The Doll People

Tiffany is a doll about Annabelle’s age, the eldest daughter in the Funcraft family. She is made entirely of plastic, including her brown hair, her pink and blue dress, and her pink hair bow. Annabelle notices how comically thin Tiffany’s arms and legs are and is astonished that two dollhouse dolls like herself and Tiffany can have such different appearances. This is not the only way in which the two girls differ. Tiffany is boisterous and confident: She loves playing Rancher Family and teasing and running from The Captain, two activities that Annabelle loathes. She tells Annabelle, “I’m not afraid of anything” (104), and Annabelle believes her. Tiffany is also impatient at times, chafing at Annabelle’s caution during their searches for Sarah and urging Annabelle to skip ahead in the journal instead of meticulously reading from start to finish.

Despite these differences, however, Tiffany and Annabelle become fast friends. They form SELMP, and together they save Papa from Captain and locate the missing Sarah. Tiffany’s function is to demonstrate to Annabelle that even very different people can form meaningful friendships; she is an important part of the text’s arguments about both Respecting People’s Differences and The Importance of Friendship.

Until the end of the narrative, Auntie Sarah exists only as a memory: When the story begins, she has been missing for 45 years. For the first part of the story, she is characterized through Annabelle’s memories of her, the Doll family’s reactions to her disappearance, and her entries in the private journal that Annabelle discovers. Sarah’s journal, written in her “squiggly and crawly” handwriting (107), reveals a fascination with learning and exploring—and a particular interest in spiders and other small creatures inhabiting the Palmer house. It also conveys her determination to continue her adventures, despite the risks. Her courage and resolve show how strongly she believes in The Benefits of Adventure and Discovery.

Sarah functions as a role model for Annabelle: Annabelle is inspired by Sarah and by the famous women Sarah used to tell her about—such as Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt. Annabelle feels a bond with Sarah because she believes that Sarah, too, got very bored with the constricted lives of the Doll family. She knows that Sarah took many risks in order to satisfy her curiosity and learn more about the world. Later, Annabelle will learn that the other adults have always been afraid that Sarah left on purpose—that her independence and her dissatisfaction with their regimented and narrow lives led her to abandon the family.

When Sarah finally appears in the narrative, she dispels any idea that she might have been tempted to leave the family behind. In fact, she cannot wait to get back to them. Her love for the family is also clear when Uncle Doll reveals how much trouble Sarah always went through to respect Mama and Papa’s wishes where Annabelle and Bobby were concerned: Every time she left the dollhouse, she dropped out of a window instead of using the door so that the children would not realize she was gone. After 45 years, Sarah remembers and reminds the family that Annabelle’s birthday is coming up, making Sarah “one of the most wonderful people in the world” to Annabelle (233).

Uncle Doll is Sarah’s husband and Annabelle and Bobby’s “uncle,” although it is unclear even to Annabelle what his specific relationship to her parents is. Like Mama, Papa, and Nanny, he is terrified to leave the dollhouse, but, unlike these other adults, Uncle Doll volunteers to accompany Annabelle. Despite his fear, he shows courage in this moment. There are limits to his courage, however: It is later revealed that he has been the one writing the newer journal entries about the attic because he has suspected that this might be where Sarah has been all this time and is too frightened to look for himself. Still, Uncle Doll clearly loves Sarah. Although he is too timid to search for her by himself, he makes it clear that he is angry at Mama and Papa for the way they have handled Sarah’s disappearance. 

Papa’s self-sacrificing rescue of Uncle Doll during the encounter with The Captain in Nora’s room is a turning point for Uncle Doll. He realizes how much family means and how little disagreements matter in this context. He apologizes to Papa and moves back into the house. He comes along with the rest of the family on the final rescue mission to free Sarah from the trunk, and he accompanies them back to the Funcraft house for Annabelle and Sarah’s party, despite his traumatic experience with The Captain on his last visit to the Funcraft house. By the end of the novel, Annabelle thinks that he is “starting to change […] a little” and has become somewhat less timid (249), but she knows that he will never be as brave as she and Sarah are.

Mama, Papa, and Nanny are all adult members of the Doll family and are the family’s most timid and conventional members. They are constantly reminding Annabelle and Bobby about the Doll Code and enforcing rigid rules meant to keep everyone safe from the dreaded Permanent Doll State. They have strong ideas about propriety, largely derived from their own origins in 19th-century England, and they enjoy following family traditions like the sing-along. Mama, Papa, and Nanny are initially hesitant about spending time with the Funcrafts, whose more modern outlook and general boisterousness strike them as “unusual” and “raucous” (72). They are also the ones who most resist the idea of searching for Auntie Sarah. These characters initially function as brakes on Annabelle’s ambitions, discouraging her adventurousness and urging her to value established norms and rules above her own sense of right and wrong.

By the end of the narrative, Mama, Papa, and Nanny have grown somewhat in their outlooks, making them dynamic characters despite their essential flatness. They seem to accept that not only Annabelle and Sarah but also Bobby will be regularly leaving the dollhouse to explore, and they themselves intend to keep visiting with the Funcrafts. Although, at the beginning of the story, they are devoted to traditions and rules and are very fearful about leaving the narrow confines of their life in the dollhouse, Annabelle’s example of Following One’s Own Moral Compass inspires them to broaden their horizons and leave behind at least a little of their fear so that they can, in their own small way, embrace The Benefits of Adventure and Discovery.

Kate and Nora Palmer are the two daughters of Annie Palmer, who is Grandma Katherine’s daughter and Gertrude’s granddaughter. Kate, the nine-year-old elder daughter, is the current owner of the Doll family’s dollhouse, which has been passed down the matrilineal line for four generations. Both Kate and Nora are flat, static characters who function as powerful external forces in Annabelle’s life. When Annabelle suggests to Mama that Kate is her friend, Mama discourages this idea, making it clear that human girls and doll girls cannot really have this kind of relationship. In front of Kate and Nora, Annabelle must pretend to be an inanimate object without any will or desires of her own. This reverses the novel’s conceit that the dolls are fuller characters than the humans.

Kate and Nora also illustrate how different people in the same family can be. While Kate is careful with the Doll family and generally conventional in the ways she plays with them—tucking them into bed, setting them at the table, and so on—Nora’s play with both the Dolls and the Funcrafts is chaotic and rambunctious. Nora is the one who creates the Rancher Family game, throws and bounces the dolls, and places them in their own icebox. While Kate’s dollhouse is meticulously set up to mimic a real home, Nora’s remains a nonsensical jumble of unrelated objects. In their differences, Kate and Nora resemble Annabelle and Tiffany. The fact that, despite their differences, they will always be sisters suggests that Annabelle and Tiffany, too, can form a long-lasting and intimate bond regardless of how different they are.