Depicting Canada’s Children

Mapping a Canadian Girlhood Historically through Dolls and Doll-Play

I n the last ten years, feminist researchers and researchers in the field of childhood studies and girlhood studies have begun to change the academic reception of dolls. Dolls are no longer considered trivial artifacts of a commercial girls’ culture symbolizing static representations of conventional femininity.1 Rather, as the rich body of literature on dolls, especially Barbie and Barbie-play, highlights, this space is one for contestations of meaning in terms of how dolls depict a contemporaneous feminine culture and how girls negotiate these ideological assumptions through play.2 Dolls and doll-play are fascinating areas of investigation providing for rich cross-cultural analyses. This essay seeks to contribute to the rethinking of the material culture of girlhood by focusing particularly on dolls and doll-play in relation to Canadian girls; accordingly, it seeks to map Canadian girlhood within a historical context of girls and popular culture more generally. Like Pat Kirkham in her introduction to The Gendered Object (1996), we are interested in recruiting“analytical tools from diverse sources and disciplines”and reflecting “the interdisciplinarity of much contemporary cultural history.”3 We are particularly concerned with finding ways of linking social science research techniques (e.g., the ethnographic or“insider”perspectives of girls and women) to approaches that are more text and artifact based, as we believe that we need both types of readings. Thus, we draw extensively on the work of Newfoundland cultural historian Stephen Riggins, whose essay called “Field Work in the Living Room: An Autoethnographic Essay” (1994) might be read as a methodological primer on working with both the materiality of objects and the personal meanings attached to these objects. In his use of socio-semiotics, he refers to undertaking denotative and connotative readings of domestic spaces and objects. In explaining his use of the term “denotative,” Riggins employs the term “referencing” and describes it as “all of the content which is about the history, aesthetics or customary uses of the objects.”4 Usually this information is taken for granted owing to the MAPPING A CANADIAN GIRLHOOD HISTORICALLY THROUGH DOLLS AND DOLL-PLAY JACQUELINE REID-WALSH CLAUDIA MITCHELL 109 constant presence and use of the objects to the degree that often they are not even considered to have a history. When interviewing respondents about their artifacts, usually they have little to say about this aspect. By contrast, according to Riggins, connotative information is of a personal nature and concerns individuals’relationships with objects, and interviewees usually have a good amount of detail about this aspect of the artifact. In explaining his use of this term he uses the word“mapping”to suggest how the objects serve as “entry points for the telling of stories about the self and its personal relationships .”5 In conducting autoethnographic fieldwork in his parents’ living room, Riggins carefully and systematically photographs (and comments on) the space and the objects (both permanent and ephemeral). In our analysis of Canadian dolls and doll-play we look at both denotative dimensions (what we refer to as“out of context”) and connotative aspects (“in context”) or the “storying” involved when interviewing others or ourselves using a “memory-work” method and other autobiographical approaches. The first section provides a historical overview of dolls in Canada in relation to Canadian girls by using and problematizing the question “What is a Canadian doll?” in terms of considering aspects such as the nationality of the producers, the consumers, and the users of the artifact. Our particular focus in the first part is on the methodological issues related to the materiality of dolls in doll-play. Within the framework of viewing museum collections, we provide examples of dolls that are unique in terms of their“Canadianness,”such as the Eaton’s Beauty doll, the Maggie Muggins doll, the Barbara Ann Scott doll, and the Anne of Green Gables doll, as well as others that do not possess the same national signification. In the second part of the essay we extend the discussion of “What is a Canadian doll?” from the artifacts to the players to examine how we might use techniques of memory-work as tools for studying both the doll and the players. Here, we draw on the gendered memory-work studies of Haug et al., Mitchell and Reid-Walsh, and Mitchell and Weber to look at several types of personal meanings:6 memories of Barbie-play, memories of Eaton’s catalogue play as constructing homemade paper dolls from the pages of the catalogue, and memories of doll...