Christine Hume
In a place named after an animal that's an old euphemism for snatch: I find hundreds of tiny porcelain dolls, stiff as pinky bones, frozen in time. That's a place to begin, on vacation in Beaver Island. I still think the joke is funny: I imagine the island crawling with vaginas: a bevy of big-toothed beavers, a cooperative of cunts, a destruction of pussies, a sororal ossuary of creamy Charlottes. That's how I first encountered the tiny Victorian-era doll called the Frozen Charlotte: huddled together in a bin on a remote, wooded island, a three-hour ferry ride into Lake Michigan. Our rental car was a seatbelt-less, unlocked sedan from the '90s with a note on the dashboard and keys in the ignition, waiting for us at dock. Town was a café, a post office, a museum, a church, a grocery and a hardware store. Tucked back a little, a labyrinthine gift shop, unfolding room upon room, murky curiosities and quirky artifacts of a once-thriving splinter Mormon kingdom. Here is where I would have delighted to find one precious antique doll. Instead I found a pile of "authentic Frozen Charlottes," porcelain naked girls of about one to four inches, whose features were slightly worn down and dirty. None were exactly alike, but close enough to understand they died out due to a minute gene pool. Vaguely defined eyes, nose, and mouth, vaginal mounds, knees and belly buttons—mold seams running down her sides like keloid scars. They were all the color of baby teeth. The doll's arms were slightly bent or folded across her chest, but never jointed—she is "frozen" after all! Her hair was wavy in a pixie bowl cut. Her toeless feet were too rounded or uneven to stand. These dolls could only lie stiff in a bin, on top of one another, a mass grave of sorts.
We like our dolls pedagogical (baby dolls) or aspirational (Barbie or Bratz), letting us rehearse our fantasies and fears of adulthood. Girls understand implicitly that they are either mothers or gods to their dolls, who stand in for coming babies or for their own freewheeling and fashionable womanhood. Wife or slut, the dolls ask us, and this either/or logic is what will have to suffice for choice. No wonder girls are often sadistic to their dolls, biting off their fingers or burning their hair. The obedient doll is the child adults prefer, the favorite child, and she replaces us, destroys our lives, humiliating our originality. We live through her; we punish her in return. But this doll, this plague of Frozen Charlottes, seemed to reverse the script. It might seem sadistic to ask girls to play with dolls that can't stand on their own, but remember Barbie's permanently pointed feet and toppling plastic breasts. She required my small hand around her small waist to hop her from townhouse to pink convertible because she was designed to remain horizontal, to lay in bed until my hand brought her to the upright life I imagined for myself.
Frozen Charlottes, however, had girl bodies, naked-toddler-on-a-summer-day bodies, unexaggerated and not meant to be dressed in the latest fashion. The first ones were made in the 1850s in Germany, where they were called bathing dolls or naked baby dolls (badekinder, nachtfrosch). They floated in water! As they gained popularity production spread to France and England then America where they stepped into an American ghost story and acquired their American name.
The ghost story keeps coming back to life in new forms. On American soil, "Young Charlotte" is a folk ballad derived from a poem, based on a story in the news. The transmutation moves chronologically from New York to Maine to Vermont then everywhere. In 1843, Seba Smith rewrote a minor piece of journalism in verse, "A Corpse Going to a Ball." The true story featured a young woman who froze to death in her carriage, with her fiancé by her side, on the way to a New Year's ball in New York on December 31, 1839. Here a taste from the middle of the long original poem first printed in Maine's The Rover:
"Now daughter dear," her mother cried,
"This blanket round you fold,
"For 'tis a dreadful night abroad,
"You'll catch your death a-cold."
"O nay, O nay," fair Charlotte said,
And she laugh'd like a gipsy queen,
"To ride with blankets muffled up
"I never could be seen—
"My silken cloak is quite enough;
"You know 'tis lined throughout;
"And then I have a silken shawl
"To tie my neck about."
