Authors: M. G. Lord
Issues of friendship and "popularity" arise as frequently in Barbie's fictive world as they do in high school. Barbie has
male and female friends, but in the early stories her relationships with members of her own gender are rocky. Perhaps as a
consequence of her chronic sexual jealousy, Barbie's sidekicks are invariably less comely and clever than she. Midge is "a
round berry" with an impulsiveness that clouds her judgment, so eager in Cynthia Lawrence's "My Friend the Pioneer" to impress
a certain boy that she lies about her wilderness skills, endangering Barbie and herself. Then there's Jody Perkins, an astrology
nut whose greatest aspiration is to marry money. "There are more important things to dream about than being rich," Barbie
reprimands. "Name one," Jody counters.
Lawrence's
Barbie Solves a Mystery,
in which Barbie's sleuthing straightens out the life of a prominent Willows-born fashion designer, cries out for comparison
with Nancy Drew. And the two gumshoes have more in common than their golden hair. Ned Nickerson, Nancy's beau, is as much
of a dishrag as Ken—indeed, Ned is so ineffectual that Nancy's car runs faster than his. The "man" in Nancy's life is, of
course, Carson Drew, her widowed father, whose stunning inability to solve cases without his daughter has curiously never
impaired his professional standing. Barbie, by contrast, does not turn to her father when Ken proves inadequate; she dates
other boys. There is little incestuous tension in the Barbie novels. Mr. and Mrs. Roberts are very much a separate unit.
Barbie and Nancy have personality differences, too. In
Rascals at Large,
or the Clue in the Old Nostalgia,
Arthur Prager suggests that for prepubescent girls, identifying with Nancy "is within reach. . . . She is pretty but not beautiful."
Identifying with Barbie is harder, but, because of her humanizing imperfections, not impossible. Nancy also has a richer spectrum
of sidekicks with whom less-conventional girls can identify, ranging from necktie-wearing George to frilly Bess, who quakes
at the sight of spiders.
This is not to say Barbie doesn't have a supporting cast—by far the strangest of which is "Big Bertha," a self-hating size
fourteen who develops an unwholesome fixation on Barbie in Lawrence's "The Size 10 Dress." Humiliated during a hygiene class
"weigh-in," Big B. waddles off to the doctor, who places her on a diet. As Bertha suffers a cruel withdrawal from cream pies,
Barbie, who has no trouble extending herself to blubbery girls, cheers her on. Then a funny thing happens. Bertha not only
slims down, she transforms herself into Barbie—affecting the same ponytail, the same clothes, even the same
laugh.
Barbie tries to be tolerant; after all, Bertha's mom is dead and, consequently, unavailable for fashion guidance. Naturally
Bertha would want to model herself on the most tasteful girl in school. But having a doppelganger freaks her out, and in the
great tradition of smalltown Protestants who have not been psychoanalyzed, she is seized by "emotions so strange that she
could not understand them herself."
Perhaps if Barbie had watched
All About Eve
she might have had a clue. But deliberately oblivious to the murky forces that might underlie Bertha's behavior, Barbie addresses
its surface manifestation—she helps Bertha personalize a dress that Bertha had copied from one of hers—and curing the symptom
evidently vanquishes its cause. Darkness dissolves quickly in Willows. At the sewing-class fashion show, Barbie and Bertha
hold hands in a "warm spotlight"—which, given the possible homoerotic subtext to Bertha's reinventing herself as the object
of her fixation, is a curious resolution. But such undercurrents remain buried in commercial fiction, and the story's moral,
seemingly, is this: It's okay to want to be like Barbie, but you shouldn't try to
be
Barbie.
Although Barbie's refusal to look inward—a common limitation of characters in commercial fiction—is exasperating in "The Size
10 Dress," it is less annoying in
Barbie's New York Summer,
a novel that charts the same superficial terrain as Sylvia Plath's relentlessly introspective novel,
The Bell
Jar.
