Barbie has gotten a lot of criticism in recent years. From her looks to her careers, nobody seems to be buying into Barbie's marketing strategies anymore. Are girls becoming more sensitive of their appearance? is Barbie to blame? Margie Piercy seems to think so.
In her poem Barbie Doll, Piercy spins the image of a girl, fastened to toys marketed towards girls for her entire childhood, that finds herself on the bad side of puberty. One day a classmate tells her, "You have a great big nose and fat legs" (6), leaving the girl vulnerable.
The second stanza describes the girl almost as if she's a product for sale. "She was healthy, tested intelligence, / possessed strong arms and back, / abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity" (7-9). this could be a play on what the society around her would see, finding "Good qualities" that were make her a decent wife, to compensate for her big nose and thick legs.
After some terrible advice from people who also probably see only her lack of beauty, "her good nature wears out" (15), and she decides to "Cut off her nose and her legs" (17. (Hopefully this is metaphoric for plastic surgery...)
The final stanza opens with a funeral, presumably the girl's. Her face has been caked in make-up, and her nose is now molded from putty. She is dressed in a pink and white nighty, which makes me wonder if this whole funeral is metaphorical. Seeing her in her casket, people are finally seeing her for the beautiful girl that she was.
I believe that the funeral in the last stanza represents the loss of the girl's childhood. During childhood, most kids are told at some point (probably by parents) that they are super special and the most gorgeous person on the face of the planet. This causes a problem during puberty, their family's perspective of them mixing in with the cruel world.
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