"Barbie Doll" Outline

Thesis: Marge Piercy incorporates the usage of simile,  repetition, and irony to ultimately characterize the severe issues of body image caused by gender norms, media messages, and peer disrespect.

1.Repetition

• "big nose...fat legs" (6, 11)
  
  • The repetition of the peer's identification of the protagonist's physical flaws enables the reader to somewhat experience the agony of focusing on those flaws. The reader can enter the mind of the protagonist, a mind fixating on the two traits even when other favorable traits are mentioned. She is so fragile and unstable, believing it to be her fault she looks the way she does, the two features engrained in her mind as being something she must apologize about. It is clear that the positive aspects are irrelevant to the protagonist, and no matter how hard she tries to fix her big nose and fat legs, the only solution to her agony is to get rid of them altogether.

2.Simile

• "Her good nature wore out / like a fan belt" (15-16)
  
  • The protagonist's breaking of strength is compared to the breaking of something inhuman and automatic. Her life has been not alive, but simply present, working to please others, but never being able to please either they or herself. Once a machine loses its meaning or function, it breaks, as does the protagonist. She can no longer take the strain of living without acceptance.

3. Irony

• "with the undertaker's cosmetics painted on, / a turned-up putty nose" (20-21)..."Doesn't she look pretty? everyone said. / Consummation at last. / To every woman a happy ending." (23-25)
  
  • Her entire life, the subject of the poem has been ridiculed, leaving her without self-acceptance. After trying to fix her only "flaws" by cutting them off, she ends her life. Only when she is lying in her casket during her funeral, with plastic surgery that has created a false but acceptable nose, do people compliment her looks. Ultimately, the price women pay for beauty and acceptance is death due to self-hatred.