Doll House Build
Azucena Mcquay
Last weekend I hit the holy grail of estate sales: a former electrical engineer and computer fanatic with hoarder tendencies had passed, leaving an attic full of meticulously-organized back issues of IEEE Spectrum and MacWorld, wall-sized ASCII art printouts, three-ring binders full of satellite data, ancient Radio Shack manuals, books on electronic spycraft, computer simulations, and systems thinking.
I made multiple trips, hauling home dusty computer magazines and aerospace convention newsletters that will likely populate my own future estate sale. I guess I have light hoarder tendencies myself, but what can I say? Every home is an archive.
Readers of this Substack will quickly recognize in it the months-long obsession with lucid dreaming that played out, in part, in these pages. In the Noema piece, I talk to two philosophers and a cognitive scientist; we get into animal dreams, the seams of reality, and ancient traditions of temple dream incubation. As ever I am grateful to find outlets that will give me space to go long on my utterly noncommercial ideas.
This 2019 talk from the designer Jen Hadley about the history of type design for television broadcast made me think about the persistent and often hidden materiality of technology. Did you know that scrolling credit sequences were once printed on literal scrolls of paper?
And anyway\u2014you never know what you\u2019ll find. On impulse, I also grabbed a \u201870s coffee table book about dollhouse collecting (regular readers know I have a weakness for plays of scale). Paging through it on a Sunday afternoon, I fell into a lost world; the book turned out to be a serious history of \u201Cthe hobby\u201D as well as an index of its leading practitioners. In 1976, it seems, miniature-making was still a cottage industry, anchored by monomaniacal craftspeople\u2014the kind who\u2019d happily spend a month hand-carving a tiny Edwardian dresser\u2014who did robust mail-order business advertising in hobbyist magazines like the Nutshell News. Delightful, obviously.
But not even the most gifted among them would have been good enough for The Queen\u2019s Doll\u2019s House. This eight foot-tall mansion, presented to Queen Mary of England \u201Cby her loyal subjects\u201D in 1924, is almost certainly the most intricate dollhouse ever built. It has electricity, working elevators, and a basement livery full of royal limousines. Its silver taps run hot and cold water. The wine cellar contains real champagne, sherry, and kegs of beer. The paintings hanging throughout the house were produced by famous English painters of the day, and authors like Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton, and Joseph Conrad each contributed tiny leather-bound, hand-written books to the dollhouse\u2019s 200-volume library. Every major firm in England produced 1/12th-scale versions of their products for the occasion. The entire inventory of the dollhouse spans two large volumes.
One of these volumes, The Book of the Queen\u2019s Doll\u2019s House, contains a fascinatingly weird essay by the engineer Mervyn O\u2019Gorman on the \u201Ceffect of size\u201D on the dollhouse\u2019s world. It\u2019s a known bugbear in miniature-making that certain materials don\u2019t perform well at scale: an inch-wide cotton coverlet sits on the dollhouse bed like a piece of cardboard, for example. But Mr. O\u2019Gorman must have been the first writer to seriously consider the physics of the miniature. According to his calculations, the little people living in the dollhouse\u2014he called them \u201CDollomites\u201D\u2014would have the strength of ten men. They\u2019d eat six meals a day, leap staircases in a single bound, and have hearts like hummingbirds. Their voices would be inaudible to us; the gramophone and working pianos in their house would cause more pain than pleasure to their tiny ears. To the Dollomites, the paint on the walls would be a half-inch thick, and a single drop of water from the tap the size of a pear. Every glass of wine would be so viscous they\u2019d have to suck it down. And forget about soup. \u201CCream or thick soup,\u201D O\u2019Gorman warns, \u201Cwould be so sticky that the soup spoon would be found to lift the plate with it from the table.\u201D
Of course, I find all this wonderful\u2014I love it when someone takes an absurd premise seriously. But there\u2019s something about this attempt in particular that I think gets at the fundamental appeal of miniatures, that is, the impossibility of ever inhabiting them. In attempting a rational scientific study of the Queen\u2019s dollhouse, O\u2019Gorman accidentally created something utterly monstrous: a dollhouse world populated by whispering, ravenous, cream-sucking, super-strong freaks. It\u2019s unholy, and that\u2019s because dollhouses are not made to be lived in; they\u2019re barely fun to play with. Dollhouses are for looking. As the poet Susan Stewart observes, dollhouses are \u201Cconsumed by the eye.\u201D They\u2019re shadowboxes of simulated order, a way of distilling the complexity of life\u2014in this case, an empire\u2014into a complete whole that can be enjoyed at a glance. The most famous dollhouses, writes Stewart, were \u201Cmeant to stop time and thus present the illusion of a perfectly complete and hermetic world.\u201D
Of course, it\u2019s hopeless; everything changes, everything moves. A dollhouse only gives the illusion of possessing that which we can never truly inhabit. But the empire reels in pain. History marches on. From birth to death every cell in our bodies sloughs off into an undifferentiated world. Every home becomes an estate sale. Rot and repeat.
