Eighteenth-century dollhouses and John Locke’s Metaphor of the Human mind
Résumé
For much of the eighteenth century, dollhouses were collection items assembled by elite women before being commercialized for girls at the end of the century. These conspicuous collections of miniatures demonstrated the wealth and social status of their owners by providing a mise-en-abyme of their rich lifestyle and culture with their scaled-down Palladian façades and luxurious state rooms. While dollhouses were the site of the consolidation of aristocratic tastes, they were also spaces of expression and construction of feminine subjectivities. The collecting and crafting practices which dollhouses entailed resonated with John Locke’s theorization of the self and of empirical
epistemology.
By adopting a material culture approach, this paper will provide insights into how dollhouses gave material expression to John Locke’s metaphor of the mind as an “empty Cabinet” furnished with new ideas and memories with each confrontation with the external world. Women bought miniatures in toyshops, embroidered carpets, sewed dresses for their dolls and decorated miniature furniture with engravings. These artistic practices were often a form of material life-writing because the materials used held sentimental value. Dollhouses were in many ways a material manifestation of their owners’ minds, in which personal memories were preserved and arranged.
While dollhouses could be receptables for personal memories, the stories which their materials contained could be lost from one generation to the next unless they were verbalized. Once they were heirlooms, dollhouses became objects which fostered the constitution of a collective female community through shared material practices. Generations of women tended to their ancestor’s dollhouse, repaired and replaced furniture and invested the miniature space with their own creativity, skills and ideas.