Family Life Writ Small

Abstract

Dollhouses today are primarily thought of as toys for children, but in earlier times, they were more typically the province of upper-class women who dedicated untold hours and great sums of money to creating alternate domestic spaces in miniature. These dollhouses present much more than mere straightforward records of domestic life, as hobbyists and collectors have typically understood them. Instead, they divulge important clues about aspirations in regard to domestic life, a subject of great interest in the Enlightenment period of liberalizing social values. Building and decorating a dollhouse, I argue, were like designing a miniature stage on which to fetishize the domestic world and explore conflicted urges of concealment and display.