Most girls grow up and think there are certain standards they need to reach in order to feel liked. Standards that are designed to create the perfect image that are otherwise impossible to reach. And when one cannot meet these standards, they feel a sense of humiliation and loathing towards oneself. In this poem, the speaker does not have a lot of self-confidence, for she feels her “bones didn’t fit in [her] body” (32). The speaker felt foreign and awkward in her body and had a…
One of my favorite poem is “Barbie Doll” by Marge Piercy. “Barbie Doll” is a irony poem. A Barbie is beautiful when she is a little girl. But when the Barbie grow up, her appearance is changing. People start to judge the adult Barbie does not meet a beautiful standards. The adult Barbie apologize to people people, then she cut off her ugly nose and plum legs. The Barbie change a nice nose and a spindly legs. The adult Barbie become a perfect Doll.…
Imagery is of great importance in the poem “Barbie Doll” by Margie Piercy. The title explains itself throughout the poem. Girls and many grown women see the doll Barbie as a perfect roll model, she is very beautiful and society expects that of women. In the poem the “girlchild” is an intelligent, healthy, and strong girl. Society expects the girl to look like the perfect, little, Barbie doll, and she is ridiculed for not looking like they want her to. A classmate tells her “You have a great big nose and fat legs,” this explains that they only judge by appearances and not by personality.…
Recently, I have read a very intriguing poem. It is called “Centerfold” and is written by Ada Limón.While reading it,I could not stop thinking thatthis poem can be about every teenager. They look at pretty ladies in the magazines imagining that one day they would meet or become gorgeous ladies with velvet skin and perfect smile. In spite of being children, they could not but mention the perfection of women’s bodies……
In the poem “Barbie Doll” by Marge Piercy the struggle many young girl nowadays face is portrayed.…
Society today, has changed people in the way how they act, and dress. The short story Barbie Q explains that a Barbie is the ideal woman. The Barbie is an example of what women believe to be perfect. The quote “So what if we didn’t Get our new bendable legs Barbie in nice clean boxes and had to buy them on Maxwell street all water soaked and sooty”(Cisneros). This quote means that anyone would buy a Barbie for a cheaper price because they didn’t have the money at the time and who would care if the dolls were wet or smoked. For example the barbie with the melted leg putting a dress on the doll would cover the leg. this event talks about women these days where men rate the women from very beautiful to ugly as they show in the story where the…
In Marge Piercy’s poem, Barbie Doll, the “girl-child” is always looking to others or the outside world to tell her how to look and feel, “a classmate said: You have got a great big nose and fat legs” (323). The character is portrayed as a girl who has everything going in her life; good grades, very healthy/strong, and an abundant sexual drive – even though she has the big nose and legs. She works her whole life to be better and for people to realize that she is beautiful, until the day she cuts of her nose and legs and dies. It is not until her funeral that the people finally call her beautiful. The girl basically kills herself trying to get others approval, when she should have lived her own life. Contrasting the context of Barbie Doll, in that a woman must meet societies standards of how women should look to be considered beautiful, Maya Angelou’s Phenomenal Woman explains how a woman should be free and act as herself. The speaker of the poem is self-confident when walking into a room full of men, “I walk into a room just as cool as you please, and to a man, the fellows stand or fall down to their knees” (322). At the end of each stanza, Angelou repeats the same lines, “I’m a woman, phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, that’s me” (322), as a cry out to the world that she is who she is and does not care what people say. The two poems, written over 30 years ago are a testament to that time and our time today. Women are constantly going to plastic surgery clinics to look like models, but there are the few women that are being free and being…
Barbies are one of the dolls in today’s world that can be seen as both a positive learning tool and a negative way of how girls see themselves. To children, especially young girls Barbies are seen as role model, the Barbie is something that children can look up to. Barbies have a wide range of jobs; including: astronaut, nurse, veterinarian, police officer, chef, surfer, princess, fashion designer, rock star, olympian, and many more. Instead of Barbies only teaching the idea of running a household, the doll has opened up a whole new field of different things that a young girl can aspire…
