Forever Barbie Read Free Page B

can also buy "for the articles."
    Barbie and Lilli symbolize the link between the Old World and the New. America is a nation colonized by riffraff; the Mayflower was filled with petty criminals and the down-and-out. When Moll Flanders, to cite an emblematic floozy, took off for our
     shores, she was running from the law. Consequently, what could be more American than being an unimpeachable citizen with a
     sordid, embarrassing forebear in Europe?
    TO FIRST-GENERATION BARBIE OWNERS, OF WHICH I WAS one, Barbie was a revelation. She didn't teach us to nurture, like our clinging,
     dependent Betsy Wetsys and Chatty Cathys. She taught us independence. Barbie was her own woman. She could invent herself with
     a costume change: sing a solo in the spotlight one minute, pilot a starship the next. She was Grace Slick and Sally Ride,
     Marie Osmond and Marie Curie. She was all that we could be and—if you calculate what at human scale would translate to a thirty-nine-inch
     bust—more than we could be. And certainly more than we were . . . at six and seven and eight when she appeared and sank her
     jungle-red talons into our inner lives.
    Or into my inner life, anyway. After I begged my mother for a Barbie, she reluctantly gave me a Midge—Barbie's ugly sidekick,
     who was named for an insect and had blemishes painted on her face. When I complained, she compounded the error by simultaneously
     giving me a Barbie and a Ken. I still remember Midge's anguish—her sense of isolation—at having to tag along after a couple.
     In my subsequent doll play, Ken rejected Barbie and forged a tight platonic bond with Midge. He did not, however, reject Barbie's
     clothes—and the more girlish the better.
    To study Barbie, one sometimes has to hold seemingly contradictory ideas in one's head at the same time—which, as F. Scott
     Fitzgerald has said, is "the test of a first-rate intelligence." The doll functions like a Rorschach test; people project
     wildly dissimilar and often opposing fantasies on it. Barbie may be a universally recognized image, but what she represents
     in a child's inner life can be as personal as a fingerprint. It was once fashionable to tar Barbie as a materialistic dumbbell,
     and for some older feminists it still is; columnists Anna Quindlen and Ellen Goodman seem to be competing to chalk up the
     greatest number of attacks. Those of us young enough to have played with Barbie, however, realize the case is far from open
     and shut. In part, this is because imaginative little girls rarely play with products the way manufacturers expect them to.
     But it also has to do with the products themselves: at worst, Barbie projected an anomalous message; at best, she was a sort
     of feminist pioneer. And her meaning, like her face, has not been static over time.
    Before the divorce epidemic that swept America in the late sixties, Barbie's universe and that of the suburban nuclear family
     were light years apart. There were no parents or husbands or offspring in Barbie's world; she didn't define herself through
     relationships of responsibility to men or to her family. Nor was Barbie a numb, frustrated Hausfrau out of The Feminine Mystique. In the doll's early years, Handler turned down a vacuum company's offer to make a Barbie-sized vacuum because Barbie didn't
     do what Charlotte Johnson termed "rough housework." When Thorstein Veblen formulated his Theory of the Leisure Class, women were expected to perform vicarious leisure and vicarious consumption to show that their husbands were prosperous. But
     Barbie had no husband. Based on the career outfits in her first wardrobe, she earned her keep modeling and designing clothes.
     Her leisure and consumption were a testimony to herself.
    True, she had a boyfriend, but he was a lackluster fellow, a mere accessory. Mattel, in fact, never wanted to produce Ken;
     male figure dolls had traditionally been losers in the marketplace. But consumers so pushed for a boyfriend doll that