Lipstick on the Mirror

1165 Words5 Pages
The Lipstick on the Mirror" is making a negative statement on Hollywood and advertising that have created empires off of convincing women that they should look a certain way. The speaker of the poem is an omniscient narrator that has been watching the "wicked queen", who symbolizes industry and advertising, influencing the "common" people. The tone of the speaker is very negative and disappointed, it is also condescending in the way that the speaker points out the negative actions of the queen. The speaker and their tone is effective in this poem because they are like the reader of a fairytale. The "wicked queen" is an allusion to the wicked queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which is a commonly known fairytale with a moral at the end. From the beginning of the fairytale, one can tell that the wicked queen is going to be the antagonist, so when the wicked queen is used as the main subject of the poem, the reader can sense from the beginning that industry and advertising, symbolized by the wicked queen, is going to be looked upon in a negative light. The punctuation creates a rhythm because many details are placed in lists; for example, "Hosiery and bras, as consumers, enchanted," (19). The listing nature of the details of the poem allow for more and more detail to be added; the rhythm makes it seem as though the speaker could find numerous details to support their case with little effort. It is also effective how Disch uses adjectives almost as if they are nouns; for example, "Would lap it up, gazing in their lesser/ Mirrors to see themselves in royal attire," (7-8). Lesser could mean that the women are looking at what they consider to be their lesser beauty, but lesser really goes with the word mirrors. Disch uses personification, among other literary techniques, often such as when he writes, "Whose compact mirrors would whisper," (12). He makes it seem

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