"Barbie Doll" by Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy was born on March 31, 1936 in Detroit, Michigan. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University respectively. She is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Gone to Soldiers, a historical fiction novel set during WWII.

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.

In this poem, Piercy compares the ordinary woman, a “girlchild…born as usual,” to a Barbie doll. Her tone is initially amiable and jovial as she mentions that the child “was healthy, tested intelligent, possessed strong arms and back, abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity.” She compliments her characteristics and in doing so compares her to the dolls that the girl was given as a child. She ironically refers to puberty as magic as she mentions a classmate making fun of the girl. In this moment, as the girl hits puberty, the poem changes as well. The tone becomes acerbic, which is displayed my Piercy’s frequent use of vulgarity in her description of the girl’s “fat nose on thick legs” and how she later cuts them off. The girl resulted to changing her “exercise, diet, smile and wheedle” yet even through all of this “her good nature wore out.” We see that Piercy the author has her own formulated opinion at this point on the girl’s decisions and societal tendencies. Piercy is saying that no matter how much she changed her outward appearance, it did nothing for how she felt about herself; instead, it made it worse as she eventually ended up in a casket. The girl’s death is ironic as she is finally viewed as pretty, which can be compared to the version of her when she was just born, in the eyes of society. However, Piercy’s true intentions were to mock societal views on the importance of beauty and self-pity cynically. Through this character, she explains that beauty is dependent on how we think of ourselves more so than how others think of us. Anything we do about our outward appearance will only be temporary. Ergo, the girl’s pity was self-imposed and in turn did nothing but to put her in a casket being admired by those that did not truly care for her and likely put her there in the first place. Piercy accurately captures the arbitrary nature of society by comparing a girl to dolls, who have had countless of designs and models throughout history and change according to societal views on beauty.