Life In Plastic, It’s Fantastic : Classical Reception and Barbie more

Liz Gloyn Life In Plastic, It’s Fantastic Page 1 of 8 Life in Plastic, It’s Fantastic : Classical Reception and Barbie An authorial note – this talk relied heavily on slides and the accompanying handout, which the academia.edu format does not allow me to present alongside the text of the talk particularly easily. Some of the images can be found on the Barbie Collector website at www.barbiecollector.com. Please contact me if you have any further questions. Let me begin by answering the question in everyone’s mind – why Barbie? This paper is part of an approach to reception studies that believes the “classical tradition” is worth studying no matter where it appears. The recently published Classics for All notes in its introduction that reception studies cannot restrict itself to areas considered intellectually worthy, like opera or theatre – classics clearly remains interesting and influential in popular culture at large. The questions we need to ask instead, as suggested by Lorna Hardwick, are as follows: how is antiquity being used? What does its use say about our culture’s perception of the ancient world? Does it reclaim marginalised elements or alter ancient history to make it more palatable for a modern audience? Barbie, as a cultural icon in her own right, holds considerable sway over the popular American imagination. In this, her 50th anniversary year, it seems appropriate to reexamine her relationship with the ancient world, to see how her approach to it has changed. In this paper, I will argue that Barbie’s appropriation of the classics is becoming more and more sophisticated, appealing to a higher level of cultural literacy without alienating less educated consumers. Dolls are not a new phenomenon. The earliest surviving doll seems to date from the third century BC, and the lady on my opening slide comes from the first or second century AD. She is the very ancient ancestor of the fashion doll, an adult doll designed to be dressed in the latest Liz Gloyn Life In Plastic, It’s Fantastic Page 2 of 8 fashions. When fear of premature sexual maturation struck parents in the 1880s, and fear arose about the fashion doll’s negative influence, the baby doll gained popularity, since it was seen as less developmentally harmful. The fashion doll resurfaced in the mid-1950s, primarily aimed at children. The dolls I will discuss today, however, are not the sort that you would buy for a five year old. [SLIDE] They come from a range called Barbie Collector, aimed primarily at adults; Mattel started to target this market after the 1988 Happy Holidays Barbie was produced in a limited edition and sold out, suggesting that a market for modern collectibles could be created. The blurb from the collector website, the first passage on your handout, makes it clear that the brand appeals to a wide church – Mattel do not try to engage with their collectors’ motivations, but aim to provide something for everyone’s interests. As a result, there are reproduction original Barbies from the 1950s, glamorous haute couture dolls, tribute dolls of celebrities like Elvis, and pop culture references like the recent series of dolls representing the main characters from the film The Wizard of Oz – [SLIDE] not to mention the pleasingly meta Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra doll from 2000. It is not a surprise that classics should find a home in this accepting and, in some ways, indiscriminate market – for the more avid collector, the fact that the doll is a Barbie is more important than the clothes Barbie wears. The collectors these dolls are targeted at, although ostensibly of all ages, are in reality a limited niche market – a report from 1995, the latest I have been able to see, found that serious collectors of any kind of doll were predominantly middle-aged, financially stable, and female. More interesting was the educational background of these women. The same report found that fifty-five percent had at least some college education, 16 percent were college graduates, and 12 percent had done graduate work – that adds up to 83 percent of these dedicated collectors with some exposure to tertiary education. For classicists, this is especially interesting; as every college professor knows, the most popular course in a classics department is often Intro to Greek Myth, Liz Gloyn Life In Plastic, It’s Fantastic Page 3 of 8 as it normally satisfies both humanities requirements and students’ general interest. It is plausible that some of these collectors could have attended such lectures during their education. Mattel did not immediately take advantage of this. [SLIDE] The first classically influenced Barbie was Grecian Goddess Barbie in 1996. My slides show the dolls as they appear on the website, and I apologise for my screen captures in advance; on your handouts you will find the text that appears on the box of each doll. Grecian Goddess is marked as classical mainly by the key design on her cloak and an exotic hairstyle. The text found on the box with her, on the handout, is not much better – it makes deliberate references to foreign words like peplos and kiton, and throws in historical details like the Athenians building the Parthenon, but does not go much further. In some ways, this is because the Great Eras Collection, the series of dolls that this Barbie