Marge Piecys Barbie Doll Essays - Barbie Doll,

Marge Piecy's "Barbie Doll" Gender Identity in Piercy's "Barbie Doll" Dolls often give children their first lessons in what a society considers valuable and beautiful. These dolls often reveal the unremitting pressure to be young, slim, and beautiful in a society which values mainly aesthetics. Marge Piercy's "Barbie Doll" exhibits how a girl's childhood is saturated with gender-defined roles and preconceived norms for how one should behave. In order to convey her thoughts, the author uses familiar, yet ironic, imagery, as well as uses fluctuating tone in each stanza to better draw attention to the relevant points of her contention. The first four lines of "Barbie Doll" are written in a trite, simplistic tone which represent the normality and basic needs of infancy. It is at this point in one's life that a child has no ability to deviate from the norm, simply because they have no knowledge of it and are completely influenced by what their parents present them with. The presentation of a doll and an oven, along with lipstick (1-3), ensure that the girl will know exactly which gender role she must be. These lines imitate the rigidity in which sexual and gender roles are defined. The tone of the introductory stanza changes abruptly in line five when the speaker relates "Then, in the magic of puberty, a classmate said/ You have a great big nose and fat legs." What is particularly ironic is that puberty is referred to as a "magic" time, when really it is a time for emotional crisis within many children as they struggle to develop their autonomy. This line is directed in a candid fashion which digresses from the mildness of the first few lines, rendering it quite more effective than simplistic speech. The second stanza of "Barbie Doll" starts off as normal as the first, but easily strays into different meaning. While "She was healthy, tested intelligent" (7) connotes positive aspects of the girl, "possessed strong arms and back/ abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity" connotes an entirely divergent idea. Gender roles always defined the man as"strong" and the woman as "weak," the man as "skillful with his hands" and the woman as "skillful with a cookie tin," and finally, the man as the "sexual aggressor" while the woman was the "submissive help-mate." In lines eight and nine, the girl is identified by the characteristics typically associated with the male gender, something quite unusual and completely opposite that of what line seven implies. "She went to and fro apologizing" (10) conveys that the girl recognizes her traits as disparaging and dishonorable. The last line of the second stanza again changes in tone from simple to forthright with the statement "Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs"(11). This line re-emphasizes the ugliness of not measuring up to the standard of an ideal female, a standard set by society. Piercy addresses the stereotypical manners that women are pressured to perform in the third stanza when she writes "She was advised to play coy/exhorted to come on hearty/exercise, diet, smile, and wheedle"(12-14). By advising the girl to act enthusiastic in response to a man, starve herself to be thin, fake emotions, and influence men with soft words and flattery, the author makes a general statement about how women were practically forced to be something whether or not they wanted to. The words "coy" and "smile" conjure up images of a false passivity that women must endure, images that help to shape the poem by providing a better view of what the subject experienced. Line fifteen contains a reference to a fan belt, an object that, similarly to a person's "good nature," will wear out from use and abuse. The change in tone is repeated once again as the author switches from mild lines about personality to a dramatic line in which an analogy is made to represent an internal change in the character's mentality. With the beginning of the last stanza of "Barbie Doll," the reader can achieve almost a sense of relinquishment as the subject symbolically "...cut off her nose and her legs/ and offered them up." The reader is led to believe that the girl has come to a realization that she must account for the loneliness and emptiness that she has felt as a result of imitating a false person. This culmination is her death, an act of her surrendering herself to the pain. With line twenty's mention of an "...undertaker's cosmetics painted on," the author paints an image of concealment--the concealment of hurt and anguish suffered when a girl