Seba Smith's poem about Charlotte caught on quickly as a cautionary tale. Don't spoil your daughter and make her vain! Don't let your children grow up deaf to sense! The poem's tension between Charlotte's father, who loves to see her glow up, and her mother, the nag, reveals the conditions for tragedy. When your mother urges you to wear a damn coat, bundle up and shut your trap! Fifteen miles is a long way to ride in an open carriage in a silk dress. What parent has not been drawn into this argument? What daughter has not rolled her eyes at the suggestion that she isn't aware of the weather? It's her body! She won't be seen swaddled like a baby! She looks hot in this dress! She wills herself into a vision gliding across the snow! She is so feverish with reckless glee, anachronistic phrases like "catching your death" cannot stick to her. They ride into the storm. When she and her fiancé, Charley, arrive, he leaps out, extending his hand to her. He's momentarily confused at her stillness, "cold and hard as a stone." That quickly, she becomes a monument to pride and obstinacy. Hundreds of newspapers in the next seven years reprint the poem. William Lorenzo Carter, a blind musician from Vermont, sets the poem to music. For a decade, he sings the popular ballad far and wide, and he was singing it when Americans first saw the hard, white bisque dolls, which they immediately named Frozen Charlottes. The baby doll found her story in America, as a dead teen stripped of her fine clothes, and everyone loved her.
Listening to Ernst Lord's 1966 version of Carter's ballad, "Young Charlotte," I think of all the times I've vividly, involuntarily imagined my daughter's demise. The song's galloping pervasive sorrow carries me, owned and known for the duration. To be a parent is to constantly relive missteps and moments of inattention that could have led to your child's death. Lord stumbles and breaks pitch, preserving the accident of which he sings. Anyone could leave without a coat, anyone could freeze to death, anyone could flub the words. The song keeps coming, but the girl stays frozen, stuck in the accident, the antithesis of Luce Irigaray's "feminine fluidity." Paradoxically, Lord's song feels like it could go on forever, like a spell holding listeners in limbo, both delivering and protecting us from the sadness of endings.
Every beginning to the Frozen Charlotte story triggers another beginning, an endless starting over or falling backward. Each tale telescopes into a prequel, each rewriting leaves traces and impressions, one fascination nested inside another. Each layer makes her story too complete for a regular doll, whose life I would have to imagine and project, whose emotions I could use to explore my own. She came with a singular story and inside that story was another story and inside that story was a poem, a song, a life, a morality tale masked as journalism. Her story begins also in her whiteness, itself an origin tale that runs through generations, a destructive mythology that idealizes dead women and pretends to come tabula rasa. As the imported doll takes on a local story, shifting and settling in translation, her context branches and her whiteness calcifies. To mistake whiteness for blankness is as dangerous as it is ordinary. Being white is a kind of self-blinding. Being white means not explaining my references; it means my writing might not reveal much about my subjectivity because I strain to even see it as a distinct experience infused with white supremacy. What it means to be white is most opaque to white people. We don't understand it because we refuse to acknowledge the referent, we refuse to see the pathological systems that made us feel superior. "Whiteness, alone" says Toni Morrison, "is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable." Whiteness freezes us in the moment just before we can know ourselves. We build identities around gaps and ghosts.
Ten years before writing the poem "Corpse Going to a Ball," Smith was the first American to use the word "scrumptious" in print. This is where another tradition intersects with the newspaper account, the poem, the folk ballad. Instead of taking her into the bathtub as the Frozen Charlotte was made to do, Americans baked them into cakes. Perhaps the doll recalled the baby Jesus figurine placed inside a cake during Epiphany, a tradition brought to the US by Basque settlers in 1718. In any case, the practice of hiding coins or figurines in cakes reaches back to ancient times. Plentiful local variations testify to our love of finding creepy choking hazards in our desserts. Or our sublimated desire to eat babies. Or the American tradition from the 1800s of contracting young women to jump out of oversized cakes, a staple of bachelor parties in the 1970s. Surprise! Who doesn't want to bite into Marilyn Monroe's soft, white thighs as if she jumps out of the cake, and not a gangster with a machine gun, in Some Like It Hot? In the end, whoever finds the tiny doll in a Mardi Gras king cake can bank on a windfall within the year.
