#Cécile and Marie Grace

[omgthatdress]

In Meet Marie-Grace, Marie-Grace celebrates carnivale by attending a masquerade party wearing a fairy costume loaned to her by her voice-teacher, Madame Océane, a leftover from one of her operas.

While a fairy costume isn’t inaccurate, the overall costume is tbh kind of plain for fancy dress costumes in the 1850s. Fancy-dress parties were a staple of the Victorian-era upper class, ie, the class who had enough disposable income to waste a lot of money on a frivolous dress that was only worn once, so they tended to be incredibly elaborate displays of wealth, like these costumes designed for House of Worth:

Costumes back then aren’t like they are today. They still fit the fashionable silhouette of the time and rarely strayed from polite dressing conventions. Subjects like fairies, shepherdesses, ethnic wear, and historical figures were common.

But you also had much more interpretive costumes, representing abstract popular themes and objects:

“Ben Franklin and his Luminous Kite”

A Dirigible

electric light

Good and Evil

a lily-pond

photography

a scrap book

[desertdollranch]

Cécile was most impressed. Here was a girl who enjoyed being out in the world, doing things, just as she did. Marie-Grace didn't even know French very well, yet she had come to the market alone! This Américaine seemed shy, but she was certainly brave, too. She had spirit. We are more alike than we are different, Cécile thought.

[midsummerdolls]

Cécile’s Parlor Set is the only piece of doll furniture I own, so I thought I’d actually photograph Marie-Grace and Cécile with it! The desk has its special place on my doll shelf, but it rarely gets used now for props due to my limited doll space.

[samantha-and-nellie]

About your doll collection, can you explain what you have? Also, it's really nice to have a creator in this fandom who talks about the stories and cares about it so much instead of solely focusing on the collector side of things. All of your posts are amazing, and I appreciate them a lot. Thank you!

ahhh, this is such a sweet ask! i'm glad that people like what i have to say about the stories, since they truly are so meaningful to me and have had a major influence in my life. i'm actually going to give babbity kate some credit behind me starting this blog; i've had a history of lurking in ag fan spaces throughout my older childhood years as a fan, and then again when i got on tumblr, but finally seeing someone else who focused on the stories made me want to do that as well.

anyways! onto your actual ask:) a little bit of context: i do have a pretty large collection from childhood (despite growing up middle-lower middle class) because my parents were keen on quality-over-quantity, so really the main items i got as gifts or spent my own money on were american girl items and books. i also got dolls/doll clothes/accessories from the ages of four to fourteen, so there was a lot of time for a collection to develop!

i have nine dolls (samantha, nellie, rebecca, marie-grace, cécile, caroline, molly, emily and grace), and a handful of mini dolls (including some of the holiday ones, but honestly i like the miniature books that the dolls come with more than i like the mini dolls themselves). my clothing collection is a lot of ag, but i also got really into sewing my own clothes for my dolls using the pleasant company patterns. i have a few off-brand furniture pieces, but i do have sam's wicker table and chairs, and i still remember the birthday that i received them:) when it comes to the books, i honestly have a handful of everything! main series, short stories, mysteries, goty, activity books, etc. most of them were bought second hand, and that is the one ag thing i will still buy if i come across some in a used bookstore or the like that i don't yet own.

if you've made it this far, here's a group picture i took of my dolls (plus a couple of china ones that i used as bridget and jenny) as a kid! it's actually driving me crazy that grace isn't in the picture, because i definitely had her by then. i also stand by uhhhh half of the clothes that the girls are wearing (marie-grace is ADORABLE in nellie's spring dress, the poncho that cécile is wearing is questionable at best).

bonus of grace being a cutie from that same childhood photo shoot:)

[pleasantsamantha]

Cécile and MG matchy matching! I got Cécile’s outfit from a doll sale last year handmade by a seamstress.