appeared in, was more interested in depicting the continuity of Barbie through the ages than striving for historical accuracy – hence the description of the cloak as ‘royal purple’ and use of Grecian, a word now used correctly only to refer to a style of architecture. The series also includes a Gibson Girl, a Flapper, a Southern Belle and an Egyptian Queen [SLIDE] – note the similarity between the Queen’s costume and the Elizabeth Taylor doll we saw earlier. What the series tries to do, as Kristina Milnor has discussed, is emphasise how Barbie is forever the same, even if her dress and accessories change. The purchaser is invited to participate – as the box text says, you too can celebrate Athena. The emphasis is on the excitement of time travel, but the only interesting details you are told are about costume and hair care. [SLIDE] The Princess of Ancient Greece in 2004 did a little better. She was part of a subseries of Princesses within the wider Dolls of the World collection. Her box text, again on the handout, gives helpful details like the names of the gynaikon and andreion, and the names of the Fates – but has to fudge over the issue of polis versus monarchy to make sure that there really can be a king in ancient Greece, and thus a princess. Cultural detail soon gives way to the description of clothing. We know that the Princess is from Greece because she has a wrap with a Liz Gloyn Life In Plastic, It’s Fantastic Page 4 of 8 Grecian pattern and is photographed in front of a blurry ruined temple; the laurel leaves on her crown are also a give-away. What these two dolls embody is a semiotics of the classical – that is, what the classical world is expected to look like. These preconceptions are at least partially influenced by the images perpetuated through film, as the Egyptian Princess’s similarity to Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra showed. Lloyd Llewelyn-Jones notes that experienced moviegoers in the 1940s and 1950s would have known what the ancient world was supposed to look like, and so film studios were correspondingly conservative in their presentation of the ancient world. This leads to a reliance on familiar and constantly reinforced visual clichés in costume designs, even into the present day, and it is these conventions that the costumes of these dolls rely on. Like Barbie herself, who transcends time and place in these collections, repetitive continuity signal that we are inhabiting the Greco-Roman composite society of the Hollywood epic film. [SLIDE] The free-standing Classical Goddess collection of 2000 is more interesting, as it is not part of a wider series. The first doll is the Goddess of Beauty – an amalgam of the Roman and Greek goddesses, explicitly combined in glorious modern syncretism, divisions between the two cultures totally erased. Again, we have the emphasis on her clothing, in both the website and box text, although there is some historical detail – note the misuse of the word toga, clearly chosen for familiarity rather than accuracy. The Goddess of Beauty, ripped from her cultural context, although interestingly not blond, is once again a fairly anodyne image of a shallow cultural appreciation of classics. Things get more interesting with the other two dolls in this series. [SLIDE] The second is Barbie, Goddess of Wisdom. Here, again, we have the traditional iconography – you know she’s meant to be Athena because she’s got her owl. This is Barbie’s second attempt at being Athena, after Grecian Goddess, and there are some similarities - as you can see in the box text, Greek and Roman cultural elements are again indiscriminately combined, and the emphasis is overwhelmingly on the detail of her costume. You’ll spot the appearance of Liz Gloyn Life In Plastic, It’s Fantastic Page 5 of 8 the laurel leaf motif, the cape, the Greek-inspired design – all the vocabulary and visual signals that are trotted out to show you that this doll was genuinely inspired by the ancients. But that’s not all that is going on here. I want to bring your attention to the last lines of the box text on the handout – “today her tales of strength and inspiration continue to intrigue. Heroic and cerebral, yet wonderfully romantic: her legend lives on as The Goddess of Wisdom”. Romance is not the foremost characteristic we associate with the virgin goddess. Equally, despite this reference to her heroism and strength, the box makes no mention of the other part of Athena’s mythic role – a war god. Yes, there is a reference to her rule over war and peace, but it suggests good governance rather than actively getting her hands bloody with spear and shield. There is nothing in this doll’s marketing text that speaks to the inherent violence of her duties and origin, and her costume does not hint at it – the medallion at the centre of her chest, disappointingly, bears no resemblance to a shield or gorgon’s head. The goddess of wisdom has been stripped of her most powerful attributes, refigured into the mould of beauty and charm that characterises the Barbie doll. [SLIDE] The third doll in this group is the most disheartening. Barbie, Goddess of Spring, supposedly capture the essence of ancient mythology, but instead evades it entirely. I do not have the complete box text to share with you, but what I have managed to find refers to the goddesses Chloris and Flora – while completely ignoring the role of