Our custom for the Frozen Charlotte is that you drop her the into batter on the first day of the new year. At the time, Americans favored a type of dessert called a charlotte, especially the charlotte russe, a ladyfinger and Bavarian cream icebox cake. You bake or freeze her into a New Year's cake. There is a party. Everyone comes—neighbors, family, friends. There is dancing and merry-making. You bring out the cake and all the children dig in hoping to find the tiny corpse in their slice. A Frozen Charlotte inside a frozen charlotte is a perfect convergence of sweet cold perfection: whoever gets the slice with the doll is going to die. Eat as much cake as you want! Seize the fucking day. Instead of fortune, the prize is the prediction of your demise within the year. You have been chosen! Happy New Year!
A year before my daughter was born, archeologists on the Mediterranean island of Pantelleria unearthed a 4,000-year-old stone doll. Just as dolls can be and have been made out of anything, they can be made into anything. Children don't use dolls only as intended. Part of what makes a doll uncanny is her lifelike thingness, teetering between foreign and familiar. We give this thing our own interior life; she is a receptacle of our wildest and most mundane imaginations. Yet she is not us. The doll's thingness is driven home for me one recent winter night having dinner with our small city's mayor. I sat next to her wife, who had just donated her early journals to a library's archive of lesbian girlhood ephemera. The mayor's wife told me that growing up, she used her Barbie's feet to masturbate. She told me the story when I asked about embarrassing moments in her journal, but she said at the time she did not feel embarrassed, and she even passed the technique on to a younger girl. Didn't it hurt, I asked, those pointy little feet? She said she used her underwear as a protective buffer, a kind of condom for her makeshift tool. Barbie's feet were not made for walking; they were made for something far better, erotic transport. I had missed out.
I try to imagine late 18th century kids playing with dead girl dolls. I wonder if they got involved with her given story, which seems too rigged to feel deeply about, or if they discarded it altogether. In some versions, Charley has to return Charlotte's corpse to her family. In others, he dies of heartbreak. Sometimes the story ends with them both in one tomb, an American romance. Some versions end with Charley bringing the "voiceless" Charlotte inside the dance hall, the song's last word echoing Poe's death-drenched "The Raven," published just two years after Smith's poem, "never more!" In America, the frozen Charlotte was often sold in a metal casket. This was her sole accessory. Did children play funeral with her? Séance? Did they rehearse death by bringing her back to life? Maybe they conjured the world with a dead version of themselves in it, mouthing their dialogue from a disappeared place. No child believes in their own death; they cannot swallow the most mundane, unbelievable fact of our lives: that we could die. For children being dead is like being "it" in a game of tag, a special status, a reversible condition. That's what being dead gave you. Young adults even fail to comprehend death's finality, that once dead, you stay dead. Believing that is more preposterous than believing in Santa Claus. When a teenager I knew killed herself, her mother told me that her friends kept texting her dead daughter's phone. As if the daughter might be reached via this portal, this hotline to the underworld, or that the phone itself was part of her body, still living and communicating.
Growing up, the shelves in my room filled with dolls that my grandparents brought back from their continuous cruises across the globe. Each return came with a doll for me from Russia or Thailand or Austrailia or Turkey. I was not allowed to play with these dolls. Though I sometimes tried, they had stands and ceremonial clothes that did not come off, and it was never satisfying. They were my white girl colonial collection, my imperialist trophies, though I never asked for or sought out this collection. Like whiteness itself, they just arrived, a bad faith birth right. A roomful of display dolls from places I'd never been coincided with my desire for a different kind of doll. This was confusing as a kid. My specific desire was illegible to the adults around me, and my dolls themselves became a way of inhabiting invisibility. I had wanted dolls that my mother objected to for one reason or another: Baby Alive would bring worms into the house, Bizzie Lizzie required batteries, other dolls were too expensive. I had only three dolls, a Holly Hobbie, whose old fashionedness I despised in the age of Barbie; a Crissy whose red hair grew or shrank back into her head; and a German Skipper doll, Barbie's younger sister who had dark hair and a flat chest and flat feet. I had to go to the neighbor's house to play with regular Barbie dolls. My childhood yearning for dolls must have left a mark on me; as an adult, friends often give me dolls. I never know what to make of it as I do not actively desire them anymore. I have a doll a homeless woman in Italy insisted I take, one a secret admirer put in my grad school mailbox, and another a boyfriend gave me, saying it reminded him of me.