In the essay of “There Is No Unmarked Woman”, Deborah Tannen explains it best through the statement that “There is no unmarked woman” (Tannen 412). No matter what hairstyle, clothes, shoes, or style a woman may choose to wear, every one of her decisions will convey a meaning to the public. “If a woman’s clothing is tight or revealing…it sends a message…If her clothes are not sexy, that too sends a message…” (Tannen 412). There are even instances where the clothes are not the cause of criticism, for a woman may be criticized upon her genetic features. As written in the poem “Barbie Doll” by Marge Piercg, a little girl grows up healthy and intelligent, but because other people deemed her as physically inadequate by having “a great big nose and fat legs”, the girl is coerced into change, and not anything like a difference in wardrobe, but permanent change with cosmetic surgery (Piercg 378). Such an occurrence is not far from reality for there are women who will do whatever it takes to be deemed as conventionally…
The first symbolism encountered is the title of the poem itself. The title “Barbie Doll” is used to represent what society has long viewed as the perfect woman: tall, thin, and inhumanly beautiful. These are unreachable standards that the girl in the poem spends many years trying to achieve. The “dolls that did pee-pee” and the “miniature GE stoves and irons” all are used to symbolize qualities that a good housewife must possess (2-3). These show that from a very young age society attempted to train the girl in the story to fit into their perfect Barbie mold. Another item of symbolism that is used in the poem is in line 4 where it talks about her being given “wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy” (4). The symbolism here is that the lipstick she receives represents the fact that people do not see her as beautiful, that society believes that she needs to cover up her natural beauty to fit their mold of the perfect woman. Even the “pink and white nightie” is symbolism (22). The pink of the nightie is a symbol for her new found femininity; the white for her sexual purity. Both of these items are things that society deems highly important. The final symbolism in the poem is her death and funeral in the last stanza. This whole last stanza is a symbol for the death of every little thing that makes her herself, everything that sets her apart from other…
Among all the poem that we were assigned, my personal favorite would be the “Barbie Doll” by Marge Piercy. The poem was written in 1969, but it is still the ugly truth of todays generation. The poem explains how the girls struggles with all the expectations from the society on what to do, how to look and even how to act. I believe that girls and even guys should be free to have their own life no matter how they look like. Moreover, the poem really engages me with its storyline, which most poem does not have.…
Those permanent thoughts are what lead me to my next point. Why do women feel so pressured to look this way and act that way? In the poem it is mentioned how the narrator sees a magazine offering “How to Find the Perfect Dress for that Perfect Evening” and she is immediately captivated and must know more. This is an excellent symbol of the society we live in. Magazines, ads on TV, movies, shows, basically most media, put such a great emphasis on how people, particularly women, should look. Each day we are pressured into “how to get flat abs” or “how to get silky smooth hair” to match the beautiful models that we see. There is always…
“Seen through Rose-Tinted glasses:” The Barbie Doll in American Society. By Marilyn Motz; supports the highly debated topic that the toy Barbie produced by Mattel is a bad influence, on young girls. Motz is claiming that the young female child envisions herself as Barbie, and with Barbie resembling an older more mature woman. Something that Barbie’s age group cannot obtain, in till they grow older and more mature themselves. However, Barbie is just a toy, her resemblance, her actions, as a doll is, solely up to the child. Adults looking into their daughter’s childhood are simply over thinking what a three to eleven year old can produce inside her mind.…
In the past, women were always considered the subordinate gender that was expected to powder their nose and stay at home to be a homemaker. Even now, despite the movement to liberate women from stereotypical gender roles, women are still seen as the inferior gender that is discriminated against in society. As suggested by the popular Barbie doll created by Mattel, the idealized image of a woman in our patriarchal society is one who takes care of the home and is flawlessly beautiful with perfect skin, long legs, small waist, and slender figure. The Barbie doll is used as a tool for patriarchy in that it reinforces the notion that women should be domestic workers and maintain a feminine outer appearance. Also, patriarchal values affect girls starting at a young age as they unconsciously begin to believe that Barbie is what a woman should look and be like. With the appeal and popularity of this doll for the past several years, it is difficult to alter the notions of womanhood suggested by this doll. This implies that patriarchy is something we can not permanently overthrow because it is so deeply rooted in our society.…
The poems “Barbie Doll” and The Leap depict two very different female characters. They both seem to be going through difficult life changing events. The early childhood of the girl within “Barbie Doll” is depicted as being idealistic, because she is said to be engaging in normal childhood activities, and she is depicted as being attractive. Jane MacNaughton within The Leap poem is somewhat similar to “Barbie Doll” because she is depicted as a seemingly normal person at first; however, Jane MacNaughton is depicted in the seventh grade, whereas “Barbie Doll” is depicted at a juvenile stage of life.…