Doll News Fall 2016 - 91
Our Fascination
with Miniatures
By Nancy Goldstein
All photos by Allan Sprecher for the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., 2016
M
iniatures cast a spell over us. A visitor casually
rambling through a dollhouse exhibit may
suddenly fall quiet and attentive when he or
she stops to peer inside one of these little domiciles. We
become bewitched by what some writers have called the
"fascination of the miniature" and "the shock of the little."
But a question remains: what is it about miniatures that so
arrests our attention?
People have been forever captivated by all kinds of little
objects. Tiny carvings from the ancient world are found in
every hemisphere. Today, legions of admirers and collectors
enjoy Japanese netsuke, model railroad layouts, and peach
pit carvings, to name just a few from the thousands of
examples. But smallness alone cannot account for this
intense interest. If it were simply smallness that compels our
attention, then we would gaze for hours on end at paper
clips, or grains of sand. No, it is something else, something
that has to do with the way miniatures enchant us in the way
that ordinary objects do not.
Literary references to smallness have long excited
the imagination. For instance, "Lilliputian" has become
a popular byword for smallness ever since six-inch-tall
Lilliputs tied down Gulliver in Jonathan Swift's 1726 satire,
Gulliver's Travels. Readers return again and again to follow
Alice as she steps through the looking-glass and sips from
the "Drink Me" vial to enter a fantastic, tiny realm. It should
be remembered, however, that for all their smallness, the
terrain of both the Alice and the Gulliver stories were writ
large with danger. Even though their worlds were tiny, and
ostensibly controllable, neither character could bring order
to their strange surroundings or to the unruly people and
creatures they met.
Perhaps the recent movies made from Alice's Adventures
in Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels indicate an upsurge in
interest in miniature worlds. Not only has the dollhouse
exhibit, "Small Stories: At Home in a Dollhouse" become
a popular destination (see the article in this issue), but this
past summer, the New Museum in New York opened "The
Keeper" exhibit of contemporary collections, which "fills
three floors and a lobby gallery with hundreds of thousands
of mostly small objects [from]. . . . over the course of the
20th century and into the 21st," according to a New York
Times review. In late July, a CBS television report, "Small
Wonders," showed how miniaturists and other artists across
the country are presently creating those wonders, inspired
by assemblages such as the Thorne Miniature Rooms in The
Art Institute of Chicago, and by dollhouses like those in the
"Small Stories" exhibit.
Fiction writer Steven Millhauser explores how tiny
objects capture our attention in his essay, "The Fascination
of the Miniature" (Grand
Grand Street
Street, Vol. 2, No. 4, summer 1983).
Even though a dollhouse is larger than the tiniest teacup in
its tiny cupboard, he says, we look at each with the same
intensity, and we become somewhat unsettled. The eye
quickly identifies the objects as a house and as a teacup. But
their discrepancy of size from that of real life "shocks us
into attention" as we recognize that this world is different
and not as it should be. It is that unsettled, excited response
that begins the fascination. We are able to see the dollhouse
more completely than a real house that we must visit
room by room. A dollhouse invites the "mountain view. . .
. To be above, to look down, to take into the yearning eye
more at a single glance: here we are at the very threshold
of the miniature," Millhauser explains. Once we succumb
to the enchantment of the miniature, we notice precision
of detail. We look closely at the furniture, rugs, art on the
walls, kitchen utensils, admiring the precise versions of
those items, and we say with Millhauser, "That craving for
absolute precision, is it not a craving for the duplication of
the world itself, its replication in miniature?"
A doll collector intuitively knows some of the other
theories of dollhouse fascination. When we restore or furnish
dollhouses, or install dolls to live in a house, we are in
complete control over a world of our making. We can have
the satisfaction of playing God, so to speak. And dollhouses
provide alternate, intimate worlds to which we can escape.
Through dollhouse doll surrogates we can mentally travel to
an 18th Century drawing room or a mid-20th century kitchen,
recapturing and holding onto a world that has been lost to time,
a world that may give us respite from the cares of the day.
Perhaps this is the key to understanding our fascination:
in a real world of countless uncontrolled events, and
sometimes chaos, miniatures provide mental safety,
refuge, order, and protection in what one philosopher calls
"felicitous space." The dollhouse is a dream world of real
or imagined memories with rooms that incorporate every
virtue we can imagine. In the words of Steven Millhauser
again, "And is it possible that the deepest fascination of the
miniature lies here, in the unfulfilled yearning to be part of
that world?"
DOLL NEWS * UFDC.ORG
91
http://www.ufdc.org
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