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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Dawn Keetley and Elizabeth Erwin As the essays in this special issue make emphatically clear, dollhouses and miniatures pervade horror. But why? What is horrifying about the doll, the dollhouse, the miniature? Each essay offers their own particular answer to this question, but here we want to offer some general thoughts. Dolls (and their houses) […]