by M. G. Lord
Significantly, there is class differentiation within the Barbie doll line itself; Barbie still maintains the ability to exist in several classes simultaneously. In 1992, for example, "Madison Avenue" Barbie, dressed and coiffed in the style of Ivana Trump, was exclusively available for about sixty dollars at FAO Schwarz, Manhattan's tony Fifth Avenue toy emporium. In the Lionel Kiddie City in Union Square, however, a less prosperous neighborhood, the shelves were stocked with fifteen-dollar "Rappin' Rockin' Barbie—Yo!" dolls packaged with rhythm-generating boom boxes.
Although Madison Avenue Barbie does, in fact, look like Ivana, the doll seems to have been deliberately coded for parody. Her pink and green outfit is not made of natural fibers, nor is her flashy pink teddy. Likewise, Mattel designer Carol Spencer's "Benefit Ball" Barbie—in a splashy blue evening dress with mountains of orange hair—bears a strong resemblance to Georgette Mosbacher. But her coiffure is so huge and her dress is so flamboyant that she, too, seems to parody Mosbacher, which, as Mosbacher is not known for understated dressing, is no mean feat. Of the outfits Barbie might wear to lunch at Le Cirque, Janet Goldblatt's "City Style" Barbie, an off-white Chanel-inspired suit with a small quilted handbag, is the most plausible, particularly on a doll with shorter hair.
Just as the Native American Barbie does not copy the uniform of a specific tribe but reflects an outsider's interpretation of Native American identity, the upper-class Barbies reproduce not real upper-class clothing but an outsider's fantasy of it. They emulate the eighties' rich-person soap-opera look—the look of Dynasty and Dallas—not the pared-down landed-gentry lifestyle deciphered for the middle classes by, say, Martha Stewart.
Then there are the "Gold Sensation" Barbie and "Crystal" Barbie advertised in magazines such as Parade. Priced at $179 and $175 respectively, these "Limited Edition" Barbie dolls can be bought for four "convenient installments" of $44.75 or $43.75. From their red fingernails to their glittering clothes (the Gold Sensation comes with "a 22 karat, gold electroplated bracelet"), these dolls are a proletarian daydream of how a rich person would dress. Fussell would, of course, mock these objects ("Nothing is too ugly or valueless to be . . . 'collected' so long as it is priced high enough," he writes) but I find them vaguely poignant. In her Allure article, Kron observes that it has been many years since, for example, long, brightly painted talons connoted "lady of leisure": they now imply its opposite, as does every other detail on the dolls.
Seeing them in their wildly excessive getups reminded me of an affecting scene in the movie Mystic Pizza. In it, Julia Roberts plays the beautiful daughter of a Portuguese fisherman who dates a patrician young man. When he invites her home to dinner, she chooses a bare, flashy dress (based perhaps on Dynasty notions of upper-class life) that painfully brands her as an outsider. (Class coding is also an issue in Roberts's later movie Pretty Woman, but unlike Mystic Pizza, in which Roberts's sister moves up the class ladder by earning a scholarship to Yale, Pretty Woman suggests that the sole way a woman can ascend socially is by hooking the right mogul— a distasteful message indeed.)
Although some toys reach across class boundaries, others are clearly targeted to a specific social echelon. Dolls in the Pleasant Company "American Girls Collection," for instance, are geared to please middle- and upper-middle-class moms. Seemingly dressed by Laura Ashley, educated by Jean Brodie, and nourished by Martha Stewart, these dolls are almost intimidat-ingly tasteful. Sold with historical novels (about them) and simulated antiques, they are intended to inculcate in their young owners a fondness for archaic things—the core, says Fussell, of upper-class taste. Felicity, a doll dressed as an American colonial girl, comes with a Windsor writing chair, a wooden tea caddy, and a china tea cup—"all she needs to learn the proper tea ceremony." She must unlearn her skill, however, when her father, in one of the novels, decides to boycott tea to protest George Ill's unfair tax on it.
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, thou
gh, 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 thirti
es 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."
The hodgepodge of styles in Barbie's house might be interpreted as a reflection of her class anxiety. "Having a period room or a correctly designed room at a certain point becomes very risky socially," Betsky explained. "Because it means that you're sort of snooty." To attract the maximum range of buyers, her furniture could convey neither hoity-toity nor hoi polloi. "If your room is eclectic, it means you've inherited things," he said. "It means that you have a family history and you're not just right off the boat. So it becomes very acceptable to have pieces that show that if you didn't inherit them from your grandmother who lived in West Essex, then at least you had enough money to go on a trip to West Essex and pick up a few pieces, even if they don't quite go with what you got downtown at Macy's."