The two dolls that I currently treasure, both about the size of a real baby, were gifts. Unlike most of the dolls given to me by others, these feel like they are mine because of how I acquired them. They sit shoulder to shoulder, almost holding hands, like best friends, like they are happy to have found one another, to be locked in one world together. They do not seem to see me. This animism is exactly what Freud was talking about; dolls give us immediate access to childhood magical thinking. Even though I did not have these dolls as a child, they stand in for the dolls I did have and return me to my girlhood perceptions. My friend Claudia gave me the first, a decrepit old doll with a cracked and peeling face and stripped down to her stained and torn muslin undies. Her best feature is a new voice box, stolen from another doll and planted inside this one. When you hug her sad, soiled, falling apart body, she says the Lord's Prayer with a delightfully prissy British accent. The effect is eerie, bewitched. Claudia gave the doll to me when she had a child because she thought it would be scary to her daughter. I didn't have a child at the time, but never thought to rid my house of scary things when I did.
Beside this doll is the one given to me by my Aunt Trish, after her mother, my grandmother, had given it to her. I first encountered my grandmother's doll while staying with her one college spring break. She had recently moved into a home for widows of Army officers. On the train ride there, I scripted elegant answers to the questions I imagined she'd ask me. But she wasn't curious about my classes or my plans after graduation or what I did on the weekends. Instead I shouted questions at her as we unpacked boxes: a tube of ointment, the end curled around itself, with a 1965 expiration date; bone buttons carved into faces of Japanese gods; a deck of cards with the faces worn off; a bag of fingerless, lace gloves; many jade figas; an arabesque patterned saucer to put your cup on while you drank spillage out of the regular saucer. If she heard my inquiries about her things, she dismissed them: "oh that was so long ago" or "I don't remember." When we scooped the large porcelain-faced doll out of a trunk, it was my last day there. "This was my mother's," she said, sitting the doll on her knee and smoothing the painted waves of black hair tenderly. She said her mother had been the youngest in a caravan of eight families traveling by wagon from California to Lostine, Oregon. When the group had been just days away from their destination, they made camp in an already cleared rocky lot. Probably it had been used by people just like them, who had to leave in a hurry. Running from an attack. Or provoking then running from an attack. They saw ash, charred sticks, a man's trampled hat, and arrowheads in the dust. At the edge of the clearing was the doll. The man who found it had three children of his own but he gave it to my great-grandmother because she was the youngest there. My grandmother told me that the doll carried the spirit of another child, presumed dead. Once passed on to my grandmother, she sewed a new torso for it when the original leather became brittle and stiff. She put on her own outgrown linen dress that she stitched with flower embroidery. The doll's black socks were moth-eaten to lace. Holding this doll between us had pushed me into a temporal vertigo—we existed together in the chance of time and this doll made us both into girls. We were girls daydreaming about our futures. I was desperate to attach my history to the doll's, to be passed this legacy of survival. "That's the story I remember," my grandmother said, "but my mother laughed when I told it once in front of her. She said 'you've put some words in my mouth before, but I don't know where you got that tale.'" We laughed together because having an imagination was then what we shared; the phrase often leveled at me by her own son, my father, as an insult and dismissal. My grandmother kept the doll until she died.
