of headless dolls. In the show’s first episode, she impresses Tyler (Hunter Doohan) by telling him she built a steam-powered guillotine when she was ten: “I wanted to decapitate my dolls more efficiently” (“Wednesday’s Child is Full of Woe”). The shift here is subtle yet significant: this Wednesday doesn’t rely on her brother to decapitate her dolls – she does it herself. What’s more, she actively seeks to perfect the method, suggesting that the subversion of normative girlhood provides an ongoing sense of pleasure. “Grim Reaper Barbie,” Tyler replies, “makes perfect sense” (“Wednesday’s Child is Full of Woe”). Wednesday is like the Grim Reaper, personifying death, making ‘a hobby’ out of scaring people, and dishing out violent punishments to any normies who threaten her or her family. But if Wednesday enacts forms of violence, she is also the victim of violent oppression, a duality expressed through dolls. A flashback sequence shows a young Wednesday (Karina Varadi) on her birthday with an Addams Family cake topped with miniature figurines. The Wednesday figurine, surrounded by her family members, gets decapitated by a falling guillotine. As the fake blood gushes out, young Wednesday smiles, while in voiceover, her teen self describes this as “the perfect cake” (“Quid Pro Woe”). The sequence pays homage to the TV sitcom and comic strips, with the young Wednesday resembling Loring, and the cake figurines looking like Addams’ cartoons. However, the scene goes further by presenting the viewer with two ‘miniature’ Wednesdays to explore her subjectivity: the sadistic punishing voyeur and the helpless decapitated victim.

Extending the living doll aesthetic, Wednesday is filled with other types of dolls. In season one, Wednesday visits a life-sized model of Joseph Crackstone at Pilgrim World and sets fire to his memorial statue with the help of Thing (“Friend or Woe”). A large ice sculpture of a Yeti towers over Nevermore pupils at the Rave’N ball (“Woe What a Night”), while Principal Weems (Gwendoline Christie) has a giant stone fireplace with a gorgon’s head in her office. Wednesday’s therapist, Dr Kinbott (Riki Lindhorne) keeps a mechanical bird in a cuckoo-clock house and makes figurine tableaus out of roadkill. Observing some of these in Uriah’s Heap, Ajax (Georgie Farmer) asks Enid (Emma Myers) if “squirrels and rats could ever work out” (“Friend or Woe”). His question, alluding to himself as a gorgon and Enid as a werewolf, demonstrates how miniature objects can also function as “significant sense-making tools” (King 253-4). Young viewers perceive these characters through an enlarged gaze to reflect on important issues such as identity, difference and power, which in turn provides them with a sense of control.

Wednesday, as the show’s lead living doll, appears in many boxes and confined spaces. Her sleeping repose in the school hospital bed mimics a dead body in an open casket (“Wednesday’s Child is Full of Woe”) and she pretends to be a corpse in a freezer chamber at the morgue (“Woe What a Night”). At Pilgrim World, Wednesday serves fudge samples to tourists in a gift shop where the shelves are stacked with dolls (“Friend or Woe”). At the old Gates mansion, her stalker, later revealed to be Laurel Gates (Christina Ricci), keeps photos of her hidden inside a children’s music box (“Quid Pro Woe”). Laurel’s childhood bedroom is a perfectly preserved miniature world, with its dainty furniture, artificial aesthetic, and pristine dollhouse. But Laurel’s dollhouse is a trap, a visual inversion of the life-sized, gothic-style dollhouse, Nevermore Academy, which will become the series’ most important site for Wednesday’s empowered identity.

“I’m not you, Mother”

Miniature houses fill Wednesday: the old meeting house, the bee hut, the art studio, Crackstone’s crypt, the monster’s cave in the woods. This miniaturised feel aligns with the vision of production designer, Mark Scruton, who sought to enlarge Addams’ artwork: “In the town, a lot of the shop fronts were stolen right out of the Chas Addams cartoons” (qtd. in Hailu). Nevermore looks like a replica of a Victorian dollhouse, with its gothic-style towers and turrets. Its circular attic window, marking the dorm of Enid and Wednesday, also resembles Wednesday’s dollhouse in the original Addams cartoons. Dollhouses signify the domestic world, with some of the earliest models operating as didactic tools for wives and mothers to effect “a performance of ideal womanhood” (Moseley-Christian 344). On being left at Nevermore, the dollhouse where her mother once played and met her father, Wednesday declares, “I’m not you, Mother. I will never fall in love, or be a housewife, or have a family” (“Wednesday’s Child is Full of Woe”). Wednesday fears becoming a replica of her mother, Morticia Addams (Catherine Zeta-Jones), and it is this version of herself that she willingly decapitates. However, Wednesday eventually finds an independent and fulfilling version of herself at Nevermore Academy, learning to master her dark psychic ability with the help of her new uncanny doppelgänger, Goody Addams.

In several episodes, Wednesday almost loses her head. Whenever a psychic vision occurs, she throws back her head in grotesque fashion, tilting it so far past her shoulders that viewers may fear it will fall off. Her eyes widen in shock, her body goes stiff as if in rigor mortis, then she collapses, only regaining control once the vision has ended. In many ways, this is a fitting example of body horror where “the fear of one’s own body, of how one controls and relates to it” informs the narrative (Brophy 280). Perceiving Ortega’s Wednesday as a type of living human doll whose childhood playthings include the decapitated Marie Antoinette, this recurring motif also suggests a more meaningful representation of Wednesday in the throes of adolescence and fighting to keep her head.

