Barbie Doll: Societies Destructive Idealism Essay Example

our culture for the way it idealizes the female body.

For more than 40 years parents have been buying the doll for their daughters, who attempt to imitate Barbie’s appearance and the values that her appearance may embody. Piercy suggests that it is extremely destructive. The title of this poem refers to Mattel’s Barbie Doll, a popular toy for young girls. The original Barbie is tall, blonde, blue eyed and shapely. Barbie made her introduction in 1959 at the American Toy Fair in New York City.

The poem begins in a fairy-tale fashion; the archaic term “girl child” is used to emphasize the mythical quality of the story.The dolls, GE stove, iron and lipstick are all traditional playthings for young girls, but they are also markers of an identity in the making, the things that young girls grow to identify with. The doll presents an idealized image of the body. The stove and irons tell them what kind of work is expected of them when they grow up. Lipstick, some claim the most sexualized cosmetic for women, signals to young girls that they will be valued for their physical appearance.

The “magic of puberty” suggests the theme of growth. It’s a magical time because the body is ever changing.Girls become young women and their bodies change. Piercy uses the term ironically here, as she is also referring to the pain that comes with puberty. Teens become more aware of one another as sexual and social beings, along with this comes a great desire to become cruel toward one another. The “girl child” is told she has “a great big nose and fat legs” even though she

is smart, healthy and strong.

These qualities are seen as being positive only for males, not females. Being good with one’s hands (manual dexterity) is a conventional male trait.Having an “abundant sexual drive” for boys might be seen as a stepping stone to manhood, for girls it is considered aggressive or slutty. Another author Alice Van Wart suggests: “By collapsing the images “of a great big nose and fat legs into the comic image of “a fat nose on thick legs,” Piercy uses synecdoche (a figure of Speech in which the part stands for the whole, or the whole stands for the part), to draw attention both to her use of irony and to the sad fact the young woman can only see herself in the terms of the artificial ideal. (Van Wart 02)”The girl was made to feel guilty for who she was, for being smart and capable and for not being slim and “beautiful. ” She apologized to everyone for not being the person they wanted her to be, but all they could see was her body and how it did not match their ideas of what a woman should look like.

They tried to help her be more accepted by suggesting how to compensate for her unfeminine qualities. It is important to understand that for Piercy the “girl child” is “every girl” not a poetic character with no relation to the real world.Children are socialized through family, culture, and education from the day they are born. Piercy is symbolically looking at the process of how children come to inhabit their gendered identities and the destructive consequences of those processes for women. Her

“good nature,” that part of her that always accommodates others, has been so exploited that she can no longer continue.

She “offers up” (a gesture of sacrifice) her nose and legs, the symbols in her disturbed mind. These lines are filled with irony.The very person that the girl child could never be is the person “appearing” in her casket, after a makeover by the undertaker. “A turned-up putty nose” and “a pink and white nightie” are features of a Barbie-like beauty and femininity. It is ironic that the very people (“everyone”) who could not appreciate the girl child, for who she was in life, now admire the person she is made to be in death.

In Piercy’s fable, it is society (not the girl) that achieves consummation; it has made the girl child into what it wanted. Consummation” is used to describe her completion. The last line of the poem echoes the happy ending of a fairy-tale. Ending as it began. In this case Piercy is saying that because of women’s subservient position in society, it is often difficult for their lives to have happily ever -afters.

Piercy’s poem symbolizes what happens tp young women in real life. Women all over the world have this stigma that if you don’t look like Barbie, you don’t fit in. You were less beautiful, less valuable, less worthy.If you didn’t look like Barbie companies would discontinue you.

You simply couldn’t compete. Before Piercy became politically active in the 1960’s she was a part of the Barbie-ized culture of the 1950’s America. The roles began to expand in the 1960’s as more opportunities developed for women. Piercy herself embodied

America’s cultural changes, as she divorced her first husband partly because he did not take her writibg seriously and held conventional notions of how a wife should behave.

VanWart suggests the following: “In “Barbie Doll,” Piercy has found the perfect vehicle to express her anger and to criticize both women and the society they live in. By equating the women in the poem with the image of the Barbie Doll and by using irony as a controlling device within the poem, the poet shows both the insidious way in which women are objectified as well as their own cooperative part in the process. ” (VanWart 3)As a result of the ever-changing American society, gender roles for women have expanded greatly since the 1950’s. These changes have been tracked by the Barbie Doll, which literally has done thousands of incarnations, including Francine the African-American Barbie, and “Punk” Barbie, a 1980’s doll. More recently Mattel has announced plans to give Barbie a makeover.

She will have a “less graduated profile,” in response to society’s interest in more realism in their toys.