Transcendence of the Dolls.

I stumbled on a new Julia Donaldson book today, quite by chance. It’s called The Paper Dolls, it features the wonderful illustrations of Rebecca Cobb and it's quite the most magical kids' book I’ve read in a long time. The story is of a little girl whose mother makes her some paper dolls. The girl –possibly a cypher for Donaldson as a young girl? – is possessed of a great imagination and leads the dolls through all kinds of wonderful adventures in each of which the dolls elude some playtime peril (a crocodile oven glove, a tiger slipper) by hopping, jumping or floating onto the next page. Until, that is, they encounter a little boy who cuts them into lots of little pieces and promises them that they'll never come back. But they do, in one of the most elegant and prettily illustrated reversals I've ever seen, as the dolls laugh at him and reform from all their constituent scraps and shreds...in the little girl's memory. There they find all the things they played with, and more besides, day after day and year after year. Eventually, the girl grows up and up and becomes a mum herself, who makes some paper dolls for her own daughter, and the circle of the imagination is perpetuated, as in the end of Peter Pan when he comes back and befriends Wendy's daughter, only without all the creepiness.

Well, I guess I failed to avoid putting in any spoilers. In my defence, I had to go into so much detail in order to tease out what’s happening here. A point is being made, I think, very subtly and without the slightest didacticism or judgement. It seems to me to be a point about the different instincts of the two sexes. Men destroy things, often out of spite at beauty. Women, on the other hand, recreate things, preserving and mending and binding together what was broken so it can be whole again, if never quite so perfectly. In doing so, they prove that creation is more powerful than destruction. However, the story also seems to be suggesting that this restoration can only occur in the memory, which is to say, outside reality. The female urge is inviolable, but only in the mind, and the physical form might never be healed. You could even say there's a very gentle analogy being made here with violence against women, those dolls that a patriarchal society makes and packages and breaks when it fancies. I know it's a children’s book and some people will scoff at reading so much into it, but I’m afraid that’s what I do. And I’d be willing to bet that this analysis isn’t too far from what the author and illustrator were trying to achieve. Then again, if you don’t care for my conjecture, you should still check out it if you have young kids, because it’s a powerfully touching piece of work.