Discourses on Paper Dolls

by Diane Glancy

A paper doll is a two-dimensional figure drawn or printed on paper for which accompanying clothing has also been made.
History of Paper Dolls
Judy M. Johnson 

I used to play with paper dolls.  I don’t see them in stores much anymore.  When I was a girl, there were books and books of paper dolls.  Paper dolls were awkward.  I had a cardboard girl, then pages of clothes to cut out with tabs on the shoulders and at the sides.  The cardboard girl had a stand, so I could prop her up.  It was a plastic circle with grooves or slots for her cardboard feet, or there was a cardboard fold-out piece behind her.  The paper clothes remained in place with tabs as long as I didn’t move her too suddenly or play outside where the wind could carry her wardrobe away.  What could I do with something so unbending, with clothes hanging on the front?  What could I do without moving?

˜    

On trips I opened my book of paper dolls— took out Elaine or Patricia.  I stood them on the windowsill of the train—or the seat of the car where they’d fall over.  I walked the paper dolls along a pretend street, took them to a pretend party, or pretended my way into school with them. 

I cut out new clothes for the paper dolls.  I wanted the paper dolls to know transformation. 

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It was a black hole of a house.  A compressed atmosphere that pressed us flat.  Our clothes hooked over our shoulders.  We could not walk, but moved forward with hops, as if our feet were tied together.  We were cardboard dolls in a black house, a boarding school. Our mouths could not open, our lips could not part, our teeth could not show.  The house was black with blue windows and a slate roof.   We hopped upstairs backwards.  I longed for the edge of light that broke into the gray clouds that morning.  What were our thoughts? Someone has done something wrong.  Someone is guilty.  Someone has a black heart.  Someone will be punished.  I am in a still room.  Then I hear a rustle.  Something is moving.  It is a snake drawn to the heat that is my body.  I am in the moment before it moves toward me, but I know it is coming.  Then someone gives me something I don’t want and says, see how you much you like it?  Every failure darkens another window.  Every wrong-doing put out the light in another room.  One window is a black rectangle, a door with a step.  We are hobbled.  We are pushed flat as tongue-depressors.  The tabs don’t always hold the dress.  Sometimes the dress rises like a sail and flies away and I am left naked.  I like it when I am riled.  I like it when I have a snowy field before me and the way is not clear.  I like the complexities.  I swallow danger as if it were rice cakes.

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There were outlets as a child—leaving the house for an afternoon.  There were places I went.  Because at that time there were vacant lots.  There were whole fields at the end of the block not yet filled with houses and stores.  There were copses of trees and sumac groves.  Places I would go and sit in the small openings, unfilled places. 

My father made a small two-wheeled cart with a long handle.  I would walk down the road pulling it behind me.  I had a doll.  I used leaves as plates and twigs as spoons.   I served small red berries.   The empty places were fields of imagination, places where I was on my own. I once came away with poison ivy so bad the doctor wasn’t even sure it was poison ivy, the skin so red and swollen with welts.  Yet I returned to the twigs and leaves, the cover, the solace.   It was a time away from people, a withdrawal.   I didn’t visit anyone with disappointment when I was there.  The woods were a low covering held up by branches, a teepee of sorts.  A paper-doll dress.

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In my mother’s album, there’s a photograph of me standing in a neighbor’s yard wearing a new dress and holding up—on a hanger—another new one much like it.  It must have been at the beginning of a new school year.  Why did I choose two dresses so much alike?  I was drawn to clothes.  I liked the sound of the word.  Clothes— Close.  What you do when you go into a room and shut the door.  Close it.  Closet.   Put it in a clause.  Make a clause for it.  Hide it among other meanings.  Make it dependent.  My mother once told me she wished I’d had a sister.  She must have sensed my aloneness. 

The necessity of disguise—

You think you’ve got yourself covered.  But your disguise is a paper dress held on by tabs over your shoulders and sides.  Your whole back is open—you are cardboard.  One dimensional.  Don’t let anyone see you from the side.  Or the back.  Face them head on.  Know it is paper hiding you from them.  You are from a broken past.  You are fragments held with tabs over your shoulders.  You are nothing but a visage held by a presence.

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A clause is an exception. 

