Beautiful Black Dolls at the Shelburne Museum

My partner and I recently visited the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, which is a museum whose collections are distributed among 39 buildings on an estate near Lake Champlain. The core of the museum consists of the personal collections of heiress Electra Havemeyer Webb, an aficionado of folk art and US material culture. The museum maintains collections in circus figures and circus posters, clothing, decorative arts, folk art, impressionist paintings, quilts, tools... and dolls. More than 400 of them. There's a whole book just about the doll collection.

I saw hundreds of dolls at the Shelburne Museum, but the ones that really stay with me are these two:

These are very special, rare, beautiful dolls. To explain what makes them so interesting, I have to provide some background on dolls and race.

Dolls are political--not only in how they look, but also in how they feel, and how their materiality invites different kinds of play. In Racial Innocence, I wrote a lot about soft dolls that were designed to accommodate children's rough play. In the U.S. in the nineteenth century, a few small cottage industries began manufacturing such dolls. Small-scale makers of soft commercial dolls included Izannah Walker, Martha Jenks Chase, and Julia Jones Beecher, half-sister to Harriet Beecher Stowe. These white women all lived and worked in the postbellum North, but each manufactured at least one Plantation-style black doll. The Shelburne Museum owns, for example, this "mammy" doll manufactured by Martha Jenks Chase sometime between 1890 and 1900:

As I showed in my book, white nineteenth-century American children routinely subjected soft black dolls to enormous violence, and this violence was not only tolerated but encouraged by white adults who viewed such acts as racially innocent.

But there's another part of the story. Until the Civil Rights Movement, most commercial black dolls in the United States were caricatured and grotesque--but in Germany and France, a whole other vision of black people flourished. As Myla Perkins demonstrates in her two-volume masterpiece, Black Dolls: An Identification and Value Guide, nineteenth-century dollmakers in France and Germany produced black dolls with the same molds they used to produce white dolls. The resulting black dolls were beautiful and non-caricatured. Unfortunately, because they were expensive imports, few African American children had access to them. In the U.S., most owners of these dolls were wealthy white girls.

Which brings us back to the white, wealthy Electra Havemeyer Webb, who added these beautiful dolls to her museum collection in 1951. These dolls are made of papier-mâché, and the Shelburne Museum identifies them as German, most likely produced in the 1850s (they were about a century old, then, when the museum acquired them). Unlike other German dolls which were produced with molds that were also used for white dolls, these dolls' faces and hair seem designed to represent the features of people of African descent.

The woman wears fine clothes and a bonnet, with detailing in the trim and buttons. While it is possible that the doll was intended to represent a servant, she does not present only that image (unlike the Martha Jenks Chase "mammy" doll and so many others like it). Her face is finely-drawn, realistic, and lovely. There is no hint of mockery.

The man is more ambiguous. He could represent a gentleman, or he could represent a servant in livery. Despite this ambiguity, this doll projects dignity. His clothing is, like the female doll's, carefully detailed in rich cloth. And the face beautifully represents African-diasporic features. In both cases, the large eyes and full cheeks reflect the period's conventions in doll-faces more than those of racist caricature.





Papier-mâché is delicate. Unlike the soft cloth "mammy" doll, who was created to endure ritualistic abuse, these beautiful, dignified, realistic dolls scripted gentle, respectful play.

How did these fragile dolls survive a century in which the abuse of black dolls was the norm? Were they owned by black children? Did they survive because they were loved and treated tenderly? Did they survive because they were unloved and ignored? As with most dolls, it is difficult or even impossible to determine precisely what relationship they had with individual children and adults in the past. But we can imagine. And we can pause to look these dolls in the face and to remember: no matter how deeply the nineteenth century was steeped in racist imagery, counter-images existed. "Mammy" and other caricatures dominated black dolls prior to the Civil Rights Movement. And because they were so dominant, so denigrating, and so damaging, it is easy to forget that other kinds of dolls existed. But they did exist--and when we see them in places like the Shelburne Museum, we should pause, pay attention, and really take in the beauty before us.

"Remarkably impressive.... Bernstein surprises us with fractures that we know."

Sometimes a review takes your breath away. Kathryn Bond Stockton's, which just came out in Modern Drama, is one such review of Racial Innocence.

The review begins:

So much depends upon dolls in pain. Do they feel their beatings at the hands of children? What’s at stake in thinking a doll can feel distress?

This is a drama. The liquid idea or crystallized tactility of such a possible sensation for a doll, for a black doll – the sense that it could recoil, with tenderness or sorrow, if you were to hit it – tells us volumes about the race of childhood, from the time of slavery up to Civil Rights. Childhood, which enthrones innocence, which shapes race (and rights that start in childhood), hangs upon pain – doll pain, in part. Expertly, persuasively, and often brilliantly, Bernstein tells us why.

