By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Barbie Doll’ is a poem by the American writer and activist Marge Piercy (born 1936). It was published in 1971 before being included in Piercy’s 1973 collection, To Be of Use.
The poem is an example of feminist literature: it focuses on a girl who is encouraged to perform a traditional idea of femininity, with the girl’s physical ‘imperfections’ eventually forcing her to go to extreme lengths to ‘cure’ herself of them. The poem’s title is a reference to the popular Barbie doll, a toy which originated in the United States.
First stanza
The poem is divided into four stanzas. The first stanza introduces a young girl who was given a number of traditional ‘girls’ toys’ as presents: dolls that wet themselves (or simulated as much), and toy gas-electric stoves and little toy irons so the girl could play at being a grown-up housewife.
The girl was also given little cherry-colour lipsticks so she could practise being an adult woman who wears lipstick (but for whom? the appreciation and admiration of men?).
But then, when puberty hit, one of the girl’s classmates at school made her feel self-conscious by telling her she has a big nose and fat legs.
Second stanza
This girl, we are told, was healthy, with strong arms and a strong back. She was also clever, good with her hands, and possessed of a normal, healthy sex drive for a teenage girl.
But despite all of these positive attributes, she went around apologising to everyone, because – so she’d been told – she had a fat nose and thick legs, and that, she believed, is what everyone saw when they looked at her.
Third stanza
The girl was told how to behave: by turns, she was to ‘play coy’, pretending to be shy and demure, and to ‘come on hearty’, or be flirtatious and flighty. She was instructed to keep fit and to go on a diet (so her legs would be less ‘fat’, one presumes). She was told to smile and to flatter those around her to get what she wants.
Eventually, the girl’s patience and kindness ‘wore out’ like the fan belt on a car. When a fan belt wears out, it snaps – and so, the girl’s temper frayed and she lost patience. She gave in to society’s demands and cut her nose and legs off, in what we might interpret as a grimly extreme form of cosmetic surgery (‘nose jobs’, for instance).
The girl has stopped trying to be herself and has instead given in to society’s requirements, cutting off the body parts which have been pronounced imperfect or flawed.
Fourth stanza
This extreme solution ends up killing the poor girl, whom we find, in the poem’s final stanza, lying in a satin-lined coffin, her face adorned by a different kind of ‘cosmetics’: the special preserving balms undertakers use to mask the haunting, unpleasant appearance of dead people’s faces.
The girl has been given a kind of ‘nose job’, with putty being placed where her real nose would have been. She is clad in that traditional feminine colour, pink, and white for purity.
Everyone who comes to see the dead girl’s body comments on how pretty she now looks, in a striking reversal of the taunts (big nose, fat legs) levelled at her in the poem’s first stanza. Finally, she has been ‘consummated’, her process of beautification complete. This is, we are ironically told, a ‘happy ending’ on behalf of all women.
Analysis
‘Barbie Doll’ is a kind of narrative poem, telling the (brief) story of a ‘girlchild’ who finds the playground bullying she receives over her nose and her legs, and the mounting social pressure to conform to a very rigid and unrealistic ideal of femininity, too much for her to take. In the end, self-mutilation and death – whether she intended to end her own life or not is open to question – is seen as the only course of action.
But although the ‘story’ of the poem is fairly straightforward (as the summary above should demonstrate), the language in which the poem is written, and the voice of the poem’s speaker, raise more difficult questions.
Take the poem’s opening stanza, which combines an arch, knowing ‘voice’ with a more infantile and immature one: ‘born as usual’ is almost world-weary in its sarcasm (this particular girl’s plight is universal to all girls and women), while ‘dolls that did pee-pee’ takes us into the mind, and the language, of the small girl receiving her first Barbie doll as a present. The child’s innocence is poignantly undercut by a more mature voice which seems to hint, ‘we all know how this goes’.
What this does is effectively offer us a dual perspective on the events being described: we are simultaneously invited into an imaginative sympathy for the poor, innocent girl who is made to hate her body because it fails to conform to impossibly high standards of beauty, and to join the ‘adult’ narrator of the poem in rolling our eyes and observing how things were ever thus in a patriarchal society which demands women act and look a certain way.
There’s a knowing quality to some of the phrases and idioms used, too: the girl has ‘cut off her nose’ (to spite her face?), while ‘offering’ her nose and legs ‘up’ casts the girl in the role of a willing human sacrifice (in many primitive cultures, virgin girls were sacrificed to the gods). Arguably, because of the poem’s title, ‘Barbie Doll’, the ‘gods’ that the girl has offered herself up to are both capitalism and patriarchal society.
Form and structure
‘Barbie Doll’ is organised into four stanzas, of slightly uneven lengths: the first stanza has six lines, the second five, and the third and fourth seven lines each. The poem is written in free verse, because it has no rhyme scheme or regular metre or rhythm. This is suitable for the poem’s rather conversational, witty tone.
However, note how the first two stanzas both end with talk of the girl’s ‘fat’ legs; the third stanza seems set to continue this trend, until we get the surprise twist (the legs, like her nose, are cut off, but the stanza does not ‘cut off’ at this point) and ‘legs’ continues, via enjambment or a run-on line, into the next line, in which these amputated body parts are offered up to some unspecified person or persons.