Sunday, December 23, 2007

The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright

Author Jean Nathan embarked on a sad mystery when she chose to delve into the life of children’s author Dare Wright. Dare Wright is best known for her photography-illustrated books about a pretty doll named Edith who is very lonely until one day two teddy bears come to live with her.

The Lonely Doll series, which began in 1947, had a tremendous impact on its girl readership—including Nathan herself. Somehow, Wright worked a special magic on her doll and teddy bears, making them seem so real in their poses and expressions.

But within those books about love and companionship lurked darker themes of punishment and abandonment. Edith is always fearful Mr. Bear and Little Bear will leave her. Mischievous Little Bear constantly lures Edith into trouble which results in spankings and threats of separation.

Nathan’s quest into Dare's story begins with a brief memory of the pink-and white gingham cover of The Lonely Doll. She becomes obsessed with the hazy memory and seeks to remember more. Eventually, she recovers the title of the book and does a little research. In the bookstore and on the Internet, she encounters comments about the books as being an autobiographical psycho-drama of childhood abuse. She can’t seem to find copies of the book anywhere, for they have fallen out of print or were lost in library circulation.

The fascination thickens. Nathan makes the right contacts, discovers Wright also lives in New York and eventually connects with her. She finds Dare Wright as a wisp of a woman in a public hospital, one that is lost in a sad otherworld, without anyone to call family.

Early on, Nathan understands that Edith the doll is an autobiographical self-portrait. The pretty, made up doll looked eerily just like the author, with the blonde, high-ponytail and gold hoop earrings.

Nathan was given hordes of photographs of Dare—ones depicting her in high-glamour, modeling her own costumes in stage-like interiors. With these artistic images, Nathan was given the only existing portal to the mysterious inner world of Dare Wright.

The biography is sprinkled with these pictures. Dare Wright was an exquisitely beautiful woman. Her presence in these pictures is incredibly haunting.

Dare Wright left very little biographical remnants. She was an incredibly shy and private woman who never married or had children. In fact, she lived her entire life as a virgin, enclosed in the clutches of her domineering mother.

Her mother, Edie Stevenson Wright was a portrait painter of the elite that always dressed to the nines whenever she went out. She was married to an alcoholic theater critic named Ivan Wright and had two children, Dare and her beloved brother Blaine.

The marriage was completely doomed and the family suffered much chaos during the early years of Dare and Blaine’s life. Eventually, the family is severed in half. Dare is separated from her father and brother. Her mother banishes their memory and begins shaping a strange life of shiny appearances and fairy tales for her and her “good and precious” daughter.

The truth is Dare Wright suffered not only severe separation, but heart-aching isolation and emotional neglect during her developing years. Her mother left her alone in the apartment. She consoled herself with dress-up games, books and dolls. Always, she craved the love and attention of her mother. This feeling would never cease, permeating her emotional core forever.

And Dare Wright never did grow up. When she entered adulthood, her mother started to take an interest in her life and completely merged with her docile daughter. They both took immense interests in their own appearances, playing and photographing dress-up sessions for years. And while many men chased after Dare for her beauty, her mother battled every advance.

This strange mother-daughter relationship was almost incestuous. They shared the same bed, often clutching one another in their sleep. They sunbathed nude together and Edith encouraged Dare to undress for the camera.

Dare never grew into her own independence, and never healed from her emotional scars. Instead, she was like those European marble fountains of Venus. From her beautiful, self-possessed beauty she spouted streams of creativity. She could sew, draw, write model, do carpentry, and of course, take amazing photos.

After many years of separation, Dare is finally re-united with her brother Blaine. Thus, began another relationship of incestuous closeness. So exited to have closed the painful chasm of their separation, and in awe of one another’s attractiveness, they fell in love in a way.

* * *

The details of this mysterious and sad life are sometimes hard to swallow. There are many more layers to Dare Wright’s life that I will not disclose here. I appreciated this book perhaps for its sadness. As I read, I wept over the tragedies of Dare Wright. I wept for the little girl so hurt by life that she never grew up; for he girl who gave birth to beautiful books that explored the painful repercussions of loneliness.

As a writer and artist myself, I am often boggled by my own desire to create. Perhaps creativity is a character trait people are born with. But I also think that highly creative people are often wounded souls, trying to heal their emotional pain through art.

I can relate to Dare Wright. I also came from a profoundly dysfunctional family and had troubles socializing in school. To escape some of the horrors that existed in my reality, I retreated to the world of books and writing poems and stories. Until well into adulthood, I lived in my imagination, often withdrawing from the world.

I understand the heart-ache of childhood loneliness and emotional neglect. For some reason, the feeling never fades. Even friends and lovers can not fill what Robert Frost called “those desert spaces” inside the soul.

For most people, childhood is a happy time of love and magic. For others, childhood is a time where frightening things happens. But the child mind has troubles comprehending the stark reality it lives in. The emotionally-endangered child retreats even further into the realm of fantasy to cope with the world.

The human impulse to fabricate and fall into the make-believe world is probably a product of evolution. How can anyone stomach the ugliness and boredoms of reality all the time? Every time we read a book or watch a movie, we escape reality. Whenever we are engaged in a captivating story, we seem to leave our bodies and enter the emotional world of the characters.

But fantasies and stories are not simply a means of escape. Story-land is also a place where our fears are explored, and our wishes are fulfilled. It’s a place where we empathize and release our own pain.

* * *

Dare Wright fell in a life-time fairy tale as a beautiful princess that longed for love. She could not cope with the real world. In fact, after her mother and brother died, she suffered a serious bout of alcoholism. After her mother, she had no one to sustain the fairy tale with. Reality started to seep into her, and with it, disillusionment. And disillusionment, coupled with alcoholism and a lack of internal independence, led to madness and despair.

The Secret Life of The Lonely Doll is not for the type of reader that just wants to escape into a world where everything works out in the end. The story of Dare Wright is painfully sad. She reminds me of Marilyn Monroe—both were girlish-women of icon-worthy beauty that never had their emotional needs met. I recommend the book to anyone who wants to examine how an artist can transform emotional trauma into creations of depth and beauty.

In the epilogue of the biography, Nathan sums up the sadness beneath the happy stories of The Lonely Doll series:

“The story of The Lonely Doll was, in large measure Dare’s own story. In the book, a tour de force of wish fulfillment, she found a way to make things right, providing her alter ego, with love and rescue in the form of two male teddy bears, the father and brother whose real-life counterparts she had lost when she was young. She ceaselessly sought that rescue in her own life, which was spent posing, playing dress-up, and retreating into fantasy in order to remain her mother’s ‘good and precious daughter,’ as if holding on to her mother and her mother’s love depended on that.”

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