Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [85]
Then there's Kirsten, a Swedish pioneer, whose accessories include a handmade rag doll, a school bench, a carpetbag, handknit winter woolens, and a wooden trestle table set with dainty stoneware dishes. Other dolls in the series include the dauntingly refined Samantha, a Victorian child who studies at "Miss Crampton's Academy, a private school for proper young ladies"; Molly, a bespectacled lass who pores over Gaining Skill with Words to take her mind off Dad, fighting overseas in World War II; and, the collection's newest member, Addy, a courageous African-American girl growing up during the Civil War. One is not likely to see Totally Hair Samantha or Rappin' Rockin' Kirsten—Yo! The Pleasant Company understands the class anxieties of its buyers, as well as their discretionary income: since 1986, over eleven million American Girls books have been sold.
To be sure, many Barbie dolls, particularly those directed at children and not adult collectors, are thoroughly rooted in fantasy and do not attempt to miniaturize real life. The "Twinkle Lights" Barbie—who has flashing fiber-optic strands emerging from her chest—and the "Bath Blast" Barbie— whom children "dress" in aerosol foam—are far from scale models of reality. A throbbing fringe of fur above her breasts would get a real woman inducted into Ripley's Believe It or Not, just as traipsing around in nothing but shaving cream might get her arrested. But Mattel's market research and my own observations have convinced me that three- to six-year-old girls really do possess a boundless appetite for anything colored fuchsia. Yet because "taste" is learned—that is to say, imposed—anxious middle- and upper-middle-class parents attempt to steer their children away from these natural desires.
In The Hidden Persuaders, a color researcher tells Vance Packard that "the poor and the relatively unschooled" favor brilliant colors; seemingly, they were never forced to unlearn their childhood preferences. "Scientific observation shows that cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education," Bourdieu writes in Distinction. "All cultural practices (museum visits, concert-going, reading, etc.), and preferences in literature, painting or music are closely linked to educational level . . . and secondarily to social origin."
To study how education perpetuates class differences in England—a process similar to what occurs in most of the industrialized West—one need merely screen Michael Apted's 28-Up and its sequel, 35-Up. Apted's video documentary charts the lives of fourteen male and female British subjects, representing the top and bottom of the social scale. In the first of serial interviews conducted every seven years, John, Andrew, and Charlie, three upper-class seven-year-olds, were studying Latin and trying to decide if they would go to university at Oxford or Cambridge. By age twenty-eight, having graduated from prestigious schools, they were pursuing upper-class careers; but because the film dramatized how their educations preserved class inequality, all but one refused to be interviewed as adults.
What is more, so striking were the boys' accents that one could identify their class without paying attention to the content of their speech. Their elocution was radically different from that of Talking Stacey, Barbie's English friend whom Mattel issued in 1969. She sounded working-class, like the Liverpudlian rock stars fawned over by American girls. Likewise Talking Barbie has never been afflicted with Locust Valley Lockjaw. The infamous 1992 "Math Class Is Tough" Barbie had the voice of a Valley Girl, placing her socially somewhere between lower middle class and high prole. But like Eliza Doolittle,