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Essay on barbie doll by marge piercy
Barbie doll analysis by marge piercy
Barbie doll analysis essay
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Barbie Doll’ written by Marge Piercy (1973)
This girlchild was born as usual
And presented dolls that did pee-pee
And miniature GE stoves and irons
And wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy.
Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:
You have a great big nose and fat legs.
She was healthy, tested intelligent,
Possessed strong arms and back,
Abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity.
She went to and fro apologizing.
Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs.
She was advised to play coy,
Exhorted to come on hearty,
Exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.
Her good nature wore out
Like a fan belt.
So she cut off her nose and her legs
And offered them up.
In the casket displayed on satin she lay
With the undertaker’s cosmetics painted on,
A turned-up putty nose,
Dressed in a pink and white nightie.
Doesn’t she look pretty? Everyone said.
Consummation at last.
To every woman a happy ending.
Robert Frost beautifully said that “Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat”. In fact, poems are all about expressing deep secretly kept feelings through the handling of language. Poetry is a shareable and universal language of specific states of heart to which any reader can identify himself/herself. It is the voice which says the truth. Quite often, delicate subjects lead to sensitive poem like the one of Marge Piercy that we are now going to scan. In the following stanzas, the poetess portrays the hard life of an innocent girl, victim of the society criteria.
The poem has been shaped according to three leading themes: innocence, persecution and death, as we will now see.
First of all, if we closely look at the first stanza, the most important one, the innocence of childhood is being depicted through the musicality of the verses. There is an assonance in “i” which sounds like a childish voice (world of innocence) and an alliteration in “s” which insists on the smoothness of this universe. Meanwhile, we will notice that the poetess does know the little girl as she uses the definite pronoun “This” (verse 1). She describes her as being innocent, naïve and passive as shown by the passive form: “was born; was presented” (verses 1-2). During her childhood, everything seems to go on quite well: she plays with girl games like “dolls; GE stoves; lipsticks” (v.1-4) and she is living a “magic puberty” (v.5)....
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...urity and innocence coming out of her since the very beginning of the poem but tarnished by the bullies. The verse 23 is then of a tremendous importance as “everyone” is looking at her to see if she finally suits the physical standards of beauty in death. “Putty” (v.21) and “consummation at last” (v.24) echo and highlight the falsity of her surrounding and the importance given to the ‘façade’. Maybe she is cutter in death because of this “putty nose” created thanks surgery. We may wonder if the poetess shares the beliefs of these foolish people. According to the two last verses we can clearly see that she does not. There is irony in her words as a “happy ending” is only possible when fulfilling the consumer society’s criteria instead of founding one’s real identity.
If sharing feelings is one of the aims of a poem, opening the reader’s eyes can be another one. Through this poem, Marge Piercy has succeeded to take life by the throat, to capture the real essence of it. The expression of deep feelings has become possible for both the reader and the poetess, who shares her grief and anger against the devastating stereotypes of the consumer society.
In order to understand the poem we need to understand the author’s background and their work focus. Marge Piercy was born in Michigan, she was the first person in her family
Author, Marge Piercy, introduces us to a young adolescent girl without a care in the world until puberty begins. The cruelty of her friends emerges and ultimately she takes her own life to achieve perfection in “Barbie Dolls” (648). At the time when all children are adjusting to their ever changing bodies, the insults and cruelties of their peers begin and children who were once friends for many years, become strangers over night caught in a world of bullying. A child who is bullied can develop severe depression which can lead to suicide; and although schools have been educated in recognizing the signs of bullying, there is an epidemic that has yet to be fully addressed within our schools or society.
In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby functions under the illusion that Daisy is perfect and is living in such distress because she was forced to marry Tom due to Gatsby being away at war and being poor. This illusion leads Gatsby to spend his entire adult life pining after Daisy and cheating his way up the social and economic ladder in order to win her over. Gatsby believes that Daisy will someday come back to him because she loves him so much and they will live happily ever after together.
Through her use of the words “dreamed”, “sweet women”, “blossoms” and the Mythology of “Elysian fields” in lines one through three, she leads the reader to the assumption that this is a calm, graceful poem, perhaps about a dream or love. Within the first quatrain, line four (“I wove a garland for your living head”) serves to emphasise two things: it continues to demonstrate the ethereal diction and carefree tone, but it also leads the reader to the easy assumption that the subject of this poem is the lover of the speaker. Danae is belittled as an object and claimed by Jove, while Jove remains “golden” and godly. In lines seven and eight, “Jove the Bull” “bore away” at “Europa”. “Bore”, meaning to make a hole in something, emphasises the violent sexual imagery perpetrated in this poem.
In her poem entitled “The Poet with His Face in His Hands,” Mary Oliver utilizes the voice of her work’s speaker to dismiss and belittle those poets who focus on their own misery in their writings. Although the poem models itself a scolding, Oliver wrote the work as a poem with the purpose of delivering an argument against the usage of depressing, personal subject matters for poetry. Oliver’s intention is to dissuade her fellow poets from promoting misery and personal mistakes in their works, and she accomplishes this task through her speaker’s diction and tone, the imagery, setting, and mood created within the content of the poem itself, and the incorporation of such persuasive structures as enjambment and juxtaposition to bolster the poem’s
In the second stanza, Piercy describes the girl as healthy, intelligent, and strong (7-8). Yet these positive equalities alone, could not keep people from criticizing her, so the girl feels inferior. “She went to and fro apologizing,” which demonstrates her collapse of confidence with the people she is surrounded with, who kept putting her down (10). She gives in to the hurtful things people say about her: “Everyone [kept] seeing a fat nose on thick legs” (11). The girl thus lets people push her in the direction of society’s standard of beauty, instead of affirming her own unique beauty.
