Connolly, Paula T. “Cultured Toys.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 21 no. 1, 1997, pp. 148-151. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/uni.1997.0003
Lois Rostow Kuznets explores the depiction of toys in literature, but also the representation and function of toys as cultural artifacts. She also discusses how their uses have ranged from fetish and sacred object to a way of socializing children. Kuznet also argues that collecting dolls both signals a struggle between adults and children for the meaning and possession of toys and how it cites, for adults, a reaction against the development of technology.
Bergner, Gwen. “Black Children, White Preference: Brown v. Board, the Doll Tests, and the Politics of Self-Esteem.” American Quarterly, vol. 61 no. 2, 2009, pp. 299-332. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/aq.0.0070
In Gwen Bergner’s piece she draws most of her info from the Brown v. Board of Education the Supreme Court case. Psychologist Kenneth B. Clark found evidence that segregation damaged black children’s self-esteem and hampered their ability to learn. Clark and his wife Mamie had tested black children’s “racial preference” by asking them to choose between black dolls and white dolls, interpreting the choice of white dolls as evidence of damaged self-esteem. She also argues against the doll test results that dolls do not have any correlations to self-esteem but argues that black children’s white preference behavior is signifying a form of psychic hybridity or mixed-race identification that eludes our historic
black/white binary.
Roye, Susmita. “Toni Morrison’s Disrupted Girls and Their Disturbed Girlhoods: The Bluest Eye and A Mercy.” Callaloo, vol. 35 no. 1, 2012, pp. 212-227. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cal.2012.0013
Susmita Roye states that Morrison emphasizes that the most imperceptible members of an already invisible black society in a race-segregated world are the little black girls, that are shrunk in stature by the crushingly diminishing combination of their skin color, gender,and age. In Roye’s article she draws from both The Bluest Eye and A Mercy which reflect Morrison’s continued concern for “girls interrupted.” Both novels present a number of ways in which girlhoods are aborted. By juxtaposing the first and the latest of her novels, Roye argues that Morrison’s feminist ideology accommodates universal girlhood, crossing frontiers of race, class, culture, ethnicity, continents, and centuries.
Frever, Trinna S. “‘Oh! You Beautiful Doll!”: Icon, Image, and Culture in Works by Alvarez, Cisneros, and Morrison.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 28, no. 1, 2009, pp. 121–139. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40783477.
Trinna S. Frever argues that dolls are multifaceted symbol for societal disputes over what it is to be female and contests of cultural and national identity. Frever uses three different depictions of dollhood in this essay which are, Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Sandra Cisneros’s “Barbie-Q,” and the doll dismemberment scene from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. In this essay it is concluded that dolls are more than just a toy but are icons in contemporary society, part of the value system of the U.S.-dominant culture, and its “representation” of womanhood.
Bernstein, Robin. “Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; or, The Possibility of Children’s Literature.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, 2011, pp. 160–169. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41414088.
Robin Bernstein argues that playing with dolls and reading children books has a direct correlation to race. He mentions Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a little girl Burnett, who took what she read in the book and acted out scenes she felt were most powerful. “At other times, Burnett performed the scene of Eva s death, casting the white doll as Eva and as “all the weeping slaves at once.” And at least once she designated the doll Uncle Tom and cast herself as Simon Legree. For this scenario, the girl bound the doll to a candelabra stand. “with insensate rage,” she whipped her doll. Throughout whipping, the doll maintained a “cheerfully hideous” grin, suggested to the girl that Uncle Tom was “enjoying the situation” being “brutally lashed.” In the article it is seen that many nineteenth-century white children read books about slavery and then used dolls to act out scenes of racialized violence and forced labor. It is also argued that representational play is performative in that it produces culture. Then the article goes on to argue about animate vs sentient dolls and the question of “what is a person?”
