Customer Reviews

The Dollmaker

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The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow

This is a magnificant, powerful book about a woman's strength, endurance and inner beauty in the face of despair and hopelessness. The innocent faithfulness and innate goodness of Gertie, many times described as a massive, unattractive woman, turns her into an angelic, beautiful creature for the reader. Gertie, always the champion of her children and "good wife" to her husband, triumphs over adversity, fends for herself and emerges as a wonderful role model for people everywhere. For a person characterized with little education, she had the quick thinking, common sense intelligence of someone with far more education. The mountain vernacular was at times difficult to decipher, but with continued reading it became easier. The descriptions of nature and scenery were so richly detailed that it was easy to picture the story--almost as if a movie was being watched. One horrible part in the story was described in such a graphic manner that the reader could literally be sickened, because by this time in the book, the characters are your own, like family members.

This may be one of the greatest works of literature portraying "woman's strength" ever written. Give it a try--you'll like it.

Having grown up in rural Kentucky 'The Dollmaker' was far too real for me. Gertie is a real character, she is the typical strong and determined woman of the mountains. It is almost repulsive that she has to be paired with a man who is a weak and spineless character. Despite it all she was able to create beauty, honor her husband and children and to have dreams in all the despair. Her life is typical for so many women of rural Appalachia from that time.

I would say that one who has to see the movie to critique the book needs to remember that a movie is rarely as worthy as the book. Either read the book or see the movie, most often I choose to do the former. Why let a movie ruin a good book!

Stands out in my mind as one of the all time best reads, comprable to "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck!

Harriette Arnow, in The Dollmaker, not only chronicles the collapse of the ages-old rural universe of Appalachia and the subsequent historic wave of migration north to the Northern States during WW II, she gives us a giant of a character in Gertie Nevels. Tall as a man, strong as a man, staunchly independent without even knowing it, Gertie nevertheless kowtows to her overbearing mother, then to her husband's wishes to give up her dreams and everything that has ever had meaning in her life. Highly symbolic, each character is nonetheless surging with blood and gristle and clashing with a society that pits human against human, culture against culture, for profit.

Arnow, a brilliant novelist and National Book Award finalist in 1955, has largely been relegated to "regional" literature and somewhat forgot in recent times. Her first novel, Mountain Path, captured a kind of human being we see little of today in America. Both fierce and fearful, generous to a fault but full of grudges and a firm believer of "an eye for an eye", they are of a time and place that is now almost lined-out with Interstates.

In The Dollmaker, Arnow takes what she so masterfully sculpted in her early fiction and brings it into the light of the world. The rough and raw characters of Mountain Path are now thrown into the mix of the new Detroit slums. Bigoted Northerners, foreign-speaking European immigrants, and the reviled hillbillies of Kentucky, Tennessee and beyond come together in an international community amidst the life-and-death early days of unions and union busters.

The Dollmaker is long and by the end I was wrung out. At times I found myself wanting to shake Gertie, at others, to take her in my arms and protect her. In the end she becomes so tragic a being that I was stunned. It is said that Arnow was influenced by Emile Zola's novel Germinal. The similarities are all there, but their messages, and certainly their conclusions, are significantly different.

The Dollmaker was a beautifully written book. Once I started to read it I could not put it down. It is about the life of a woman during World War II, who under certain circumstances regarding her husband, is obliged to move her family from Kentucky to Detroit. The change that Gertie, the mother, is forced to undergo and adapt to is evident through the course of the novel. Arnow opens our eyes to life during this period for many people like Gertie. People, with "big" dreams, go to work in war factories that over work them and place them in dangerous conditions. Because money made is necessary for payments, food, or other foolish neccessities, families are forced to live each day as it comes. This view of society during this period was new to me. I had never realized the adjustments, cultural shocks, and advantages people could take of others during this time, or during a war. Arnow tells the events that take place in Gertie's life so well. The images she creates our realistic. She doesn't try to make a romance or happy-go-lucky ending out of the book. She tells about Gertie's sufferings as they are. Her book is more like a historical documentary, except we get to experience, emotionally, what the characters do. Some would argue that this book is too depressing, but Arnow wanted us to realize that life can be like this some times. There is no cruelness or situation that occurs to Gertie or others in this book that we don't see in our own lives or could empathize with. I felt emotionally and mentally as drawn to this book as I did to The Grapes of Wrath. I saw the same spirit of human survival and courage in both books. The Dollmaker gives an inside look into what changes in surroundings can do to a family. Just as in The Grapes of Wrath, we see the gradual deterioation in the family structure. This was sad, but truthful. You have to read this novel to understand or feel what I mean in describing it. If your realistic and perceptive, you'll enjoy this novel. It will be mind boggling at times. I recommend you have a box of tissues at your side before beginning. In any case, after reading The Dollmaker you'll certainly be more open minded and sympathtic towards others' sufferings and realize that you and I have it easy.