Both Hagar and King Lear strive to change their flaws and dysfunctional situations in life, aiming for success and growth as an individual. Similarly, Hagar and King Lear both have perceived worst moments of their life. Hagar’s worst perceived moment throughout her quest of life is when she stumbles across an ad in the newspaper that Marvin and Doris; her son and his wife, wer...
Paula Bohince grew up in rural Pennsylvania town and still resides there. (Bohince, Paula). The theme and setting reflects a young innocent girl raped in a Pennsylvania town. The poet writes the poem from the victim’s perspective. The words give a creepy feeling of what has happened. The poem describes a young girl who was brutally taken advantage of and relays the devastating affect it had on her. The diction is very fitting for the poem. It creates a very vivid picture of the devastating affect the attack had on the girl. The diction creates a gruesome picture and tone for the reader. The use of words like transparency, black lamb and maggots generates a rejected feeling in the girl. There is no place she can hide and her feelings are constantly being eaten away.
...is shows Daisy’s intention the whole time as she was never going to leave the life she knew for Gatsby. Daisy was never going to pick Gatsby over Tom although that is what Gatsby expected. In actuality, the outcomes were detrimental to Gatsby unlike the jovial outcomes in Gatsby’s fantasy.
The influential roles of women in the story also have important effects on the whole poem. It is them that press the senses of love, family care, devotion, and other ethical attitudes on the progression of the story. In this poem the Poet has created a sort of “catalogue of women” in which he accurately creates and disting...
When reading a story or a poem, readers tend to analyze, and develop their own opinions. Any content an author or poet produces is up to the reader to question, and identify what the story is trying to say. The point that I am stating is that, stories are like maps that we readers need to figure out. We have to find the starting point, and get to the destination of our conclusion, and the thoughts we have about the story or poem. In the stories that we have read so for throughout the semester, they all have different messages of what they are trying to convey to the reader in a way that can be relatable. Among all the author’s and poet’s works we have read, I have enjoyed Theodore Roethke’s poems. Roethke has developed poems that explore emotions that readers can relate to. I would like to explain and interpret the themes that Theodore Roethke expresses in the poems “My Papa’s Waltz”, “The Waking”, and “I Knew a Woman”.
On April 20, 1999 in a suburban town called Littleton, Colorado one high school was about to have one of the most tragic and deadly days in US history. Columbine High School was in the forefront of this tragedy. Two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, opened fire on their fellow classmates and teacher. These two students cut the lives short of thirteen students and one teacher. They then turned their guns onto themselves leaving the nation with no answers as to why? They did leave videotape. This videotape contained Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold planning their attack on Columbine High School. This piece of evidence showed two students that were not part of the "in crowd". They were outsiders, losers, as some would consider them. They were taunted, humiliated, and disrespected by their classmates. But how can two intelligent students do something as deadly as they did. Was it because they had bad parents? Not at all, they even went out of their way to save their parents the blame by repeatedly saying that it was not their fault that they were about to do what they did. So what was the cause of all this tragedy and how can it be stopped so it can never happen again in our middle schools and high schools? Elliot Aronson a social psychologist wrote a book called Nobody Left to Hate, Teaching Compassion After Columbine. This book represents his ideas on how to use certain strategies to have a better school environment that teaches compassion, tolerance while putting education in a winning situation.
In a world where many are led to believe that they fall short of what society depicts as “perfect”, it is still true that everyone is beautiful in their own way. There are even more demands on girls now a days than there has ever been before. Some may think they need to fit in, so they become someone they are not or they begin to act like a totally different person. “Barbie Doll” by Marge Piercy, illustrates society’s high and unrealistic expectations on the physical appearance of women, while failing to see that a woman’s self-esteem is at risk of being diminished.
Nobody could have predicted the tragic events that occurred on April 20, 1999. Soon, the town of Littleton, Colorado would be the setting for the deadliest shooting in US history. Students, parents and teachers all started their day like any other; parents dropping off their kids at the high school and teachers preparing for another day of learning. Little did they know that in two hours, everyone’s lives will change forever. The massacre started at 11:30AM. The whereabouts was the Columbine High School as two gunmen wearing black trench coats and ski masks threw explosives as well as shooting students and staff – killing up to 23 (actual body count was 15) and injuring over 20 people. Gunshots were constant throughout the school, as both gunmen stalked and terrorized the other students.
Between the years 1999 and 2007 twelve school rampage shootings occurred, eight of them referenced Columbine as inspiration (Guy). The United States has then become a nation where school shootings are common. But, also where Americans have become numb to them, since they are vastly frequent. Accordingly, in the United States it has been studied that mass killings happen about every two weeks and a school shooting once a month (Guy). Harris and Klebold were victimized by other students and considered outcasts. This lead for many people to believe that's what motivated them to plot the massacre. Therefore, many schools are trying to create a “positive school climate” to prevent school shootings (Calefati). This positive school climate is a way of making the school environment safe, yet also make the students feel valued. Teachers and school administrators are now encouraged to be more connected to students that are in small groups or isolated. This allows students to feel more connected to their school communities and comfortable to talk to someone. Something like this would have really benefitted Harris and Klebold at the time, since they had a strong hatred toward the school and