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

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Doll News Fall 2016