Thoughts on “The Dummy That Lived” by L. Frank Baum

            In my quest to further my knowledge of L. Frank Baum’s writing outside of the Oz series, I recently looked at American Fairy Tales, a short story collection from 1901. A story that immediately caught my eye was “The Dummy That Lived”. Like essentially all of his output, it's freely available and public domain.

             

 I’ve long had a fascination with stories about mannequins which come to life. I first encountered the concept in The Twilight Zone, in the episode “The After Hours”, about a woman who is a living dummy but doesn’t know it, and has to be reminded by the other dummies in a department store. Another work I like that uses this concept is Kraftwerk’s song “Showroom Dummies” (embedded above). In this song, a group of mannequins in the window of a shop come to life, break the glass in the window, and walk to a dance club where they dance. It’s a suitable song to be sung by a group that often masqueraded as robots and put on concerts and interviews with robotic counterparts. I’ve seen several other media use this concept, such as an episode of Doctor Who and the music video for "Instant Crush" by Daft Punk. L. Frank Baum’s story, however, predates all of the examples I know by more than half a century. Did he come up with this concept? Was his story the first? I suppose it is predated by Pinocchio, but then again, that was a puppet coming to life, not a store mannequin. Baum was quite the innovator, and did provide early examples of robots, cell phones, and the concept of fantasy world building in his writing, so maybe he created this concept as well.

            The story is about a mischievous elf named Tanko-Mankie, who just for fun breathes life into a mannequin in a store window. This mannequin is at first baffled by her sudden consciousness. She eventually escapes the store and tries her best to blend in with society, walking through town and into a coffee shop (only to burn her lip and decide she doesn’t like coffee), ending up being hit by a car (to the horror of witnesses who see her caved-in skull; luckily she doesn’t feel pain) and thrown in a jail cell, before the elf takes her life from her again. Bringing inanimate objects to life is a theme that shows up often in the Oz books written after this story as well (the mannequin character brings to mind Jack Pumpkinhead and Scraps the Patchwork Girl, specifically), and it seems like something Baum thought about a lot. It’s a story that can force the reader to dwell on their own existence and question what it means to be alive.

I relate to this poor mannequin. I’ll often be walking around, baffled by my own existence, attempting to interact with other human beings but not really knowing how, just trying to copy what other people do and hope it goes over well. But the story really has universal appeal. Aren’t we all in the same sort of predicament; finding ourselves alive in a strange world that makes little logical sense, doing our best to fit in with it, not always doing a good job of it, only to one day be inevitably stripped of our brief consciousness? Is this curse of self-awareness and consciousness, which seems unique to our species, merely a trick that was pulled on us by a mischievous cosmic entity, like Tanko-Mankie? This story is really a metaphor for the human condition. When we look up at the night sky, at all of the stars and constellations, we really don’t know much more about our vast universe than the dummy knew looking out the shop window after just becoming conscious.