Forever Barbie (22 page)
Authors: M. G. Lord
Then there's Kirsten, a Swedish pioneer, whose accessories include a handmade rag doll, a school bench, a carpetbag, handknit
winter woolens, and a wooden trestle table set with dainty stoneware dishes. Other dolls in the series include the dauntingly
refined Samantha, a Victorian child who studies at "Miss Crampton's Academy, a private school for proper young ladies"; Molly,
a bespectacled lass who pores over
Gaining Skill with Words
to take her mind off Dad, fighting overseas in World War II; and, the collection's newest member, Addy, a courageous African-American
girl growing up during the Civil War. One is not likely to see Totally Hair Samantha or Rappin' Rockin' Kirsten—Yo! The Pleasant
Company understands the class anxieties of its buyers, as well as their discretionary income: since 1986, over eleven million
American Girls books have been sold.
To be sure, many Barbie dolls, particularly those directed at children and not adult collectors, are thoroughly rooted in
fantasy and do not attempt to miniaturize real life. The "Twinkle Lights" Barbie—who has flashing fiber-optic strands emerging
from her chest—and the "Bath Blast" Barbie— whom children "dress" in aerosol foam—are far from scale models of reality. A
throbbing fringe of fur above her breasts would get a real woman inducted into Ripley's Believe It or Not, just as traipsing
around in nothing but shaving cream might get her arrested. But Mattel's market research and my own observations have convinced
me that three- to six-year-old girls really do possess a boundless appetite for anything colored fuchsia. Yet because "taste"
is learned—that is to say, imposed—anxious middle- and upper-middle-class parents attempt to steer their children away from
these natural desires.
In
The Hidden Persuaders,
a color researcher tells Vance Packard that "the poor and the relatively unschooled" favor brilliant colors; seemingly, they
were never forced to unlearn their childhood preferences. "Scientific observation shows that cultural needs are the product
of upbringing and education," Bourdieu writes in
Distinction.
"All cultural practices (museum visits, concert-going, reading, etc.), and preferences in literature, painting or music are
closely linked to educational level . . . and secondarily to social origin."
To study how education perpetuates class differences in England—a process similar to what occurs in most of the industrialized
West—one need merely screen Michael Apted's
28-Up
and its sequel,
35-Up.
Apted's video documentary charts the lives of fourteen male and female British subjects, representing the top and bottom of
the social scale. In the first of serial interviews conducted every seven years, John, Andrew, and Charlie, three upper-class
seven-year-olds, were studying Latin and trying to decide if they would go to university at Oxford or Cambridge. By age twenty-eight,
having graduated from prestigious schools, they were pursuing upper-class careers; but because the film dramatized how their
educations preserved class inequality, all but one refused to be interviewed as adults.
What is more, so striking were the boys' accents that one could identify their class without paying attention to the content
of their speech. Their elocution was radically different from that of Talking Stacey, Barbie's English friend whom Mattel
issued in 1969. She sounded working-class, like the Liverpudlian rock stars fawned over by American girls. Likewise Talking
Barbie has never been afflicted with Locust Valley Lockjaw. The infamous 1992 "Math Class Is Tough" Barbie had the voice of
a Valley Girl, placing her socially somewhere between lower middle class and high prole. But like Eliza Doolittle, Barbie
is, in matters of speech, a chameleon. In
Dance!
Workout with Barbie,
an animated exercise video also issued in 1992, Barbie has an older, less overtly proletarian voice. "We're fulfilling what
we've always said—that she has many voices," Mattel vice president Meryl Friedman, who supervised production of the video,
told me. "She's open-ended."
Unlike their upper-class counterparts, the three working-class boys in
35-
Up
did not, at age seven, speak of universities; they had no clear idea what a "university" was. At thirty-five, one was a bricklayer,
another a cab driver, and the third a workman in a meat-packing plant. At seven, the working-class girls had a vague notion
of higher education, although they sensed that it was beyond their financial grasp. Significantly, though, when they became
mothers, they developed academic aspirations for their children. The working-class men, however, were defensive about their
lack of "opportunities"; they failed to see the distinction between class and money.
