#the mourning doll comparison is really shooting yourself in the foot

[butchladymaria]

ok but seriously. i know “doll as a mourning doll” is a popular interpretation but i spent hours hunting for credible sources on the subject and the longer you spend actually understanding what a mourning doll was, the less sense that claim makes. mourning dolls were:

1. made for infants and very small children and made/commissioned by their parents. it was not something people did for any deceased loved one. if an older child died, there were other methods by which to memorialize them — some of the more “extreme” by modern standards being post-mortem photography with the corpse and mourning hair art.

2. they were more like sculptures than dolls — made of wax due to the rise in wax sculpture as used for medical purposes. some were weighted to help a mourning parent, but that is as far as it goes based on the actual historical evidence. they weren’t articulated, as the doll is.

3. mourning dolls are the product of an entire complex cultural landscape with very specific attitudes towards children. as a result, mourning dolls are very much bound up in those attitudes. even if the previous inconsistencies don’t deter the equivalency, i think a lot of people make it without actually realizing the full weight of what they are implying about the doll, maria, and gerhman.

tl;dr i am begging people to please please please understand what things are in context before making that kind of false equivalency because i know for a fact some of yall do not mean to imply that gerhman viewed maria the way the victorians viewed literal infants