American Girl

[osprey_archer]

You guys you guys! My professor has okayed my topic for my final paper: I'm going to write about American Girl!

This is AMAZING! I <3 <3 <3 American Girl. It's a fascinating phenomenon - and it is a phenomenon - that there's this whole sort of subculture around American Girls. There are not only books and dolls, but movies, a magazine, stores that people all but take pilgrimages to, to have special American girl teas; last year at the elementary school, we had an American Girl club and read the Kit books.

Obviously it's a commercial phenomenon, but American Girl is also quite consciously selling specific values - bravery, friendship (female friendship FTW!), breaking the rules if the rules are bad (but not being disobedient just to be disobedient). Diversity and tolerance is both apparent in the books and in looking over the variety of different girls they've included - of different races, different religions, different parts of the country, even different socioeconomic classes, which Americans often forget to think about.

Speaking of different socioeconomic classes: in the Rebecca books, Rebecca reaches her apotheosis when she gives a speech about how awesome socialism is. I am honestly astonished that conservative groups haven't noticed they should be complaining the hell out of these books.

I need to pare down all the multifarious avenues from which one could approach this topic to a single 2000 word paper. What should I doooo????

Things that are probably not appropriate topics for my paper:

- why I am still mad that they retired Felicity. Felicity is the first doll that they retired, did you know that? Why? She was the Revolutionary War girl! She stole a horse from its abusive owner! (Maybe that's why. They didn't want to encourage horse-thievery. Clearly a big problem with juvenile delinquents these days.)

- in fact, comparative analysis of why certain series work are more dramatically satisfying than others is probably off-topic in a paper that is supposed to be focused on history rather than literature.

- this means that my paper is not the place to discuss Friendship in the American Girl Books, either. Darn it! I have Things to Say. But that's why I have an LJ, right?

ANYWAY. Obviously as I'm doing a project about them, it's totally relevant for me to catch up on all the many series that I've missed. I meant to read about Julie, the 1970s San Francisco girl - whose best friend, who gets IIRC a book of her own, is Ivy Ling, who is Chinese American. Race in American Girl - possibly a good topic for my paper? Using history to inculcate the values to build a better America.

But ALAS only half of Julie & Ivy's books were in the library, so I got Kaya's books instead.

And then! I have had a brainwave. I have papers to grade, sixty-five of them. And there are six Kaya books...

So! Every ten papers, I will get to stop and read a Kaya book! And when I've finished all 65, I will read Brave Emily, which is about Molly's friend the British evacuee Emily. Did they actually evacuate British children to America? Is it really proper to call very English Emily an American girl, anyway? Details! I will indulge myself.

Comments

[ursula]

Wait, no more Samantha or Kirsten, either? So weird!

Re:

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Their books are still being sold! It's just the dolls that have been retired.

It's still kind of weird, though.

[anomilygrace.livejournal.com]

I am SO SERIOUSLY excited for you. That is such an amazing topic, and there are so many ways you can approach it! I can't wait to see your thoughts on the topic as you research it more. Also reading ALL THE BOOKS is definitely needed - though Rebecca is the absolute best. I finally read her last year and was utterly thrilled.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I LOVE the Rebecca books! I read them last year too, but I never did get around to posting about them...I should do something about that! She's in a movie, it's so splendid.

I mean, really, I should clearly just do posts about each American Girl series. To get my thoughts in order for my paper, of course. :p

[anomilygrace.livejournal.com]

Absolutely! To help get your thoughts in order. It would be a completely rational and useful endeavor. >.>

Have you seen the new girl Caroline from the War of 1812? If my gosh darn kids would stop borrowing them from the library, I could check them out myself and read them! Uh, I mean, I'm SO HAPPY they're so very popular with the students at the library...

I have not seen that there's a Rebecca movie. I'm far too happy to hear that.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

No, I have given you false hope! Rebecca is in a movie in the books, but as far as I know there's no Rebecca movie in the works in real life.

But there totally should be. Because Rebecca is awesome!

I have seen the Caroline books! But they're all gone out of my local library too, so I don't think I'll get to read them in time for the project. They look like fun, though: lots of action! And the first one starts on a boat!

[anomilygrace.livejournal.com]

OH. I even considered the 'Rebecca was in a movie' angle and decided to go with the other one. But there should be a Rebecca movie! She is amazing!