[kirstenlarsons]

Continuing the tour of my collection, this one is a two for one

Marie-Grace Gardner

and

Cécile Rey

[We will ignore that I did not think about the way AG eyes work before deciding how to photograph all of my dolls for these introduction posts.]

Cecile and Marie Grace are already character dolls, two girls living during the Yellow Fever epidemic in New Orleans in 1853. They were the only dolls American Girl released as a pair, so I couldn't make separste posts for them.

Something I can't wait for is making new clothes for them. I am currently studying costuming, and the 1850s and 60s just happen to be my favourite time period in fashion history. Like set a book then just to describe the dresses favourite. Like I dress like that every day favourite. So many more clothes for these girls will follow.

These girls were bought second hand on ebay, shortly before last Christmas (2022), and they arrived with very loose limbs. I fixed Marie Grace, mostly, but I quite hate scooping out their innards, so Cécile will probably stay loose. Queen of sitting down.

[dandelionsandderivatives]

American girl reviews: Cécile and Marie-Grace

I posted a few weeks ago about rereading some of the American Girl books, and I've been wanting to type up my thoughts about some of them.

American Girl has made some of their Black-history-centered books available as free ebooks online, so once I'd read through the books on my shelf, I decided to go see what they had available.

Cécile and Marie-Grace were introduced after I'd aged out of American Girl, but I had beloved younger relatives who were still very invested in the franchise, and so I picked up and read their books pretty soon after they came out. I remembered almost nothing about them, other than the switching-places-at-the-ball plot, and that I didn't find them particularly engaging.

On a reread, I think the series really suffers from the shared POV; I think it could have been done well, but the pacing is dreadful. The events of Meet Cécile and Meet Marie-Grace are almost exactly the same; there are multiple places where we see a scene from Marie-Grace's point of view, and then we have to reread it from Cécile's point of view in the very next book. Essentially, by the time we get to Marie-Grace and the Orphans, we're halfway through the series and nothing has happened. This issue continues through the books; there are a few places where we see something from one character's perspective, and then we wait till the next book to find out what the other character thought about it. This could be a fun way to build suspense, but in my opinion it usually feels anticlimactic (as there really isn't much personal drama between the two girls).

To be clear, I don't think this is a character issue; I think the idea of having a shared POV is inherently difficult, and AG bit off more than it could chew. The other series with best friends get seven books (six for the main character and one for the best friend), and I think they would have done well to add another book to the series. Maybe start with Meet Marie-Grace and Cécile (or perhaps Meet Cécile and Marie-Grace), and then arrange the series like so:

Meet Marie-Grace and Cécile

Cécile has an adventure (MG helps)

Marie-Grace has an adventure (Cécile helps)

Cécile and Marie-Grace team up to save Christmas!

Marie-Grace has another adventure (Cécile provides moral support)

Cécile has another adventure (MG provides snacks)

Changes for Cécile and Marie-Grace

This way you'd get less repetition and a bit more character development, and the book series might as well be a bit longer, since this is a New And Different Way To Approach American Girl Dolls.

As for the subject matter of the books, I don't think I had many complaints; at least, none that couldn't be fixed by giving the characters a bit more room to develop. I think a Black character with a wealthy family was a good addition to the lineup, and the interracial friendship was great! I just wish they'd had more story, rather than retelling a shorter story multiple times.

I also. . . don't think the art helped much. I'm not much of an artist, so it could be that I'm just not getting what the art was trying to do, but it looked oddly flat to me?

The collection was also a bit weird. I absolutely love the 1850s; they might be my favorite fashion decade ever. Everything Marie-Grace and Cécile wear is technically accurate, but all of it appears to be cut with no regard to how things drape in doll scale? Marie-Grace's blue two-piece dress, for example, looked really off to me because the sleeves are an odd in-between length. The basque bodice she's wearing is certainly an 1850s-appropriate style (and the collar is white, NOT self-fabric, which a lot of people get wrong), but generally you see that style with long sleeves, not short! I was able to find at least one period photo with a similar cut, so it's fine, but it still looks *off* to me. (I also suspect it's a more adult-woman style rather than a little-girl style, but I'm not 100% sure.)

