Reading this wonderful article in The Guardian about dollshouses and the people who make them, I was struck most especially by these words spoken by Jose Aleson, a guy from North London who fell into dollshouse-making by accident but now finds himself obsessed by it:
“It’s not to play with, but you know what, there’s nothing more relaxing than sitting here at night, with the lights off, and all the lights on in the doll’s house, enjoying that moment. I like everything to be in order, and this is a kind of perfection. It’s like you’ve stopped time.”
For me this immediately conjured a scene from a story within a story: the man making the house and imagining it as a living entity within a world he himself has built, the writer writing about the creative dreamer who has built it.
There’s no denying the power that miniature houses exert over the imagination – the same pull that real houses have, I suspect, only distilled, concentrated in line with the reserves of imagination and commitment needed to create them. The finest dollshouses are undoubted works of art, but they are something else also. They are repositories of our dreams and sometimes also our fears.
I’ve loved dollshouse literature ever since I first read Rumer Godden’s 1947 novel The Doll’s House when I was eight or nine. Another favourite is Joyce Carol Oates’s tense and frightening short story ‘The Doll’. There’s something about this – the idea of losing control over a world you yourself have created – that is terribly frightening. But then there’s also that excitement of creation – of capture, of recreation of something lost – that feeds the maker’s obsession and makes him risk everything.
I messed around with these themes a little in my own story ‘Darkroom’, first published in Allen Ashley’s anthology Subtle Edens back in 2008. I remember thinking even then that I’d only brushed the surface of the subject – there was Mr Ashley’s 6,000-word word limit to consider, after all. But the fascination hasn’t gone away and doesn’t seem likely to.
Something to think about on rainy days, no question. In the meantime I’ll be posting ‘Darkroom’ at the Featured Story page as a kind of placeholder……
Dolls house, 17th Century, German National Museum, Nuremberg