Forever Barbie

by M. G. Lord

  A chemist who fled graduate school long before completing a Ph.D., my mother was a casualty of the Feminine Mystique. She had stopped work to become a fifties housewife and hated every minute of it. She didn't tell me, "Housework is thralldom," but she refused to buy Barbie cooking utensils. She didn't say, "Marriage is jail," but she refused to buy Barbie a wedding dress. What she did say often, though, was "Education is power." And in case I missed the point, she bought graduation outfits for each of my dolls.

  Nor did she complain about her mastectomy. I sensed the scar embarrassed her, but I never knew how much. Then I unearthed Barbie's bathing suit—a stretched-out maillot onto which my mother had sewn two clumsy straps to keep the top from falling down.

  That sad piece of handiwork spoke to me in a way she never had. It spoke not of priggishness or prudery, but of the anguish she had felt poolside and why she rarely ventured into the water. It spoke of how she felt herself watched—how all women feel themselves watched—turning male heads before the operation and fearing male scrutiny after it. It spoke of pain and stoicism and quiet forbearance. It broke her silence and my heart.

  When things of aesthetic power—say, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial— have emotional resonance, the resonance feels right. But I cannot tell you how strange it was to ache with grief over a bunch of doll clothes. Or to find in a Barbie case a reliquary of my mother.

  I forced myself to study Ken masquerading as Steichen's portrait of Garbo; Midge looking like a refugee from a boys' boarding school; even Barbie looking more Martina than Chrissy. (Barbie wore a tiny tennis skirt, but it was under Ken's sweatshirt.) I concluded that I'd been one messed-up kid.

  But as I explored the mess, I came to realize that, given my environment, it would have been far flakier not to have cross-dressed the dolls. It wasn't just my mother's message that a woman's traditional role was loathsome; it was all the weirdness and fear floating around the idea of breasts. I don't think Midge's sartorial inspiration was Una Lady Troubridge or Radclyffe Hall. I think it was terror. Femaleness, in my eight-year-old cosmos, equaled disease; I disguised Midge in men's clothes to protect her. If her breasts were invisible, maybe the disease would pass over them. Maybe she'd survive. I even shielded Barbie, permitting her to show her legs but armoring her chest. Only Ken was allowed the luxury of feminine display; he had no breasts to make him vulnerable.

  Seeing Barbie ignited a brushfire of ancient emotions; no longer could I dismiss the doll as trivial. Freud, of course, understood that dolls weren't trivial; in his essay on "The Uncanny," he writes about the creepy or "uncanny" feeling dolls or automata provoke in people when such dolls are too lifelike. He also understood that if commonplace or familiar things— like, say, Barbies—trigger the recollection of a repressed memory, they can send shivers down one's spine.

  In German, "the uncanny" is das Unheimliche—that which is weird or foreign. The word is the opposite of das Heimliche—that which is familiar, native, of the home. Once "homely" objects, my dolls had become uncanny: they preserved, as if in amber, the forgotten terrors of my childhood. Freud explains: "If psycho-analytic theory is correct in maintaining that every affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs."

  He calls this class of scary things "the uncanny." Consequently, Freud writes, "we can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche ['homely'] into its opposite das Unheimliche, for this uncanny is really nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression."

  In his essay, Freud pushes the idea of the uncanny much farther than I do. He describes the fantasy of being mistakenly buried alive as "the most uncanny thing of all"—remarking that psychoanalysis has revealed that fantasy to be a transformation of another, originally nonterrifying fantasy qualified "by a certain lasciviousness"—that of intrauterine existence.

  Thus the womb, "the former Heim [home] of all human beings," is the ultimate unheimlich place. This might also suggest why, while not literally a return to the womb, my profound reconnection with my mother—experienced as an adult through my childhood dolls—seemed uncanny.

  I was eight when I got my Barbies, well past the age of appropriating them as what psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott termed "transitional objects." But Mattel's research shows that today kids get Barbies earlier, usually about age three. Thus, Barbies, in the psyches of toddlers, can function as transitional objects—which warrants a closer look at Winnicott's concept.

