[The Dollmaker's] depiction of family life—the entangled bonds between parents and children, brothers and sisters—is unparalleled in modern American fiction. Especially affecting is the loving relationship between mother and daughter shared by Arnow's heroine, Gertie, and five-year-old Cassie. Skillfully and movingly the novel depicts fictional children as original and as realistic as any child the reader has known. It also makes the joys and the pains of motherhood as heartbreakingly palpable as any vicarious account can suggest.

More than just employing fresh subject matter, The Dollmaker dramatizes the frequently skirted conflict between a mother's attempt to be both true to her art and watchful of her children's welfare and happiness. Gertie Nevels, a hulking Kentucky hill woman with a talent for carving in wood, grapples with the distractions and obstructions that interfere with her sculpting a human figure out of a cherished man-sized piece of wild-cherry wood. The cherry-wood figure is more than an art object: carved during moments of hope, sorrow, regret, and then despair, it reflects the nature and the toughness of Gertie's moral fiber. The aesthetic and moral quality of the figure thus takes on singular importance in Gertie's life, for she is as much creating and discovering her destiny as she is demonstrating and assessing her talent. More than anything else, Gertie's motherhood is responsible for the cherry-wood figure's reflecting her sympathies with suffering humanity and for its remaining unfinished. Her children are the source of Gertie's sympathy and compassion—the material for her art and the cause of its doom. Thus motherhood at once inspires Gertie's creativity and condemns it to destruction. (pp. 854-55)

This riveting story of a family's migration during World War II from the Kentucky hills to a crowded housing project in Detroit centers on Gertie's efforts to keep her family unified both before and after she joins her husband in Detroit, where the army has assigned him to a defense plant. Heaped with details of how city life befuddles and splinters the uprooted family, the novel measures Gertie's ability to help her family preserve its integrity in an alien, often hostile environment. (p. 855)

Gertie has the artist's inventiveness and originality in abundance. When her family is still in Kentucky, she is sure she can carve in the rich, pure-grained cherry wood the [merciful, laughing] Christ [in overalls] imbedded in her imagination since childhood…. When Gertie gives up her dream of buying a farm in Kentucky and follows her husband, Clovis, to Detroit, she is less certain that Christ will come laughing out of the wood. Although she had little choice but to go to Detroit, she feels that she has betrayed the two of her five children who love the Kentucky hills: twelve-year-old Reuben and the younger Cassie. She begins to fear that the hidden man will be the Judas that increasingly haunts her mind…. Discovering which man is hidden in the wood will reveal to Gertie her own moral strength or weakness. (pp. 856-57)

[No] character in the novel is as engaging as Gertie's favorite child, Cassie Marie. Arnow's loving portrait of this irreverent, clumsy, innocent, creative child and Gertie's mutually adoring bond with her bring readers into that "other dimension" [Tillie] Olsen suggested [in her essay "Silences"] might come from writers who are also mothers. Few characters in literature are so winsomely original, so indelibly printed on the reader's consciousness; thus Gertie's betrayal [and loss] of Cassie is the book's tragic heart, because she loves the elf-child more than her other children…. [Gertie misses Reuben, who returns to Kentucky when Gertie guiltily urges him to betray his country heritage and "run with th rest," but Cassie's departure is permanent.] Gertie is proud of Cassie's individuality but worried that she needs friends; Cassie is contented with the companion she brought from Kentucky, her imaginary playmate, Callie Lou. Back in Kentucky Gertie and Cassie had laughingly included Callie Lou in their games…. But upset over the project children's calling Cassie "cuckoo" when she talks to Callie Lou, confused by her neighbors' disapproval and her family's embarrassment, and feeling that Cassie might be happier playing with other children, Gertie tells the stunned, disbelieving Cassie, "There ain't no Callie Lou." The shock of Gertie's words is debilitating because Callie Lou is more to Cassie than an imaginary friend: she betokens Cassie's individuality, her ebullient creativity, her love for Kentucky, where Callie Lou was born. (pp. 857-58)

The consequences of Gertie's decision to take Callie Lou from Cassie are more horrifying than the distraught mother could have imagined…. Determined to restore [Callie Lou to Cassie], Gertie finds Cassie playing with Callie Lou in the railroad yard—where Cassie can evade Gertie's rebuke. This scene, one of the most excruciatingly powerful in literature, evokes Gertie's horror and desperation as she screams for Cassie to get off the tracks. But unaware of her mother's shouts, which are drowned out by the approaching train and an overflying plane, Cassie sits cradling Callie Lou in her arms as the train, lurching ahead, severs her legs before Gertie's stricken eyes. In attempting to protect Callie Lou even from the train, Cassie expresses her inarticulated need to safeguard her private world and to resist assimilation. Sadly, ironically, Cassie dies protecting her child, as dear to her as Cassie is to Gertie. (p. 858)

Gertie turns to her art for comfort …, [but carving] done at such times reflects [her] immense guilt and grief over betraying another child. One side of the block begins to emerge as "the cloth-draped shoulders of someone tired or old, more likely tired, for the shoulders, the sagging head, bespoke a weariness unto death."… Gertie's "own torture became instead the agony of the bowed head in the block of wood."… She cannot recover from losing two of her children as well as the Kentucky farm she saved for fifteen years to buy…. Her art helps her to take responsibility for her sins; she perceives her kinship with Judas only when she suspects that he is the hidden man in the wood…. (p. 859)

Gertie now lacks the energy and the optimism to find a face for her laughing Christ. The shock of discovering that Clovis has killed a man over union politics nearly undoes her. No longer independent, defiant, life-giving, she does nothing…. Discovering the man's identity helps Gertie to decipher hers, though she is in Harriette Arnow's opinion unluckier even than the arch betrayer: he could give back the silver, Mrs. Arnow once told me, but Gertie couldn't give back Callie Lou.

