Changes in Youth Culture from Barbie to Monster High Narrative Strategies and Female Protagonists

Ever since her release in 1959 by Mattell, Inc.,* Barbie has dominated the fashion doll market – and her power has been far deeper than mere economic success. Responding to transformations in youth taste, however, Mattell developed a new line of fashion dolls in 2010, the Monster High collection. Sporting Barbie bodies, but resembling offspring from, among others, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and the Phantom of the Opera, the Monster High dolls reflect what I call a -gothifying” of youth culture. This is also evident in the wild popularity of such young adult fantasy-like book series as Twilight and The Hunger Games, not to speak of Harry Potter. The combination of the beautiful with the sinister, romance with danger, the supernaturally fantastic with the threatening, which has been adapted from Gothic fiction, is a package that young adult fiction has fully embraced. We will trace this development, emphasizing the -from Barbie to Monster High” effect on narrative strategies in fiction and the young female protagonist. The girl hero, as clever and daring as any male one, overcomes jeopardy through self-empowerment and a strong measure of social solidarity. We will ask ourselves such postmodern questions as this: Who controls the discourse in the novel and the -packaging of girlhood”? Key fantasy/dystopian works will be Coraline (2002) and The Hunger Games (2008) [plus of course the film adaptations]; the widely read but very controversial Weetzie Bat (1989; first of Dangerous Angels series) can serve as an example of books in which the protagonist is grounded in realistic contexts but shares the quite magical self-assertion of the neo-gothic girls. We will devote some attention to the novelistic ancestors of Barbie and the Monster High dolls in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Little Women (1868-69), The Wizard of Oz (1900), and the Nancy Drew mysteries (1930-ca. 1969). We will try to figure out why most girls see no contradiction in having both Barbies and Monster High dolls fill the shelves of their bedrooms * Did you know that the prototype of Barbie was -Bild Lilli,” a German doll with an adult figure popular in the 1950s, based on a comic strip in the -Bild Zeitung”?! You may order Coraline and The Hunger Games; Weetzie Bat and all of the other reading (excerpts from young adult novels, theory) will be contained in the semester reader, to be distributed at the beginning of the semester. Anglistik - Sprachpraxis Universität Siegen SoSe 2013 Ph.D. Waegner Cathy Ph.D