The Wooden Doll
by Lucy CliffordGenre: Fairy Tale
Setting: Fantasy
Format of Original Source: Short Story
Recommended Adaptation Length: 60 Minutes
Candidate for Adaptation? Promising
EXCERPT:
The wooden doll had no peace. My dears, if ever you are a doll, hope to be a rag doll, or a wax doll, or a doll full of sawdust apt to ooze out, or a china doll easy to break–anything in the world rather than a good strong wooden doll with a painted head and movable joints, for that is indeed a sad thing to be. Many a time the poor wooden doll wished it were a tin train, or a box of soldiers, or a woolly lamb, or anything on earth rather than what it was. It never had any peace; it was taken up and put down at all manners of odd moments, made to go to bed when the children went to bed, to get up when they got up, be bathed when they were bathed, dressed when they were dressed, taken out in all weathers, stuffed into their satchels when they went to school, left about in corners, dropped on stairs, forgotten, neglected, bumped, banged, broken, glued together,–anything and everything it suffered, until many a time it said sadly enough to its poor little self, “I might as well be a human being at once and be done with it!”
COMMENTS:
A sad, weird Pinocchio-esque story about a doll who longs to be alive, and the rather unpleasant things which happen to her. Disturbing and strangely pessimistic for the time in which it was written.
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