Charlotte Brontë's Paper Dolls

Abstract:In the nineteenth century, dolls were powerful emblems of mourning practices, teaching children how to perform the rites of grief, death, and burial. However, nineteenth-century children found that burial brought about equal promises of reanimation (a doll that is buried can be dug up again). The possible reversibility of doll burial (and thus death) became a source of narrative potential for the Brontës, who used toy soldiers to create fictions that reversed death. For Charlotte Brontë, this play spanned from her early writing to her novel Shirley, which she writes to bring her sisters back from the dead.