Cécile's parlor outfit has the same issue: it's a darling idea, and the print on the skirt is to die for, and the jacket is cute – except the sleeve length, which looks awkward in every picture I've seen of it. And again, I don't think you usually see a short-sleeved jacket over a white waist like this? I'm not saying never; I'm just saying it sets off alarm bells.

Especially when Addy has a darling little Zouave jacket with proper pagoda sleeves in her school outfit. AG has managed to produce good mid-century sleeves in the past.

And all of the outfits I've seen just look a little off. The necklines are too high or too low, the sleeves are the wrong length, etc. Marie-Grace has two pink dresses that look similar enough that I'm shocked AG decided to put both into production.

I haven't seen any of the furniture in person. The stock photos make it all look rather plasticky and flat, but maybe it was really nice in person?

Final verdict: Cécile deserved better. Marie-Grace deserved better. It's been only a few weeks since I read them but I don't remember what Cécile's favorite food is, or what she liked to do other than sing and hang out with Marie-Grace.

I do like the parrot, though.

[dolls-and-cats]

Here's my last post exploring the world of some of the real people from the time and place that Cécile and Marie-Grace's stories are meant to represent.

1st couple of pics - Marie-Grace and Cécile enjoying beignets at Café du Monde, which has been there since 1862. Someone else recently posted about them at Café du Monde as young women and I forgot who said it - please feel free to identify yourself!

Pistachio-colored house - built by Jamaican immigrant and free person of color Louis Nelson Fouché in the early 19th century https://nolatours.com/free-people-of-color-architecture-2/

Yellow house - built by Jean-Louis Dolliole, the same person whose home I showed yesterday, in 1819 https://www.frenchquarter.com/freepeople/

I love the way that the fictional stories drew me into learning more about the real history in this area.

[tr0ubl3d-tr4n53nd3r]

I can't find a difference between these photos

[aimmyarrowshigh]

Femslash February 2023

053. Ice - Cécile Rey/Marie-Grace Gardner - archiveofourown.org/works/45121297

[omgthatdress]

Cécile and Marie-Grace were released alongside the best friends line of dolls, and are a pretty transparent gimmick to get people to buy two dolls at once. That being said, I actually kind of love their collection.

Their story is set in New Orleans in 1853, which is a pretty great way to represent the Antebellum South without having a Scarlett O’Hara doll. New Orleans was one of the few places in the south with a robust middle class. Everywhere else had tremendous wealth inequality with absurdly rich plantation-owners, barely surviving poor Whites, and slaves.

Cécile is of the gens de coleur libre, that is, the free people of color, a class of New Orleans citizens born out of the plaçage system in which White men would take women of color as informal second wives. Plaçees held a really interesting position, as they could legally claim inheritance once their patron died, and the children born of plaçage could be named heir of an estate. Plaçees were also allowed to develop assets and run small businesses. All of this created a level of generational wealth that was unique among African-Americans at the time. Today, their descendants are known as Creoles.

As far as Marie-Grace goes, I don’t think she’s Cajun, just French-American. Cajuns are a specific group, the Catholic descendants of the French colonizers of Acadia, now called Nova Scotia, who were forced by the British out of the home. They settled mostly in the fertile Mississippi delta, and maintained a rural, somewhat insular way of life. Marie-Grace is the city-dwelling daughter of a doctor, so probably just the descendant of regular French citizens who settled in New Orleans.

Hair-wise, this is the era when girls tied their hair up with rags at night to have fat sausage curls in the morning. Most photographs and paintings that I’ve seen of Black girls in the era show them with their hair tied up, but there are a few who had curls.

Marie-Grace’s face-framing curls are a little bit more Jan Brady than 1850s, but it’s cute on her, so I’ll give her credit for that. The long hair isn’t inaccurate.