The uncanny takes as its premise that the estranged begins right at home. Heimlich is a word whose meaning develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich or uncanny. Hélène Cixous points out how Sigmund Freud's famous essay on the uncanny is itself uncanny, "less like an essay than a strange theoretical novel." I would call it a ghost story or a tale of trances and residues. The "uncanny" traces back to a concept that psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch explored in 1906 and that Freud elaborated on fourteen years later, merging the concept with Edmund Burke's much earlier theory of the sublime and Otto Rank's fresh exploration of the double or doppelgänger. Freud defined the uncanny as an alchemical juxtaposition of the familiar and unfamiliar, something strangely familiar or secretly familiar. Something repressed has returned, and along with it our narcissistic overvaluation of our own mental processes, our childhood belief in our own omnipotence. A latent magical power awakes. We thought we were over it, but magical thinking comes back to us. A whiff of terror keeps us spellbound. Spatial and temporal dislocations—the dead teen now a tiny bisque doll forever frozen in her dying hour before the new year—grip us tightly within it. Frozen Charlotte throws into question our boundaries between what's hidden and revealed, imagined and real, past and present. What, after all, do we even know about life and death? So much of us can break down, but still survive. Do you believe in ghosts and spirits? The soul? An afterlife or reincarnation? Heaven? Did you once believe?
When I was on Beaver Island, I wanted to buy all the Frozen Charlottes in the gift shop and give them away, but the only person I could imagine appreciating it was my mother. Her eccentricities displayed themselves in collections and tchotchkes that choked her walls and shelves, souvenirs from a life she pretended to live. She called them knickknacks or bric-a-brac. I bought her one. I know the Frozen Charlotte doll is a morbid gift, but I didn't care. Some gifts you give are morbid and you give them because sadness is your glue. You share a mood, you offer a token of it, an acknowledgement of a dead girl living somewhere inside you both. Some things you do are morbid and you do them because you can still feel. I've always been a sadness magnet, and my mother's manic depression is partly why. The doll's name recalls the only friend I've ever had named Charlotte, a new girl in 6th grade. I had been a veteran new girl by this point, wearing my awkwardness and terror more like a personality than a situational condition, but Charlotte made "new girl" look glamorous. She showed me the right way to show up. She was beautiful, smart, and looked like she came from the future; her boobs definitely looked like they arrived from late high school. She had moved from Texas where she had some sort of accident involving bleach or maybe Draino that made her tear ducts constantly active. She always had tears in her eyes. Streaming down not as fully formed emotional drops, but a slow leak of tears, a sad song barely audible behind her face, brightening and magnifying her eyes. I forgot about the tears eventually. After that, they covered every lovely thing, the world smeared in a wistful morning mist, a grieving only recognizable to another girl crying or screaming on the inside.
The Frozen Charlotte is both a product and a portal. She arrived in time to embody a haunted tale caught in a cultural echo chamber reverberating with other fairy tale characters. Like Snow White, she dies but waits. Like Sleeping Beauty, she's suspended, waiting, like we all have, for something to happen, for a catalyst to break us out of our sleep. Time stands still, the body suspended like a doll; time in the story makes room for us. This pause is my favorite part, the open expanse of it. The real story is too prosaic to continue. A girl's shadow falls across the porcelain doll body, and the doll's story falls across the girl's story. Time tilts back into itself. Time makes room for timelessness. We are waiting on the verge of a fairy tale; our hope is a new doll, stiff and lustrous; our recollection is a discarded doll, unlovely and old; our repetition, our continuation, is an indestructible doll that fits closely in our hands and tenderly. The point of the Frozen Charlotte story is that you are not special. You could freeze to death and become a mass-produced figurine that thousands of children covet then neglect. You could become the cheap product of a whole culture in the throes of dead children. Google "Frozen Charlotte" and you will find thousands of images of her. Perhaps without even knowing it, we have already continued living through her. Waiting, the girl can never feel her own perfection; she only feels it when looking back.
The doll shows us the fantasy of girlhood, the good girl who loses sight of her goodness as she becomes real. What draws me to the doll is the vague but persistent sense of having lost my true and best self. A feeling of having once been more disciplined, attentive, athletic, daring, intelligent, and attractive. My imagination seems cloistered in the before and after, in the uncanny's feeling of remembering something you've repressed, like the ability to fly or your great grandmother's memory. Having once known infinitely more but forgetting it all in the process of living. Perhaps I am remembering a time when I identified so strongly with dolls, I joined their ranks, perfectly fulfilling the needs of others and my own fantasies. I left that person behind in an indistinct and instinctive decision to be alive. I let myself cleave in two, splintering first and second person: a doll and a child, a writer and a reader. I cannot remember a time when I have not chased both a better tomorrow and looked back for my better self. The now comes into focus as an idealized stereo-vision of the past and future. The doll holds the self on the brink of awakening into a dream realized, a well-worn Romantic motif. Born firmly in the Victorian era, during the age of the modern ghost story (Poe, James, Lee), when the "uncanny" gains its spectral aesthetic currency, the Frozen Charlotte, saturates this motif in Victorian structures of feeling. The uncanny slips through the supernatural, and the Frozen Charlotte's popularity begins to die only when Queen Victoria herself dies.
