"Barbie Doll", Marge Piercy

Bio: Marge Piercy (1936) is an American poet born in Detroit, Michigan, to a family deeply affected by the Great Depression. She passed the time she spent sick as a child with a rheumatic fever by reading, and she has written many novels, poetry collections, and other collected works.


Barbie Doll

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 highlights not only how much words can hurt others, but how much society can effect and ruin someone's life. The tone begins light-hearted, making the audience reminisce about their own childhood, when they used to play with the child-sized versions of adult tools; stoves, irons, babies, and lipstick. Once the main character reaches puberty, however, the tone changes to one that is relentlessly cruel, stating that the protagonist has fat legs and a large nose. Throughout this poem, Piercy uses a more light-hearted tone to contrast against the very serious topic about which she is writing; how women - specifically teenage girls - are not the slightest bit hesitant about changing who they are to fit how society believes they should look. The first three stanzas begin speaking about how the young woman is beautiful, and lists the qualities that make her a unique, individual, and beautiful person. She then ends the first three stanzas stating something about how society believes that she still isn't good enough because of her legs and nose. The tone shifts from the middle to end of each stanza, because it goes from speaking about happy things about the girl, to saying that she isn't good enough. Only in the last stanza is there a 180-degree flip, where the beginning and middle of the stanzas have a depressing tone, but the ending changes when society comments on her beauty in the casket. We can assume that she is in the casket because she tried so hard to please society with being beautiful by their standards that she was willing to go to drastic measures to do so.