A few weeks ago the writer Theresia Enzensberger and I held a public conversation at the Goethe-Institut in Los Angeles; as someone who tends to daisy-chain from one fixation to another, I rarely have the opportunity to talk about my work as a whole. At one point I was struggling to connect the dots and our moderator, the science fiction scholar Sherryl Vint, made the very astute observation that what seems to capture my interest is the gap between models and reality. I felt deeply seen by that. It\u2019s true!
Speaking of noncommercial ideas: the original Bumper Stickers for Your Phone, Volumes II and II are now available as a bundle. To quote Jason Kottke, \u201Clol, tiny bumper stickers for your phone.\u201D
I can\u2019t get enough of the Studs Terkel Archive Podcast, an unofficial feed of interviews conducted by the legendary oral historian Studs Terkel on his four-decade-spanning Chicago radio show. Two of my favorite episodes: Studs talks to Quentin Crisp, in London, about being out in England before the War, and to James Baldwin, right after the publication of Another Country, in 1962. Baldwin ends his interview with a fragment of a poem by Marianne Moore, which I\u2019ll leave you with now:
The play concerns the fate of a married woman, who, at the time in Norway, lacked reasonable opportunities for self-fulfillment in a male-dominated world. Despite the fact that Ibsen denied it was his intent to write a feminist play, it was a great sensation at the time[2] and caused a "storm of outraged controversy" that went beyond the theater to the world of newspapers and society.[3]
In 2006, the centennial of Ibsen's death, A Doll's House held the distinction of being the world's most-performed play that year.[4] UNESCO has inscribed Ibsen's autographed manuscripts of A Doll's House on the Memory of the World Register in 2001, in recognition of their historical value.[5]
The title of the play is most commonly translated as A Doll's House, though some scholars use A Doll House. John Simon says that A Doll's House is "the British term for what [Americans] call a 'dollhouse'".[6] Egil Trnqvist says of the alternative title: "Rather than being superior to the traditional rendering, it simply sounds more idiomatic to Americans."[7]
The play opens at Christmas time as Nora Helmer enters her home carrying many packages. Nora's husband, Torvald, is working in his study when she arrives. He playfully rebukes her for spending so much money on Christmas gifts, calling her his "little squirrel". He teases her about how, the previous year, she had spent weeks making gifts and ornaments by hand because money was scarce. This year, Torvald is due a promotion at the bank where he works, so Nora feels that they can let themselves go a little. The maid announces two visitors: Mrs. Kristine Linde, an old friend of Nora's, who has come seeking employment; and Dr. Rank, a close friend of the family, who is let into the study. Kristine has had a difficult few years, ever since her husband died leaving her with no money or children. Nora says that things have not been easy for them either: Torvald became sick, and they had to travel to Italy so he could recover. Kristine explains that, when her mother was ill, she had to take care of her brothers, but, now that they are grown, she feels her life is "unspeakably empty". Nora promises to talk to Torvald about finding her a job. Kristine gently tells Nora that she is like a child. Nora is offended, so she tells her that she got money from "some admirer" so they could travel to Italy to improve Torvald's health. She told Torvald that her father gave her the money, but, in fact, she illegally borrowed it without his knowledge (women were forbidden from conducting financial activities such as signing checks without a man's endorsement). Since then, she has been secretly working and saving up to pay off the loan.
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