Both Plath's character Esther Greenwood and Barbie Roberts are smalltown girls who have earned guest editorships at fictional
Manhattan magazines—
Ladies' Day
and
Teen Journal,
respectively. Plath herself was awarded a guest editorship at
Mademoiselle,
Joan Didion won
Vogue's
Prix de Paris—such internships were, in the fifties, a commonplace steppingstone in a writing career. They also had a Cinderella
quality: "Look what can happen in this country," Plath's heroine comments with irony. "A girl lives in some out-of-the-way
town for nineteen years, so poor she can't afford a magazine, and then she . . . wins a prize here and a prize there and ends
up steering New York like her own private car."
Because Barbie's story is told in a young adult novel and not in a literary one, it is considerably less raw than Esther's.
But there are similarities. Both are frustrated by commitments to oafish boyfriends back home—"calm, steady" Ken Carson, who
cannot reach the "cloudland" where Barbie lives, and Buddy Willard, a plodding figure whose genitalia, while not nearly as
deficient as a Ken doll's, will live in infamy for having reminded Esther of "turkey neck and turkey gizzards." Both are squired
around Manhattan by exotic New York men—Esther by United Nations interpreter Constantin something-or-other (a name Esther
cannot pronounce, because it is "full of S's and K's") and Barbie by Pablo Smith, a rich Brazilian who aspires to be a playwright.
Both also had female mentors keen to mold them—
Ladies' Day
editor Jay Cee for Esther and
Teen Journal
chief Cornelia Desmond for Barbie.
Esther is, however, a few years older than Barbie, and the thrill of being a protegee has worn off. "Why did I attract these
weird old women?" she laments. "They all wanted to adopt me in some way, and, for the price of their care and influence, have
me resemble them." One wonders if with time Barbie, too, will grow disenchanted with her Pygmalions. For both Barbie and Esther,
clothes represent a great deal more than protection against the elements. One reason Barbie applied to
Teen Journal
was to get "a whole New York wardrobe, free." Like a Berlitz student mastering a foreign accent, she scrutinizes stylish Manhattan
women and shortens her dresses so she will resemble them. Esther also judges by appearance, coolly decoding messages of sexual
availability and social status in other women's outfits. Consequently, when Esther hurls all of her clothes off the roof of
her hotel, it is a forceful declaration of her madness—a rejection of the feminine language she has taken pains to learn.
In both novels, fash-ionability is, for women, the outward manifestation of mental health: Barbie, who is allegedly sane,
collects clothes; Esther, who is growing flakier by the minute, flings them into the street.
In the same way that Esther—seasoned, jaded—is critical of her mentors, she is also violently ambivalent about her mother.
When Esther, who by this time is in a mental hospital, describes her mother "begging [her] with a sorrowful face to tell her
what she had done wrong," it is hard not to think of Mrs. Roberts and her eerie, masochistic relationship to Barbie. If the
conventions of the genre had permitted Barbie to look inward, would she, too, have been revolted by her mother's manipulative
self-denial? Certainly Barbie's flight from a future resembling her mother's suggests a horror of it, and, by extension, of
her. "I hate her," Esther shouts in response to her therapist's inquiry about her mother. "I suppose you do," the therapist
replies. Is this what lies ahead for Barbie?
Yet the struggle to become independent and separate from one's mother is not a problem unique to Barbie; it is, for all girls,
a core aspect of prepubescent development. In
The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis
and the Sociology of Gender,
Nancy Chodorow, building upon observations of psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, describes detachment strategies that could have
been inspired by the Barbie novels: "A girl . . . tries to resolve her ambivalent dependence and sense of oneness [with her
mother] by projection and by splitting the good and bad aspects of objects; her mother and home represent bad, the extrafamilial
world, good. Alternately, she may try in every way to be unlike her mother. (She may idealize a woman teacher, another adult
woman or older girl, or characters in books or films and contrast them to her mother.) In this case her solution again involves
defensive splitting along with projection, introjection, and the creation of arbitrary boundaries by negative identification
(I am what she is not)."
