• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

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 adopt 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