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Barbies Live Forever: The Linear Story of a Circular Literacy
by Isabella Thoroughman, University of Cincinnati

Once upon a time…
Belle lived in a dreamy house on Main Street.
Once upon a time…

A plastic barbie doll house sat lopsided, crushed by an intruding baby. Sparkly pink columns dangled from the roof like strings of meat off bone.

Belle floated down to the kitchen. Atop a painted lavender table sat a steaming pot of French onion soup, garnished with herbs and permeating the entire mansion with the delectable scent of French cuisine.

A young girl gently placed a grey plastic doll pot atop a three-legged, used-to-be-purple-and-now-bleached-grey table, but not gently enough. The table toppled, the pot toppled, and a strange mixture of mashed fruit gummies, soda, and cookie came spilling out. She turned to her sister and shrugged. Time to clean up before Mom found out. Or the baby got into it – the baby who had destroyed the dreamhouse – the baby who belonged to a rebel sister and her abusive drug addict husband.

Two sisters, two stories, two inextricable worlds circling into one reality. The scrappy piece of carpet on which we sat meant nothing. Neither did the bare yellow lightbulbs lodged into the sooty ceiling overlooking Barbie Land. Not even the dismal dreamhouse, marred by the painful memory of our lost sister, could tear us from our view of Barbie Land as the pinnacle of wonder. Steven King once described his basement, the place where he created his renowned novels, as his “far-seeing” place (103). Our basement was our far-seeing place. It was the place where imagination and reality met and became one fluid circle. All the faults of the old charcoal cellar were overlooked in favor of playing together in our imagined world.

It was in Barbie Land that I discovered the magic of storytelling, and that my literacy in storytelling began. As others develop literacies in reading and writing, I was developing a literacy in creating worlds, characters, and plots, with the sole purpose of sharing imaginary worlds with my sister. “Come with me and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination. Take a look and you’ll see into your imagination” (Charlie, 00:00:27 – 00:00:37). Willy Wonka’s song encompassed the purpose of our playtime exactly.

At its earliest stages, my literacy had no self-imposed purpose. Its only purpose was imposed by nature. Playtime has been shown to assist in brain development, problem-solving, literacy, independence, physical abilities, and stress reduction in children (Blahey). Playtime is vital for developing social skills, according to Dr. Stuart Brown of the National Institute of Play (Brown). In fact, in one study that Brown examined involving highly social animals that were isolated and kept from any type of animal play, the results demonstrated a significant behavioral difference. “They can’t discriminate friend from foe, do not bond socially to mate, and exhibit many other deficiencies, including less rich connectedness in their brains.” (Brown). Brown even looked at the history of play for incarcerated murderers and found that “the parallelism between their play deficiencies, and the objective problems in forming trusting social bonds with others seems very significant” (Brown). Finally, storytelling as a part of play fosters the development of imagination, the forefather of creation and innovation. (Russ).

These forces of nature were acting upon us in our playtime, developing our social skills, creativity, and imagination. Our playtime produced a circularity of imagination and reality that were interconnected and inextricable, so that we were fully capable of ignoring the ignoble state of our play area. The connected circularity of imagination and reality itself held no meaning for my developing storytelling literacy, but the use of that circularity defined my earliest views of life. My sister and I, like countless other children playing pretend around the world, used imagination to overlook broken toys because the act of play was more important than the perfection of the play items. We were not focused on any personal gain or ambition through playtime. Our values as children lay in human interaction and connection, in experience over product. The expensive porcelain dolls atop Mommy’s dresser were far less valuable than the five-dollar Barbie dolls in the shoddy dreamhouse to us, because the Barbie dolls were what allowed us to play together. “Come with me and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination. Take a look and you’ll see into your imagination,” Willy Wonka sings upon entrance to his chocolate factory (Charlie, 00:00:30-00:00:44). This “pure imagination” was the pure purpose of my storytelling literacy in its earliest stages.

