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Marge Piercy's The Barbie Doll

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The poem Barbie Doll by Marge Piercy is a short poem that talks about a little girl who is born just like any other little girl. She plays with dolls and little ovens and messes around with makeup. She is fine and unbothered with her life till she hits puberty. Around that age she has a classmate tell her “you have a big nose and fat legs.” She was a girl who was healthy, strong, and intelligent but, she was apologizing to everyone for what they saw. She dieted and exercised to try and be better and she put a smile on her face to make it all seem okay but, it got tiring and she couldn't do it anymore so she gave up her nose and legs. With that being said it could mean various things so take it as you will. The end of the poem you see her in a casket with a new nose and makeup and essentially she looks like a doll. Everyone who is there to see her comments on how pretty she. She is said to now have a happy ending. This poem talks about how this girl was just an innocent girl who didn't have any issues with herself till she reached a certain age. Other peoples comments is what made her become self conscious and felt the need to please others. She put herself through so much to get to this perfect image and eventually gave up. She gave up her nose …show more content…

She was a political organizer and took part in a lot of different issues, feminism being one of them. In her free time Piercy wrote, through the poem Barbie Doll you can see how real life issues seeped into writing. The social issues really came through in this poem because this little girl was morphing to be this image that society told her to be. Around that time a woman’s voice was belittled and she was expected to change to be this person that everyone told her to be. People then didn't clearly see the consequence that young girls especially were going through just to try an attain this unattainable

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