Life as Plastic Both today and yesterday's society have created a mold that young women are expected to fit in to. Tall, tan and slender girls are often looked at as the beautiful members of society. The positive and wonderful qualities of both women and men are often overlooked because of physical appearance and image. Marge Piercy accurately portrays the unreachable standards placed on women to be beautiful from adolescence into adulthood by her use of fluctuating tone and effective symbolism in her poem “Barbie Doll”. The poem follows a young girl from her childhood to her adulthood in a third person omniscent point of view.
The rhetorical stance that Prager conveys is that Barbie is one of the many reason that young adolescent girls today have body image issues. The intended pathos for “Our Barbies, Ourselves” is directed to those who can relate to Prager’s feelings towards Barbie. Young and middle aged girls can understand Prager’s reasoning for her mixed feelings. Prager gives examples of how she played with Barbie when she was younger and how she felt knowing that Barbie and Ken could never become romantic. Those who have played with Barbie dolls at some length can grasp what Prager was talking about.
Even though Barbie is put in a professional occupation, they attribute her success to good luck instead of her non-existent efforts. Instead, it is her pleasure- seeking that allows her dog to discover the gold. Even at work Barbie lives a life of leisure. Motz explains how the image of an adult woman that barbie plants on little girls is fictional. However, we all seem to encourage our little girls to play and interact with this dolls.
Giovanny Sanchez May 5, 2012 Ms. Collins Barbie’s World In everyone’s childhood there is always that one special non-living figure in their personal lives, a figure we admired, something we looked up to be, like an idol. In “You Can Never Have Too Many,” Jane Smiley thanks Barbie for the effect she had on her daughter’s lives as they were growing up to be young adults; by teaching them the feminine side of woman at an early stage, which ultimately allowed their minds to have a lot more options when it really came down to figuring out who they wanted to be at an adult stage. Smiley however, does not effectively support this argument because she gives a lot of credit to Barbie for the way her daughters turn out to be but she’s forgetting
In the poem, the speaker states the girlchild has “wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy” (4), showing that she already wants to alter her appearance. As children grow into young adults, they become aware of outside judgments; as the girlchild was made aware in the poem. “Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:/ You have a great big nose and fat legs” (5-6). Girls are pressured into looking the way media portrays beauty. Unfortunately, outward appearances take on a more important role than other characteristics to teenage girls.
Analytical Essay Have you ever wanted to change something about yourself that no one else thought needed to be changed? What if everyone else but you thought you needed to change a flaw you had never seen before. That is the tragic situation in Marge Piercy’s “Barbie Doll.” The main character went from having a positive outlook on her beauty and being healthy and intelligent to having a negative self image and becoming self-conscious of everything that once was. If she had been told she was beautiful, maybe just once, she would not have taken such drastic measures to obtain beauty. In Piercy’s poem, the deadly effects of the ‘Beauty Myth’ are revealed in a symbolic representation of death.
Anonymous Mrs.Anonymous English 101 Essay #1 1 Oct. 2012 Vignette Essay As a young girl there are many assumptions and unanswered questions about growing up and what it means to be a woman. In “The House On Mango Street”, the author Sandra Cisneros teaches many lessons throughout her novel including one in particular. In her vignette “Hips”, Esperanza, Nenny, Rachel, and Lucy explain to each other what it means to have hips. In “Hips”, Cisneros shows the innocence of young girls and establishes the relationship between Esperanza and Nenny which demonstrates her view of where a woman’s place is in society. The setting of this vignette describes Esperanza, Nenny, Rachel, and Lucy playing double-dutch together.
In the poem “Barbie Doll,” written by Marge Piercy tells a story of a young girl’s short life. The girl is born and lives a normal life until she is made fun of during puberty which causes her to commit suicide. In this poem we see evidence to this idea in the poet’s use of irony, her attitude on the subjects of both inner and outer beauty, and her attitude on the significance of words interfering with a woman’s self confidence. To begin, the poet’s use of irony is felt most toward the end of the poem. The very thought that people would say a person is pretty only after they are dead and it is too late for them to hear is sad and disturbing.
So why are females so bombarded with pressure to live up to what society says a woman should be like? For a very long time in American history, women were told that they should be feminine. They were told that there place in life was to be at home and raise a family and to look pretty for their husbands. Little girls were given Barbie dolls and games called Mystery Date and Miss Popularity (Peril). All of these things helped conform little girls into thinking that their role in life was to be something pretty for a man to look at.
International Business Chapter 14 Oxford University Press Prof. Rakesh Mohan Joshi Case Study BARBIE FACES ISLAMIC DOLLS Barbie, so named by ideator Ruth Handler after daughter Barbara s nickname, became the world s most popular fashion doll. Handler found that young girls enjoyed playing out their dreams in adult roles when she saw her daughter Barbara playing with a paper doll and imagining it as a grown up. Most children s dolls available at that time represented infants. This gave rise to an idea of a teenage doll, Barbie. Handler co-founded Mattel, a Southern California toy company with her husband Elliot Handler, and spearheaded the introduction of the doll.