Book Review: Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection

Fer Troulik

Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection by Tara Campbell, Aqueduct Press, 2021

Reviewed by Katharine Blair

In my early twenties I worked for a year in a convent-run Home for Unwed Mothers, which is odd given that I was neither religious nor living in the Victorian age, but need does as need must and at that point what need needed was money for school. I’d be a mother myself two years later. Wed, if you’re nosy, like I tend to be. Any birth story — ask me, if you like. I have so many, and all of them riveting to no one but me — makes clear that the processes by which we become mothers need no help locating themselves in the world (sur)real. Childbirth is at once the most highly regulated and feral thing a person can do, and Campbell seems more than aware of this dichotomy. In “The Box,” Campbell took me, older, dare I say wiser?, and mother now many times over, right back into that place and, with beautiful restraint, pulled only the thinnest of veils over the ongoing fight for bodily autonomy.

Dolls as playthings and women as playthings may not be the most groundbreaking of parallels, but neither is ‘what if inanimate objects found sentience’ as a frame for the way internet/automation/tv/radio/telegraphs/the written word has shaped our world and I think we can agree we’re far from ready to give up on those thought experiments yet either. Sometimes the most effective and thought-provoking speculative fiction is found in the smallest of shifts in perspective. Given the number of stories in Cabinet of Wrath that explore the ways in which a woman’s value depends so profoundly on the motives of her oppressors, I think anything that keeps us as readers closer to the root of our own culpability is best.

Lost loves and predators, manipulation and finding solace, violence and the search for connection. These most human of experiences are at once the beauty and the horror of this collection and the perfect subject for its vantage of a seemingly childlike entry point into our world. Childhood has always been as much about powerlessness as innocence. The unknown, as any boxed cat will tell you, will always hold both extremes.

I would probably tell you in conversation that I’m not big on body horror. My love for Gaiman ends at his propensity for organ removal by hand and I have a hard No saved for movies where people sever their own limbs, but to be human, especially to be woman, is to constantly be made aware of your inner workings, and it is here that Campbell and I find common ground. For example, “If they hatched, they’d consume whatever stuffing they found” (from “The Box”) feels decidedly accurate to anyone who has thought about the blood-to-breast-milk pipeline for even a second, and “Pino learned how to turn the material of his own birth in his new human hands, how to think of it as something else, how to feel at least a little bit better about it” (from “Pino”) was a lot for my discomfort with my own embodiment to have to read in a retelling of Pinocchio, and yet, in each of these stories Campbell has a very real, very present, facet of humanity she’s trying to make plain. To treat women as dolls is accepted but to treat dolls as women is grotesque and, well, that’s the sort of true statement about our times that makes you need to lie down.

Many of the stories in Cabinet of Wrath are short vignettes, sexual-politics thought experiments in the vein of Yoss, and others are longer investigations of the bonds humans form with comfort objects, mostly in a bid to feel a little less alone. To go into much detail about them individually would do the reader a disservice, but it ruins nothing to assure you that Campbell goes well beyond the well-worn territory of ‘what do dolls get up to when we’re not looking?’ Campbell’s dolls are much too human for that. The collection begins with an account of the traumatic way we become parents and ends with a window into the complexities of becoming a child. In between, well, I’ll leave that to you to find out.

I was 22 years old when I walked through the doors of the Home and learned secondhand what it was to go unprepared and unsupported into adulthood. I watched children have children, saw the way innocence and ignorance are so intertwined, and was reminded again how the bodies of women are routinely regulated beyond their control. Now here, twenty years, a divorce, and eight pregnancies later, I think I’m ready to call it: if you want to understand the human experience, speculative fiction, and specifically a collection like Cabinet of Wrath, this is a great place to start. Let these dolls be the abstraction that allows the necessary distance to examine your own world with clarity. If, however, your goal is to avoid having to reckon with the vulgarities of existence, and in particular the true costs of living while perceived female, you’d do best to ignore the Sisters and listen to me. There isn’t a gold band in all the world that will save you. To be human is to be messy and to be female is to be made messy. Either can be made a little easier with good friends, excellent chocolate, and an even better book. Why not start with this one?

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Katharine Blair is a queer gender-ambivalent Canadian poet currently living in California. Her work investigates human relationships, mental health, and the intersection of childhood trauma and body identity. Katharine’s most recent work can be found in Anti-Heroin Chic. She tweets @katharine_blair