“Barbie Doll” and “Lady Lazarus” are two powerful and exceptional poems written by two celebrated poets from America. Marge Piercy and Sylvia Plath excellently portray the position occupied by women in society, but in extremely diverse ways.
A Critical Analysis of “Barbie Doll”
“Barbie Doll” is the outstanding poem by Marge Piercy, the American feminist poet, who excellently depicts the predicament of women and the abuse of women by the patriarchal society. Barbie dolls bring in the image of the cute and attractive toy girls. Every Baby girl child is born like Barbie dolls that have unrealistically perfect blonde hair, body and belongings. But whether they get the proper, contended life seems dubious and uncertain. The girl in the poem “was born as usual” and it’s a fact that she fails to receive an opportunity to feel satisfied with her life as she lives purely for the sake of others and finds contention in others happiness as is expected from a girl and a woman by the society.
Women as Perceived by the Society
Piercy quite plainly discloses the gifts offered to the girl child that highlights the expectations of the family and the society in general. The “dolls that did pee-pee/ and miniature GE stoves and irons” symbolizes the strong feminine aspects and gendered versions that follow the baby right after her birth into the world where she ought to occupy a similar place and position with the baby boy. It is a rather shrewd and tricky aspect of the society to define the roles to be played by the women by projecting the simple aspects of gifting stereotyped toys right from the start of a girl’s life. The activities of cooking and ironing are ascribed to women and these are assigned and labelled as feminine activities. A girl, to be accepted by the society, needs to have good looks and attracting appearance. In order to get the approval of the society, the girl manages to enrich her looks by wearing cherry- red lipstick that arouses sensuousness and enhances the sexuality of her that prioritize her over others.
The poet also invites our attention to the unavoidable puberty menstrual cycle in a girl’s life. The body starts changing and the girls sense a difference in their whole being as the new phase begins. The girl in poem has “a great big nose and fat legs” that invites criticisms from the public and she starts becoming conscious of her appearance and her existence in the society.
The poet also elaborates the good qualities and aspects of the girl like her intelligence, her strong arms and back, her abundant sexual drive. But these qualities seem to have no special value as everyone notices and criticizes her big nose and fat legs. Unfortunately her physical looks covers up her innate positive qualities and the society ridicules her for her fat nose and thick legs. It is really disgusting to witness the girl being persuaded by the society “to play coy, / exhorted to come on hearty, /exercise, diet, smile and wheedle”. But the failure to fulfil the expectations of the society pushes her to put an end to her life. The final stanza presents the dead body of the girl inside the coffin that resembles a big Barbie box. There is shocking irony in the last lines of the poem when the poet says, “to every woman a happy ending” which throws light on the fact that for women to lead a peaceful and happy life, she should conform to the principles of the society and should behave like a perfect Barbie doll. Philip Frisk comments:
So the author, in a bitter, bitter touch of grotesque comedy, has her cut them off. Soon after, in the funeral parlor, she is displayed with a cute, little nose and long, straight, slim legs, and everyone says how good she looks. Apparently, the undertaker has given her the Barbie Doll look after all. The poem ends with this bitter comment: "Consummation at last. / to every woman a happy ending (38).
A Critical Analysis of “Lady Lazarus”
Lady Lazarus, the celebrated poem by the renowned American writer Sylvia Plath, portrays the speaker’s aggression with the use of World War II Nazi Germany insinuations and imageries. It belongs to the Holocaust poems in which she develops a German image to symbolize Nazism and in sequence, repression. Plath calls herself a Biblical figure of a cat resurrected by the Christ as she has been three times resurrected from her suicidal attempts. Plath also seems to ridicule the male ego through the poem.
Pessimism of Plath
The poet infuses the realms of personal agony and communal woe in the poem and the poem establishes a distressing tautness between the solemnity of the experience pronounced and the deceitfully simple and meek form of the poem. The lexis and tempos which caters to the idiomatic ease of the casual speech, the recurrently end-stopped lines, and the replications which owe to effect of derisively offsetting the viciousness of the implication, all these launch the consciously facetious message which the poem attempts to accomplish. