Why Waldorf Dolls Have No Faces

The Waldorf doll has a bare face, or two dots for eyes and the hint of a mouth, because a face that has been finished leaves the child nothing to do. In anthroposophy the child before the change of teeth grows by its own inner activity, and the picture-forming of the imagination is not decoration but a formative force, the same force of the etheric body that is building the child's organs in those years. A doll whose expression is fixed at delight, or sorrow, is delighted or sorrowful whatever the play requires. A doll with a bare face is sad when the child's game is sad and laughing when it laughs, because the child supplies the expression from within, and the supplying is the point.

Steiner's napkin doll

The account is in Steiner's written work and belongs to the founding of the pedagogy. In The Education of the Child, the essay of 1907 that precedes the first Waldorf school by twelve years, Steiner sets two dolls side by side. One is made from an old napkin folded and knotted into a body, with two ink spots for eyes. The other is what he calls the beautiful doll, with painted cheeks and real hair. The napkin doll, he says, obliges the child to complete the figure out of its own imagination, and this work of completion forms the brain, as the muscles are formed by work that is fitted to them. The finished doll gives the child nothing to complete, and the forces that would have done the completing lie idle. Steiner's word for the effect of the beautiful doll on the brain is that it becomes desolate.

The Waldorf doll as made today in kindergartens and homes descends from that passage. It is a picture of the human being, offered unfinished.

What the doll is made of

The doll is made from natural materials so that the child's senses meet what is true. The skin is cotton knit; the stuffing is sheep's wool, which takes on the warmth of the child's body and gives it back; the hair is wool or mohair. A doll stuffed with wool is warm to hold, has weight, and yields. The tradition's sense of touch is a sense of the boundary of one's own body, and what the young child touches teaches it what the world is; wool, cotton, and wood teach differently from plastic.

The proportions matter more than the face. The doll for the young child is made with the head large in proportion to the body, as the young child's own head is, and the limbs simple. The child recognises its own form in it. As the child grows toward the change of teeth, dolls with longer limbs and fuller bodies, and a little more of the face, follow the child's own changing proportions.

The face by age

The bare face is not a rule but a gradation. For the child under three, the doll may be a simple knotted form, a head and a body in one piece of cloth, with no face at all. For the kindergarten child, two eyes and a small mouth, embroidered in muted thread, neutral in expression. Not until the child approaches the grades does a doll with a fuller face belong, and even then the face is quiet, since the imagination in the second seven years is still the faculty the education relies on, now for the inner pictures of the lessons rather than for play.

The same principle in the kindergarten

The doll is one instance of a principle that governs everything in a Waldorf early childhood: the less the object does, the more the child does. The blocks are cut from branches and are not shaped into anything; the play cloths are plain silk and cotton in single colours that become a river, a cloak, a roof; the shells, pine cones, and knotted cloths on the shelf become whatever the game needs. A toy that does one thing calls forth the one thing. A toy that does nothing calls forth the child.

The same reasoning is why the Waldorf kindergarten is free of screens and why the teacher tells stories rather than showing pictures. In each case a finished picture from outside is withheld so that the child forms its own, and the forming is what builds the child.

What the tradition holds and does not

It holds that the imagination of the young child is a formative force in the strict sense, building the body it works in, and that a childhood spent completing simple things leaves an adult with a living inner picture-life. It does not hold that a child given an ordinary doll is harmed, that faces are bad, or that the doll must be made in a prescribed way. Parents make Waldorf dolls at home from patterns passed between kindergartens, and the making, over several evenings, is itself part of what the doll carries into the child's hands.