I have been your doll-wife, just as at home
I was papa’s doll-child; and here the children have been my dolls.
I thought it great fun when you played with me,
just as they thought it great fun when I played with them.
That is what our marriage has been, Torvald.
(H. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, Act III)
When Frances Glessner Lee was born in Chicago in 1878, her life had already been planned.
Her parents, industrialists who became millionaires selling agricultural machinery, had very clear ideas about what they expected from her: she was going to grow up in the big family estate, which resembled a fortress, where private institutors would instruct her in the feminine arts of sewing, embroidery, painting. Once she had become a raised-right young lady, she would marry and continue her existence in her husband’s shadow, as it was suitable for a respectable woman. For a perfect doll.
And Frances followed these rules, at least apparently. After her parents refused to send her to Harvard to study medicine like her brother (because “a lady doesn’t go to school”), the young girl married a lawyer and gave him three children.
And yet Frances felt secretly repressed by the morals of her time and by not being allowed anything outside domestic tasks: she was eager to do something tangible for the community, but on the other hand could not openly dispute the social role that was assigned to her.
Thus many bitter years passed, until things slowly began to change.
In 1914 a first, small scandal: Frances divorced her husband, partly because (according to her son) he was not happy with her doing creative manual work, in which she excelled. In little more than ten years, in turn, her brother, her mother and her father died. Frances found herself with an immense fortune, free at last to pursue her true vocation – which actually was quite far from the dreams others had dreamt for her.
Because her passion, fueled by the stories of Sherlock Holmes, was the newly-born forensic science.
Frances had a close friendship with George Burgess Magrath, who was her late brother’s collegue and a famous medical examiner specializing in murder cases. Magrath often complained about investigators misinterpreting or even tramplimg with the evidence on a crime scene: there still was no education on this matter, police officers moved the bodies or walked on blood stains without giving it a thought, and as a consequence a high number of homicides went unsolved.
The now wealthy heiress decided, initially assisted by Magrath, that she would begin to do her part in renewing the system. In 1931 she endowed Harvard University with a generous donation in order to establish a Department of Legal Medicine; subsequently she founded the George Burgess Magrath Library, and created an organization for the progress of forensic science, the Harvard Associates in Police Science.
Magrath died shortly after, but Frances — even though she was not a trained doctor — had already acquired a stunning knowledge in criminology. In the pictures from the time, she is sitting beside the biggest experts in the field, like a respected godmother and patron.
But her most extraordinary contribution to the cause was yet to come.
In the 1940s, Frances Glessner Lee decided to hold biannual seminars for detectives and investigators. And here she presented for the first time the result of countless days of solitary work: her Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.
At a first glance they looked like elaborate and detailed dollhouses, but looking closely one could discover their macabre secret: the puppets inside those houses were all dead.
Each diorama was in fact inspired by an actual crime scene, which Frances had studied or seen in person during the investigations.
The quality of craftmanship was impressive. With painstaking care, every doll was dressed with tiny cross-stitched clothes; using jeweler’s precision tools Frances was able to equip her models with windows that could be opened, working keys and locks, pantries filled with food cans and countless other microscopic details.
Thanks to her familiarity with autopsies and crime scenes, the murdered dolls showed realistic signs of violence and death: wounds, bruises, decomposition symptoms, blood spatters on clothes and walls, everything was reproduced to the smallest detail.
The dioramas, each accompanied by a “witness statement”, were designed as crime mysteries to be solved.
The investigators attending the seminar were given 90 minutes to examine each single scene; they had to carefully study every clue.
What happened exactly to that family, all massacred by gunshot? Was it a murder-suicide, or were the father, mother and baby killed by a stranger?
And why did this housewife decided to commit suicide with gas, taking the precaution of carefully sealing the door — but leaving in the sink some half-peeled potatoes? Could the hour of death be determined by the state of food in the open freezer?
Did the man in the barn really hang himself?
If this other woman really died while drawing a bath, how come the stopper was not in the bathtub? And why her legs, in full rigor mortis, had stopped in that unnatural position?
When the allowed time ran out, the detectives had to draw their conclusions on what might have happened.
Thanks to her exceptional work, Frances was made honorary captain in the New Hampshire State Police in 1943, becoming the first woman to be chief of police.
Frances Glessner Lee died in 1962; but to think her incredible dioramas (18 in total) were some kind of eccentric and cheap game, would be way off mark. They are so complex and accurate that they are used still today in Harvard to train forensic specialists.
Beside their specific educational value, the story these works tell us is also interesting for another reason.
In a sense, Frances Glessner Lee never stopped playing with dolls, as she was taught to do when she was little.
And yet the bourgeois interiors, the cabins, the bathrooms or the alleys recreated in her models speak of a reality of abuse and violence, of victims and executioners. In a subtly subversive way, the Nutshell Studies use the “language” of toys and childplay to describe the most brutal and terrifying aspects of existence — hatred and blood creeping into the reassuring tableau of a marriage, of a family, splattering those clean and tidy walls. It’s real life, with all its cruelty, bursting into the idealistic world of childhood.
One could guess, in these dioramas, some sort of secret pleasure on the part of their creator in destroying the idyllic domestic space.
Maybe staging savage murders inside a dollhouse — thus turning the perfect decent lady pastime into something terrible and macabre — was to Frances a small, symbolic revenge.