In the documentary, however, that distinction is hard to miss. Bruce, an Oxford-educated patrician who teaches school in Bangladesh,
is desperately poor—though he remains upper-class. And Nick, a farmer's son who studied physics at Oxford, is no longer in
his original class; but because of the rigidity of the English system, neither is his new position clear. Not surprisingly,
Nick fled to a less structured country—America—where he is a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Even within America itself, the West Coast is less structured than the East Coast. Joan Didion's family may have been in California
for six generations, but most people's haven't. Many nonnative Californians came to escape what they perceived to be suffocating
social hierarchies at home; to them, the state's openness is a blessing. But transplants whose sense of self derived from
their position within the Establishment may find its absence a threat. Under the cruel glare of the Pacific sun, shabby gentility
just looks shabby.
In part, the extent to which Establishment women are uncomfortable with Barbie reflects the degree to which she embodies West
Coast style, which, exported by the Hollywood-based entertainment industry, seems to have been snapped up without protest
in the Midwest and Sunbelt. "Whatever the fashion, the California version will be more extreme, more various, and—possibly
because of the influence of the large Spanish-American population—much more colorful," Alison Lurie explains in
The
Language of Clothes.
"Clothes tend to fit more tightly than is considered proper elsewhere, and to expose more flesh . . . virtuous working-class
housewives may wear outfits that in any other part of the country would identify them as medium-priced whores."
Even "the opposition between*the classical sports and the Californian sports," Bourdieu says, expresses "two contrasting relations
to the social world." The classical sports—those practiced by the French bourgeoisie— reflect "a concern for propriety and
ritual" and "unashamed flaunting of wealth and luxury"; the Californian sports, by contrast, involve a "symbolic subversion
of the rituals of bourgeois order by ostentatious poverty." To be sure, Barbie has engaged in her share of classical sports—skiing,
tennis, riding—but she is more profoundly associated with democratic sports—surfing, snorkeling, Frisbee-throwing—that the
middle classes can afford. Nor do these sports require expensive childhood lessons to be performed successfully by adults.
Barbie's egalitarian sports, however, are usually
''new"
or "trendy"; in 1992, her whole tribe was equipped for rollerblading. Barbie has, however, never fully embraced a working-class
identity, avoiding such traditional nonbourgeois sports as bowling.
Sometimes a parental struggle over Barbie is not a scrap over a toy at all. It is a clash of East versus West, intellectual
culture versus physical culture, rootedness versus deracination. Consider Barbie's history of opulent bathrooms—unabashedly
lower-class by Fussell's standards. "The prole bathroom is the place for enacting the fantasy 'what I'd do if I were really
rich,' " Fussell writes. But on the West Coast, water truly is a luxury. In a land reclaimed from the desert, sprinklers
are
magical, as are irrigation canals. Like the Christian soul in baptism, the land, through water, achieves new life. The whole
of southern California is as man-made as Barbie; in her hallowed hot tub, her sacred shower, her sacerdotal spa, she celebrates
the miracle of manufactured existence.
Likewise, in the East, flashy cars are considered at best nouveau, at worst narcissistic. Top-out-of-sight classes drive beat-up
station wagons, Fussell tells us. And he is correct: One would not have been likely to spot the late Jackie Onassis tooling
around in a pink Corvette, pink Porsche, pink Jaguar, pink Mustang, or any of the other roseate conveyances in Barbie's garage.
Yet cars have a different meaning in southern California, particularly for adolescents. They are like shoes. Transportation,
autonomy, separation from parents—all these teenage "issues" are difficult without wheels. Regardless of social class, cars
are a marker of puberty—as much as are female breasts or male beards. To display oneself in a fancy car seems as legitimate
an adolescent impulse as to parade around in the absurd outfits one sees on MTV. True, perhaps to East Coast preppies, the
cars and costumes are a tacky masquerade, a vulgar outdoor display. But having grown up in California, I can understand Barbie's
pink Porsche; had my budget and my superego not had a say in the car I bought, I, as a teenager, might have driven one too.
