Elizabeth Bowen’s Toys and the Imperatives of Play

Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction and nonfiction feature a panoply of toys. Stuffed animals, dolls, and tin soldiers necessarily figure as pieces of realist detail accompanying the multitude of children who people her novels and short stories. They recur in her many metaphors, in which characters are likened to wind-up dolls, rocking horses, spinning tops, and puppets. Like Walter Benjamin and other twentieth-century cultural critics, Bowen wrote a series of articles—most notably “Toys,” an unpublished essay dated 7 December 1944—about the public’s growing intellectual fascination with the toy.¹ In radio interviews, she often turned to playthings to frame her aesthetic development or index aspects of her literary style. Reflecting on the relationship between reality and fiction, she stated, “I think the circumstances of my own life and my memory and my autobiography were much like a box of bricks, out of which a child might build a building.”² In an effort to describe her experimentation with form in The Heat of the Day (1948), she explained, “I wanted the convulsive shaking of a kaleidoscope, a kaleidoscope also in which the inside reflector was cracked.”³ Her “Notes on Writing a Novel” (1945) resembles a toy tract written in the tradition of Heinrich von Kleist, in which she elevates the marionette to the status of a philosophical object to occasion her larger theories on character, mimesis, and narrative. That the toy could serve so many functions in Bowen’s writing not only signals its central importance to an understanding of her literary aesthetics but also exemplifies one of her most striking arguments about imaginative resource and the felt imperatives of play, namely that all objects have the potential to become toys.

This essay plays with a wide range of resources and endeavors to reimagine Bowen’s writing in relation to several late nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual traditions. More than critical indulgence or a performative exercise, this approach is imperative owing to Bowen’s long-debated or belated status within the literary canon, the genre-bending and often bewildering idiosyncrasies of her style, and the failure of her writing to fit neatly into time-worn aesthetic, temporal, and national paradigms in critico-literary history.⁴ With a rigor informed by a scholarly body made up of modernist critics, Bowenites, and “thing theorists,” I will also draw together Bowen’s myriad reflections on the toy (gleaned from published and unearthed essays, interviews, and letters) in order, ultimately, to probe the relationship between materiality and metaphor in her novels. In likening characters to toys—especially the paper figures, wooden dolls, and set pieces of the Edwardian toy theater—Bowen critiques the “lifelessness” of Anglo-Irish communities, while simultaneously testing the limits of her own realist practices.

Toy Theaters and Interior Worlds of Play

In her critical and autobiographical essays, Bowen nostalgically returns to a set of toys that affected her developing sensibilities. She rhapsodically recalls her aunt’s Japanese, “tonsured, lackadaisical doll that had a sash gummed to its middle and sleeves of paper gummed to its flapping arms.”⁵ She considers a village shop’s aviary of “miniature bright-painted celluloid” perchy birds, that when flicked at exhibited a “delicate equilibrium.”⁶ She describes the rows of threadbare, stuffed animals lining the beds of her dormitory, and particularly a friend’s teddy bear, with which she frequently “played Jezebel.”⁷ Of all the objects in her childhood, Bowen favored the toy theater, a plaything that, itself, reflected the changing sociomaterial conditions of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Children would construct a miniature proscenium, figures, scenery, and props from large sheets of mechanically reproduced, printed paperboard, which they would cut, paste, water-color, and often embellish with found domestic objects (ranging from fabric, string, and tinsel to feathers and locks of hair).⁸ Recollecting her education at the age of seven in an English parsonage, Bowen writes that, between lessons, she and one of her caretakers “constructed a wonderful toy theatre, and staged a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (or, at least...