549 pages of misery. Reminded me much of Ken Rouch's painful movie "Ladybird, Ladybird". Depressing to read, especially when I thought I had figured out, about 100 pages before the end, what was going to happen. But the end, when it came, took me completely off guard, made me want to weep. Which says an awful lot about Arnow"s writing capabilities. You never saw her writing. No overblown metaphors or similes. Just a bleak portrait of one hillbilly woman who could not change or learn from her mistakes. And pays, oh so dearly. And yet she paints her characters with such vivid brush strokes that they leap off the page and into my thoughts in bed. A book not easily forgotten . Yet not remembered with ease either. What a tragic figure is Gertie Nevels.

As editor of The Mountain Laurel, a journal of mountain life, I found this book excellent in its descriptions of mountain people. It is a perfect example of two types of poverty and how mountain people cope with it - poverty at home in the mountains, where they have land and can raise their own food, but have little money, and poverty in the big city where they have jobs and have to buy everything they need to survive. The main theme in this powerful book is survival. If you wish to understand Appalachia, read The Dollmaker

The central character in The Dollmaker is Gertie - a strong Appalacian woman during WWII. Forced by economic conditions and pressured by her husband and family, she leaves the isolation of the rural mountains for Urban life in Detroit. This is a compelling page turner - it's not a fairy tale and it has a hard edge. Currently on assignment in Appalacia, I have had an opportunity to view Gertie's world first hand. Jane Fonda's TV Movie is also recommended - it is faithful to the book and Ms. Fonda's performance won an Emmy. I read this book over 10 yrs ago and I never forgot it.

This book is about a strong, loving mother: Gertie, the dollmaker. During wartime, her family must leave their homeland of Kentucky and move to Detroit where her husband can find work in the factories. In Detroit, the family is very, very poor. But Gertie strives on, caring for her children, carving dolls, and dreaming of a better future. Tragedy and utter sadness strike the heroine. You feel the pain in your chest as though you were her.

A wonderfully written book. Deep characters that you care about. Warning: emotionally wrenching.

Gertie Nevels is a woman meant to live out her days on the land in Kentucky, all her dreams for her children tied up in the predictability of hard work, where abject poverty is ameliorated by fresh vegetables and harvested crops, self-sufficiency the rule the family lives by. But industrialization has hit the country, jobs scarce, the cities calling workers with the promise of a weekly paycheck, food on the table and a company roof over their heads. For men like Clovis Nevels, this opportunity is all that is left in a country at war, the factories emitting a siren call to prosperity. Were it not for her husband, Gertie would never leave her home, but she is a humble woman, guided by her Bible and righteousness to keep the family together. Against her children's complaints, Gertie gives up her dream for a home of her own and moves her brood to wartime Detroit.

The cacophony and dirt of the city are a terrible shock to Gertie and her children, but the living conditions are outrageous to those used to country life, row houses connected wall to wall, the loud voices of neighbors booming in argument, contentious men needing sleep before the next shift, wives unhappy with their husband's drunkenness, hordes of children gathering to play in the dusty courtyard, every semblance of the country removed in this smoke-filled, filthy place, where shift change is announced by the bleat of a horn and the wail of the train wakes the night. Her children settled in school, Gertie makes her peace with this new environment, keeping the younger ones close by, comforted by the wood carving she does to calm her hands and pass the time.

The Dollmaker is a powerful social indictment of the consequences of industrialization, spoken in the idiomatic dialect of an uneducated country woman faced with the disintegration of all that she holds dear. The formidable Gertie will know the loss of her husband's pride and self-respect, the creeping fear of joblessness, the private nightmare of assimilation into an indifferent city and the small comfort of the wood she works with her hands. Eventually, even comfort will be forfeit, given a loss that brings Gertie to her knees, prayers scant comfort in her extremity. As multifaceted as the figures she carves, Gertie Nevels is the backbone of her family, and a source of strength to her friends, driven to survive this new, soulless world. Luan Gaines/ 2005.

An amazing book, especially considering it was published in 1954.
The opening scene is gripping: an uneducated rural housewife performs a tracheotomy on her dying son. She values their country life and holds to those country values even when war comes and she takes the kids and follows her husband to Detroit where he's been assigned to work in a war factory.
Wonderful characters, vividly drawn. But most of all, The Dollmaker is a passionate denunciation of industrialization and of war and all that it does to families and society.