1930: Hitty, Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field

I had never heard of this book before I read it for this blog, but I found the story line familiar, as would most people: it's the story told from the perspective of a toy. Like the Tin Soldier or the cast of the Toy Story movies, Hitty is a doll who goes through many owners and adventures, always without her owners realizing that she is observing them. But I read this as more than just a story about a doll. It seemed to play around a lot with the subject/object duality. Hitty is an object, but giving her a voice and personality subjectifies her. Her position as an observer gives her the ability to view her owners, who range all over the social spectrum, with objectivity. And though the story makes her subjective, her immobility as an object makes her the passive victim of the whims of her owners.

In essence, Hitty is a slave. Though she has a life and thoughts of her own, she is considered property to be treasured or abused on a whim. When I wrote about Smoky the Cowhorse, I made this assertion based on contextual evidence, but in Hitty the author actually makes this comparison explicit. From her time with a Quaker family who reads Uncle Tom's Cabin but cannot participate in the war, Hitty makes her way to the South where she meets two old ladies who lost loved ones at the hands of the "Yankees." Later still, she comes to belong to a little black girl whose family, while technically freed, still live in poverty in a shack belonging to a plantation. Even more explicit, toward the end of the book Hitty is auctioned off in an estate sale where she discovers that she is a valuable antique. She remarks, "I am sure no slave on the block was ever more surprised at her own value than I."

This explicit comparison colors much of the rest of the story with extra shades of meaning. For instance, when she's put on display at various places, such as the cotton expo and a junk sale, I was reminded of the Hottentot Venus. I could hardly help flinching when Hitty says that being sold was a "great relief to me, as I grew tired of being explored by so many strange fingers."

Additionally, the book seems more like a slave narrative when we consider that Hitty is only able to write her memoirs after a hundred years or more. For the rest of her time, her ability to write "her story" leaves her essentially without a "history." When she hears her owner wondering about her origins, she thinks, "it made me wish more than ever that I had some way of telling her about myself." The only thing each owner can discover is her name, cross stitched (branded?) on her undergarments by her first owner.

Of course, this all might make it sound like an unpleasant book, but it really isn't. In fact, there are quite a few people who make their own Hitty dolls and form clubs about her. As a side note, Hitty actually does exist; Rachel Field bought her from the antique store where she ends the book, and she now lives in the Library Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. There's plenty of info on the internet about making your own Hitty, as well as kits you can buy for flat traveling Hittys that you can mail to friends or family members. Maybe I'll have to learn how to whittle so that I can make my own Hitty ...