“Do you guys ever think about dying?” Barbie asks all her friends one night in the 2023 Barbie movie (00:00:23-00:00:33). The music comes to a roaring stop, and everyone stares. My life came to a roaring stop the day I first asked that question. One might say I was waking up to reality, but in truth, I was learning to let a reality I already knew darken my outlook. I was starting to see life through grown-up eyes, eyes that struggled to find wonder amidst the brokenness of the world. My imagination was beginning to falter in its ability to cover up the sadness. That was when my storytelling literacy took a turn. Playing for its own sake began to be insufficient. As grown-up thoughts started to form little clouds of fear over my light-hearted childish spirit, I responded accordingly. For the first time, my literacy had a self-imposed purpose: eliminating death. Our faded pink Barbie Land camper suddenly served the additional purpose of a hospital, and countless “decapitated” Barbies were revived there with a little electrical tape and glue. None of our barbies could die. That was the cardinal rule.

Death was only the first chapter of my “growing up” discoveries. Another chapter was the discovery of limitations. As a child, I thought I could do anything my Barbies could do. Reality and imagination were inseparable. However, once I started to really notice myself making mistakes, I developed anxiety, and every time I did something wrong, I was plagued by an almost unbearable sense of guilt. That was not something that imagination could get rid of. A little crack had formed in that fluid circle of imagination and reality. I began to lose the capacity to overlook brokenness with imagination. I started to use the stories written by other people to help me escape. My favorite protagonists: Jane Eyre, Paul Bäumer: these characters did not live forever, nor did they experience life from a “dreamhouse.” They lived in a real world, with real villains, death, and imperfection. With their imperfections, they seemed real, and yet still, they were better than me—more intelligent, stronger, more courageous. I could live vicariously through these characters, since they were imperfect like me, but I could also feel what it was like to be heroic.

As I started to escape through books, I also began to discover an escape through my own storytelling. I created villains in our Barbie games who reflected my own imperfections and guilt magnified, but who were also perfect in strength and courage. I no longer told stories only to share imagination or to eliminate the things in the real world that bothered me. I now told stories to be someone in Barbie Land that I was not brave enough to be in real life. This new purpose in the development of my storytelling literacy reflected a shift in my outlook on life. Where storytelling had once filled the void of control, it now filled a void of insecurity and aspiration. The older I got, the less self-sufficient my storytelling literacy became. It was riddled with layers of purpose.

Through the discovery of limitations, a new “grown-up” discovery was born – that of obsessive self-ambition. Limitations would not control me, not in a world where working hard could get allegedly earn a person anything she wanted. School was a prime example. My mom would call me to watch a movie.

 “We’re turning on Pride and Prejudice!”

No. I didn’t say that, but it was what I meant. I was going to feel the chestnut wood of my desk chair until I understood the proof for the angle of an arc within a circle.  The first four parts of the proof were taking me in a twisted loop right back to where I had started, and the more my brain hurt, the more I refused to give up. Symbols and theorems and geometry rules whorled in circles around me, like the world spinning around the sun. Everything, the desk, the room, the voice of my mom was fading to a blur in the whirlwind of my ambition. Grades came before everything else. The acknowledgement of my limitations drove me to attempt perfection. Nothing if not 100%. Every point counted. Because, of course, points could accumulate. One point off here meant little, but it also meant the world. Because it meant an oversight. I had overlooked something, a sign of laziness, a sign of falling short, even degrading, relapsing. A sign that I might possibly be slipping, and that each slip would be a little bigger, each slide a little faster, until one day I started being ok with B’s, and then, oh, the forbidden C. The colors of the world were fading before my eyes as I began to choose the pursuit of perfection even over my family.

First I thought about death. And then I thought about my limitations. And then I started to pursue a life of endless pursuit of perfection. And from these realizations, I began to see life as a circle thing. A grey, endless circle thing. Days circle around every twenty-four hours, seasons circle around every year, and even we circle around from dust to dust as we are born and die and go back into the ground. I could not use my imagination anymore, because the truth was, I no longer valued the uses of imagination – developing friendships and sharing games together.  I had grown up. “That’s the real trouble with the world,” Walt Disney once said. “Too many people grow up. They forget.” (qtd. in McComb). I was weary with anxiety, hustling, and ambition, and I forgot the childish capacity to cling to the most important things in the world – human connection and love. I looked at the dreamhouse and all I could see was a cheaply made child’s toy that ought to have an address in the dumpster, rather than the portal through which my sister and I shared countless stories and memories. I had lost my ability to overlook its faults because the grown-up things of the world – stress and the pursuit of success – had drowned out the childish love I once had for the simplicity of togetherness.