  During the months following birth, a baby doesn't grasp that its mother is separate from itself. Embodied by her ever-nurturing breast, the mother is an extension of the child; she can be magically conjured up by the child whenever the child wants—or so the child believes. As the child develops, however, it must face the fact that this just isn't so—not, for the child, a happy idea. It isn't just the physical weaning, having to give up a stress-free means of satisfying hunger. It's also the trauma of becoming independent, of losing the blissful, boundariless connection to Mom.

  This, says Winnicott, is where transitional objects come in. They are, for a child, his or her first "not me" objects. The child imbues them with elements of the self and the mother; and they symbolize, for the child, that relationship, which is coming to an end.

  There aren't hard and fast rules about transitional objects: They can be as stereotypical as Linus's security blanket in Peanuts or as idiosyncratic as a piece of string. Nor are there rules about the age at which children appropriate them. Sometimes a baby will attach itself to a toy in its crib; sometimes an older child—such as Linus—will endure the ridicule of schoolmates rather than renounce his object. But the objects, Winnicott has pointed out, aren't fetishes; having them, for kids, is normal behavior.

  Significantly, though, the transitional object "is not just a 'not me' object, it's also a 'me' object," said Ellen Handler Spitz, who has written on the phenomenon in Art and Psyche. "If she loses it and is put to bed without it, she may have a tantrum and be devastated. Like the transitional object, the Barbie doll leads the child into the future by enabling her to detach, to some extent, from the mother. At the same time, because the doll is a little woman, it represents the relationship with the mother." A transitional object can also be a child's bridge to future aesthetic experiences. This is because the child often sucks, strokes, and mutilates it into "a highly personal object," the way an artist fashions artwork out of clay.

  LEGALLY SPEAKING, THE BARBIE DOLL IS A WORK OF ART. Mattel copyrighted Barbie's face as a piece of sculpture, not because the doll was intended to be a unique object, but because it wasn't. The manual processes in Barbie's creation—the sewing-on of hair, the painting of lips— might permit a variation or two; thus hair and makeup were not copyrighted. But the duplication of the doll's body was mechanical and, therefore, uniform; hence the registration of the sculpture.

  In 1936, when critic Walter Benjamin investigated the idea of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he focused principally on photographs, which in his view satisfied the masses' craving "to bring things 'closer' spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction."

  In the case of Barbie, however, the reality is the reproduction. Human icons—Elvis, Garbo, Madonna—can only be possessed through film or audiotape; there either was or is an "original" somewhere that forever eludes ownership. But Barbie herself was meant to be owned—not just by a few but by everybody. Issued in editions of billions, she is the ultimate piece of mass art.

  Benjamin was writing at the dawn of the age of mechanical reproduction, two decades before the post-World War II boom in synthetics that made Barbie possible. He wrote before the era of plastic, the revolutionary materi
al that did for objects what film did for images. Plastic is a key to understanding Barbie: Her substance is very much her essence.

  Hard, smooth, cool to the touch, plastic can hold any shape and reproduce the tiniest of details. It is not mined or harvested; chemists manufacture it. Nor does it return to nature: you can throw it away, but it will not vanish— poof—from the landfill. Time may alter its appearance, as it has with some of the earlier Barbies—dolls with white arms on coral torsos with oily, apricot-colored legs.

  To a poet or a child or anyone given to anthropomorphizing, such dolls are victims of vitiligo, the disease from which Michael Jackson claims to suffer. But to a chemist, they are evidence of an inadequate recipe. Never mind the beads of moisture on their mottled thighs, old dolls, a chemist will tell you, don't sweat. But their "plasticizer" (the substance used to make plastic pliable) may begin to separate from their "resin" (the plastic base— polyvinylchloride in Barbie's case). Or their dyes might fade.

  In the environmentally conscious nineties, it's hard to remember a time when plastic was considered miraculous. In the fifties, "Better living through chemistry" was the slogan of the plastic pocket protector set, not an ironic catch phrase coined by users of hallucinogenic drugs. Science was inextricably tied up with patriotism. The Soviets launched Sputnik in September 1957; we countered four months later with a satellite of our own. Can-do, know-how—these were American things, as were those big acrylic polymers and giant supermolecules. It had been our manifest destiny to tame a big continent; we drove big cars; even on the molecular level, we placed our trust in big.

