Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [86]
Unlike their upper-class counterparts, the three working-class boys in 35-Up did not, at age seven, speak of universities; they had no clear idea what a "university" was. At thirty-five, one was a bricklayer, another a cab driver, and the third a workman in a meat-packing plant. At seven, the working-class girls had a vague notion of higher education, although they sensed that it was beyond their financial grasp. Significantly, though, when they became mothers, they developed academic aspirations for their children. The working-class men, however, were defensive about their lack of "opportunities"; they failed to see the distinction between class and money.
In the documentary, however, that distinction is hard to miss. Bruce, an Oxford-educated patrician who teaches school in Bangladesh, is desperately poor—though he remains upper-class. And Nick, a farmer's son who studied physics at Oxford, is no longer in his original class; but because of the rigidity of the English system, neither is his new position clear. Not surprisingly, Nick fled to a less structured country—America—where he is a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Even within America itself, the West Coast is less structured than the East Coast. Joan Didion's family may have been in California for six generations, but most people's haven't. Many nonnative Californians came to escape what they perceived to be suffocating social hierarchies at home; to them, the state's openness is a blessing. But transplants whose sense of self derived from their position within the Establishment may find its absence a threat. Under the cruel glare of the Pacific sun, shabby gentility just looks shabby.
In part, the extent to which Establishment women are uncomfortable with Barbie reflects the degree to which she embodies West Coast style, which, exported by the Hollywood-based entertainment industry, seems to have been snapped up without protest in the Midwest and Sunbelt. "Whatever the fashion, the California version will be more extreme, more various, and—possibly because of the influence of the large Spanish-American population—much more colorful," Alison Lurie explains in The Language of Clothes. "Clothes tend to fit more tightly than is considered proper elsewhere, and to expose more flesh . . . virtuous working-class housewives may wear outfits that in any other part of the country would identify them as medium-priced whores."
Even "the opposition between*the classical sports and the Californian sports," Bourdieu says, expresses "two contrasting relations to the social world." The classical sports—those practiced by the French bourgeoisie— reflect "a concern for propriety and ritual" and "unashamed flaunting of wealth and luxury"; the Californian sports, by contrast, involve a "symbolic subversion of the rituals of bourgeois order by ostentatious poverty." To be sure, Barbie has engaged in her share of classical sports—skiing, tennis, riding—but she is more profoundly associated with democratic sports—surfing, snorkeling, Frisbee-throwing—that the middle classes can afford. Nor do these sports require expensive childhood lessons to be performed successfully by adults. Barbie's egalitarian sports, however, are usually ''new" or "trendy"; in 1992, her whole tribe was equipped for rollerblading. Barbie has, however, never fully embraced a working-class identity, avoiding such traditional nonbourgeois sports as bowling.
Sometimes a parental struggle over Barbie is not a scrap over a toy at all. It is a clash of East versus West, intellectual culture versus physical culture, rootedness versus deracination. Consider Barbie's history of opulent bathrooms—unabashedly lower-class by Fussell's standards. "The prole