This was the lesson at Francis Willard elementary school.  There was agreement with a clause dependent on certain conditions: I could go if I was invisible.  I could stay if I was quiet.  I wore the childhood costumes of scarlet fever.  Chickenpox.  Measles.  I stood in space.  I was clothed in silence.  I was pushed out of the house each morning.

This is more than I ever thought I could say. 

Each word is a paper dress I wear on the islands of these little paragraphs.

˜ 

I wore a paper dress with tabs folded over my shoulders and at my sides.  I was flat as cardboard.  I did not bend.  I was stationary.  My clothes were pieces of paper.  I was a piece of paper on which to write.  I walked if someone hopped me along.  I was kept in a book.  Tabs folded over my shoulders to hold on my clothes.  No pull-ons or pull-overs.  I wore a disguise.

I was in a boarding school.  I was not in a boarding school.   I went to public school.  I was a Big Chief Tablet.  My pages were lined.  I had a red line down my left margin.  Words slip off the page unless margins hold them on.  

In school, I was made to sit, though I was cardboard. 

I have an uneven bend across my waist.

After school, the paper dolls could not stand up straight again.

˜ 

I remember a shadow land of paper dolls—memories that come in fragments—or in brief bursts of wholeness that immediately disappear.

I mend the clothes with tape.  But how do I iron a paper-doll dress?

I don’t remember what the paper doll wore when she was not wearing a paper dress.  Some sort of slip or underclothing, likely, certainly not underwear.  Something to cover her and yet make it possible for her to wear clothes.

I cut out this clothing of memory for the paper dreams of the dolls.

˜ 

I don’t know where these words come from.  These little sharpnesses that stand side by side.  These disconnectives.

Clothing as landscape.  Clothing as geography.  Clothing as disguise and costume.  The dialogues infested with Christianity. 

From my father I took that thread of heritage—of which I knew little except it was there.  I expanded it, thought about it, stood apart from it too.

I don’t have the heart to battle.  I think I love war more than anything.

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If I had a sister I would have eaten her.

No, I would have torn her out of a book and made her wear clothes I didn’t want to wear.  She would not have had a choice.

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The idea for paper dolls came from cave drawings.  They are petroglyphs that left their stationary position.  It was not until after the invention of paper that they could be cut from their surroundings.  It was not until after the invention of scissors that they could be cut.  It was not until after the invention of metal that scissors could be made—

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An ancient Japanese purification ceremony dating back to at least A.D. 900 included a paper figure and a folded paper object resembling a kimono which were put to sea in a boat.
History of Paper Dolls
Judy M. Johnson 

Some excerpts from The History of Paper Art Dolls, Aisling D’Art in Art Doll Quarterly:

Paper was invented in China around 105 C.E.

The Original Paper Doll Artists Guild is based in Kingfield, Maine.

I plan my own article for the Art Doll Quarterly:  Electric wired hair.  Roto doll.  Meta doll.  I cut out text as though paper doll clothes.  I write until the writing becomes photographs, and the photographs, the space between the writing. 

I make a paper doll who wore everything she had as did the Indians.  A hide dress would last.  It was all animal skin.  A blanket if she was cold.  Sometimes outerwear.  Snowgear from the catalog.  Battery-warmed mukluks.  Some beads.  Elk teeth.

I make a paper doll and name it Lazarus, the thirst of a rich man.[1]

Sometimes I made paper-doll dresses of newspaper.  I let the paper dolls wear stories I didn’t want to hear.  I used paper dolls to understand my placement in the world.  Or lack of it.  I moved the paper dolls in their imaginary lives making a way for my own life.  How do I understand the world?  How do I understand my place in it?  By making paper dolls move.  By placing clothes upon them.  By having the power to clothe.

˜ 

The placement of figures
The empty space around them
The proportions— Henry Matisse

…carrying the weight of that cumbersome box on legs which are cruelly positioned for walking.
The Courage of Turtles
Edward Hoagland

I learned self-determination from my paper dolls.  I learned my placement in dichotomy.  I made paper-doll selves I would follow.  They were costumes.  Disguise.  Yet they were both disguise and a revealer of truth. 

The paper dolls were my sisters.  They were myself.  They were a yearning for autonomy.  They could never stand on their own without a prop.

Paper dolls were my first road dreams.  I found travel and destination in them.  Paper doll clothes were a geography of language.

