The Polly Diaries #1: Pandemic Polly
“Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are ‘housed.’ Our soul is an abode. And by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms,’ we learn to ‘abide’ within ourselves.” —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958)
Did you own a Polly Pocket when you were a kid? Like Super Soakers and Cabbage Patch Kids, Polly Pockets were ubiquitous in the 1990s. A Polly Pocket was a toy that featured a tiny doll in a miniature house. The house folded up into a plastic compact, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.
When I was growing up in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, I didn’t own a Polly Pocket. But television commercials marketing Polly Pockets certainly gave me a vivid impression of what it would be like to play with one. Lately, I’ve become drawn again to these toys from my childhood. The Covid pandemic has shut down my city, and consequently I find myself daydreaming about Polly Pockets. In my imagination, I enact simple domestic storylines in their tiny, pastel interiors. I even purchased a few vintage Polly Pockets from Etsy. On occasion, I prop them open in my hand and gaze inside.
I’m dedicating the next few entries of this notebook to Polly Pockets. You might think that surely there are more serious matters, such as the Covid pandemic and the racial reckoning taking place throughout the United States, that are far more worthy of my time. Still, Polly Pockets are tied—even if by a flimsy thread—to my experience of the pandemic and racial trauma. This connection is based not on my negative associations with such experiences, but as antidotes to them. When I was in Yale Divinity School, I took a course called “Anthropology of Playthings” that delved into the deeper meanings of toys. It was too fascinating a field of study for me not to carry on in some way or form after I graduated. So let these entries on Polly Pockets be an homage to that course that Dr. Anderson Blanton taught with so much passion. Even though I’m trained as an art historian, my interest in cultural objects is broad. I don’t limit the time and attention I dedicate to certain objects just because they’re considered low- or middle-brow or part of popular culture rather than elite art. If nothing else, my art-historical education has made me realize just how culturally constructed and elitist the category of “art” really is.
When I gaze at the interiors of Polly Pockets, I feel a rush of relief and assurance. They evoke security, freedom, and comfort. They offer joyful escapism in the midst of the pandemic. They hint at dreams of personal space and refuge in a society that has historically redlined and curtailed the growth of intergenerational wealth for racial and ethnic minorities. They fuel fantasies of living an idyllic, off-the-grid life in counterpoint to the infrastructural woes that seem to plague regions across the United States.
Human beings can process traumatic events through small but cumulative acts and practices. For me, writing and thinking about art and culture has long been a way of gaining some sense of control and power over the chaos and dysfunction around me. In “The Polly Diaries,” I’m going to approach this toy from my perspective as an art historian, cultural historian, and theologian. Perhaps doing so in this casual e-space will generate some insight into how my pandemic anxieties, experiences of systemic racism, and discontents with economic inequity are shifting my long-held concepts of home, identity, and self-efficacy.
Maybe thinking about Polly Pockets will offer you, as it has for me, a small measure of meaning-full and meaning-less thought and distraction.