The Dollmaker (1954) by Harriette Arnow

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Dollmaker (1954)

by Harriette Arnow

Pulaski County, Kentucky

Kentucky: 7/16

  Calling The Dollmaker a Kentucky novel is a little misleading, in that the vast majority of this 500 page plus book takes place squarely within Detroit, Michigan.  It's about Kentucky as much as a novel about a New York City immigrant family from Italy is about Italy.  It's also a melodrama, a genre so down on its luck that it has become a pejorative adjective.  Arnow's heroine is a plucky housewife from the holler with a talent for whittling.   During World War II, her husband, a coal miner with a talent for "tinkering" finds work as a skilled machinist in a War factory.   The wife puts up a small amount of resistance before she whisks herself and her children off to city live circa World War II era Detroit.  Spoiler alert: It sucks and she hates it.

  The Dollmaker is squarely in the "protagonist never leaves the house" quarter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  This lady gets herself and her family to the apartment/townhouse in Detroit, and thereafter she leaves the immediate of the vicinity once for a visit to the school of her children, once to the hospital to accompany an injured child and that is it. End of list. Twice in over five hundred pages of text.  The Dollmaker reminds me of Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett.  Basically, all this lady does is worry and eventually she makes some dolls.  Her children adjust to urban life with varying degrees of success, and not for the first time in this chapter I am reminded that the "upward mobility through education" style American dream doesn't work for children who are taught to feel "less than" at school.

 Another theme from the Kentucky Appalachian area is that holler culture is not the product of degenerate's inbreeding, rather it represents a migration of a specific sort of people: white immigrants who mostly came from the borderlands of England and Scotland without much organization or forethought, settling where no one else wanted the land.  The whole point of mountain Kentucky was to escape elites telling them what to do and how to live, and that persists to today.  It wasn't like there was some well-organized period and then things fell out- Kentucky hill people were the same from the 18th century to the present in their cultural characteristics.