Forever Barbie

by M. G. Lord

  Then there was the best-selling Barbie Game, which promoted a different agenda—exploiting men for financial gain and competing for them based on physical appearance. To appreciate why the Barbie novels were, for many girls, windows onto a wider world, one must reexperience the claustrophobia, cosseting, corseting, girdling, and cantilevering that underwired women in the late fifties. One must, in other words, roll the dice and plunge oneself into the mindset of the Barbie Game.

  My friend Helen—I am not so pitiless as to call her by her real name— claims to have been horribly scarred by the game. She cannot forget the time that, in two hours of play, she was unable to get a boyfriend—not even Poindexter, the dud, the nerd, the untouchable. Helen had achieved almost everything she needed to win. She was "popular"; the Drama Club had elected her its president. She had a formal dress—indeed, the game's most expensive one, Enchanted Evening, a regal pink gown with a rabbit fur wrap. She had earned more money than the other players. But without a boyfriend, Helen was a washout. She couldn't even attend the prom, much less be crowned queen.

  This cruel moment did not occur in 1961 when Helen was seven and Mattel first issued the game. This happened last summer, at one of the gatherings I convened to observe various adult female friends playing the game—just as I had been watching children play it. My purpose was not, as one sore loser accused, "to relive the worst moments in a girl's life," but to see whether women who grew up reading Ms. and discussing "sisterhood" could devolve into back-stabbing, predatory, cartoon mantraps out of Clare Boothe Luce's The Women. (They could.) I was also curious whether contestants' careers would influence their style of play. Would, say, lawyers and doctors compete more ruthlessly than painters and novelists?

  Careers, I discovered, had little impact. After the first bottle of champagne (and the first groans over such instructions as "You are not ready when he calls. Miss 1 turn.") nearly everyone got a sort of crazed glint in her eye. An odd coincidence, however, was that although success in the game relied primarily on luck, people's real-life achievements—or shortcomings—were often reflected on the board. Helen, for instance, is a highly accomplished professional, but anguishes over her lack of a beau. Consequently, she was shaken by the eerie playing out of this difficulty. "I'm not telling my mother about this," she said. "But I am telling my therapist."

  Touted on its box as "A fun game with real-life appeal for all girls," Queen of the Prom is set not in "real life" but in a precursor of She-Ra's state of nature—with a few Potemkin tract houses scattered about to create the illusion of a middle-class suburb. Or, more accurately, an upper-middle-class suburb. At a time when gum was ten cents and two could dine in a fashionable Manhattan restaurant for under twenty-five dollars, I doubt many youngsters from blue-collar families could afford to drop thirty-five to sixty-five dollars on a prom dress, as players are required to do. In the game, Dad does not sully his manicured nails on an assembly line. He plays the market; one "Surprise" card entitles a player to a ten-dollar present in celebration of Dad's "extra large stock dividend." Like Nancy Drew, who solved cases with her widower father, players of the Barbie Game have a close relationship with Dad; he turns up often in the "Surprise" cards as a source of cash. Having no money of her own, Mom, however, is virtually invisible.

  The box promises competition in three areas—Shopping, Dating, and School Activities—evidently the only races that matter. The message is: Don't waste your time on academic, athletic, or artistic achievement—and especially, don't look inside yourself. Be outer-directed.

  Significantly, the sketch illustrating School Activities does not show a classroom, a library, or a laboratory, but two stylish women standing around with sodas. They appear to be displaying themselves, which, according to sociologist Winni Breines, author of Young, White and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties, was a big part of what a teenage girl was expected to do. "The commodification of one's look became the basis of success," Breines writes. "Even the post-war dating system, in which dates were commodities that validated an individual's worth, was based on display, on being seen, since unseen, one's value could not be measured." High schools were a key place to be seen, which was "one of the main attractions of attending school."

  In the game, the greatest rewards come not from skill or learning but from physical appearance. The largest sum of money a player can earn at one time is ten dollars for a modeling job, as opposed to, say, one dollar for washing dishes. Players are taught not to expect to profit from brainwork. One space in the "Earning Money" section invites the player to write a story for a magazine, only to jeer at the player's presumption: "Sorry—no sale."

  It isn't as if looks alone are commodified; so are men. A player rolls the dice, lands on a potential boyfriend's face, and if she wants to win, she grabs him—even if he disgusts her. In the abridged version, boyfriend cards are predealt to players along with their allowance. It's easy to come away thinking: A boyfriend is a dress is a dollar.

  If a player lands on a space with two arrows, she can move in either direction, except at the "School Entrance." School is neither optional nor pleasant; all but one square inside it promises misery. The lone desirable square grants straight A's to the player who lands on it—then, as a reward, instructs the player to hasten to any "Stop and Shop" space on the board. The subtext here: Achievement is never for its own sake; it is only meaningful as a stepping-stone to acquiring objects, particularly those that will enhance one's looks.