Gertie shares a kinship with Judas not only because like him, she betrays "innocent blood," but because also like him, she does "meanness fer money."… Needing money to pay for the furniture and appliances Clovis buys on credit, Gertie is faced with the artist's perennial dilemma of maintaining one's artistic integrity or prostituting one's talent in order to make a living. Weakened by the loss of her land, Reuben, and then Cassie, Gertie succumbs to Clovis' pressure and carves for money…. Instead of creating beauty, she adds to the world's ugliness, carving a sunbonneted, barefooted figure that represents a rich city-man's picture of a folksy country woman, and a bleeding, thornycrowned, "ribby-chested" crucifix…. The unprofitable cherry-wood man must wait until Gertie has fed her family. Finally, he is sacrificed to their bellies. In the novel's closing pages Gertie carts the faceless man to a scrapwood lot and chops him into boards for her mass-produced dolls.

Gertie is up against so much in her struggle to finish the cherrywood Christ that one wonders if it's possible in the novel's world both to retain one's integrity and to feed one's family. Arnow stacks the deck high against her heroine, but Gertie escapes being a victim of forces: never shirking, she assumes responsibility for her choices, refusing to blame predestination and thereby be excused. Even Judas, she reckons, was responsible for his sins, whether or not he was fulfilling a prophecy.

The Dollmaker's presumed dichotomy between mother and artist is as curious as it is disturbing. Often writers work out fictionally what they cannot manage in their lives. But in this novel Arnow depicts as impossible what she in fact achieves: reconciling motherhood with the demands of an artist. Arnow's deep involvement with Gertie's struggle is apparent throughout the novel, indicating that she may have loaded any frustrations and resentments into her fiction, to communicate somewhere the destructiveness of the compromises demanded by both selves, and to document the cost of her achievement.

And there is a cost. The Dollmaker itself shares the flaws as well as the attributes of Gertie's cherry-wood masterpiece. The writing is in places as seemingly effortless and as inevitable as Gertie's whittling when the knife works its will with the shape and grain of the wood. For depictions of emotional trauma, the scenes describing Cassie's death and Gertie's progressive debility are unexcelled in literature. But just as Gertie's knife occasionally works contrary to her designs, so Arnow's pen at times shows evidence of strain in minor confusions. Gertie's puzzlement can become the reader's own as she wonders whether the cupped hand holds sandy earth from her father's fields, or gifts offered by Jonah, Esau, Lot's wife, or Job. These other possibilities distract the reader trying to discern either Judas or Christ in the wood and thinking at this point that the cupped hand holds Judas' silver. The religious symbolism related to her other carvings is in places confusing.

The reader can also get lost in the abundant detail, which solidifies Gertie's world but can obstruct the larger issues. Arnow's exuberance and thoroughness lead at times to excesses. However masterful the writing in The Dollmaker, occasionally the reader feels inundated…. While repeatedly documenting the facts of Gertie's life makes vivid her daily trials and failures, the reader may crave a more structured, foreshortened vision of Gertie's world rather than a recreation of it. Hence, as the man in the wood is ultimately unfinished, so Arnow's novel is in places unfinished. Both works of art bespeak an absence of the uninterrupted, singular devotion that might have perfected them. (pp. 859-61)

More than documenting the conflict between motherhood and an artist's "agitated" life, Harriette Arnow's example illustrates the problem any writer—male or female—has in reconciling the need for creative expression and the desire for close human relations. Few writers have both the circumstances and the dedication to give their lives up entirely to their art. (p. 864)

However much sorrow pervades the man in the wood and the book in which he lives, both works are life-affirming. For all the sadness and spoiled hopes, both testify to the power of the female imagination and to the common humanity that binds us all…. Arnow insists on the hope present at the novel's end. She once told me that Gertie might be able in a few years to buy a farm outside Detroit and thereby get closer to the land, for Clovis, she guessed, would never agree to go back to Kentucky. The Weedkiller's Daughter demonstrates Gertie's doing just that. A minor character dubbed "The Primitive" by the neighboring children, Gertie Nevels lives on a sprawling farm on the outskirts of Detroit, one similar, it seems, to Arnow's farm in Ann Arbor. Gertie endures, and may even prevail.

The Dollmaker will surely do both. It is important both in what it dramatizes and in what it represents. Oddly, happily, it disproves one of the novel's most persuasive arguments: that woman cannot be both artist and mother. The richness of its subject and the skill of its execution demonstrate those "profound aspects and understandings of human life" Tillie Olsen predicted would be expressed by artist-mothers. Not surprisingly, The Dollmaker is one of Olsen's favorite books, for succeeding where Gertie fails, Harriette Arnow tells us what Gertie wanted so badly to tell Cassie as she sought her out in the railroad yard: "A body's got to have somethen all their own." The Dollmaker is Harriette Arnow's Callie Lou. (pp. 865-66)