With her inventiveness, thoroughness, and carefulness always in evidence, always remarkably impressive and required, always surfacing in apt formulations, she makes her focus on dolls indispensable to grasping racial cruelty in the nineteenth century and even beyond. That is to say, in this conspicuously well-researched study, Bernstein surprises us with fractures that we know. Pain as a possible, meaningful sensation – a feeling we attribute to others, even dolls – marks specific borders, especially between enslaved and free, but also between childhood innocence and something like juvenile inuredness to hurt. Who feels suffering and so needs shielding from it? Who, in other words, has racial innocence, a sensitivity to possible harm? Children rehearse these relations with their dolls. And adults rehearse them by watching children play – and by watching dramas or reading certain novels that induce beliefs surrounding human pain.

I want to include all of the review, but I can't for copyright reasons. It's on Project Muse, for those of you who have access to that database.

Kathryn Bond Stockton is the author of three books, including, most recently, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century and Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets "Queer"--books I admire keenly. I'm honored that Kathryn Bond Stockton reviewed my book, and I deeply appreciate this lyrical, compelling engagement.

Winner, Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize, New England American Studies Association

Racial Innocence has won the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize, given by the New England American Studies Association. I am thrilled and honored to win this award, and I thank the NEASA and in particular the Rudnick prize committee: Aaron Lecklider, Jeffrey Meriwether, and chair Ben Railton (who runs the terrific website American Studier). I am especially pleased because Lois P. Rudnick's research was useful to my own. Lois Rudnick is a wonderful literary scholar and biographer who has written many books on modernism and the "new woman," and in particular on Mabel Dodge Luhan, the famous patron of the arts who was in social circles that included, in Paris, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and, in Taos, New Mexico, Georgia O'Keeffe. In Racial Innocence, I cite an astonishing passage from Intimate Memories, The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan, which Rudnick edited. In this memoir, Luhan recalls how, as a girl, she sadistically attacked the genital region of a black doll. The memory is offered with no apology or embarrassment; if anything, Luhan relates the racist violence with relish (she recalls that the attack on the doll aroused in her girl-self "a queer delicious kind of pleasure, both mysterious and yet familiar"). The incident is one of the most vicious and disturbing that I recount in my book (you can read about Luhan's attack on the doll on pages 209-210 in my book and pp. 17-18 in Intimate Memories). Rudnick's new book, The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis in the Making of Modern American Culture, was just published this year by the University of New Mexico Press, and I hear that the violence in that book is even more disturbing. I haven't read that book yet, but I certainly will soon.

Sometimes I have mixed feelings about the amplitude of violence that I document in my book. But then I am reminded that no matter how much violence I recount, there is infinitely more in history. I wanted my book to historicize violence in a new way--especially by taking seriously the violence perpetrated by white children like Mabel Dodge Luhan. I thank the NEASA for honoring this project, even as it brings to light so much pain.

"horrifying historical content built into supposedly innocent items of everyday culture "

The journal Girlhood Studies has run a special issue, edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell, on dolls and girls' culture. The issue includes Elizabeth Chin's great review of my book. Here's an excerpt:

“It is a great pleasure to see a book of this sophistication that takes on children and childhood to argue their centrality in larger issues. From the outset, Bernstein makes it clear that both childhood and child material culture have been key in the discourse and practices of making race and racism in the United States. Especially important is the chapter on Raggedy Ann, which highlights that doll’s ancestral ties to the golliwog and other racist characters. After reading Bernstein’s careful and compelling account of that particular staple of many a girl’s childhood, I find it hard to imagine buying one ever again.

“This focus on the horrifying historical content built into supposedly innocent items of everyday culture is surely the book’s most important point. It is one that I imagine will hit home quite hard with undergraduates in particular; this book would be a great resource for courses on race, children and childhood, power, and U.S. culture. Bernstein is at her best when demonstrating the ways in which the everyday walks a tightrope with balancing exactly those dilemmas most of us claim to have avoided: racism, sexism, and hegemony more broadly. Perhaps more than almost any book I have seen, this one is a vehicle for showing students the paradoxical ways in which even against our will, we are drawn into dynamics of power and inequality in the most subtle and everyday ways. . . .

"It is certainly both striking and disheartening how easily the scripts identified by Bernstein can be applied to . . . present-day items of material culture. The power and relevance of her analysis is thus something we are likely to discover not just in our own everyday lives, but in those of girls for whom [present-day] dolls are ostensibly intended. As the stuff through which much of their understanding of the world around them begins to take shape, these objects of material culture are, as Bernstein richly demonstrates, powerful vehicles for complex agendas usually thought to be far outside the realm of childhood innocence.”