There’s something about Cécile’s dress that keeps saying “wrong” but I can’t quite put my finger on it. A more accurate dress would be more along the lines of something like this:

(The Victoria & Albert Museum)

(The Victoria & Albert Museum)

(New York Historical Society)

Marie-Grace’s dress seems to have been inspired by this portrait of Creole children:

(credit to @in-pleasant-company​ for finding it)

Cécile’s pillbox hat is a style that was adopted more in the late 1860s and 1870s. A more accurate hat would also have her in a “coal scoop” bonnet.

Her gloves, however, are accurate and adorable!

(The Met Museum)

Marie-Grace is wearing a kind of sun hat that was popular for children:

(The Met Museum)

Marie-Grace’s fan looks typical of the French fans that were popular at the time. They were usually painted with pretty pastoral scenes instead of flowers, however, although Chinese fans at the time frequently had floral themes.

(The Philadelphia Museum of Art)

(The Victoria & Albert Museum)

The shoes are definitely late Victorian rather than 1850s. Fine city ladies in the 1850s would be wearing boots made out of silk with leather soles:

(The Met Museum)

[misty-eyed-memory]

AMERICAN GIRL DOLLS MY BELOVED

i recently watched babbity kate's 6 hour video on kirsten and boy did it unlock some memories!! so i felt the need to revisit this beloved character from my childhood in her iconic saint lucia gown 🌟

[midsummerdolls]

Hello everyone! Happy summer! I’ve been super busy with life stuff, but today I made time to change all of my dolls out of their winter clothing into their summer clothing! I am hopeful that I will get to take photos of them before the summer is over. I hope you have a great day!

[samantha-and-nellie]

Please do tell me which books you have collected!

yay! love an excuse to show off my books:) @beautifulwillfulldead also asked about them, so here’s a peek for both of you.

(bonus pic of the mini books i own because i love miniature books so much)

as i mentioned in a previous ask, the majority of my books are thrifted, and the books are still the only ag item that i continue to collect. however, other than the history mysteries, which i have sought out copies of on occasion over the past year, i’m not really actively trying to collect, and only add books if i happen to come across them. (i am tempted to find samantha’s wedding memories and her movie script book though.) i’m also not particularly picky about edition, as you can probably tell, but have thought about getting double copies for the girls who went through illustration changes.

please let me know if there’s any books you want a better look at while i’m here! i can’t do scans or like photograph an entire book, but i’m happy to do more of a peek at any particular one if you send along an ask!

books partially obscured in the photos: kirsten’s theater kit, one play script and the director’s guide from samantha’s theater kit, the director’s guide from molly’s theater kit, the american girls album, samantha’s cooking studio, the silent stranger, and kira down under

books not pictured (not at this location currently for a variety of reasons): the sound of applause, the roar of the falls, growing up with aloha, trouble at fort la pointe, under copp’s hill, watcher in the piney woods, shadows in the glasshouse, riddle of the prairie bride, and enemy in the fort

[dovelylittlebird]

It is now officially my mission to own dolls that I have books for. So based on my current collection, I must acquire:

Felicity Merriman

Elizabeth Cole

Josefina Montoya

Cécile Rey

Nellie O'Malley

Rebecca Rubin

Kit Kittredge

Julie Albright

Melody Ellison

Lindsey Bergman

Kailey Hopkins

Marisol Luna

Jess McConnell

Mia St. Clair

Lanie Holland

McKenna Brooks

Isabelle Palmer

Lea Clark

Luciana Vega

Addy Walker

Kirsten Larson

Samantha Parkington

I already own Marie-Grace Gardner, Kaya'aton'my, and Grace Thomas, as well as their books. So I've got my work cut out for me!

[pleasantsamantha]

Complete group photo for the beginning of 2023!

Look in my “about me” tag for more about my dolls 💖