Life Like Dolls: The Collector Doll Phenomenon and the Lives of the Women Who Love Them
A. F. Robertson
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0415944511
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Since the 1980s there has been a growing billion dollar business producing porcelain collectible dolls. Avertised in Sunday newspapers and mailbox fliers, even Marie Osmond, an avid collector herself, is now promoting her own line of dolls on the Home Shopping Network and sales are soaring. With average price tags of $100 -- and $500 or more for a handcrafted or limited edition doll -- these dolls strike a chord in the hearts of middle-aged and older women, their core buyers, some of whom create "nurseries" devoted to collections that number in the hundreds.
Each doll has its own name, identity and "adoption certificate," like Shawna, "who has just learned to stack blocks all by herself," and Bobby, whose "brown, handset eyes shine with mischief and little-boy plans." Exploring the nexus of emotions, consumption and commodification they represent, A. F. Robertson tracks the rise of the porcelain collectible market; interviews the women themselves; and visits their clubs, fairs and homes to understand what makes the dolls so irresistible.
Lifelike but freakish; novelties that profess to be antiques; pricey kitsch: These dolls are the product of powerful emotions and big business. Life Like Dolls pursues why middle-class, educated women obsessively collect these dolls and what this phenomenon says about our culture.
Taipei: City of Displacements (A McLellan Book)
Pulp Fascism: Right Wing Themes in Comics, Graphic Novels, and Popular Literature
Essential Manners for Men: What to Do, When to Do It, and Why
A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul
Countries and Their Cultures, Volume 2: Denmark - Kyrgyzstan
But it is also a victim of the old and futile tendency to separate “nurture” and “nature”: “Ignoring or playing down the biological, material body helps to perpetuate dualisms of mind versus body, with all their gendered connotations.”32 The modern academic disciplines have set themselves up around this schism, with biologists, historians, geologists, and psychologists LIFE LIKE DOLLS 17 going about their own separate business. But discussion of heredity and environment is now shifting its.
Sympathetically with the collectors’ feelings we have to ask some deeper questions about what aspects of “real life” are embodied in the dolls and how they are put there. Part of the answer can be found in the clever details of manufacture, but it is of course mainly the women themselves who imbue the dolls with life. How and why do they do it? For all its apparent childish triviality, the porcelain collector doll (PCD) obliges us to think again about the distinctions we habitually make between.
Franz Reinhardt.31 The Franklin Mint was set up in 1965 by Joe Segel (who later founded the QVC—Quality Value Convenience—TV shopping channel). The company, well known for its medallions and jewelry, was taken over by Warner Brothers in 1981 and was bought by the current owners, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, from Warner in 1985 for $167.5 million. They added the Franklin Heirloom Dolls to the firm’s repertoire, and by 1995 the firm had about $800 million in sales worldwide ($600 million in the.
At some risk of seeing the resemblance between dolls and children a little too clearly, becoming susceptible to the old shock of bereavement when they are forcibly reminded that they are “just things” (the shattered porcelain, teddy losing his stuffing). People can get very attached to all sorts of collectible objects (thim bles, knives, bubblegum cards) but their “thing- 120 LIFE LIKE DOLLS ness” is usually more obvious and less troubling. The PCDs are not simply collected as clever porcelain.
Grandma displaying the dolls in her room and the rest of the house.” She passed them on, one by one, to her granddaughters, including Kathleen: We were too young, so most of the time they were lost, sold at garage sales, poked in the face with thumbtacks, or colored on. Now that I am a young woman at the age of 23, I have taken on the responsibility of preserving what is left of my grandma’s remaining dolls. I sometimes, very briefly, show them to my five-year-old niece, and then I hurry and put.