The feminist reclamation of the doll within Western twentieth and twenty-first century women's writing

This thesis will analyse the feminist repossession of the doll within twentieth and twenty-first century women's writing, from its male representation as a figure of female cultivation and the male gaze. The figure of the doll holds immense importance in the shaping of female identity within today's culture, its image being prevalent through children's toys, puppet shows, clothes mannequins and sex objects, even becoming a cultural figure of female aesthetic attainment (Lee Weida, 2011). This study aims to explore the literary doll within women's writing to analyse its feminist significance from the 1900s to the present day.
Previous scholarship has tended to focus on the male gaze through one of its original interpretations, E.T.A. Hoffman's 'The Sandman' (1816), and Sigmund Freud's The Uncanny (1919), hence the representation of the doll in women's writing has been overlooked. This research will study the representation of the doll in a selection of women's writing published between the twentieth and the twenty-first century. This will enable a re-examination of women's texts which have been neglected since the rise of feminism, in order to capture a more representative picture of the evolution of the literary doll through the 'female gaze' (Calogero, Tantleff-Dunn, Thompson, 2011; Gansen, 2017). This study will also include an investigation into women writers' relationships with the symbol of the posthuman doll in the form of the automaton, and how this representation of women illustrates cultural anxieties surrounding women transcending their position within society.
Well-known literary authors such as Daphne du Maurier and Joyce Carol Oates have too used the figure of the doll to subvert the submissive female expectations of the doll in texts that have been under researched in literary scholarship. In 'The Doll' (1937), du Maurier's life-size doll is male and used for the sexual gratification of her female protagonist. Oates' more recent 'Doll: A Romance in Mississippi' (2005) focuses on a young female protagonist called 'Doll', who is prostituted to men by her uncle-figure and breaks away from this possession by murdering the men who attempt to touch her. These subversions of Hoffman's representation of Olympia as a passive female figure of male fetishization, demonstrates the significance of analysing the literary reaction of women to this figure of the male gaze. The inclination of women authors to subvert this figure is also present within texts by neglected authors, such as Margery Lawrence and Thea von Harbou; the latter whose representation of the female automaton was made famous by the male-directed film, Metropolis (1927).This illustrates the extent to which women authors were over-shadowed by men within this period, and how their literary reclamation of the doll has been ignored.
An analysis of novels and short stories between the twentieth and twenty-first century and research through the NTU MLA online databases and archives of the British Library will be undertaken throughout this research project. Visits to Childhood and Doll exhibitions, at Sudbury Hall and the V&A Museum of Childhood in London, will enable the collection of historical information for contextualisation of the texts under investigation. Working with these organisations will enable an in-depth analysis of the influences the doll had on women during the 1900s up until now, and how this is reflected in their literature.