Forever Barbie (10 page)

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.

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 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 material 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.

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."

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.

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.