The Polly Diaries #4: Houses for Children
One major difference between the velour cases of the 19th century and the Polly Pocket compacts of the 1990s is that the latter were made specifically for children. As Walter Benjamin noted, Victorian cases were often lined with crimson velour or plush, materials that solicited tactile engagement and retained cumulative encounters of touch. Polly Pockets, however, were made entirely of durable plastic, a material that could be easily cleaned. Furthermore, the plastic material made the case more resilient to rough treatment from young hands.
Unlike the compact cases and dollhouses of previous centuries, Polly Pocket was created especially for children. After all, Chris Wiggs made it to fulfill the desire of his young daughter to have a dollhouse on-the-go. It may seem obvious to us today that toymakers would create objects that fulfilled children’s own wants and wishes, but this is actually a very modern idea. In previous centuries, the objects that children played with were curiosities passed down from adult owners. When playthings were intentionally made for children, they were often smaller versions of adult tools and implements. These were meant for training children to fulfill grownup responsibilities. Smaller versions of kitchenware and wheelbarrows were intended to aid children in learning how to perform their future tasks.
This was not necessarily the case in the 1990s. In that era, toy companies often focused on children’s fantasy worlds. In Kids’ Stuff (1999), toy historian Gary Cross notes the period’s interest in allowing children to indulge in their fantasy worlds; parents and toy designers did so in ways that were not associated with cultivating the children’s (often gendered) future social, professional, or civic roles, as they were in previous eras. This applies to the Polly Pocket, particularly in the context of girlhood. Cross writes, “These new toys encouraged forms of play that were abstracted from the real worlds of family and household care. They did not invite girls to be ‘little mommies.’ But they also gave no hint of a modern woman’s need to balance work and family…. [They] neither perpetuated old sex roles nor offered alternatives for a new age. These toys evaded the modern ambiguities of growing up female.”
Let’s consider what Cross means by applying his observations to Polly Pocket’s fictional world. It seems to me that the dolls are not full-grown adults. The dolls’ body types and personal effects situate the characters in an eternal childhood where children are only playing at being adults. The characters are playing at being vets or teachers, playing at looking after children, playing at being servers at restaurants, playing at managing salons and hosting parties. These adult roles don’t bear any serious consequences. The figures’ bodies and the interiors’ furnishings are so stylized that they function as pure toys, not educational tools to practically prepare children for the grownup world.
The main point is that Polly Pocket’s universe offers fantasy versions of the grownup world rather than substantive training materials for children to practice their future roles and responsibilities. The furnishings and interiors aren’t simply smaller versions of grownup tools and environments; rather, they are stylized to be rounded off at the corners and appear in pastel shades. The compacts are thus about good feelings and escapism; they are portals for fantasy play.
Perhaps these words from French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space, 1958) best describe the particular spatial magic that the miniature world of Polly Pockets holds for children: “To make inside concrete and outside vast is the first task, the first problem, it would seem, of an anthropology of the imagination… [The] miniature can accumulate size. It is vast in its way.” The fact that you can carry a Polly Pocket compact anywhere means that your fictional domestic or interior realm can come alive concretely no matter where you go in the vast real world in which you move. A jingle for one of the Polly Pocket commercials in the ‘90s goes, “Open up the case, there’s a world inside!” But again, this inside world is not the world of real adulthood and responsibilities; it is a fantasy world in which children play at adulthood. In On Longing (1984), Susan Stewart eloquently articulates this mechanism of miniaturized fantasy: “Once the toy becomes animated, it initiates another world, the world of daydream. The beginning of narrative time here is not an extension of everyday life; it is the beginning of an entirely new temporal world, a fantasy world parallel to (and hence never intersecting) the world of everyday reality.”
Polly Pocket thus offers fantasy houses specifically for children. They are not smaller versions of the adult world. The durable plastic, the eternal youthfulness of the dolls’ bodies, and the stylized, pastel-colored aesthetic of the interiors all assert the separateness of the Polly Pocket universe from the real adult world; it is a fantasy world that prioritizes children’s agency in creating a distinct realm of their own through daydreams.