Caroline appears to be a spy of some sort? I'm intrigued. I also haven't gotten a chance to read Marie-Grace & Cecile though those appear interesting too. I'm a bit leery of the racefail possibilities, but American Girl usually at least tries to do well.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Spy!Caroline! Yes yes yes I hope so!

I'm cautiously hopeful about the Marie-Grace & Cecile books; I thought the Addy books were terribly well done (of course, I was about seven, but looking back I don't remember any red flags) and the Josefina books also, so the American Girl books have earned some trust, I think.

[anomilygrace.livejournal.com]

It's a fair point! Maybe I'll check to see if they're on the shelf today and borrow a few.

(Related: How has American Girl never been nom'd for Yuletide. I WOULD READ THAT.)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I think Felicity was nommed a couple of years ago, but IIRC no one wrote it...we should do something about this next year!

Obviously Rebecca fic would be awesome, but I'm not sure many Yuletiders will have read her books - they're out of the demographic. Felicity's a safe bet, though.

[enemyfrigate.livejournal.com]

Yep, British children were definitely evacuated to the US and Canada during WWII.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Excellent! I just accepted it wholesale as a child, of course, but looking back now I wondered. It did seem like an awfully big plot point for them to just make up.

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

I am still unhappy about Felicity!

I think there was a big shift sometime after the introduction of Josefina (who I wanted the most, but after I already had Felicity, sigh), when they started doing spinoff books about the main dolls' friends, and then spinoff dolls.

The customizable ones that you could get to look like yourself were interesting, too, and I, liked that you could get hobby/holiday-focussed clothing and accessories for them based on lives of real girls.

They really are a super interesting phenomenon.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I don't understand why they retired Felicity. She has her own movie, for goodness sake - it's not very good, but still! - why retire her when she's still going strong? Sure, it will make her more collectible, but the company won't make any money off that, will they?

Re: spin-off dolls: the first spin-off doll was Samantha's friend Nellie, who was introduced after Kaya in the early 2000s. This seems to have been so successful that they started incorporating the best friend-who-will-be-a-doll into the conception of the series with Julie & Ivy in 2002, and then last year put out a series with two protagonists rather than protag-and-best-friend.

I haven't read Cecile & Marie-Grace's books yet; I'm curious how this two protags thing works out. I'm inclined to be a bit sniffy because there's a perceptible drop in illustration quality.

There are also spin-off mystery books about the American Girls, which don't seem to be canonical the way that the spin-offs about their friends are...but fretting about what's canon and what's not is probably getting rather silly with American Girl books.

The modern-day girls are clearly out of the realm of this paper, as is the magazine, but they're interesting too - really, the whole thing is interesting. It's so unusual for me to be so on board with the values promoted by...almost anything, really.

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, by then I'd well-aged out of the demographic (although I still have my Felicity, and one of these days I'm going to start making Tudor clothes for her and my Anne of Green Gables doll). I don't think I ever did AG dolls quite the way I was supposed to, although I did subscribe to the magazine for a long time.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I always found the books much more interesting than the dolls. I liked looking through the catalogs, and I had one of the modern dolls, but once it wasn't in a picture and just sort of sat there in the corner of my room it was much less enticing.

The books left far more scope for imagination.

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

I liked to make things for my dolls. I didn't really *play* with them as such. And oh boy, there was so much anachronism (Anne and Felicity were pretty temporarily separated to start with, but I made them modern accessories and got Addy's furniture and so on).

[silksieve.livejournal.com]

Fun! I used to drool over the catalogs when Pleasant Company was still Pleasant Company and not Mattel. Also over the historical "dress-like-your-doll" costumes.

Also, I think we can probably all date ourselves on the basis of which girls we grew up with. :)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Probably! There's a part of my mind that thinks Felicity, Kirsten, Addy, Samantha, and Molly are the "real" dolls, and all the ones that came out after - even the ones whose books I read as a kid - are somehow impostors.

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

(http://glittertextmaker.info)



That is going to be an AMAZING paper!!! American Girls is, for me, the opposite of Barbie. Real girls, real issues without sugarcoating too much, real life lessons to learn without being overly preachy. I'm glad my girls had them.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes! It helps that they have stories, I think: it makes it inevitable that the dolls will have real content rather than just being pretty but empty.

[entwashian.livejournal.com]

Fun!

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I hope so!