Analysis Of Rubens Women By Wislawa Szymborska

Who decides what a woman should look like? Wislawa Szymborska’s poems “Rubens Women,” “Portrait of a Woman,” and “Over Wine” begin to answer this question. The ideal female body of today’s world is tall and skinny, but not everyone fits that description. Why can’t a woman decide for herself what she should look like?

Szymborska was a Polish poet who was one of few females to win a Nobel Prize for her works. She is not known for feminist writing and she does not preach feminism in her works. Many of her poems in this novel do not specify a gender, but since she is a female we assume it is of the female role. Polish professor Grażyna Borkowska says it does not matter for literature, whether the author is male or female, what matters

Szymborska praises these “Rubenesque” women in the poem. In “Rubens Women” it says that skinny girls do not make it into his paintings, they “went single file along the canvas’s unpainted side. Exiled by style. Only their ribs stood out.” The poem goes on to say that, “The thirteenth century would have given them golden halos. The twentieth, silver screens. The seventeenth, alas, holds nothing for the unvoluptuous (Szymborska, 2000, pg 47). Szymborska uses some imagery in “Rubens Women” to help you visualize these big women and perhaps she over exaggerates to make her point. Perhaps this poem, along with her other poems based on works of art, are about her thoughts as she looked at them. She says, “O pumpkin plump! O pumped up corpulence inflated double by disrobing and tripled by your tumultuous poses! O fatty dishes of love!” In today’s world no women would want to be described as a “fatty dish of love” and are told to love their bodies no matter what shape and size, but she is trying to give the poem a humorous

It is comprised of contradictory phrases such as, “change so that nothing with change (Szymborska, 2000, pg. 161).” The woman’s role in this poem seems to be the typical female persona of having kids, being submissive to the male, and reading Ladies Home Journal for fun in her down time. The woman is “Naïve, but gives the best advice. Weak, but takes on anything. A screw loose and tough as nails.” Naïve, weak, and a screw loose could be how a male describes her, but she would say that she gives the best advice, has the willpower to take on anything, and is as tough as nails. The last two lines of the poem read, “She must love him, or she’s just plain stubborn. For better, for worse, for Heaven’s sake.” For better, for worse is taken out of a traditional marriage ceremony and since they are married, she is bound to him forever and it his her duty to love and please him. Although this described role of the wife is not as common of a tradition today, because gender roles are not as defined in the post modern era, there are still multiple male figures around the world who believe that this is still the utmost duty of the