"Barbie Doll" by Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy was born in Detroit, and later attended the University of Michigan. She usually approaches her poetry with a feminist view or writes about topics of class or culture. She has published poetry as well as several novels. She is still continuing to write to this day, living with her husband in Cape Cod. 

Barbie Doll by Marge Piercy 

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.

This poem is structured in stanzas. Each stanzas starts with a new degree of the girls condition, and each one gets worse. The poem is about a girls body image, and how people around us can impact us and lower our self esteem to the point of death. The stanzas continue to increase in the severity of her condition until the last stanza when the poem implies that the girl has died. This is organized in a way so as to show how severe this issue can be. 

I think this poem does a great job of showing a modern issue that many girls have today. We all have the pressure to be perfect and look like the girl on the magazine cover, but in truth we all have our own beauty. The girl in the poem was pestered about her body image until the point where she dies because she was trying to be what others wanted her to be. 

This poem conveys how others perception of ourselves can affect us more than what meets the eye. A snarky comment about someone's weight may seem light, but it can follow someone forever. In the poem, the girl starts out loving her body as a child, but when others make comments about how it's not what it is supposed to be then she starts noticing her imperfections. Our lives tend to revolve around who we surround ourselves with, and I think if we surround ourselves with positive people than our lives will have more positivity and spread to many more things throughout our lives.