Gifting the Bear and a Nostalgic Desire for Childhood Innocence

Abstract

Each and every human being at one time or other has wanted a teddy bear to give them friendship and companionship (Andrews 2004, 1). [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Imagine a child holding tightly onto a teddy bear. The bear's face wears a comforting smile; the child's shows openness and peacefulness. This is an iconic image that from the early twentieth century has symbolized the toy's assumed protective innocence shielding the otherwise vulnerable innocent from real or feared harm. The line drawing shown here, from a 1920 children's picture book, reflects this illusory simplicit. Produced by instilling emotional labor in adult products (Hochschild 1983, 160), this commoditized compassion is constitutive of the adult teddy bear culture that by the 1920s, privileged the toy as a redeemer of individual human frailty and of human social failings. Unlike children's fantasy, the dominant beliefs and values of this adult culture are governed by an emotive sentimentality that depicts the teddy bear as possessing real feelings toward humans. Thus, as a result of the creation of the teddy bear as emotive subject, the ideology of teddy bear culture sees the personal sacrifice of superfluous material goods as both all that is necessary and sufficient for the personal and social restitution of humanity. This article provides a socio-cultural history of that transfiguration and of its relationship to the activity of teddy bear gifting: the provision of teddy bears as a means for alleviating the alienated emotional self. Adult teddy bear culture is identified as an outcome of the late nineteenth-century symbiosis of child-animal nature in popular and scientific culture. Over the first half of the twentieth century, the ideologies of the child as young animal and animals as sentient beings became embodied in the teddy bear, which, in turn, became representative of white childhood innocence. From the second half of that century and continuing into the twenty-first, the toy was further imbued with social, emotional, and material capacities of transformative love. Examining the mythology of the teddy bear's origins and the infusion of the item with a commoditized sentimentality reveals how it has become possible for the teddy to be reified as therapeutic artifact, and for its gifting to become an act of social justice seen as equivalent to donations of food, clothing, and financial aid. It can be tempting to dismiss or mock adult reverence for the teddy as nothing more than kitsch, but Ehrenreich (Ehrenreich 2001, 43-53) has warned of the ways that the all-encompassing nature of kitsch in the lives of women suffering from breast cancer is built upon a social alienation that celebrates passive social interaction in place of real social change. Similarly, Sturken's Tourists of History, explains that the teddy bear's cultural promise is to, by its presence alone, make us feel better about the way things are, (Sturken 2007, 7) to quell the possibility for anger, rebellion, aggression, or hate against personal and social conditions. Coupling its socio-cultural history to the analyses of Sturken and Ehrenreich, I argue that the gifting of teddy bears, a commercialized relational artifact, is a practice that inherently replaces real social and political engagements with a dehumanizing relationship to things. The Birth of an Icon Happy birthday, teddy bear It's been 100 years. Happy birthday, teddy bear We're glad that you are here (Pell 2002). The origin of the teddy bear toy and its value as ambassador of love is situated within a mythological outcome of a November 14, 1902 hunt, when President Theodore Roosevelt is deemed to have freed a bear that had been roped for him to kill. In different tellings, the captured bear is variously described as old, young, sick, or, according to a 1926 magazine article, as only eighteen inches tall (Crenshaw 1926, 62). …

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