  Nearly every square on the board is a land mine, especially for women who have grown up with feminist assumptions. Yet the game is strikingly efficient at reinforcing behavior—the way repeated electric shocks can persuade a laboratory rat to perform tricks against its will. Frequent landings at the "soda fountain," for instance, a square where players without boyfriends must surrender a dollar, have, in my observation, caused even committed lesbian feminists to stalk men—at least for the duration of the game.

  To be fair, Mattel at almost the same time introduced a "Keys to Fame" game that encouraged little girls to try their hands at careers. But Queen of the Prom was the game that took off; it is the one boomers remember—especially for the splashy, eye-catching fifties graphics that belied its grim economic message. While playing it recently, I often brooded on the invisibility of the mother. Did little girls perceive Mom's absence as a victory in the war for Dad? Did they associate it with her status as a non-wage-earning entity? Or did they realize that they, too, could be headed in Mom's direction—a glistening prom queen one minute, a shadow the next?

  I also thought of Ernest Dichter's market research on Barbie—the way he urged Mattel to exploit mothers' dark, unarticulatable fear that without a stern tug in the right direction, their boyish daughters would grow up into unmarriageable brutes. In Queen of the Prom, as in the card game Old Maid, to be ugly, frowzy, or manless is to be shut out forever from success.

  To a degree, the three Barbie short-story collections and eight Barbie novels that Random House published are set in a similar world—the world of proms and boyfriends and "school activities." But Barbie Millicent Roberts, as the fictive character is called, reflects the biases and experiences of the young, independent women who told her stories. In 1962, a year before Betty Friedan identified "the problem that has no name" in The Feminine Mystique, Cynthia Lawrence dramatized it in her novel Barbie's New York Summer. In it, Margaret Roberts, Barbie's housebound mother, lurches from sacrifice to sacrifice; if she isn't renouncing some pleasure to accommodate her husband, George, she is torturing herself for Barbie. Flabbergasted by her masochism, Barbie finally blurts, "Mother, don't you ever want anything for yourself?" To which Mrs. Roberts, after weirdly taking stock of her living-room furniture, replies: "I have you till you're grown and I have Dad. You're the one who has an exciting career ahead of you."

  Far from patterning herself on Mom, Barbie models herself after autonomous professional women. She has a string of glamorous female mentors who introduce her, and, by ex
tension, millions of little girls (by 1966, the Barbie Fan Club had a million members), to the idea of economic self-sufficiency. These women have men in their lives, but they aren't dependent on them. Their autonomy is portrayed as desirable; none attended the Joan Crawford school of executive gorgonhood. Paula Foxx, a West Coast swimsuit designer who, in Bette Lou Maybee's Barbie's Fashion Success, invites Barbie to intern with her company, slips into the Roberts "family circle as naturally, as warmly, as any ordinary woman might have done." She is "not some cold, frightening creature that oozed sophistication."

  Barbie's mother welcomes Foxx—even though Foxx's mode of existence implicitly calls Mrs. Roberts's into question. Instead of seeking self-validation by creating Barbie in her image, she goes the stage mother route. She admires Foxx for recognizing "what a pretty and talented daughter I have," where "I have" is a significant detail. Barbie is her possession—like the living-room furniture—and she enjoys having its quality discerned.

  Like the world depicted on Father Knows Best, Barbie's cosmos is a comforting place for children. Justice prevails. Conflicts resolve. Life isn't random; actions have a cause and effect. Barbie's relentlessly nonethnic parents don't drink, fight, gobble tranquilizers, or have extramarital dalliances. Nor does Willows, the generic midwestern town where Barbie lives, teem with heroin addicts or teenage runaways. Barbie does not stew over nuclear war—or class or race war, for that matter. Asians, African Americans, and Hispanics apparently do not live in Willows, though an Italian-American family turns up in one of the later stories.

  Significantly, Barbie cannot bear family conflict—in her own or anybody else's. Wherever she goes, she hatches plots to reconcile parents with their estranged children, and she is not above resorting to deception to patch up domestic rifts. Were Barbie neither fetching enough to model nor deft enough to design clothes, she could have a big future in family therapy.

  Although the Barbie who emerges in Maybee's and Lawrence's fiction is slim, smart, and adept at winning national talent competitions, she manages to escape total obnoxiousness through a couple of humanizing imperfections. One is her sexual insecurity: Never mind that she looks great; she fears that other women look better and will divert male attention away from her. In Bette Lou Maybee's "Barbie's Big Prom," published in Barbie magazine's inaugural issue, she smolders with jealousy during the visit of her cousin, an orange-haired hussy from New Orleans. Barbie's other refreshing flaw is her petulance; she is moody, afflicted with "rare streaks of being just plain ornery," which today might be diagnosed as premenstrual huffs.

  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 ado
pt 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?