Innocence and experience in Barbie

Abstract

The paradisical garden of archetypal myth is an image both of the world as it once was and of how it should ideally be. This Arcadian or Edenic space, the ‘Happy Garden’, is verdant, safe and sunny. Its inhabitants do not have to labour to live; rather, their environment spontaneously provides all that they need, and more. Barbie alters the terms of the expulsion from Eden that lies at the heart of Jewish and Christian accounts of the origin of patriarchy. Barbie leaves voluntarily, unable to remain in a matriarchy that persists in its investment in the forever young, whereas Ken remains in Barbie Land, uneasily reconciled with its restored gender hierarchy. The film is another instance of the power struggle over the meanings, purpose and agency of the female reproductive body, which is to say it is a film about motherhood, non-motherhood and about the female body as it changes over time. In Jewish and Christian myth, pain in childbirth was a punishment for Eve's transgression and the body's reminder of women's subjugation. In Barbie, by contrast, knowledge of those changes and the experience of coping with them is the mark of Barbie's liberation from the space of innocence.