The Doll Games

This excerpt from the Jacksons’ unfinished collaboration is edited and introduced by J. F. Bellwether, Ph.D.

The Doll Games are a ground-breaking series of collaborative improvisations by Shelley and Pamela Jackson that took place in a private home in Berkeley, California, in the first half of the 1970s.

The Doll Games cannot be precisely dated. 1970 and 1976 are generally understood to mark the limits of the period of greatest energy and invention, though any attempts to identify an inaugural moment are defeated by the nebulous nature of the phenomena under discussion. The Doll Games did not spring fully formed out of a Mattel box, but evolved by degrees out of earlier games (stuffed animals, “Kleenex dolls,” Kiddles). When did the Doll Games begin? As Babette Jackson has said, “That depends on how you define the Doll Games.” The ending point of the Doll Games is easier to locate, though too much weight has been placed on Shelley Jackson’s famous dictum (1976): “People are more interesting than dolls.”^[1]

The Games themselves, as well as the numerous documents and artifacts they generated, borrowed freely from literary and consumer culture. To make up a cast of characters comprised of swashbuckling heroines, tender heroes, bumbling he-men, whores and roués, the Jacksons used whatever material came to hand with bold directorial instincts and a sense of identity fluid in the extreme. Barbie’s kid sister Skipper got a butch haircut and later, clay breasts, and became the dashing heroine Aina; baby dolls were reimagined as obese adults; Little Red Riding Hood, sporting a moustache, became the lecherous wolf Harvey, the Doll Games’ enduring antihero.

Similarly, the Games’ highly conventionalized narratives, employing stock scenarios such as “pirates,” “the orphanage,” “the rebel princess,” and “running away,” appropriated and remixed elements of the epic, comedy, romance, and farce. (Tragedy and gothic horror, though deliberately excluded from the doll world, visited the Doll Games from without, a point I make in “Laurie Reborn: Death, Resurrection, and the Chaste Hermaphrodite in the Doll Games of Shelley and Pamela Jackson.”^[2]) Giving the postmodern pastiche a comradely nod but eschewing its cynicism, the Doll Games have confused some critics. Never afraid of acknowledging wish-fulfillment as narrative’s primum mobile, the Doll Games presented a resolutely cheerful Weltanschauung, leading some scholars to dismiss them as naïve. However, this scholar would argue that this optimism was a radical gesture, given that the values the narratives affirmed were in stark contrast certainly to playground norms, but also to those of the larger society around them—a contrast of which the artists were very much aware.

The Doll Games emerged in Berkeley, California, at a time when gender, politics, race, and sexuality were fiercely and publicly debated. Indeed, as the dolls were taking their first steps toward literary history, the artists’ family was opening a feminist bookstore just down the street from People’s Park. The Doll Games’ privately staged confrontations between androgynes and “dainty ladies,” their outlaw utopias and anarchic child societies, and their uncompromising moral vision, cannot be understood without reference to the larger public discourse in which they took place.

The Doll Games held up a funhouse mirror to their times, and what survives of them are historical documents of a wobbly, comical sort. But the Doll Games transcend their epoch. Intricate, obsessional, moral, violent and sexual, funny and tragic, the Doll Games propose doll games as a true folk art form, renewing itself with every performance. Obedient to no rules except those its practitioners invented for themselves, completely collaborative, the Doll Games was a genuinely interactive art form. In this theater of two, every audience member was a co-creator.

“The Doll Games” is also the title of a project the adult Jacksons undertook to document their childhood collaborations. It was conceived at different times as, variously, a multimedia art extravaganza, a work of postmodern cultural criticism, an open-to-the-public celebration of and clearing house for foul-mouthed ex-little girls, and a collection of thoughtful and rather poetic autobiographical essays. It is no wonder that it became none of these things, but languished as a collection of poorly copyedited fragments in the files of the Jacksons, while they went on with less ambiguous projects—until I, as a tenacious admirer and scholar of the original Doll Games, persuaded them to abandon their files to the ministrations of my jiggling keyboard. As an independent scholar I have studied the Doll Games for some years; I feel immensely privileged to introduce this curious little world to a new audience.

It is up to the reader to say whether a Doll Games configured and, yes, perhaps disfigured by an epigone can succeed where, by their own admission, the adult Jacksons’ own “Doll Games” failed. That abandoned project has been for some years a ruined edifice housing a ruined edifice: a mystery inside an enigma. It has haunted me. This fossil, this derelict, I have done my best to disensepulcher, and even, in so far as it is possible for one not privy to the secrets of the Doll Games first hand, to restore. I consider myself in the light of an archaeologist working two sites at once: a ruined city, and the ruined city it was built upon. Perhaps this work of mine will itself fall to ruins and become the object of a future archaeologist’s course of study, and perhaps the opus that results from that study will fall to ruins in turn and await a still more future scholar of endeavors past, and so on. Or perhaps in my own investigations I will penetrate so far into these worlds within worlds that I will find myself examining the back of my own head, having come full circle.

Not the least peculiar object that has come down to us from that late, decadent period of the Doll Games so particularly rich in artifactual droppings, is a doll-sized mirror. A crude moustache, eyebrows, and shaggy “do” have been cut from electrical tape and arranged on the face of the mirror in such a way that a doll (or her handler) sees her face transformed. This influencing machine, fashioned with who can say what degree of knowingness about the theatricality of gender, this all-purpose Duchamp, is already tremulous with the implied moustache of Harvey, but—mise en abyme—when Harvey himself is the Narcissus, becomes delirious with the double spectacle/specularization of the moustache-implicit antagonizing and defeating the moustache-explicit. Which latter, to add exquisite layers of irony, is itself a disguise and a supplement, so that the transfigured Harvey in the mirror might look to him/herself, if you will pardon this fancy that bestows sight on a doll, rather more feminine than usual, in his/her reduplicated facial decorations, because more like any other female in a false moustache, and therefore both less like him/herself (“Harvey”) and more like him/herself at once, restored to the Little Red Riding Hood that is hidden inside every wolf.

As, in my mind’s eye, I look at a little girl looking at a doll looking at a reflection of a doll disguised—and unveiled—in the candid duplicity of this most extraordinary mirror, I may be excused, I hope, for experiencing a moment of vertigo, especially if I inform the reader that I too have a moustache, and for a moment seem to glimpse my own image in the glass. Is it possible that I am neither the critic nor the audience, but just the latest dummy of the Jackson girls—that those pint-sized ventriloquists are throwing their voices out of the past, not to reveal their secrets, but to play yet another Doll Game?
—J. F. Bellwether, Ph.D.