The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow

First published: 1954

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: Late autumn, 1944, to late autumn, 1945

Locale: Appalachian Kentucky, then Detroit

Principal Characters:

• Gertie Nevels, the dollmaker, a big, strong-spirited mountain woman
• Clovis Nevels, her well-meaning, mechanically inclined husband
• Clytie, their daughter, aged fourteen, who adjusts to Detroit
• Reuben, their son, aged twelve, who returns to Kentucky
• Enoch, their son, aged nine, who also adjusts to Detroit
• Cassie, their daughter, aged five, who is killed by a train
• Amos, their son, aged three
• Callie Lou, Cassie’s imaginary playmate
• Henley Kendrick, Gertie’s brother, who is killed in the war
• Granma Kendrick, Gertie’s mother, who is sickly, complaining, and religious
• Victor, a kind Detroit neighbor who is Polish American
• Max, Victor’s attractive young wife, who leaves him
• Sophronie, another friendly Detroit neighbor, originally from the South
• Whit, her husband, who is also from the South
• Mr. Daly, an obnoxious Detroit neighbor
• Mrs. Daly, his long-suffering wife, the mother of ten
• Joe, the friendly vegetable man, a Sicilian American
• Joe’s Nephew, an illegal immigrant who is killed by Clovis in a labor dispute

The Novel

The Dollmaker is the story of an Appalachian family’s migration from Kentucky to Detroit during World War II. Uprooted from the land, the Nevelses in Detroit become culturally displaced persons and economic pawns, able to survive, if at all, only by denying their sense of identity and adjusting to the system. Yet they are not alone: The millions of other workers, coming from numerous ethnic backgrounds and crowded into Detroit’s industrial melting pot, suggest that the Nevelses’ experience is a familiar one, with variations. In Detroit, human beings are reduced to economic integers. Thus, unfolding in slowly building, realistic detail supported by powerful unifying symbols, The Dollmaker is ultimately a damning critique of the American industrial order.

The story begins during late fall in the Kentucky Cumberlands, where Gertie and Clovis Nevels and their five children live a poor but close-knit life on a tenant farm. By selling eggs and other farm produce, Gertie has hidden away money for fifteen years to buy their own farm. When her brother, Henley, is killed in the war and her parents give her the government’s compensation payment, Gertie finally has enough money to buy the old Tipton place. A home and an independent livelihood seem within reach.

Clovis, however, unaware of Gertie’s secret plans, has other ideas. He has long been unhappy that he could not provide better for Gertie and the children. He has earned a little money by hauling coal in his old truck, but now, with the miners off at war and gas rationed, even coal hauling is down. Advertisements for war workers in Oak Ridge and elsewhere are enticing. When he goes to Lexington for his army examination and the army indefinitely postpones his call-up, he continues north to Detroit. In Detroit he gets work, sells his truck, and sends money home.

Gertie proceeds with plans to buy the old Tipton farm, but her scandalized mother, believing a wife’s place is with her husband, blocks the sale. When Clovis sends for Gertie and the kids, Gertie’s mother spends the Henley money on clothes and train fare for Detroit. The family’s horrifying train ride—steerage on rails—is a prelude to Detroit itself. The first thing that Gertie hears when they arrive is the slur, “Hillbilly,” and the first things that she feels are Detroit’s blowing snow and paralyzing cold. Taking the mountain family on a winding ride through the Dantesque industrial hell, the taxi deposits them on a garbage-strewn street before a row of connected gray-green sheds just across the railroad tracks from a blast furnace. This is Merry Hill, their new home.

Gertie and the children are stunned by the urban environment—the ugliness, the overcrowding, the noise, the strange Detroit accents. Some neighbors are friendly and helpful, but others mock the Nevelses’ dislocation. The Nevels children are beaten up in the alley and told in school to “adjust.” Wanting to be accepted, Clytie and Enoch do adjust at an alarming rate: Within a year, they have even learned to laugh at cartoons of “Hillbillies.” Reuben, his pride repeatedly hurt, stubbornly resists adjustment; he finally becomes so unhappy that he runs off back home to Kentucky, to his grandparents. The bright, elfin Cassie, also highly sensitive, withdraws into conversations with Callie Lou, her imaginary playmate. When the alley kids call Cassie “cuckoo,” Gertie denies Callie Lou’s existence. Yet Cassie retreats further with Callie Lou—to the railroad tracks, where, in a gruesome, heartrending scene, a train cuts off Cassie’s legs and she bleeds to death. Gertie uses her hidden money, saved to buy a farm, to bury Cassie.

