values

Walmart is in hot water again. It seems the manager at one of its stores -- which store isn't known, but one in Louisiana is suspected -- put black Barbie Dolls on sale for a little over half the price of the regular white Barbies on the shelves right next to them.

A Walmart spokeswoman, who could not verify the exact store shown in the photo, said that the price change on the Theresa doll was part of the chain's efforts to clear shelf space for its new spring inventory, the ABC coverage of this story reports, adding that critics say Walmart should have been more sensitive in its pricing choice.

Devaluing the otherwise-identical black doll also sends a message about what "the Real Barbie," who plays a critical role in America's spiritual life, is supposed to look like.

The centerpiece of indigenous and basically unconscious American spirituality is an unrecognized but very real and very plastic polytheistic folk religion, whose most important deities in this era are Elvis Presley, John F. Kennedy, and Marilyn Monroe. (They used to be George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.) Barbie isn't exactly a goddess, like Marilyn, but she's America's most important totemic figure.

Like it or not, the Barbie doll historically has been both a reflection and an important influence in defining American ideals of womanhood, both for women and men. Her example informs little girls how a grown woman is supposed to be, and tells boys what kind of woman they're supposed to want. We would like to think and may ardently wish to outgrow such notions as we grow older, but we ignore their persistence in the unlit and more primitive recesses of our minds at our peril.

Barbie evolved from a popular 1950's German newspaper cartoon character drawn by Reinhard Beuthien for Hamburg's Bild-Zeitung. Lilli, as he called her was a tall, slender, curvy blonde in her 20's, a single clerical worker, quick-witted and unlike her monogamous American descendent something of a whore. "I could do without balding old men but my budget couldn't!" she once wisecracked. The newspaper's management decided to market a doll based on Lilli and contracted a German toymaker to produce "Bild Lilli," as she was called. The doll was as successful as the cartoon, and sold in Germany between 1955 and 1964 when the American manufacturer Mattel bought the rights to her and German production ended. Sold in tobacco shops and novelty stores, she was an adult toy, and many Germans considered her unsuitable for children. In spite of that, and because as time went by more and more outfits were made available for her, she eventually became popular with girls, and manufacturers jumped in with dollhouses, furniture, etc. for the sophisticated and worldly toy woman, whom one Mattel CEO sometimes referred to as "that hooker."

Bild Lilli was the doll the American toy marketer Ruth Handler of Mattel discovered while shopping in Europe in 1956, and corresponded uncannily with what she had already been thinking of producing. She bought three dolls, gave one to her daughter Barbie, and showed the other two to designers at Mattel. When Mattel's Barbie debuted at the New York city toy fair in 1959 she looked awfully much like Bild-Lilli, even including the sidelong glance, and was atypically available as either a blonde or a brunette.

The significance of Barbie Millicent Roberts's only direct ancestor being a woman of questionable character conveys some strange significance in assessing the meaning of this icon of unattainable femininity and her status as a vacuous, strangely empty role model. It's almost as if the only truly interesting things about Bild-Lilli were exorcised from her American descendent, and never replaced by anything. What's important, what makes her who she is and are through her put forward as the ideal traits of American womanhood, are her white skin, yellow hair, and anatomically impossible body.