Like Freud's essay on the uncanny, I wanted to write this essay in two parts, but the doubling keeps proliferating unmanageably, and the stories keep unstacking like Russian dolls. It's as if I can't bear to imagine my own death.
I'm sure my mom is the right person to receive the Frozen Charlotte because of her reflexive gallows humor. When I give it to her and tell her the doll's story, she exclaims, "Poor Charley!" Wait, I'm confused. When Charlotte dies, you first feel sorry for her boyfriend? Then she surprises me further with sarcasm: "Well, that's cheerful." As an arch defender of the patriarchy, I might have anticipated her identifying with the man and not the mother or the young woman. She is the type. Never happier than when I give the phone to my male partner to speak with her. Part of the problem is that she does not think of herself as a fan of the macabre, and she will do anything rather than think about death. After my father died, I asked her about a DNR; in response, she told me a story about a man who came out of a coma after 50 years. She wants to live at all costs. Even if "frozen" in a coma. At the same time, she competes with things to be the subject of her own story, the narrator of her own life. All the trinkets and things piled up around her remind her that she is not waiting to die because she is waiting to live. Perhaps the Frozen Charlotte throws my mother's formidable will to survive in her face.
The Frozen Charlotte is not the figure of perfection, except in the Plathian sense of a woman being perfected in death. She is the flattened character of social rebellion, the quintessential beautiful corpse. "Arrogance, vanity," the gods cry! Her story keeps reiterating itself, if faintly, as if looking for a companion, another frozen woman. I would like to introduce her to one. Or perhaps she comes back as the young woman who believes, in 2015, in the healing power of cold. She works at a Las Vegas spa, where after hours, she sometimes gives herself a crypotherapy session. Crypotherapy is deep freeze therapy that deadens irritated nerves and preserves youthfulness. A cross between beauty treatment and health care, clients use it to reduce pain, burn calories, strengthen immune systems, and halt aging. You can get cryofacial, known by its cutesy argot, "frotox," or you can get cryosurgery (for prostate cancer among other things). One morning, her colleague discovered her frozen rock-solid in the chamber, which is filled with liquid nitrogen and minus 240-degree Fahrenheit. Chelsea Ake-Salvacion, age 24, became a 21st century Frozen Charlotte. Frozen Chelsea.
We see ourselves and others frozen on screen in awkward mid-gesture daily on Zoom. We understand our frozen images as the product of unstable connections, which as a metaphor, helps us unfreeze the moment. The pandemic has thrown us, a little numbed and disoriented, into a time capsule. We had been living as if our neoliberal arrangements were fated or a force we were helpless to redirect. We thought time would keep ticking, then came COVID-19, the pandemic, the quarantine cycles. What is the future if it is foreseeable? Is it even a future? If time courses mindlessly around the same tracks, do we call it a standstill, a waiting period? Some people believe so fervently in the future that they can imagine picking up where they left off after they died. You might know that Walt Disney's body is frozen for some future time when the medical industry has figured out how to restore him, and he can keep creating his empire, an embodiment of the ultimate futuristic movie. Cryonics is a movement, a kind of pseudo-religion that believes in preserving dead bodies at exceedingly low temperatures until a time when technology might restore them to life. Cryonicists endorse a future that doesn't pretend to know where the stakes of death might migrate: Are we dead when our heart stops? When we stop breathing? When we can no longer remember who we are? At the same time, they have a very static idea of identity, one that is tied to the present versions of ourselves, as if culture did not partly fashion and interpret us. It's not easy to look away from the mirrors culture creates for us. Cryonicists pump the body with a kind of antifreeze to keep it in a suspended state by way of vitrification, a process that turns the body into glass. Collapsing the syntax of fairy tale, the glass body waits. At the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona, headquarters of the movement, hundreds of these glass bodies are heaped underground waiting to be brought back to life. We become dolls with a single story waiting to be woken up into a new world, a sci-fi future written in calligraphy on parchment paper. A memoir on a floppy disc. No one will have the tools to read us.