After the war is over, things become even worse in Detroit. The manufacturing companies lay off workers and try to break the unions, and management-labor disputes, always common, escalate into industrial warfare. When Clovis is laid off, the Nevelses are deeply in debt, Clovis having bought the furniture, the car, and the Icy Heart refrigerator on time. Gertie, who has been making a little money by whittling out dolls and crucifixes on special order, is forced to mass-produce the objects to which she had devoted an artist’s care. A factory system evolves within the home: Clovis roughs out the items on a jigsaw, Gertie adds the finishing touches, and the surviving kids hawk the product in the streets.

The nadir is reached when Clovis, fighting for the union, kills a man. In street battling, a young “goon” hired by management beats Clovis about the face with a lead pipe, leaving scars, but Clovis tracks the man down and takes revenge, using Gertie’s whittling knife on him. Unhappily, Gertie knows the young man as more than a “goon”: He is an illegal Sicilian immigrant, the nephew of Joe, the friendly vegetable man who brings his produce truck around and gives Gertie credit. Gertie is afraid to ask Clovis for details, and Clovis is afraid of being recognized by the police, so he stays inside during the day, and more of the family’s economic burden falls on Gertie.

When Gertie receives a big order from Grosse Pointe for dolls and crucifixes of high-grade wood, she makes her symbolic sacrifice—a huge chunk of cherry wood which she brought all the way from Kentucky and on which she has been carving the upper torso and head of Christ. Followed by a procession of her neighbor’s children, Gertie hauls the chunk of wood to a lumberyard to be split. All along, Gertie has had trouble finding the right face for Christ, so the statue remains faceless. Now, however, as she drives an ax into the statue’s head and listens to the wood groan, she tells the lumberyard owner that “millions an millions” of faces would have done, including the faces of some of her neighbors.

The Characters

The Dollmaker is a woman’s story, expressing a feminist outlook in the days before feminism, with Gertie as the prototypical feminist heroine. Her heroic credentials are established in dramatic fashion in the very first chapter, where, riding her prancing mule, Gertie waylays a military car to take her choking baby to a doctor. The officer protests and threatens to draw his revolver, but he faints away when Gertie draws her knife and performs a little surgery on Amos’s throat, letting out the pus. Gertie continues to show the same indomitable spirit throughout the novel, yet she is also a victim in a man’s world, particularly of the notions that a wife must quietly obey and must sacrifice her dreams for her husband’s.

Using a limited omniscient point of view, Harriette Arnow tells the story from Gertie’s perspective. Drawn into this perspective, the reader is encouraged to identify with Gertie and to share her opinions. The point of view allows a close study of Gertie and gives the novel a powerful emotional unity, but it might also be the novel’s main flaw. Gertie and her observations dominate the story: The cards seem stacked against Clovis, Detroit, the military-industrial complex, and established religion.

Clovis is depicted as Gertie’s foil, a well-meaning but basically no-account man: He cannot do anything right. Mechanically inclined rather than a farmer, he lets Gertie and the children struggle with the farm work in Kentucky while he occupies himself with what Gertie calls “tinkering.” She cannot tell him about the money she has saved, or he would spend it on his truck. On top of this, he is a petty complainer, complaining about the food that she puts on the table and about almost everything else that she does, such as working too hard. It is not surprising that a man so insensitive to his wife’s needs should become a vengeful killer, hardly more than an extension of the military-industrial complex.

The reader may question the fairness of Arnow’s characterization of Clovis, and in this connection Gertie’s remark about his “tinkering” is significant: It reveals a basic split between Gertie’s image of Clovis and Clovis’s image of himself. She never recognizes that Clovis’s “tinkering” is as important to him as her “whittling” is to her, or that he deferred his dream for years while she kept him tied down on the farm; instead, she merely belittles him. No wonder these two, despite fifteen years of marriage and five children, communicate with each other so poorly. Although Arnow seems unaware of any failings on her heroine’s part, Gertie’s own insensitivity and complaining tend to draw her perspective in the novel into question. Gertie begins, at times, to sound a bit like her carping mother (Gertie’s mother, a truly vicious character, and the obnoxious Mr. Daly of Detroit are extreme representatives, respectively, of the Protestant and Catholic religions).

The Nevels children reflect, to a great extent, the split between their parents. Taking after their father, Clytie and Enoch adapt to Detroit ways; despite this, they are good children. Eventually their adaptation proves beneficial in selling the dolls about the streets (Gertie tries hawking the dolls once but immediately gives up in embarrassment), and they help ease their mother into Detroit life. Reuben and Cassie take after their mother, even symbolically representing different sides of her. The stubbornly resistant Reuben, who returns to Kentucky, represents the part of Gertie that will not stop dreaming of down home. Cassie, with her folkloric imagination, represents Gertie’s artistic side. When Gertie denies Callie Lou to Cassie, Gertie is also denying her own deepest self, with consequences symbolized by Cassie’s death.

