Barbie Doll By Marge Piercy

It is clear to see that since the beginning of time, the true definition of a woman was to be a thin waist, long haired, porcelain doll who everyone adores. She being a subtle and delightful creature could never be viewed as anything but “attractive and vacuous”. No matter how many mishaps she may have, her beautiful body could never be at fault. After all, a man eats with his eyes and thinks with his package. Unfortunately, to go beyond the cloud nine phenomenon, pass the plastic mold, and straight into reality, the world we live in is painted in more than just black and white. It shouldn’t matter if we’re round, hourglass, or slim, we’re beautiful in all aspects of the meaning.
With changing of the times comes changes of opinions,

The poem describes the challenges that women of all ages face when they cannot fit into society standards of being a woman and how it can be detrimental to their inner and outer physique. The girl who was intelligent and healthy had to play along into her surroundings, but to others she’d always have those unappealing features. This I believe is when her breaking point was hit. Piercy describes this very moment in the poem by saying, “her good nature wore out like a fan belt” (lines 15-16). In other words, the young girl could no longer endure the torment by the society around her, so she just snapped. In doing so, she relinquished her chubby legs and inflated nose to fit in with the fabric of the witnesses. The entire poem is written with a tone of depression and sadness, in fact, with the young girl presented as “going to and fro apologizing," about her culturally unacceptable image (line 10). The image that she possesses is not supposed to be wrong in an empirical sense, but rather that it is incorrect in comparison to what America typically presents as being the "perfect"

Stanza two I found to be more explanatory in the article, “Barbie Doll” and “G.I. Joe”: Exploring Issues of Gender by Robert Perr. Perr of course states what the second stanza is bluntly saying to describe the young girl and her progression through puberty. What I was surprised by, was Perr’s literary analysis of it. He says, “however, the aggressively positive characteristics are balanced by a grim yet simple line: “she went to and fro apologizing” (10). Students do not miss the sad rhythmic emphasis that “to and fro” provides”. He’s saying that to give the poem that tone, it needs that one saddening line to make you sense that defeat. Perr, Robert. “Barbie Doll” and “G.I. Joe”: Exploring Issues of Gender.” The English Journal, Vol. 88, No. 3 (Jan, 1999): 83-85.