skygiants | (no subject)

A few months ago, for reasons unknown, I suddenly remembered the existence of Sylvia Waugh's Mennyms series.

For those unfamiliar, the Mennyms are British children's books from the nineties about a family of life-sized rag dolls with button eyes, living secretly in a rental house in constant fear of discovery by non-rag-doll humans. Individual Mennyms include of a set of autocratic rag-doll grandparents named Tulip and Magnus; a set of stressed-out rag-doll parents named Joshua and Vinetta; an existentially depressed blue teen rag doll named Soobie; a bratty teen rag doll named Appleby; a set of ten-year-old twin rag dolls named, inexplicably, Poopie and Wimpey; and an eternal baby rag doll named Googles.

The rag dolls have constructed themselves elaborate lives of bourgeois pretense, in which they cook imaginary meals and celebrate endlessly repeated birthdays and plan fake vacations while refusing to acknowledge the fact that their lives are actually filled with nothing but static isolation (much to the frustration of existentially depressed Soobie.). There is also Miss Quigley, an designated-unrelated spinster rag doll, who visits once a week from her independent 'house' down the 'road', but in fact spends the rest of her time in the hallway cupboard, alone, in the dark. It's great to be a Mennym!

After rereading the first book, I became overwhelmingly convinced that Sylvia Waugh was using the Mennyms to work through some shit about the stifling illusion of middle-class respectability. "It's a strange world," says Vinetta Mennym, sadly. "We pretend to live and we live to pretend. The rules are so complicated." When Miss Quigley announces with bitter dignity that the other Mennyms need no longer profess to believe that she spends her days in anything but a hall closet, is it a moment of cleansing truth or deep despair at the loss of the dream of independence and social mobility? Or both!

Also, sometimes a human is there, and faced with the prospect of nine pairs of button eyes staring at them from perfectly stitched cloth faces.

I owned and was aware of two of these books as a child, but in fact there are five; I have now reread all of them, in increasing fascination and disquietude.

In The Mennyms, the family is terrified by the possibility of a human visitor that turns out to be a prank; Soobie discovers a deconstructed sibling rag doll in a chest in the attic and then put its potentially sentient head back in the box until it cannot threaten their human charade, only to return after several months to put her back together, spontaneously generating a twin sister named Pilbeam; and Appleby attempts to run away from home, only to get caught in a rainstorm and spend several months horrifically waterlogged, bloated and near-comatose for her sin of attempted independence. This, it will turn out, is foreshadowing.

In Mennyms in the Wilderness, the Mennyms make one (1) real human friend (who has been guided to them by the ghost of their maker, his great-aunt) who puts his entire life on hold to help them move temporarily to the country, where they're all miserable. Soobie gets kidnapped by children and nearly burned at the stake as a Guy Fawkes, and the human -- a thirty-something college professor -- has a brief doomed romance with an eternally sixteen-year-old rag doll, before all his memories of her and the rest of the family are magically replaced by an encyclopedic knowledge of Eric the Red.

In Mennyms Under Siege, Pilbeam dares to try and go to the theater, after which a neighbor attempts to offer her a ride home. This complete non-event causes Grandpa Mennym to forbid his entire clan to leave the house or have any interactions with the outside world. Appleby sneaks out to the disco, but is almost outed -- "I was having the best time of my life when suddenly being a rag doll mattered [...] I don't like being a rag doll. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it" -- and is subsequently driven by her family's paranoid isolationism to increasingly reckless behavior, culminating in a self-destructive impulse to open a magic door in the attic despite being warned against it by the ghost of her maker. This ... kills her! The book ends with the family grieving the first Mennym to die a true death. Light entertainment for kids!

In Mennyms Alone, Grandpa Mennym has a premonition that all of the rest of the Mennyms are going to die within a year, so the entire family spends the first half of the book grimly facing down the prospect of their inevitable demise. Middle-grade readers will love to experience Grandma Mennym's thoughtful estate planning and Miss Quigley's mourning of the portion of her life that she wasted silently standing in a hall closet! Midway through the book, they gather together in a room labeled 'DOLL ROOM' to meet their death, after lying to the ten-year-olds to tell them it's all just a game ...

... and the rest of the book is about the efforts of the house's new owners - one of whom is a college professor with an encyclopedic knowledge of Eric the Red and no memory of his tragic rag doll romance -- to find a suitable way to dispose of the creepy life-sized rag dolls they have apparently inherited ...

... UNTIL we learn that Soobie, alone of his family, is, in fact, still alive! but completely unable to move!

The blue rag doll sat in the rocking chair in the attic, imprisoned in stillness and silence, but living. [...] I am not to know death, he thought, as he sat in the darkness after the light that should have killed him died away. I am not to know death.

This goes on for months!

Soobie's watch gave him the news that it was January. He was near to despair. How, oh, how, does a rag doll die?

[...]

Then, suddenly, months of patient suffering gave way to anger. His heart cried out savagely to its maker, insisting upon being heard. [...] "Either restore us all to life," it said, "or teach me to die." This was no self-pitying prayer. It was a howl of indignation, as if some creature bound hand and foot were rattling in its chains. The whole house groaned, and the sighing of it was heard within the halls of Heaven.

In Mennyms Alive, the Mennyms all come back to life, and it turns out all the existential despair was worth it because now they are no longer on a lease and can become homeowners.

...so who wants to tell me where I can pitch an article about the Mennyms and the existential horror of the artificial bourgeois?