Background Context for His Heart’s Desire
On Dolls and Boyhood
On Children’s Pageant Plays
On Dolls and Race
Dolls and Boyhood
Boys have always played with dolls. Although doll play has often been seen as a way to prepare for caregiving duties assigned to girls and women, children often don’t do what they are “supposed” to do.
Dolls are often marketed to girls, and children’s gender identity has often been formed, in part, by the gendering of toys and play. Sometimes boys have been discouraged from playing with dolls. In “His Heart’s Desire,” we see that Andy, only five years old, has already learned to associate dolls with girls and to hush his own desire for a doll.
Still, boys have not always been discouraged in their doll play, and their connection to dolls has been recognized. Counsellor E. A. Johnson’s 1908 essay “Negro Dolls for Negro Babies,” published in the Colored American Magazine, discussed the importance of Black dolls for Black children, both boys and girls. Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s study of children, dolls, and race in the 1940s, famously photographed by Black photographer Gordon Parks, included both boys and girls. Conversations about the gender stereotyping of toys extended into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. For example, white children’s author Charlotte Zolotow’s 1972 picture book William's Doll tells of a boy’s desire for a doll and his adult family members’ disagreement about fulfilling his wish. Still, boys are underrepresented in popular depictions of and stories about dolls.
Children’s Pageant Plays
The children’s pageant featured in “His Heart’s Desire” would have been a familiar event to readers when the story was first published in 1900.
Forms of performance such as recitation and pageantry have long been incorporated into children’s education. With increasing access to public education from the late 1800s into the early twentieth century, pageants became a common feature, particularly to enhance children’s history education. The rise of children’s pageantry into the Harlem Renaissance would see plays by prominent African American authors including W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Mary Church Terrell and collections of historical drama for youth published by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, an organization led by foundational Black historian Carter G. Woodson. Dunbar-Nelson’s children’s pageants include a pageant written for the celebration of Black abolitionist and activist Frederick Douglass’ 100th birthday in 1917.
After “His Heart’s Desire” was published in the Chicago Daily News, Dunbar-Nelson revised the story, making a dramatic change that shifted the focus of the children’s pageant from war to peace. In the Daily News version, Andy, representing Young America, sings the praises of Admiral George Dewey, who was celebrated for his victory at the Battle of Manila Bay in the Spanish-American War in 1898. Dewey’s victory contributed to the emergence of the United States as a white-supremacist imperial power. In Dunbar-Nelson’s unpublished, revised version of “His Heart’s Desire,” Andy still represents Young America, but he praises World Peace instead of Dewey.
Both versions of the pageant in “His Heart’s Desire” reflect popular expressions of American patriotism in which Dunbar-Nelson and other Black writers of the time participated.
Dolls and race
Alice Dunbar-Nelson does not describe the race of any characters in this story. While some authors and readers take the absence of clear racial descriptions to mean characters are white, it would be a mistake to read Dunbar-Nelson’s writing this way, because she often wrote about characters whose race is not clearly stated. Dunbar-Nelson based the ’Steenth Street stories on her experience teaching Black children, so it makes sense not to assume the children of this neighborhood were white, but to read Andy and Sissy as Black.
Because dolls are toys made to look human, they usually have skin and hair that suggests their race. Dolls might also have items, like clothing, that suggest gender and class. Dunbar-Nelson does not describe the gender, race, or class of the button-eyed rag doll Andy makes from scraps of cloth. But she does describe the doll that Andy wants as blue-eyed, blonde, and wearing a pink silk dress.
Andy’s desire is for a store-bought doll, not a homemade one, like he and Sissy already have. When Alice Dunbar-Nelson wrote this story, store-bought dolls were expensive. For most families in 1900, no matter their race, expensive dolls like the one Andy receives at the end of this story would have been out of reach. Andy’s mother, who takes in washing to make a living, likely cannot afford such a store-bought doll.
Whether or not we read Andy as a Black boy, it is not surprising that he would long for a white-looking doll in a fancy dress. When this story was written, most store-bought dolls made in the United States had light skin because most doll manufacturers were white and assumed the children who played with them would want white dolls. Black parents did make dolls with dark skin for their children much earlier than this.
In the 1890s, some African American parents were already looking for and buying Black dolls but such mass-manufactured dolls were hard to find. Black dolls would become more readily available later in the 1900s and into the 2000s.