What can I make from nothing?—  As I travel the road wrapped in veils of grief.  I have known failure and longing on the long roads I have driven.  I have heard the turmoil of broken fields.  I have been on the academic front where I served as a professor.  I have longed to wrap students in my arms for their struggles behind and ahead.  I have been a pray-er for the world.  I have driven long roads.  Ignored.  Dismissed.  Yet I found autonomy for the broken.

˜ 

On trips I still open my book of paper dolls.

The news from history is difficult.  I read it to my paper dolls.

Some of the news I spare them.

The Seventh Cavalry.  The World Wars.  

Vietnam.  Iraq.  

The threat of unrest in the near and Middle East.

Now they are dressed in camouflage to take the oil fields.

˜ 

Minneapolis to Chicago to Frankfurt to Munich to Ismir.  Twenty-two hours.

On a flight to Turkey, I sit next to a man who works for Haliburton during the War on Iraq.  He is returning to Kuwait after his mother’s funeral.  He was in the army during Desert Storm.  But he’s no longer a soldier, he says.  He lives in a fenced camp and is taken by bus to work then returned to camp.  Yes, it’s a burden to be there.  They are killing one another.  But if we leave it will be worse— the ones that come after will be worse than the ones we got rid of. 

The darkness brings with it semi-sleep—images jut in front of one another— war trains out of place.  Flying camouflage uniforms sitting up / unable to lie down.  Unrelated yet somehow interconnected. 

Hours later, the cabin lights go on.  An announcement is made.  The early sun comes in the window once the plane reaches light and my mouth is open and dry.  We eat.  We land.

The Haliburton man waves to me as he leaves in another direction.

A guide and driver meet me at the airport in Ismir.  I am stamped—approved to enter the country.  They drop me off at the hotel where I lie flat on the bed. 

The next morning we travel to the places I have come to research for a novel I’m writing about the voices of several Biblical women.  I take the notes I have come to take.  There are poplars and cypress on the winding roads above the Aegean.  Minarets spike the small towns we pass.  The road so rough sometimes I cannot write.

I see an American flag upside down.  I don’t speak when we eat in restaurants.  I don’t want them to see I’m an American, though it shows, the guide says.

Afterwards, I fly from Ismir to Istanbul to Tel Aviv.  The next day I meet a colleague who is an anthropologist working there.  The only American, he says.  My purse is checked when we enter a restaurant.  They are afraid of sidewalk bombs.  I imagine eating, thinking any moment there could be an explosion.

The colleague takes me to the historical site of an ancient city.  I get the feel of the sea.  The incoming wind.  The sound of birds.  I dream of what could have been nearly 2000 years ago, finding voices on the land.

That night, in the International Herald Tribune, I read a story from the Rafa Refugee Camp on the Gaza Strip.  During a four-day incursion, Israeli tanks pushed through the Rafa zoo.  They knocked down trees and made big piles of earth with a bulldozer that looked as if it had number 7 on the side.  Then bulldozer No. 7 was joined by bulldozer No. 4.   They left a moonscape of twisted cages.  The Israeli forces pushed through the zoo because they thought the main route was blocked by charges laid by Palestinians.  The Israelis were trying to stop arms smuggled in from neighboring Egypt.

Out of eighty animals, only seven, including a wounded raccoon and a small bounding kangaroo, remained— ducks and an ostrich were dead.  Rather than leave the animals caged in a combat zone, the Israelis released them.  The caged animals were now free to run wild in their terror across gunfire and crossfire.  They were free to eat bullets.

Where were the others? The jaguars, the foxes, the wolves, the monkey, the python, and two of the three ostriches?  Had they disappeared in the narrow alleys between concrete houses?   In the rubble of the demolition?  

Houses had been demolished also.  Forty Palestinians dead.

Why do I think of the animals?  Maybe because I remember the slaughtered buffalo in America.  Maybe it’s a disguise to cover the deaths of the people.

Watch out little ostriches—you were caged in the heart of a warring world. 

What would it be like to be caged as the bulldozers pushed through the zoo?  Maybe death wiped away their horror as bulldozers cracked the long leg bone of an ostrich and turned over its body as a feathered accordion that squealed an improvisational war dance.