When I no longer believed in the dreamhouse or cared for games, the circularity of reality and imagination, which had once been so inseparable in our lives, had split fully into two distinct, linear forces. I needed an escape from a world devoid of color, so I decided to pick up the remnants of my storytelling literacy that had begun in Barbie Land and dedicate it to paper. Instead of a pink, sparkling dreamhouse as the portal to my far-seeing place, I used the looping grey lead of a pencil. I returned to my literary instructors: Bronte, Fitzgerald, Remarque, and Austen. They had once taught me to create flawed characters; now they would teach me to put those characters on paper.  I had played games with dolls, and they played games with words. How the words could leap up from the page and make me see things I did not even want to see. I still remember the grimace on my face when Myrtle was murdered by Gatsby’s car in The Great Gatsby. Oh, what mighty games Fitzgerald could play if he could force a scene to live in my memory for that many years. I wanted to play games like that, with my pencil. I went back to my “far-seeing” place, the peeling, ignoble basement, curled up on a couch, lifted my singular player, my pencil, and began my first attempt at word games.

Thus, the purpose of my literacy reflected pure as a mirror my changing perspectives on life as I grew up. Stories were not part of the grey circle—they were a linear thing. There was a beginning, a middle, and an end, and they were filled with grand adventures and with characters who were not subject to the endless spinning of the circle of life. Sherman Alexie once explained how Native American children on the reservation of his childhood were expected to be stupid, and thus acted so, because expectation is comfortable (364). Joining the hustle culture is also an expectation of twenty-first century culture. So I filed in line, entering a world of chug-and-plug circular monotony and ambition, because any deviation from the norm was too uncomfortable and frightening. On the contrary, my characters controlled their destinies and followed a linear path of growth and change. My storytelling literacy allowed me to escape the monster of the grey circle life I had created by living through these linear characters and plotlines. However, even this escape was only another story I had told myself. My literacy of storytelling was not helping me to escape my prison—it was simply reflecting the prison in which I had already placed myself. My literacy purpose as an escape served as a reflection of a life which necessitated an escape – a life devoid of meaningful value, and instead wrought with worry and hurry.

The first moment I was able to look beyond my grey circle was when I met Emma. I was volunteering at her birthday party the day before she was due for a surgery to remove a tumor. Her parents held onto both her arms as they walked her into the party room. She was not talking well either–the tumor and subsequent surgeries had had too great an effect on her. But on her face was a bright little smile, and in her braided hair a sparkling tiara. I wondered why she looked like that–so peaceful and happy, though she was facing the terrifying reality of very real death. It reminded me of our dreamhouse. Though the carpet was scrappy and the light bulbs were bare and the cracked columns reminded us of a sister we would never see again, we would rather have been playing in that dreamhouse than living in any real pink sparkling mansion. We were children, minds unclouded by fear, living for the joy of playing together and little else. Tiny Emma was the same way. She had cancer and she could die, but she was also dressed as a princess, playing with her friends, her childlike mind unhindered by the heavy weight of growing up. She was satisfied, she had hope, because she looked at life through the eyes of a child who asked for nothing beyond love.

Consequently, the purpose of my literacy began to shape-shift once again. I discovered an organization that would allow me to dress up as a Disney princess named Merida to visit children in hospitals. I would keep telling stories, playing games, and escaping the world. But now, I would be cycling back to the original purpose of my literacy – a purpose designed by nature to help children socialize and develop imaginations. My literacy purpose was no longer self-imposed; I was not escaping or redefining my reality. I was only trying to help little children whose life situations had placed at precarious risk of developing grey circle views of life far too early.

Merida burst forth into the grand hall of Ronald McDonald House. Every child stared in awe at the confident, lively princess who had come to visit them that night.

The room was bare, minus three card tables and about twenty metal folding chairs. I felt my cheeks burning a little from the eyes of so many people. I was not brave, but for these children, I would be.

