Alice, Dolls, and Other Worlds

What is a doll?

An imaginary daughter? A miniature version of ourselves? A character we would like to become? A body waiting for someone to give it a story?

The extraordinary Russian illustrator Maxim Mitrofanov, wandered through a large doll exhibition in Moscow looking especially for Alice and her companions. Among countless creations, he photographed Alices, White Rabbits, Mad Hatters, and other creatures that seem to have stepped through the looking-glass and found new bodies.

Looking at these images, I began to wonder whether there might be a deep connection between Alice and dolls. Alice is constantly changing size. She grows, shrinks, becomes estranged from her own body, and asks, “Who am I?” A doll also plays with scale and identity. It is human without being human, someone and something at once. It can be a child, an adult, a fantastic creature, a double, a character, an alter ego.

As children, we care for dolls as if they were our daughters. But perhaps we also live through them. We dress them in clothes we would like to wear, give them houses, names, adventures, fears, and desires. We create little worlds for them to inhabit. Or perhaps we create those worlds because we would like to enter them ourselves.

A dollhouse is a miniature world before which we are giants. Yet through imagination, we can become small enough to cross its threshold. Perhaps this is one of the mysteries of the doll: it does not merely represent someone. It opens a world. A place where we can become someone else, experiment with other bodies and other lives, and give what does not fit into the ordinary world another scale in which to exist. Alice knows very well how to get there.

And you? When you look at a doll, do you see someone to care for, someone you would like to be, or a magical world you would like to inhabit, at least in imagination? 🗝️🍄