A young woman had been frozen in a dilapidated family chateau in the Loire Valley for eighteen years, until her husband took his place beside her in a freezer in the cellar early this century. The husband, a biologist who once taught at France's most prestigious medical school and a believer in cryonics, had been planning for his death for over thirty years, but local authorities did not want to supply the electricity necessary for keeping two bodies frozen until American cryonics companies figured out how to bring them back to life. A court authorized the use of force to gain entry to the chateau and take the bodies to be buried. This is how the dead wife, Monique, became unfrozen in 2002.
In 2020, across the ocean, at Marine Terminal in South Brooklyn, a long row of 53-foot refrigerated trailers holds hundreds of frozen bodies, dead from COVID-19, until cemeteries and crematories can take them. Tucked into a parking lot, past the fashionable furniture warehouses and next to a crumbling pier building, these makeshift morgues are like enormous tombstones. At the same time, in Tennessee, baby Molly is born from an embryo that had been frozen for twenty-seven years, when her mother was two years old.
If the Frozen Charlotte, a dead doll, a frozen homunculus inside a cake, is a transitional object, the transition is between life and death. Between girl and woman. Here is the temporal frisson: Frozen Charlotte's naked body belongs to childhood, yet her story is that of a grown diva. We have her both ways, a baby and a betrothed young woman. We gloss over the age gap in order to make it work, her body frozen in one time, her story in another. Emblematic of a teenager veering between childhood and adulthood to create a third state, a freewheeling exploration where unknowability quadruples. Teenagers famously carry out a program of inquiry into mortality, entropy, violence, and heartbreak—all notable in Charlotte's story. If we survive, we learn that the world was broken long before we arrived. We choke on our overbearing nostalgia for a past childhood that no one ever inhabited but which we manically invent for ourselves, layering it into our experiences and piecemeal replacing our memories. This revelry of purity is how we simplify ourselves. Out of this discovery comes the ache of cosmic nostalgia, an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of an unbroken place, harmonious world, where we were uncorrupted, full of exacting talents and traits, profoundly promising and promised everything. Time compresses and like more contemporary uses of the uncanny, the doll channels the past in order to constantly refigure the present. The uncanny is an effect of reflection without referent: the mirror staring back at no subject. In the current moment of climate change and pandemic paradigm shift, we might all be Frozen Charlottes. We know the planet is freezing, but we don't change our behavior. We know capitalism is killing our planet but do nothing to reverse it. We do not act on what we know. The disconnection is visible all around us.
When in early middle age my shoulder was clinically diagnosed as "frozen," I thought perhaps that was just the beginning. Could other parts of me freeze? Would my jaw or knees be next? My vagina? Would my whole body freeze solid? What even does it mean to become frigid? You know exactly. Frigid is a word that from the very beginning (1660) has been used to describe a lack of sexual vigor. Yet sometime during the heyday of the Frozen Charlotte, the subject shifted from a man's impotence to a woman's cold sexual indifference. Frigid describes women's sexuality when not in sync with a man's, and it makes me wonder what Charley did or tried to do in the carriage that night on the way to the ball. What trauma might have made Charlotte freeze up like a doll? In this version of the story, the calm cruelty of Greek myth freezes Charlotte at the moment before sexual violence. Instead of turning into a tree as Daphne did, she turns into a porcelain doll. It is difficult not to think about the frozen body as a metaphor, especially one attached to women. The Frozen Charlotte might be an effigy or she might be a monument to frozen bodies, frozen time, frozen ideas. As such, frozenness connects women, becomes a salve to historical and personal loneliness. Yet viewing women as a collective tends to erase the individual and viewing bodies as metaphors releases us from responsibility for them.