  With the introduction of credit cards, "plastic" became a synonym for money. Diner's Club issued the first universal credit card in 1950, American Express followed in 1958, and by 1968, the best career tip for a youth like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate was simply: "Plastics."

  Plastic, Roland Barthes wrote, "is the very idea of its infinite transformation; as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible." It is also democratic, almost promiscuously commonplace. In the past, imitation materials implied pretentiousness; they were used to simulate luxuries— diamonds, fur, silver—and "belonged to the world of appearances not to that of actual use." Plastic, by contrast, is a "magical substance which consents to be prosaic"; it is cast, extruded, drawn, or laminated into billions of household things.

  But if Barbie's substance is the very essence of the mid-twentieth century, her form is nearly as old as humanity, and it is her form that gives her mythic resonance. Barbie is a space-age fertility symbol: a narrow-hipped mother goddess for the epoch of cesarean sections. She is both relentlessly of her time and timeless. To such overripe totems as the Venus of Willendorf, the Venus of Lespugue, and the Venus of Dolni, we must add the Venus of Hawthorne, California.

  But wait, you say, Barbie is no swelling icon of fecundity: thick of waist, round of shoulder, pendulous of breast and bulging of buttock. How can you link her with Stone Age, pre-Christian fertility amulets? The connection rests on her feet, or the relative lack of them.

  The Venus of Willendorf is a portable object of veneration. Her legs, like those of other Stone Age "Venuses," taper into prongs at the ankles. For her to stand up, the prong or prongs must be plunged into the earth, an act that, as she is a representation of the Great Mother, completes her. Mother Nature, Great Mother, Mother Goddess, Mother Earth—by any name, the female principle of fecundity is "chthonian," literally "of the earth."

  In this context, Barbie's itty-bitty arched feet can be interpreted as vestigial prongs. Their suitability to the wearing of high heels is a camouflage, diverting the modern eye from their ancient function. No one disputes that Barbie has the trappings of a contemporary woman, but, either deliberately or coincidentally, they are arrayed on a prehistoric icon. When I raised the issue with Mattel employees, most responded cryptically with a remark like: "I've heard that said."

  Sleek, angular fertility idols are not without precedent. The best-known were produced in the Cyclades, Aegean islands off the coast of Greece, between 2600 and 1100 B.C. The artist who fashioned the Venus of Willendorf conceived of female anatomy as a landscape of dimpled knolls; the Cycladic artists, by contrast, translated breasts and bellies into schematized geometric forms. Like Barbie's, the shoulders of Cycladic dolls are wider than their hips and their bodies are hard and smooth. They are an example of what art historian Kenneth Clark terms a "crystalline Aphrodite"—a stylized descendant of the Neolithic "vegetable Aphrodite." Why Cycladic sculptors streamlined the dolls, however, remains a mystery; scholars, says art historian H. W. Janson, can't "even venture a guess."

  Over the years, "dolls"—anthropomorphic sculptures of the human figure— have been used as often in religion as in play. Archeologists who unearth such figures must puzzle out whether they were intended for the temple or the nursery. When first discovered, the ancient Egyptian figures known as Ushabti were believed to be dolls; scholars now classify them as funereal statues-—miniature versions of a master's slaves buried with the master to serve him after death. Likewise, the Barbie-shaped "snake goddesses" produced in Crete around 1600 B.C. look like dolls but were in fact religious icons.

  Then there are dolls that defy classification. Traditionally, Hopi Indian parents give their children kachina figures— cult objects representing various gods—to play with on ceremonial occasions. The dolls teach them the fine points of their faith. Like the kachinas, Barbie is both toy and mythic object—modern woman and Ur-woman—navelless, motherless, an incarnation of "the One Goddess with a Thousand Names." In the reservoir of communal memory that psychologist Carl Jung has termed the "collective unconscious," Barbie is an archetype of something ancient, matriarchal, and profound.

