In an interview for BBC Radio’s Front Row, Greta Gerwig said (with a self-deprecating laugh) that the sources of Barbie include medieval and Renaissance poetry. She went on to talk about John Milton’s late Renaissance epic Paradise Lost:
I remember the first time when I read Milton and I realized this idea of, Paradise has no poetry. Because what do you need metaphor for if everything is literally what it is? You need this sort of separation from your environment in order to have a need for the beauty of poetry.
This might be a result of my monomaniacal obsession with Milton, as I finish writing a book about his poem’s afterlives across the modern age, but I was struck by the deep parallels between Paradise Lost and Barbie.
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