The Uncanny Doll

Innocence and the Uncanny Doll

Dolls are universal in child play. Hand made from cloth or sticks or store bought, their appeal to children ranges across the imagination. Typically made in human form with movable parts, we attribute human qualities to them. Children interact with dolls to practice and role-play activites witnessed in the world as well as to enact their wishes and range of feelings. Adults' nostalgic attitude about dolls might relate them to fondly recalled innocence and comfort. But another side of our interest in dolls as we mature concerns how strangely they continue to affect us. The once innocent doll can become the uncanny doll, endowed with strangely powerful capacities.

Dolls, manikins, puppets, and the like are fascinating in their suggestiveness. They often appear in artistic productions that engage imaginative-real distinctions. What is their attraction for adults who typically no longer play with dolls ?

vintage dolls from toy museum

Dolls of all sorts can be admired for their physical qualities such as human look-alikeness, babydoll cuteness, Barbie-like desirability, or warrior strength. But they also can serve as magnets for our personal projections and projective identifications. That's what leads us into in uncanny territory. We attribute psychological qualities to these imaginatively animated-objects, which can be good and/or bad: innocent, needy, kind, cunning, mischievous, malevolent . Whatever associations arise from our projections can be comforting, powerful, bewildering, and scary.

Psychology of the Uncanny

The sense of the uncanny interested Sigmund Freud, who described it in 1919 as strangeness come to life in the familiar. Applied to both life and art, the uncanny can take a variety of forms to which individuals are differently susceptible. When we experience the uncanny, it unsettles us. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Like other experiences that awaken us to our personal world, the uncanny tends to alert us, make us pay attention to our reactions to things around us. But it also taps into an ambivalence. The familiar object, which we've usually taken for granted previously, now generates something evasively secret, unfamiliar, or repressed. We enter disquieting territory, rousing us from the stupor of taking for granted the familiar and suggesting there's more to be known. Some of us enter such territory more easily and more willingly than others, expanding our imaginative scope. Some see irony, humour, surreal pleasure in it. But you never know for sure.

Especially so when dolls and puppets, familiar objects from childhood, are transformed into uncanny objects of our experience. We face a rather primal uncertainty over whether such things might be real and alive in some way or just inanimate objects. Psychologically, uncanny dolls call our established adult categories into question. No wonder some adults are particularly uncomfortable with dolls and similar "in-betweens." To quote a science fiction author (Ellen Datlow), "Dolls, perhaps more than any other object demonstrate just how thin the line between love and fear, comfort and horror, can be "

Art and the Uncanny

Dolls, puppets, and masks often appear in artistic works-- given that art, itself, engages imaginative-real connections. You've perhaps experienced uncanny associations when looking at different works of art that have drawn you in. Many artists appreciate the uncanny quality of dolls and their ilk, working with them as content in their paintings, music (Tales of Hoffman), and media productions. Think of Cindy Sherman who deliberately exploits and pushes the doll-human interface to exceptionally vivid heights. So do historic and contemporary media, as in the horror-genre but also in appealing films like Lars and the Real Girl, Barbie, and the prolific depictions of android-human interaction..

Forms of art, especially figurative art, can pull us into our imaginations and evoke associations, memories, and inchoate feelings. These may be pleasant or not, often not quite understood or resolved. Like transitional objects, dolls are more than they appear to be, full of projections and evocations. Their uncanny quality can feel surprising, even frightening to some. All the while, the dolls themselves remain poised elsewhere. Whether they appealing, attractive, mysterious, or eerie, they have caught us in our imaginations.

part of These Boots Were Made For Walking assemblage artwork by Janet Strayer

I've incorporated dolls into my figurative artwork -- as tangible physical objects in assemblage works and depictions in narrative paintings, as shown here. You can see how my poorly photographed source (taken at Pollock's Toy Museum) was rendered into a finished portrait of The Kewpie Family Spots a Fly on the Wall.

The Kewpie Family painting by Janet Strayer (see actual dolls used as source below)

Personally, I prefer painting from poor photos rather than good ones: helps free up more imaginative treatments. I've never displayed The Kewpie Family painting in an exhibit, and I'll explain why.

Here's the story. I once exhibited another story-painting, called Howdy's Girl. It focuses upon a very amiable cowboy-puppet, Howdy Doody, from a TV show I loved watching when very young. I especially liked the show because it had puppets and people interacting on stage, not separated behind a partition. That fit well with my childhood active imagination. My painting (from my point of view) depicts the story of looking up to Howdy as a child and, ironically, seeing his gaze focussed on a doll-like adult female version of this child.

Howdy painting by Janet Strayer

When I showed this painting in a public exhibit, someone angrily stomped away from it and out of the gallery loudly muttering with disgust "that doesn't even belong in a garage sale!" Ouch. Was it that bad a painting? Even so, what could have caused that much anger? Why not simply just walk on by? Putting on my psychologist's hat, I thought it very likely centered on the uncanny doll-figure triggering a projective incident in which we attribute our own unacceptable thoughts or impulses outward. Afterward,I learned of a horror movie using a Howdy look-alike character. But that wasn't my Howdy story. Still, every painting reflects what others see in it, even if unintended.

My first solo show was a series of monochromes called Child Out of Time (Garlands, shown here). The exhibit invoked an uncanny experience in the gallery director, who reported dreams about these images of timeless children for days. The dreams took her places both she did and did not want to go. You can click here for a video experience of some of these works.

Garlands, digital painting by Janet Strayer

Imagination and the Uncanny

Personally, I have little attachment to actual dolls. One exception that I remember fondly: Columbina, a small rubber doll in a navy blue corduroy outfit and beret that accompanied me as an immigrant toddler on my voyage to America. But, like others with a high curiosity quotient, I'm open to the imaginative dimensions that dolls can inspire. They can selectively and more rarely provoke the uncanny.

Used in artwork, dolls often mimic or reference adults. Some artists, like Cindy Sherman, imaginatively turn the tables on this and show humans as doll-like self-presentations. Whether uncanny or not, the relationship of dolls to human imagination seems worth considering.