ABSTRACT
The ‘sightless and speechless doll’ that appears in ‘The Featureless Wisdom’ manifested itself earlier in a different context in Lee’s article, the ‘Economic Dependence of Women’ in the North American in 1902. Here the doll figures as an analogue for the powerless Victorian woman, subject to male power and control. Living in a patriarchal society where she is handed from father to husband, the woman functions, according to Lee, as a commodity ‘amalgamated with the man’s property’, a possession, ‘a piece of property herself, body and soul’ (1908, 270).2 She observes that, by this process, ‘the man and the woman ... do not stand opposite one another ... but in a quite asymmetrical relation: a big man, as in certain archaic statues, holding in his hand a little woman; a god ... protecting a human creature; or ... a human being playing with a doll’ (1908, 270).