A bin of frozen figures, stiff and white as bone, comes to be when no one wants to play with dead dolls anymore. The final death blows of the Frozen Charlotte come with the war and the flu pandemic of 1918. We no longer want dolls to bring death near, we have had enough. It's here in time that another frozen woman keeps her story locked inside her until the world is ready. Buried seven feet in permafrost in Alaska for almost eighty years, this frozen woman changed history from the grave. She died of the flu in Bervig Mission, ravaged, like much of Alaska, by the 1918 flu pandemic. Within five horrifying November days, seventy-two of the eighty residents died; only eight children survived. Officials paid gold miners to dig a mass grave for them all. One woman kept the complete virus preserved cryogenically inside her until the medical field was ready to sequence the virus's genome. We know a lot about the man who found her. He had been to this gravesite forty-six years before as a graduate student but failed to find the live virus. As a retired pathologist, 72 years old, he went back alone one week after reading that a virologist was looking for samples to sequence; his only tools were a pickax, an autopsy knife, and his wife's garden clippers, which he took without asking. In Alaska, he met the village matriarch who called the mayor who assembled a village council who granted him permission to dig. He unearthed the frozen woman with the living virus intact on his fourth day; before he left, he made two giant wooden crosses to replace the ones that had almost entirely rotted away in the graveyard. Later he tracked down the names and ages of all the flu victims from the village and put them on a brass plaque that he nailed to one of the crosses. This man's nickname is the "Indiana Jones of the scientific set." We also know about the virologists who later used the frozen woman's RNA to sequence the genome of the 1918 flu virus. Her body contains the full viral story, something buried that returns, uncannily, to us: what it is, how it originated, and how we might prevent future cases and pandemics.
Other than that, what we know about the exhumed body is that she was an Iñupiat woman, about 30 years old, and obese. Fat had protected her organs through the tundra's occasional partial thaws and refreezing. Packed in fat, her lungs were perfectly preserved, full of blood and H1N1. The man who dug her up in 1997 named her "Lucy." He named her not in the tradition of Inuit people or using one of the actual names from the gravesite. He named her to draw a parallel with another nonwhite female body exhumed by a white man in the name of science. He named her after a pre-human ancestor (once called "the missing link"), found in Ethiopia. Even in death, indigenous and Black females become colonized and their identities become overwritten with Latin names. Remember that other "Lucy," an over three-million-year-old skeleton that shed light on human evolution? She was named after the Beatles song, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Her message to the world is that all humans have a common origin, yet her name robs her of a specific identity in order to locate her within white culture and the white imagination. This is a problem of whiteness, where white people claim objectivity and universality. By doing so, we automatically claim white supremacy and fall in line with its gender hierarchies. In Ethiopia, she is known by her Amharic name, Dinknesh ("you are amazing"), and in the Afar region where she was found, she is known as Heelomali ("she is special"), yet "Lucy" is the name with global household recognition. We should give the indigenous Alaskan woman a name that reflects her identity and location. At least that. Are we all dolls to them? Do we all belong to anyone who picks us up? No wonder we are icy bitches and frigid wives, no wonder our faces freeze that way. Frozen shut, unable to call out our own stories, our own names, from the grave.
When my three-year-old daughter impulsively threw her doll over a bridge into the frazil and slush ice of the Huron River one winter, I was startled. I briefly imagined she was a cold-hearted psychopath. Then I felt her liberation. We waved goodbye as the doll slowly sank beneath the freezing surface. We had been walking with friends, a father and his young son, who were horrified and ran to retrieve the doll from the river at their own considerable peril. No, I said, refusing to take it back, we are done with the doll.
NOTE
The 1918 flu pandemic killed about 30% of the world's population. Per capita, more people died in Alaska than anywhere else in the world other than Samoa. Alaska would not become a state for another 40 years, but colonizer viruses, including the 1918 flu (which originated in Kansas), would continue to wipe out whole communities and traditions, as well as pave the way for further white exploitation and violence including by missionaries and gold miners. Many (25-40%) flu victims in Alaska froze or starved to death before getting medical attention.