Snapshot Harvey Cedars Analysis

The three short stories, Snapshot Harvey Cedars: 1948, The Barbie Birthday, and After He Left, all stereotype women, or girls, as weak, submissive, or dependent on men. Textual evidence for this perspective will be explored in the hope that the reader will become conscious of the sexism inherent in these stories. Commonly, the female is treated as a pet to the male; being brought around as a source of attention to the public for male affection. By calling attention to the distorted ways that girls and women are portrayed in literature and in real life, perhaps future females will have the education they need to no longer be fooled or influenced by false and misleading images.
Snapshot Harvey Cedars: 1948 by Paul Lisicky, is an anecdote which
The young girl in the story is constructing her entire identity on the ideal body of her Barbie Doll, in which her future step-mother is compared to. The line, “Barbie was sex without sex”, suggests that the girl is being inculcated with the idea that her self-worth is dependent upon her beauty as a sex object. Real girls should have many other things on their minds other than their body and sex such as school, friends, and family; but these other points are completely absent from the story. The girl explains that her new barbie was “who [she] wanted to be”, with the idealistic figure of having “torpedo breasts, the wasp waist, [and the] tall-drink-of-water-legs”. The bodies of dolls are negatively impacting young girls to make the wrong decisions regarding their bodies; this is where eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia originate. Despite the girl’s dead mother prohibiting her from having the doll given by her stepmother, she decided to take it in and let it have an influence on her instead. In addition, the girl’s future stepmother is described as having “auburn curls bouncing in the early May light…[and a] suit of fuchsia wool blooming like some exotic flower” The imagery and the simile used in this excerpt are portraying some perfect female form that’s not usually attainable. The focus on the physical features in both the doll and the stepmother strengthen the message in the young girl’s mind that her worth is proportional to her physical beauty. The story reaches the point where the desire for the idealistic female body is so strong in the young girl that it overpowers the respect she has for her dead mother’s memory, and so she accepts the new barbie doll from the stepmother. By doing this, she may be losing respect, in the long run, not only for her dead mother but also for