Of course there is no way Cynthia Lawrence, who published
Barbie's Neiv
York Summer
in 1962, could have been literally influenced by the
The Bell
Jar;
it was published pseudonymously in England in 1963 and did not appear in America until 1971—having been delayed by Plath's
mother's vigorous campaign to suppress it. Yet within the circumscriptions of its genre,
Barbie's New York Summer
actually does address the problems of a talented young girl learning to define and achieve her goals. It is also filled with
sophisticated jokes, including an interior monologue in which Barbie, while modeling for a photographer, expresses outrage
at being treated like a doll or mannequin. "I felt like a piece of merchandise," she grumbles. Lawrence also slyly freezes
Barbie in sexy stills from popular culture—such as this image inspired by Marilyn Monroe standing over a subway grate in
The Seven Year Itch:
"A sudden gust of wind caught [Barbie's] full skirt and made it flutter like a flag. She clamped it down with her palms as
Pablo laughed."
Nor do Barbie's Boswells interpret her character identically. What stands out in the fiction of Bette Lou Maybee—whose family,
she told me, immigrated to America before the Revolution—is Barbie's fierce democratic tendencies. Life is portrayed as a
meritocracy: Rich kids who exploit their parents' wealth or social position do not get ahead, they get their comeuppance.
In
Barbie's Hawaiian Holiday,
a novel unfortunately dated by its phonetic renderings of Chinese-accented English, Maybee rages against monarchism and the
evils of an inflexible class system. In one scene, the woman with whom Barbie and her family are staying rhapsodizes about
how King Kamehameha and his troops united Hawaii by driving a rival chieftain's army off a steep bluff. "It was probably Clara's
British background that made her think so highly of monarchies," Maybee writes in Barbie's voice. "Even when these were achieved
at the cost of pushing people off cliffs."
Barbie, Midge and Ken
(1964), Lawrence and Maybee's last anthology, contains their most openly subversive stories. "She's a Jolly Good and "Go Fly
a Kite" are about girls whose opportunities have been limited because of their gender. In "She's a Jolly Good Fellow," Willows
High School's first female class president—who ascends from the vice presidency when the male president abdicates—overcomes
gender-based prejudice. And in "Go Fly a Kite," Skipper and a female friend defiantly enter a boys' kite-making contest. They
don't win, but they don't embarrass themselves either. Instead, Maybee introduces a young boy who actually helps Skipper construct
her kite—an underage avatar of the seventies "Sensitive Male."
I asked Maybee, who is currently retired on the West Coast, if she and Lawrence had intended their stories to open windows
for girls. "I was born in the wrong part of the century myself, and probably there was some ventilating," Maybee said. "I
never fitted into the whatever-women-were-supposed-to-be kinds of roles. And ["Go Fly a Kite"] was probably out of one of
my childhood experiences." The novels, I learned from Maybee, were produced under acute deadline pressure; she worries there
may have been stylistic flaws because there wasn't enough time to rewrite. But the authors definitely did incorporate their
experiences in their stories. Lawrence, who grew up in New York, wrote
Barbie's New York Summer;
Maybee, who was raised in Seattle and lived on the West Coast, wrote novels set in San Francisco and Hawaii. And while Paula
Foxx, the mentor figure and swimsuit designer in Maybee's
Barbie's Fashion Success,
was not literally modeled on beachwear manufacturer Rose Marie Reid, there are elements of Reid in her personality—a reflection
of Maybee's having written advertising copy for Reid's company. In
Sex and the Single Girl,
Helen Gurley Brown elevated Reid as a paradigm of female financial independence: a "swimsuit wizardess . . . off and running
at the success steeplechase." If one accepts Brown's book as a progressive tome, this makes Reid an equally progressive role
model.
After speaking with Maybee, I was baffled: How could Mattel—maker of the Barbie Game—place its imprimatur on these lively,
seditious books? Further investigation, however, suggested a possibility: No one at Mattel had actually read them. Not one
of the hundreds of letters exchanged between the toymaker and Random House—preserved in the Random House archive at Columbia
University—alludes to the content of the books. There are dozens of memos about the correct placement of the trademark symbol
on various title pages. There are multiple complaints from Ruth Handler that the books didn't have enough pictures. There
is even a lengthy exchange about where the Handlers should stay when they visited Manhattan in August 1963; this includes
a letter from the manager of the New York Hilton, who, presenting himself as a friend of Random House editor Robert Bernstein,
recommends its Tower Suites, which then ran between $175 and $250 a day. There are royalty statements—and rejoinders from
Mattel saying that the royalties are both insufficient and not reported often enough. But never do issues of plot or character
or tone or appropriateness emerge in the correspondence.