I never thought I would say it.
I stepped into American Girl Place today - I needed to pick up the newest catalog, make sure I was correct about the theatre (it is no more), and just take a quick peek at the place in preparation for an article I am going to submit.
Dr. Martinson, this ain't your grad student's American Girl Place.
The American Girl that I wrote about in my dissertation, the one that so effectively straddled the line between a mom's wants and her daughter's wants, the one that masked its storeness by constructing itself as an empowering educational resource and an experiential destination, the one that schooled young girls in refined taste a la Bourdieu, allowing girls to gain fluency in upper middle class cultural practices like seeing theatre and cafe dining, that American Girl is gone. It has been overwritten in garish pinks and purples (wherefore art thou demure berry interior design theme?) and animated to look like an awful Bratz-meetz-American-Girlz mash-up (only NEW My American Girls dolls come to life online at innerstarU.com) and buried in too many flowers and stars and butterflies (with whimsical faux hand-drawn clip art!).
I miss the old American Girl.
Not that I retract my critiques. I don't. Old American Girl did put forward a simplistic narrative of American progress as basically good, with only a few minor bumps (displacing native peoples, slavery, manifest destiny, orphan trains) along the way to the multicultural utopia of today in which we are all the same (so long as we are upper middle class - and preferably white). Old American Girl did teach girls about competitive consumption and social positioning. And the Old American Girl Musical Theatre pieces did favor deadening theatrical practices, did enforce racial difference (but only for people of color), and did serve as a commercial brought to life.
And now? It still does all that, only now it all seems so cheap. Not the prices, mind you, NEVER the prices - as long as suckers are willing to shell out the same dollars and get less, then the joke is on them. But the crap (now literally crap) you can buy, the store, the experience, the brand - its all so cynically lessened. You can practically taste the Value Engineering that has happened when you walk through the doors of American Girl Place or page through the catalogs. You can almost see the corporate honchos sweating over the products, looking for ways to save $.01 here and another over there by skimping on design and production and quality. You can essentially hear the meetings in which marketers discuss how "archiving" their historical characters will create a buying rush AND allow the brand to grow by introducing new characters. It slaps you in the face, this rush to maximize profits by giving consumers less and less and telling them it's all the same.
It was bad enough to have old American Girl make so much money by artfully masquerading as a school, a library, a museum, and a dose of feminism. New American Girl doesn't even have to be artful about it.
I miss you, Pleasant Rowland.