Dolls and Isolation

Mary Wilkins Freeman’s short story, “Old Woman Magoun”, tells the tale of an older woman raising her granddaughter, Lily, into a life of isolation. Throughout the story, Lily carries around a doll even though she is close to fourteen years old, and I think this helps prove her innocence/isolation. 

Someone made the point that Lily’s relationship with her doll is similar to Old Woman Magoun’s relationship with Lily, and I think that this is a very interesting argument that greatly contributes to the story. When Lily is sent to the store for the first time to pick up some salt, she runs into Jim Willis, an older man that she trusts only minutes after meeting him. Willis is surprised when he learns of Lily’s age, and she reacts by “pull[ing] her little hand away from his, and he let it go with no remonstrance. She clasped both her arms around her rag doll, in order that her hand should not be free for him to grasp again.” (Wilkins, 211). In this scene, it seems as though Lily uses her doll as a type of anchor to keep her from interacting with the “real world”; in other words, the rag doll keeps her in her state of isolation.

Similarly, Old Woman Magoun uses Lily to keep herself in place. She refuses to allow Nelson Barry, Lily’s father, to adopt his daughter, and does everything she can to keep Lily where she is in her state of innocence. When Lily dies, Old Woman Magoun decides to keep to the doll, and she carries it around wherever she goes. The doll, in many ways, took Lily’s place, and became Magoun’s new anchor: “Old Woman Magoun continued to live as she had done before. She supported herself by the produce of her tiny farm…but people said she was a trifle touched, since every time she went over the log bridge…, she carried with her, as one might have carried an infant, Lily’s old rag doll.” (Wilkins, 224). In this case, Magoun doesn’t have an infant to carry, so the ragdoll becomes the new Lily.