Barbara Millicent Roberts

I think a good indicator of my future grade on this test is that I enjoyed these poems much more than last weeks, which isn't saying a whole lot, but still I'm at least getting a kick out of them.  Like the next one Barbie Doll by Marge Piercy.  Some people would like to believe Piercy is attempting some sort of social statement with this work about how our culture views an attractive woman, but I believe it goes deeper than that.  But before one is able to examine that, one must realize the allusion (#14) made in the title of the poem to understand where Piercy is coming from.  Nowhere in the poem does the speaker mention a Barbie Doll nor what one is, yet an educated reader will immediately acknowledge the famous perfection of the doll and the controversies that have long come with one, expanding and amplifying Piercy's point.  The verbal irony used in the poem is where the main focus is at, with the final stanza ironically reflecting on a woman who killed herself for failing to fit society's standard of said woman, while looking uncannily beautiful in the casket.  She cut off her nose and legs, the parts of her body she was so often told were ugly before doing so.  The eerie cool part for me was how the funeral-goers commented on how great she looked because she had a fake (putty) nose and the legs are never shown at a showing.