  In Barbie's universe, women are not the second sex. Barbie's genesis subverts the biblical myth of Genesis, which Camille Paglia has described as "a male declaration of independence from the ancient mother-cults." Just as the goddess-based religions antedated Judeo-Christian monotheism, Barbie came before Ken. The whole idea of woman as temptress, or woman as subordinate to man, is absent from the Barbie cosmology. Ken is a gnat, a fly, a slave, an accessory of Barbie. Barbie was made perfect: her body has not evolved dramatically with time. Ken, by contrast, was a blunder: first scrawny, now pumped-up, his ever-changing body is neither eternal nor talismanic.

  Critics who ignore Barbie's mythic dimension often find fault with her lifestyle. But it is mytholog-ically imperative that she live the way she does. Of course Barbie inhabits a prelapsarian paradise of consumer goods; she has never been exiled from the garden.

  Mattel attributes the success of its 1992 'Totally Hair" Barbie, a woolly object reminiscent of Cousin It from The Addams Family, to little girls' fascination with "hairplay"—combing, brushing, and generally making a mess of the doll's ankle-length tresses. But since not all Barbie owners become cosmetologists, one has to wonder what "hairplay" is really about. I think it may be a modern reenactment of an ancient goddess-cult ritual.

  Witches traditionally muss up their hair when they are preparing to engage in witchcraft. As late as the seventeenth century, civilized Europeans, historian Barbara Walker tells us, actually believed witches "raised storms, summoned demons and produced all sorts of destruction by unbinding their hair." In Scottish coastal communities, women were forbidden to brush their hair at night, lest they cause a storm that would kill their male relatives at sea. St. Paul, one of history's all-time woman-haters, was scared of women's hair; he thought unkempt locks could upset the angels.

  The toddler brushing Barbie's hair may look innocent, but who knows, perhaps she is in touch with some ancient matriarchal power. In 1991, a survey of three thousand children commissioned by the American Association of University Women revealed that girls begin to lose their self-confidence at puberty, about the time they give up Barbie. At age nine, the girls were assertive and felt positive about themselves, but by high school, fewer than a third felt that way. Perhaps this could have been avoided
had the girls simply hung on to their Barbies. Forget trying to be Barbie; even gorgeous grown people would be hard-pressed to pass for an eleven-and-a-half-inch thing. But maybe they should build a shrine to the doll and light some incense.

  There is a remarkable amount of pagan symbolism surrounding Barbie. Even the original location of Mattel—Hawthorne—has significance. The Hawthorn, or May Tree, represents the White Goddess Maia, the mother of Hermes, goddess of love and death, "both the ever-young Virgin giving birth to the God, and the Grandmother bringing him to the end of his season." Barbie's pagan identity could also account for Ken's genital abridgment; cults of the Great Mother were ministered to by eunuchs. And it would explain why the housewives in Dichter's study took an immediate dislike to Barbie: "The white goddess is anti-domestic," Robert Graves writes in The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. "She is the perpetual 'other woman.' "

  Even if it wanted to, Mattel could not assert ignorance of pagan symbolism. This isn't merely because Aldo Favilli, the Italian-born, classically educated former sculpture restorer at Florence's Uffizi Gallery who has run Mattel's sculpture department since 1972, ought to know a thing or two about iconography. In 1979, the company test-marketed two "Guardian Goddesses," "SunSpell," "the fiery guardian of good," and "MoonMystic," "who wears the symbols of night." Identical in size and shape to Barbie, they came with four additional outfits--"Lion Queen," "Soaring Eagle," "Blazing Fire," and "Ice Empress"--sort of Joseph Campbell meets Cindy Crawford. But even stranger than their appearance was what they did. To "unlock" their "powers," you spread their legs-or, as their box euphemizes, made them "step to the side." Then they flung their arms upward, threw off their street clothes and controlled nature. Freezing volcanoes, drying up floods, blowing away tornadoes, and halting a herd of stampeding elephants are among the activities suggested on their box.