100 Ways to Make a Japanese House

Abstract

100 Ways to Make a Japanese House Hannah Field (bio) Scenes of children making dollhouses are something of a leitmotif in Rumer Godden’s celebrated doll stories. Her first children’s novel, The Dolls’ House (1947), has sisters Charlotte and Emily Dane refurbishing a Victorian dollhouse, while in 1956’s The Fairy Doll, the young protagonist Elizabeth fashions a more unassuming home for her doll. Of course, Charlotte, Emily, and Elizabeth are not alone in these pursuits, and Godden is not the only mid-twentieth-century children’s writer to detail them. One of Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School heroines, Tom Gay, creates many dollhouses in her time at the school, selling these at the end-of-school sales; the first appears in Tom Tackles the Chalet School (serialized in 1947 and 1948 before being released as a single volume in 1955). The Five Dolls series by Helen Clare is likewise full of improvised dollhouse objects and craft activities; in Five Dolls in a House (1953), for example, heroine Elizabeth converts her child-sized blue velvet ribbon into a dolls’ staircase carpet, blithely saying, “we’ll pin it on with drawing-pins as I haven’t any stair rods” (58). However, what is an ancillary, if significant, motif in Brent-Dyer, Clare, and even The Dolls’ House or The Fairy Doll becomes the defining narrative preoccupation in two of Godden’s lesser-known works, her 1961 children’s novel Miss Happiness and Miss Flower and its sequel Little Plum (1963). Indeed, before the narrative proper of Miss Happiness even begins, Godden signals the focus on dollhouse crafts with her acknowledgements: My thanks are due to Edmund Waller, who designed the Japanese dolls’-house described in the book, and who with his brother Geoffrey, aged twelve, made it; to Fiona Fife-Clark, aged eleven, who furnished it, painted the scrolls and lampshade and sewed the dolls’-house quilts and cushions; to Miss Anne Ashberry and Miss Creina Glegg, of Miniature Gardens Limited, Chignal-Smealey, Essex, who made its garden and grew the tiny trees; to Miss Stella Coe (Sogetsu Ryu) for her [End Page 153] advice over the meaning of flowers in Japanese lore and for reading the book; and finally and especially to Mr Seo of the Japanese Embassy, for his valuable help and advice and for the loan of books. (N. pag.) The elaborateness of this inventory, its near-obsessive attention to detail, is notable; but so, too, is the specific provenance of these dollhouse accoutrements. Every object that inspired the fictional Miss Happiness dollhouse, from the space of the house itself to its smallest adornment, has been produced or painted, sewn or grown, by hand.1 Moreover, the hand in question sometimes belonged to a child: “Geoffrey, aged twelve,” or “Fiona Fife-Clark, aged eleven.” From its very front matter, Miss Happiness orients around children’s dollhouse crafts, and Little Plum shows a similar predilection. The significance of Godden’s focus on children’s craft in specific connection with the dollhouse is the topic of my discussion here. Why should stories in which children build or furnish dollhouses be important? The reason, I argue, is that such stories go against the prevalent conception of the dollhouse as a site antithetical to such making-play. A number of authorities who have weighed in on the subject argue as much, and before detailing the ways in which dollhouse crafts are depicted in Miss Happiness and Little Plum, I will canvas some famous criticisms. The Edgeworths provide a classic example of the complaint in Practical Education.2 After they castigate “frail and useless toys” that demand the child’s care and attention “because they cost a great deal of money, or else . . . as miniatures of some of the fine things on which fine people pride themselves,” rather than because of any real appeal or benefit to the child (14),3 the dollhouse comes within the writers’ purview: Our objections to dolls are offered with great submission and due hesitation. With more confidence we may venture to attack baby-houses: an unfurnished baby-house might be a good toy, as it would employ little carpenters and seamstresses to fit it up...