Wednesday is often warned about the dangers of her psychic abilities. Xavier tells her that her visions are “triggered by emotions” and may be untrustworthy (“Friend or Woe”). Principle Weems recalls how Wednesday’s mother “thought she might be losing her mind” when her own visions started as a teenager (“Woe is the Loneliest Number”). Morticia says that Wednesday’s gifts are more powerful than her own, “but without the proper training, they can lead to madness” (“You Reap What You Woe”). Wednesday believes that her long-dead ancestor, Goody Addams, will train her, but Morticia warns, “Goody was a witch of great strength, but her vengeance pushed her too far and even she couldn’t save herself” (“You Reap What You Woe”). Significantly, Goody is Wednesday’s double: also performed by Ortega, she is a fellow Raven in Wednesday’s bloodline and resembles a creepy doll come to life with her slow movements, wide staring eyes, blonde pigtails, and corseted pale dress. Wednesday will learn to control her supernatural power under Goody’s tutelage, but to do so, she must first tackle her unresolved conflicts with the living: in particular, her overbearing mother.

In a discussion of the proliferation of dollhouses in contemporary horror films, Anna Leszkiewicz observes how these texts often explore claustrophobic mother-daughter relationships: “Trapped in houses and families that smother them, the women of these stories are all struggling under the weight of maternal relationships that infantilise and imprison them.” Wednesday’s mother is loving, not cruel, but she remains a powerful, domineering force. Rebelling, Wednesday first attempts to escape from her mother’s dollhouse, which she describes as a prison: “As usual, you underestimate me, Mother. I will escape this educational penitentiary, and you will never hear from me again” (“Wednesday’s Child is Full of Woe”). Morticia insists that Nevermore is the perfect school for Wednesday, but her daughter challenges her at parents’ weekend: “Why would you send me somewhere where I can only ever exist in your shadow?” (“You Reap What You Woe”). Eventually, Wednesday realises that her relationship with Morticia is not a competition, and her rejection of Nevermore might be a fear of not living up to the idealised self. With this knowledge, Wednesday can begin to imagine a new life for herself at Nevermore. Her transformation is confirmed when she is fatally wounded by Crackstone and Goody’s spirit passes through her, saving her life and disappearing as they become one (“A Murder of Woes”).

Asserting Wednesday’s new identity and her mastery of her psychic ability, the second season of Wednesday begins with her tracking down a serial killer who makes replica dolls of his victims. In the opening image, Wednesday sits at a table in his basement, surrounded by dolls (“Here We Woe Again”). As far as horror goes, this is one of the series’ creepiest images, with the serial killer presenting his victim with a ‘gift’: an actual Wednesday doll. But as Wednesday quickly escapes and turns on her captor with the chilling words, “Let’s play dolls,” the message going forward is clear. Playing dolls can be fun, but woe betide anyone who poses a genuine threat to an Addams. This Wednesday keeps her head.

---

Works Cited

“The Addams Family Goes to School.” The Addams Family, season 1, episode 1, ABC, 18 Sept. 1964, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwwhtOnMyjuxQy81h7uJMCdsR-bS-uVaD.

“Amnesia in the Addams Family.” The Addams Family, season 1, episode 22, ABC, 19 Feb. 1965, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwwhtOnMyjuxQy81h7uJMCdsR-bS-uVaD.

Brophy, Philip. “Horrality: The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films.” The Horror Reader, edited by Ken Gelder, Routledge, 2000, pp. 276–84.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875–93.

Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard. “Introduction: The Spectacle of the Female Head.” Off with Her Head!: The Denial of Women’s Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture, edited by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz and Wendy Doniger, University of California Press, 1995, pp. 1–14.

“Friend or Woe.” Wednesday, season 1, episode 3, Netflix, 23 Nov. 2022, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81231974.

Hailu, Selome. “Wednesday Production Designer Explains Inspiration and Process Behind the Stained Glass, Romanian Forest and Shrunken Head.” Variety, 23 November 2022, https://variety.com/2022/artisans/news/wednesday-production-designer-stained-glass-1235440848/.

“Here We Woe Again.” Wednesday, season 2, episode 1, Netflix, 6 Aug. 2025, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81231974.

“If You Don’t Know Me by Now.” Wednesday, season 1, episode 7, Netflix, 23 Nov. 2022, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81231974.

King, Claire Sisco. “Not Your Mom’s Dollhouse: Miniatures, Mediation, and Trauma.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 48, no. 2, 2025, pp. 249–65.

Leszkiewicz, Anna. “The Rise of the Creepy Doll’s House.” New Statesman, 31 October 2018.

Lightfoot, Najah. The Spiritual Magic of Dolls. Weiser Books, 2025.

Miserocchi, H. Kevin. The Addams Family: An Evilution. Pomegranate, 2010.

Moseley-Christian, Michelle. “Seventeenth-Century Pronk Poppenhuisen: Domestic Space and the Ritual Function of Dutch Dollhouses for Women.” Home Cultures, vol. 7, no. 3, 2010, pp. 341–63.

“A Murder of Woes.” Wednesday, season 1, episode 8, Netflix, 23 Nov. 2022, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81231974.

“Quid Pro Woe.” Wednesday, season 1, episode 6, Netflix, 23 Nov. 2022, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81231974.

Scott, Lindsey. “Growing in Nightshade: Toxic Culture and Healing Horror in Netflix’s Wednesday.” Poison and the Popular Imagination: Representations, Iconographies, and Meanings in Media and Culture, edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Bloomsbury, 2025, pp. 227–43.

“Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe.” Wednesday, season 1, episode 1, Netflix, 23 Nov. 2022, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81231974.

“Woe is the Loneliest Number.” Wednesday, season 1, episode 2, Netflix, 23 Nov. 2022, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81231974.

“Woe What a Night.” Wednesday, season 1, episode 4, Netflix, 23 Nov. 2022, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81231974.

“You Reap What You Woe.” Wednesday, season 1, episode 5, Netflix, 23 Nov. 2022, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81231974.