In
Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies,
Reyner Banham explains how he came to comprehend the centrality of the automobile in southern California culture, and the
way that this influences a southern Californian's perception of space. "The first time I saw it happen nothing registered
on my conscious mind," he writes, "because it seemed so natural— as the car in front turned down the off-ramp of the San Diego
freeway, the girl beside the driver pulled down the sunvisor and used the mirror on the back of it to tidy her hair. Only
when I had seen a couple more incidents of this kind did I catch their import: that coming off the freeway is coming in from
outdoors. A domestic or sociable journey in Los Angeles does not end as much at the door of one's destination as at the off-ramp
of the freeway."
To drive from, say, the Hotel Bel-Air to Mattel's headquarters in El Segundo is to experience Los Angeles County as a theme
park. Crawling at breakfast with film-industry types—faces as familiar as Mickey's and Goofy's—the hotel, with its quasi-Spanish
pretense, its swan pond, and its burbling fountains, reminds one of Disneyland's New Orleans Square. Then one pulls onto the
San Diego Freeway, a speeded-up Disney autopia, and cruises past the Los Angeles International Airport, where landing airplanes,
as if part of a heart-stopping ride, appear to descend within inches of the sunroofs on the cars ahead. On the left there
is a vast memorial park with a sparkling faux-classical temple. As readers learned in Evelyn Waugh's
The
Loved One,
even death can be themed.
Mattel Headquarters, too, rises above its clean, new industrial plaza like a theme-park corporation. It is gray, erect. Inside
are Barbie dioramas and baby dolls; outside it is almost comically masculine—no postmodern whimsy, no coy touches of pink.
Traveling this path each day for a few weeks (though not throughout my entire stint in Los Angeles), I quickly unlearned eastern
verticality. I did not unlearn archaism, but I grew tolerant and curious about the new. Even if Los Angeles, as some believe,
has proved to be a failed evolutionary experiment, a basin of crime and drought and fouled air, I understood what its horizontality
might have meant in the postwar world—a patch of green for every citizen; a romance with the earth; an urge to flee the aridity
of sky-box living for the succulence of freshly sprinkled soil. To Banham, it represented "the dream of a good life outside
the squalors of a European type of city . . . a dream that runs back not only into the Victorian railway suburbs of earlier
cities but also the country-house culture of the fathers of the U.S. Constitution."
Seduced by California, to which 1 had not returned since I left for college, and sucked into Barbie's tiny world, I began
to see a dignity in Barbie's houses. With a little imagination, one could discern the influence of the
Art
& Architecture
Case Study Houses—bold, modernist designs from the likes of Pierre Koenig, Craig Ellwood, Charles and Ray Eames—that sprang
up in California from 1945 until the early sixties. Barbie's original Dream House, although a jumble of colors, is clean and
simple in design—pared down by virtue of its function, which involved folding up into a portable carrying case.
Barbie's 1964 Go-Together plastic furniture also had a sort of Danish modern, psychiatrist's-office look to it; but her revamped
1964 Dream House abandoned Case Study starkness in favor of Levittown rococo. When asked to decipher its confluence of styles,
and, as Mattel's catalogue put it, "all the elegant accessories Barbie has chosen," West Coast architecture critic Aaron Betsky,
author of
Violated Perfection,
was nonplussed. "Well, there's a brick wall that's right out of late Frank Lloyd Wright thirties school," he said, squinting
at the Mattel catalogue. "Then there's this slightly Biedermeyer sofa and chair set, next to the television. And over there,
next to the modern kitchen, these fake sort of Scandinavian arts and crafts chairs that have suddenly become bar stools."