A Distorted Mirror (Question 8)

Marge Piercy's "Barbie Doll" bears a rather bitterly harsh tone. Each stanza of this poem serves to express this mood in parallel manners. In the first and second stanzas, the general pattern progress from positive to negative points. At first, the girl in the poem experiences happiness, with "dolls that did pee-pee" (2), "miniature GE stoves and irons" (3), and "lipsticks of the color of cherry candy" (4), all items which convey an image of girlish joy. But then that joy is cut short: "A classmate said:/ You have a great big nose and fat legs" (5-6). In that instant, the tone sours. The second stanza also follows this pattern. The speaker presents several wonderful characteristics of the "healthy, tested intelligent" (7) girl. Yet at the end, the speaker again brushes these qualities aside: "Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs" (11). The third stanza offers a brief change in pattern from the other three stanzas, but this stanza contains solely a bitter-sounding description of the society's pressure on the girl to change herself, culminating in "her good nature" (15) wearing out.

The final stanza offers an interesting change: this time, the negative is expressed first, followed by the positive. The speaker utilizes overstatement to emphasize the girl's change within and without. The speaker even goes so far as to imply that the girl's old self died, replaced with a girl "with the undertaker's cosmetics painted on,/ a turned-up putty nose,/ dressed in a pink and white nightie" (20-22). The event described as horribly depressing. Instead of describing it as depressing however, the speaker recounts the reaction of society: not a reaction of horror, but one of elation at the woman's "happy ending" (25). The tone is powerfully underscored in the final line of the poem: "To every woman a happy ending" (25). This bitterly ironic statement reflects on the supposed happiness that society makes people believe they feel when they kowtow to everyone's perception. With that final sentence, the speaker seems to be expressing the sentiment that the effect of societal pressure is terrible, but it is also unstoppable.