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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?

Yet the struggle to become independent and separate from one's mother is not a problem unique to Barbie; it is, for all girls, a core aspect of prepubescent development. In The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Nancy Chodorow, building upon observations of psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, describes detachment strategies that could have been inspired by the Barbie novels: "A girl . . . tries to resolve her ambivalent dependence and sense of oneness [with her mother] by projection and by splitting the good and bad aspects of objects; her mother and home represent bad, the extrafamilial world, good. Alternately, she may try in every way to be unlike her mother. (She may idealize a woman teacher, another adult woman or older girl, or characters in books or films and contrast them to her mother.) In this case her solution again involves defensive splitting along with projection, introjection, and the creation of arbitrary boundaries by negative identification (I am what she is not)."

Of course there is no way Cynthia Lawrence, who published Barbie's Neiv York Summer in 1962, could have been literally influenced by the The Bell Jar; it was published pseudonymously in England in 1963 and did not appear in America until 1971—having been delayed by Plath's mother's vigorous campaign to suppress it. Yet within the circumscriptions of its genre, Barbie's New York Summer actually does address the problems of a talented young girl learning to define and achieve her goals. It is also filled with sophisticated jokes, including an interior monologue in which Barbie, while modeling for a photographer, expresses outrage at being treated like a doll or mannequin. "I felt like a piece of merchandise," she grumbles. Lawrence also slyly freezes Barbie in sexy stills from popular culture—such as this image inspired by Marilyn Monroe standing over a subway grate in The Seven Year Itch: "A sudden gust of wind caught [Barbie's] full skirt and made it flutter like a flag. She clamped it down with her palms as Pablo laughed."

Nor do Barbie's Boswells interpret her character identically. What stands out in the fiction of Bette Lou Maybee—whose family, she told me, immigrated to America before the Revolution—is Barbie's fierce democratic tendencies. Life is portrayed as a meritocracy: Rich kids who exploit their parents' wealth or social position do not get ahead, they get their comeuppance. In Barbie's Hawaiian Holiday, a novel unfortunately dated by its phonetic renderings of Chinese-accented English, Maybee rages against monarchism and the evils of an inflexible class system. In one scene, the woman with whom Barbie and her family are staying rhapsodizes about how King Kamehameha and his troops united Hawaii by driving a rival chieftain's army off a steep bluff. "It was probably Clara's British background that made her think so highly of monarchies," Maybee writes in Barbie's voice. "Even when these were achieved at the cost of pushing people off cliffs."

Barbie, Midge and Ken (1964), Lawrence and Maybee's last anthology, contains their most openly subversive stories. "She's a Jolly Good and "Go Fly a Kite" are about girls whose opportunities have been limited because of their gender. In "She's a Jolly Good Fellow," Willows High School's first female class president—who ascends from the vice presidency when the male president abdicates—overcomes gender-based prejudice. And in "Go Fly a Kite,"