Persephone in classical mythology. The awakening of the world from a wintery slumber recalls Persephone rather than the more marginal mythological figures mentioned in the box text, yet she is entirely removed from the consumer’s range of vision. One suspects that this is in order to avoid discussing why she is the goddess of spring – that is, to elude a description of her rape by her uncle Hades, and her subsequent rotation between the upper and lower worlds. Far easier to refer to trivial goddesses than address this myth – far more commercially acceptable to not only take power out of the hands of women, but to erase the abuses of power against them. We return to the safe Liz Gloyn Life In Plastic, It’s Fantastic Page 6 of 8 space of Grecian-inspired patterns, and see again the incitement to worship this goddess just as the ancients did. The Classical Goddess collection sterilises the mythology it was inspired by; it takes characters with force and potency, and sanitizes them for popular appeal. All possibly unsettling details are erased, and consumers are not expected to have the background to supply that missing information. However, things seem to change with the introduction last year of a new Gold Label doll, issued in numbered editions of 25,000 or less worldwide. [SLIDE] Barbie Medusa is a new approach to classical subject matter entirely. Gone are the ‘Grecian inspired’ prints and the claims to historical accuracy. Haute couture has found Medusa, and so has her history. You will note that her hair is not scaly and hissing, and that instead the snake bracelets she wears foretell the snakes that will become her hair. Medusa’s transformation is prefigured – but what was the cause of that transformation? The box text, on the handout, tells us that Poseidon followed Medusa to Athena’s temple, and Athena, enraged by their transgression, turned Medusa into a monster – but what was the transgression? The box does not say. Ovid, however, tells us that Poseidon raped Medusa. We have some elision of violence against women here, as ‘their’ transgression implies Medusa consented to whatever the transgression was – but the story is hinted at in a way that means it can be reconstructed by those in the know. Similarly, even in the website text the fishtail skirt hints at Poseidon’s involvement, as well as Medusa’s own future monstrous form. The doll treads an interesting line in constructing the figure of Medusa – on the one hand, the monster is domesticated without the snakes of her hair to turn her watching owner to stone, but the woman before the monster is rescued from never being anything other than a fright. The story is manipulated and thoughtfully used in a way we have not seen before, especially for Medusa – such a glamorous portrayal is very rare in modern iconography. [SLIDE] This sophisticated approach to myth is continued in this year’s Gold Label doll, Barbie as Aphrodite. Again, the crude semiotics to signal the classical world have disappeared – Liz Gloyn Life In Plastic, It’s Fantastic Page 7 of 8 Barbie is no longer showing us what we expect to see. The emphasis is on the gown and the goddess’ marine origins– and once more, for those of us who have taken Myth 101, there is an in-joke to be found. Aphrodite, according to one version of her myth, was born after Zeus castrated his father and threw the testicles into the sea; the reference to a sea-foam green and cream gown in the web text, replaced by the less suggestive aquamarine and white in the box text, provide the opportunity to nod knowingly, to see the visual pun, to enjoy the reference. [SLIDE] There may also be a more knowing nod to film here. In this close-up, you can see that the facial features of the doll are fairly strong. The figure on the right is Ursula Andress, exiting the sea as a Bond Girl in Dr. No; one might argue for a certain familial similarity between the two. If this is so, then it is an appropriate influence, for Andress later played Aphrodite in Clash of the Titans – her birth from the sea in Dr. No neatly prefigures that role. If this is a nod to Hollywood’s handling of antiquity, it has come a long way from the visual clichés borrowed by the earlier dolls. Mattel, then, seems to have caught up with the education of its adult collectors. It appears to have abandoned a view of classical antiquity that relies on trite and clichéd visual semiotics, such as the Greek keys print, and is moving into a more creative approach to the possibilities offered by Greek myth. At the same time, a space has opened up in the descriptive text of these dolls for reincorporating the less salubrious aspects of myth for the educated collector, without giving details in such a way as to alienate the uninitiated consumer. The classicist can enjoy the new dolls for their fresh approach to myth, while the non-classicist is enthused by dress design, aesthetic appeal, or simply Barbie herself. The ancient world remains a playground for the modern imagination of children and adults, specialists and the general public – these dolls signal a fresh acknowledgement of the intellectual sophistication of some of that audience. Liz Gloyn Life In Plastic, It’s Fantastic Page 8 of 8 Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States, Wilmington, Delaware, in October 2009. Liz Gloyn Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey lizgloyn@eden.rutgers.edu