Ou’Wash in his bulldozer.  Barbarians.  All of us.  In this house of war.

The morning I leave Tel Aviv, I lift my luggage to the bin, that roost above the seats.  My little wheeled bag likes its high places with others tunneled in darkness.  It likes the act of leaving.

The outsiders and the side-riders.  The polyvocalism of plane travel not filtered through western thought, but reinterpreted in reinvented spaces.

Tel Aviv to Frankfurt to Minneapolis.  Nearly twenty hours.

Insurgents.  Militants.  Returning thoughts of Fallujah.  An under-estimation of Ou’Wash.

My family has been in wars.  Woods Lewis, my paternal Cherokee great-grandfather, was in the Union army.  My maternal great-grandfather, James Perry Adams, was in the Confederate army.  I have the small pitcher he brought my great-grandmother, Martha Adaline Adams, when he returned in 1865.  Then my uncle in WWII, my cousin in Vietnam, my son in Desert Storm—

What is different about bulldozers in Gaza and car-bomb drivers?  What about those men in Baghdad shooting guns into the air in a crowd?  What about them jumping up and down in the streets in an Islamic polka at the death of a Palestinian leader who was not for peace.  The Iraqi waltz.  The Jews and Palestinians mopping up the dance floor.  Their purpose.  Their march.  Their Crusades.

All countries have a disguise—wearing peace to the world while trampling into another country; in our case, to establish the disguise of democracy.  Our paper-doll clothing.

I dress my paper dolls in purdah, chador.  I cover them from the news.  

I made my paper doll dresses of newspaper.  They wore words.  They wore the print of stories I didn’t want to hear.  I gave the words instead to them.

˜

Once I cut out a paper doll.  I named her Job.  I drew boils on her.

Once I held a paper doll witch trial.  I burned her at the stake. 

I taught her to see the spirit land of buffalo.

Of Indian history.

Of Indian land.

Of land that was Indian.

Words that were land.  Land that was words.

Everything is a trial to me.  Forgive my love of Job.  As I travel with a fish tank on my back.  Fold-tabs over my shoulders. 

Excuse the paper dolls on my back.

I wash my paper dolls with butter.[2]

I make bullet-proof vests for my paper dolls.

Give me space.  Give me a chance to breathe a moment.

˜ 

Once in a while I get this sense so brief I hardly know it—but a sense of some enormity that was or could have been.  A way of life that has been so erased there are just streaks and those streaks hardly visible—but in them, a spot of grief and longing so overwhelming— 

I hold up the dress as if it is for the missing sister. 

Or the person I could have been had I had access to that other, lost life.

I had a sense of stability.  A sense that it was a lie.  I trained my paper dolls to walk in a fragmented text.  I trained them to stand in open space.  I showed them how to hop between the shifting subject matters.

This is just lacework, they will say.  This is not writing, they will complain.  It can’t hold water.

My mother would only look away all over again.

There are mismatched, odd pieces that don’t go together.  Fragments, by-passes, splits, incomplete sentences, hanging clauses, disagreeing tenses.  Starting a new, incomplete sentence when the previous incomplete sentence had not been finished.  Or finalized.  Thoughts moving ahead to other unrelated thoughts.  The way I hear a power saw a few doors down and think of the carpenter, Jesus.  The way I see the autumn trees handing out their leaves to the multitudes.

˜ 

A paper doll is a road.  A paper doll is travel.  A paper doll is car repair.  A paper doll is a fortress.  A defense.  A memory of school.

Air is the worst enemy that paper dolls have.
Early History of Paper Dolls
Roma M. Welsh

The open air was all I had.  I laid these words for pavement so I could walk across the air.  These words must be pavement.  I am walking on these words.  These words I speak from air.

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[1] Luke 16:19-31

 

[2] Job 29:2, 6  O that I were in the months past….when I washed my steps with butter.

 
“Discourse on Paper Dolls ” was selected by Nick Flynn as the winner of the 2008 Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize.

• Two honorable mentions went to Judy Copeland from Pomona, New Jersey for “Louisville, 1953″ and Kali Meister from Knoxville, Tennessee for “Seven Vignettes about Rats.”
• For information about the 2009 Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize, which will be judged by Robin Hemley, click here.
• For more creative nonfiction, click here.