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Posts Tagged ‘Barbie’

The Virginia Woolf Barbie doll that was not to be

Posted in commodification, doll, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , , on Friday 11 October 2024| 1 Comment »

Imagine, if you will, a Barbie doll made to represent Virginia Woolf. Well, Mattel did more than imagine it. Mattel was ready to produce one. Luckily, Woolf’s estate objected.

“We all agreed, over our dead bodies,” said Woolf’s great niece, Virginia Nicholson, who spoke at the recent Cheltenham literature festival, according to The Guardian.

The doll was prim, dressed in Victorian garb, with hair in a bun and a tiny copy of Mrs. Dalloway in her hand.

One might think that the Virginia Woolf Barbie would have been among good company. Mattel has produced and sold commemorative Barbies of Maya Angelou, Billie Jean King, Helen Keller, Ida B. Wells, Dr. Jane Goodall and Queen Camilla. And just last week, Mattel announced the first Diwali Barbie.

This is not the first time Virginia Woolf has been connected to Barbie. When Greta Gerwig’s film named after the iconic doll came out in 2023, I wrote a post detailing what I saw as “The connections between Barbie and Virginia Woolf” — from Gerwig herself to NPR.

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The connections between Barbie and Virginia Woolf

Posted in 21st century Woolf, A Room of One's Own, feminism, films, tagged , , , , on Sunday 30 July 2023| 3 Comments »

The way I see it, there are several connections between Greta Gerwig, her blockbuster film Barbie, and Virginia Woolf. Here we go:

  • One of Gerwig’s all-time favorite books is Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). It is, she notes, “A classic for a reason. My mind was warped into a new shape by her prose, and it will never be the same again. The metaphysics she presents in the book are enacted in a way that allowed me to begin to understand that corner of philosophy.”
  • In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf writes that “a woman must have a room of her own” in order to write fiction. In Barbie, all of the Barbies have entire dream houses of their own — and they find such ownership essential to their independent, feminist lifestyles.
  • An NPR story on the film includes this quote: “But Barbie could fend for herself. Like Nancy Drew, she drove her own roadster and lived in her own dream house — Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own painted in pastels.”
  • From Second Wind Books comes this Facebook post that lists the similarities between Woolf and Barbie:


From Woolf scholar and novelist Maggie Humm comes this Twitter post:

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