The victims in the Nutshell Studies are mainly women.
And this last detail sounds a bit like a warning, a cautionary note addressed to young girls: do not believe too much in fairy tales, with all their princes charming; do not believe in the golden, coddled lives the adults are preparing for you.
Do not believe in dollhouses.
On the Nutshell Studies you can find a documentary film on YouTube and a book on Amazon.
I highly recommend a visit to this website: besides finding further infos on Frances Glessner Lee and her dioramas, you can test yourself on some of the puzzles, explore crime scenes and examine the main clues.
Buongiorno Bizzarro!!!
Ti leggo sempre con grandissimo piacere e curiosità, da molto tempo ormai. Mi permetto di farti i miei complimenti, perché le storie che ci racconti sono esattamente quelle che mi piace sentire…. inoltre, è anche un po’ “colpa tua” se mi sono deciso ad aprire il mio (ancora) piccolissimo e in fase di apprendistato blog. Volevo solo ringraziarti per la bravura, l’impegno e la magia delle storie…. bravissimoo!!
Ancora tante grazie, per “l’incoraggiamento virtuale” che mi hai dato…
Buona domenica!!
Grazie a te Ale! Appena ho un attimo farò con piacere una visita al tuo blog! 😉
I diorami sono inquietanti e spettacolari, il livello di dettaglio che ha raggiunto fa spavento. Una tecnica notevole, vorrei averne uno!
Interessante anche la storia della loro autrice – diciamo che tifo sempre per chi vuole scegliere la propria strada nella vita 🙂
Pensa che in alcuni diorami il paesaggio che sta fuori dalle finestre, che poteva essere semplicemente disegnato, è stato ricreato in tre dimensioni con tutti i dettagli.
Assomiglia a Miss Marple!
Le case sono spettacolari! perfino l’acqua della vasca da bagno, sembra vera. Le sigarette spente, le ciabatte ricamate. Favoloso!
Secondo alcune fonti la sua figura avrebbe ispirato il personaggio principale de “La signora in giallo”.
Quale sottile piacere svegliarsi la domenica mattina e trovare gli aggiornamenti del blog.
Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca. …
😀
Fantastico articolo e interessantissimo. Mentre leggevo, al principio avevo cominciato a pensare che tutti quei familiari li avesse uccisi lei…. Ci vuole proprio una gran passione per fare cose così!
Quel che hai pensato al principio è giusto, è lei che li ha uccisi (nel senso di racconto tip Edgar Poe), si è vendicata per come lo hanno trattata, lei e le done in generale nei secoli. Questo è anche il senso che trasmette il post.
Infatti il movimento femen è motivato dalla vendetta, e non per caso i movimenti rivoluzionari, specialmente il comunismo, pretendono di liberare la donna. Eros e thanatos.
Ma simbolicamente o sul serio?
Che differenza fa, io non sono poliziotto.
Ahahahah, allora non sono l’unica ad averlo pensato :D!
E’ molto normale di pensarlo, perché sono tutti i indizi per pensarlo, anormale è di trarre piacere da tutta questa storia miserabile.
Eh? Veramente stavo rispondendo a Nicoletta De Matthaeis…
Per la precisione… Ho “riso” sulla curiosa coincidenza, e sul fatto che un’altra l’abbia pensato. Trarre piacere sulle disgrazie altrui, non mi è minimamente passato nell’anticamera del cervello, figuriamoci a provarlo.
Per la precisione … non si trae piacere soltanto dal riso, e per di più dal riso coincidente. La mia frase non si riferiva al tuo riso, ma qualcos’altro.
Come anonimi non conosciamo le camere e anticamere del cervello rispettivi, pero senza rendersi conto noi diamo informazione su noi stessi tramite i nostri commenti, cosa diciamo e sopratutto come li diciamo. Esattamente come in criminologia.
Ancora non ho incontrato una persona, anche on line, che dice se ha la anticamere e le camere del cervello pieno con risi causati dalle disgrazie altrui. Fino adesso ho incontrato soltanto santi.
Vabbuono! come vuoi, siamo tutti sadici lupi vestiti da agnelli, blablabla finiamola qui che dici? anche perchè siamo in rete come tu giustamente hai fatto notare, e ognuno rimarrà radicato nei propri concetti e supposizioni. Dato che rispetto questo blog e il suo autore, direi che ho finito di riempirli il post di cavolate non inerenti al tema.
Oh mamma, sto via mezza giornata e guarda che casotto! 😀
“bizzarrobazar” mi spiace T____T.
Ma va’ là. 🙂
Semplicemente meravigliosi, articolo e diorami!
Grazie Livio.
Storia bellissima, grazie per gli splendidi articoli che scrivi! Ogni volta scopro qualcosa di affascinante e nuovo.
Grazie a te per il commento cyzu.
Inquietante ma molto interessante quella vicenda
Un bel ricordo dell’attore Robin Williams, a firma di David Simon, che curiosamente coinvolge questo tipo di diorami…
http://davidsimon.com/robin-williams-a-brief-encounter/
Caspita, bellissimo e commovente.
Anch’io ho sempre avuto la sensazione di una sorta di euforia disperata, nelle sue improvvisazioni migliori (durante le interviste, le ospitate televisive tipo Graham Norton, o le comparsate come quella in teatro con Steve Martin, ecc.).