What Was I Made For?
The search for ways of being--in art and Barbie
This Friday, I headed with my family to Western Massachusetts, and stopped en route for a brief visit to the Clark Institute of Art. On the drive up, I kept my daughter engaged by scanning through my phone for photos from the Clark’s collection—Renoir paintings of women in hats and elegant dresses; a few Picasso drawings (and the concept of cubism as explained to a pre-schooler), and of course a few Mary Cassatt portraits of young girls. I made it a game for her, asking about their backstories: Who is this person? I’d ask. How does she feel? Are these people friends? What are they doing? What do they want?
When we entered the museum, her attention became singularly focused on one object we’d pulled up: Degas’ Little Dancer Aged 14. After a quick turn through the Edvard Munch show (worth a visit if you can get there), we raced to the permanent collection and leapt from gallery to gallery, searching for the “ballerina” with the tulle skirt and the distant gaze. Suddenly, around a corner, there she was—nose in the air, skirt perfectly aloft, held up on a pedestal. I remembered my first visit to my own Little Dancer, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when I was somewhere in the vicinity of 6-10 years old. I took her posture—its elegance, its arrogance—as a provocation. I moved my feet into fourth position (or an approximation of it), tucked my arms behind me, and lifted my chin into the air. The impulse to imitate was a reflex then, as it was for my daughter on this trip. What do you think of her? I asked. She looked, she moved, she approximated the attitude. She giggled—next position.
I’ve been thinking about how culture gives women examples of how to live in the world—how it offers us models of how to move through space, how to communicate our willingness to bend, or our refusal to break. Within 48 hours, I’d had close encounters with two archetypal figures from my childhood—first, Barbie as seen through the lens of Greta Gerwig, then the Little Dancer via Degas. How did each of them teach me to be? Poised in wax and fabric, then cast in bronze 20 years later; made from plastic, but meant to be more real than the baby dolls of the past. As a character, Barbie was a woman untethered from either matrimony or motherhood, and thus she could allow girls to imagine themselves as grown-ups on their own terms of happiness. It’s no surprise that Ruth Handler, the doll’s inventor, named her creation after her own daughter—a commercially-available wishing well for what her life could be. “Every little girl needed a doll through which to project herself into her dream of her future,” said Handler, and Barbie would give her daughter—and millions of others—that opportunity. But (as the film illuminates, and I won’t spoil here) we don’t get real or fictive examples of what self-satisfied womanhood actually looks like beyond its material trappings—its Dreamhouse, its dream closet, all suggestions of an invisible gynocracy in which women and their values are the ones that matter most. Barbie teaches us how to buy our way to happiness, not how to actually be happy. And yet she prevails as a model for women, in part because we have so few other examples to choose from. What does a dream life for a woman looks like? One in which we can float from our bedrooms to our convertibles, and where our heels never touch the floor.
The Little Dancer is more similar to Barbie than we might imagine. The original model, Marie Geneviève van Goethem, was born into poverty, sculpted by Degas at the age of 11 and fired from the Paris Opera Ballet for being late to a rehearsal. Despite her precocious talent, she was in many ways what the historian Deidre Kelly put it, still “a girl whose future would be determined by her past.” Yet the defiance of her posture was what supposedly caught Degas’ eye: she took the pose of fourth position—a posture that forces the dancer into a visually stunning yet physiologically challenging shape—and maintained it for hours, her face fixed in concentration. Her form was first cast in wax and fabric, then eventually preserved in bronze across thirty different statues distributed across museums all over the world. She was not initially perceived as beautiful—indeed, critics called her form a “terrible reality” in the art world, just as Barbie was called an indecency, a provocation to little girls to play at the possibilities of grown-up futures in grown-up bodies. Yet she prevailed, in her gravity-defiant pose, as so many fictive representations of women do, because she contains so many possibilities. No one knew, yet everyone asked: what would the Little Dancer do after she relaxed her pose? Would she leave the studio, and the (violent) world of dance, behind? Would she have the opportunity to realize her own destiny?
What are dolls but an opportunity to imagine all of our fullest possibilities, all the selves that we could become—and as a result, are they destined to fall short? Why, even after sitting through a film that teases out the joys and pitfalls of falling in love with Barbie, did I find myself weeping repeatedly when the main character—who is, above all things, fixed in plastic perfection—expresses a wave of (very recognizable) self-doubt? I’m fascinated by the impulse that I—and my daughter, even at this age—have to imitate the models of womanhood that we encounter on pedestals, our desire to push our feet into impossible positions, to freeze like statues, and for even a moment, to seem as though we know exactly what we are doing and what we’re about.
Recommendation: Apart from a general visit to Western Massachusetts, I’d like to specifically recommend one of the pieces we heard at Tanglewood, Ellen Reid’s When the World as You’ve Known It Doesn’t Exist. A really astonishing piece of modern orchestral music, and one that more than held its own with the Paganini and Prokofiev on the rest of the program.
The Perfect Bite: This weekend I had a marvelous meal in the backyard of a restaurant in Lenox, MA. Of course I have no official information to share on this, but hopefully the post will be close enough—if you’re in downtown Lenox on a Saturday and want to grab a pound of smoked chicken, sausage, and some of the best slow-cooker mac & cheese you’ve ever had, this is the place to go (and likely the one you’ll find most delightfully satisfying).
Cooked to Completion: Ripe peaches. Over pancakes, in mid-(late?) summer. (Our go-to pancake recipe here).