After Gertie has experienced her suffering, she begins to understand more about the suffering of her neighbors in Detroit: Sophronie, who must leave her children and work a night shift in a factory; the kindhearted Victor, whose young wife leaves him; Joe, the friendly vegetable man, who did not come to America to like it; Joe’s nephew, with his roving eye for pretty girls and cars; Mrs. Daly, mother of ten, crying at her ironing board. These are only a few of the many people who help Gertie see the vision of the crucified Christ in Detroit.

Critical Context

In a 1971 commentary, the novelist and critic Joyce Carol Oates, who has some experience of Detroit, called The Dollmaker “our most unpretentious American masterpiece.” Most readers of the book would agree with her, and through the years appreciation for the work has grown, though proper recognition has never been given Harriette Arnow. The Dollmaker was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize but lost out to William Faulkner’s A Fable (1954). In 1984, the novel was made into a television film starring Jane Fonda.

Possibly Arnow’s Appalachian origins and subjects have caused the literary world to underestimate her. In actuality, qualifying as “our contemporary ancestors” gives Appalachian writers a rather distinct vantage point from which to examine America. So far, no one has demonstrated this better than Harriette Arnow in The Dollmaker, and her example has inspired such younger writers as novelist Gurney Norman in Divine Right’s Trip (1972) and poet Jim Wayne Miller in The Mountains Have Come Closer (1980).

Bibliography

Baer, Barbara L. “Harriette Arnow’s Chronicles of Destruction.” The Nation 222 (January 31, 1976): 117-120. Baer shows how Arnow’s The Dollmaker is an intricate part of what is considered her “Kentucky trilogy.” Argues that although The Dollmaker can be read from the feminist view, it is an excellent example of a work which documents the initiation of American society into the modern, industrial age.

Chung, Haeja K., ed. Harriet Simpson Arnow: Critical Essays on Her Work. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995. An excellent volume with which to begin a detailed study of Arnow’s life and writing. Chung has assembled twenty scholarly essays on Arnow’s life and career. Three essays are devoted to The Dollmaker. The volume also includes an interview with Harriet Simpson Arnow by Haeja Chung.

Chung, Haeja K. “Harriet Simpson Arnow’s Authorial Testimony: Toward a Reading of The Dollmaker.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 36 (Spring, 1995): 211-223. A detailed analysis of Gertie, the central character in the novel. Chung focuses on an interview she conducted with Arnow and asserts that the author’s testimony is relevant to re-reading the novel, especially in assessing the complexity of the main character who has often been stereotyped as a “strong woman.”

Cunningham, Rodger. “ ‘Adjustments and What It Means’: The Tragedy of Space in The Dollmaker.” In The Poetics of Appalachian Space, edited by Parks Lanier, Jr. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. This article approaches Arnow’s novel from a different perspective. Cunningham discusses how the novel is the story of an individual seeking space of her own but tragically finding her dream destroyed at every turn.

Eckley, Wilton. Harriette Arnow. New York: Twayne, 1974. This book-length study of Arnow’s works offers an excellent appraisal of her canon through the completion of The Weedkiller’s Daughter (1970). Three particular chapters should be of interest to anyone delving into the significance of The Dollmaker. Chapter 1 is a biographical sketch which illuminates some of the major events in Arnow’s life. Chapter 5 is an analysis of The Dollmaker. Chapter 8 gives an overview of Arnow’s career and makes some suggestions as to where her career might lead.

Gower, Herschel. “Regions and Rebels.” In The History of Southern Literature, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., et al. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. This article places Arnow in the context of the Southern writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who provided a depiction of common folk, as opposed to earlier writers who recalled the good old days of the plantation South.

Hobbs, Glenda. “A Portrait of the Artist as Mother: Harriette Arnow and The Dollmaker.” The Georgia Review 33 (Winter, 1979): 851-866. A useful scholarly perspective.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “On Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker.” Afterword to The Dollmaker. New York: Avon Books, 1972. In her commentary, Oates presents two dominant factors to be considered when reading The Dollmaker. First, the Nevels family’s story represents humanity as a whole, caught in a neverending cycle of beginnings and endings. Second, Oates sees the work as representative of American literary naturalism in which the individual is controlled by social forces, most specifically economic forces.