Merida knelt down and pointed to flowers on a little girl’s dress. “They remind me of the wildflowers in Scotland,” Merida murmured. “Would you come to my castle in Scotland, and we can pick flowers and make flower crowns?” The little girl’s eyes were sparkling with excitement, and she nodded eagerly.

I would never be going to Scotland. And chances were, that little girl never would either. Not with how sick she looked. But somewhere in their dreams, Merida and she were running across fields of wildflowers, making daisy chains and laughing. It was ok that it was all imaginary. Because going to Scotland was not the point. Getting to hug a princess, feeling as though a princess had come just for them, feeling that a princess loved them – that was the point.  To stop the growing up that happens too fast in hospitals, to remember what it felt like to be a kid again, to play games and pretend to have no cares in the whole world – these were the reasons that Merida – that I came to visit the children at Ronald McDonald House. It prolonged for one more day the chance to feel imagination and reality flow together in one fluid circle, to believe that love was all anyone needed.

I had once believed that the concept of immortality in my Barbie dolls represented a childhood fantasy. Now I know that this storytelling concept was inextricable with reality. Barbies can live forever, and princesses can visit hospitals, for little children whose need for the joy of imagination and love far surpasses the grown-up need for dry facts and escape. I had lost my sister, but these children had lost their freedom, and yet they still refused to see life as the grey circle I had learned to accept. As the circle of my life grew grey, I too experienced a growing resentment of life that necessitated the rejection of fantasy. Only when I returned to the root of my storytelling literacy as a means of human connection through my princess visits did I understand how the purpose of storytelling went far beyond a useful escape from life. The purpose of my linear literacy of storytelling had come full circle, as it was now once again based on a deeper need for human connection, this time in the lives of isolated, hospitalized children. As my literacy had always reflected my worldview in each changing season of life, so it now reflected my new perspective gained through my visits to Ronald McDonald House.

Today, the circle is still visible in my life. Because in the end, we still live in circles. We still wake up and eat and go to sleep every day until we die. But the color is different. There is no ashen circle of disappointment. There is a vibrancy, the same vibrancy through which I saw life way back in those early years, when playtime was simply about sharing stories with my sister. I believed again. I believed again that life can be colorful, the way it is through the eyes of a child, if one can only remember what children have always known – that a life valuing togetherness is the most colorful kind. Willy Wonka said it best: “There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination” (00:01:50 – 00:02:00).

Works Cited
Alexie, Sherman. “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me.” Writing about Writing: A College Reader by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp. 362-365.

Barbie. Directed by Greta Gerwig, performance by Margot Robbie, Warner Brothers, 2023. Youtube, uploaded by Barbie the Movie, 16 October 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImFQpKImJqQ

Blahey, Lori. “The Power of Play: 6 Benefits for Child Development.” Edmonton Public Library, 4 Aug. 2021, www.epl.ca/blogs/post/importance-of-play-for-kids/. Accessed 6 February 2024.

Brown, Stuart. “Rough and Tumble Play – Consequences of a Play Deprived Life.” PlayCore, 05 Nov. 2018, www.playcore.com/news/rough-and-tumble-play-is-it-necessary-part-2. Accessed 7 Feb. 2024.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Directed by Mel Stuart, performance by Gene Wilder, Paramount Pictures, 1971. “Gene Wilder – Pure Imagination.” Youtube, uploaded by Beralts, 29 December 2012. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVi3-PrQ0pY.

King, Stephen. “What Writing Is.” On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King, Scribner, 2020, pp. 103-107.

McComb, Correy. “Walt Disney on ‘What’s Wrong with the World.’” Corey McComb. coreymccomb.com/2018-9-27-walt-disney-on-whats-wrong-with-the-world/. Accessed 6 February 2024.

Russ, Sandra. “Help Your Children Play out a Story and Watch Them Become More Creative.” The Conversation, 5 July 2023, theconversation.com/help-your-children-play-out-a-story-and-watch-them-become-more-creative-61194. Accessed 6 February 2024.

—
Isabella Thoroughman is a fourth-year honors student and Presidential Scholar at the University of Cincinnati. She is pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in ballet and a pre-medical certificate. She would like to express gratitude to her professor, Mr. Gary Vaughn, for his wise insight and instruction during the creation of this essay.

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