Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [32]
My Barbie paraphernalia was a museum of my mother's values. Arrayed together, the objects were a nonverbal vocabulary, the sort of language in which John Berger urged women to express themselves. Except for "Solo," which a friend had given me, the language was hers.
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,