Little Effigies

Effigy: {a representation of a person, especially in the form of sculpture or some other three-dimensional form}.  In this case a child's doll. Most likely a female child. Little girls would practice for motherhood with a doll such as this; a doll with wide, ever-open eyes. Its pupils permanently dilated in acid-trip-wonder. It's over-sized hands perpetually reaching for you, me, anybody to grab onto. Little boys didn't have real-world scale effigies to hold, or which begged to be held. Their effigies were much smaller in scale: army men, plastic dinosaurs, G.I. Joes. And they were not to be cuddled, they were to be posed, put into action, thrown, smashed, melted and burned. A smaller effigy is a more distant effigy. A more distant effigy is removed from us as a conceptual being, and what that teaches boys is anything but fatherhood. Not that a vinyl baby-doll was a substitute for a living role model. But dolls such as the one pictured above. for sale at a flea market, were designed to be held closely and with tenderness. Most little girls did not set their dolls on fire or tie them to the end of their kites. Dolls had names and pretty clothes. They were given special privileges. They sat at the dinner table and and took long trips in the car. But they don't age well. An old doll is a creepy doll, and as the hair falls out and the flesh takes on the patina of a street vagrant, they begin to more accurately mirror people - people we'd rather not acknowledge.  A doll is intended to mimic those features in a child that play to our nurturing nature, but there is something very false about them beyond the plastic skin and stiffness. It's trickery stops working at a certain age and the effect must be something akin to what a duck feels upon touching down beside a wooden decoy. Man creates many different kinds of effigies for all sorts of purposes, but none have the impact of those we create for child's play. Those first interactions with little fake people -  the first 'people' we ever fully control, the first 'people' whose fates lie in our hands, form our earliest people dynamics. Girls were given dolls they could hold and have conversations with, boys were given tiny monochromatic men with no discernible features, bearing weapons or equipped to carry them. Both options feel disturbing in hindsight. And maybe that's why dolls like this one are often found in flea markets and garage sales; the army men were all melted years ago.

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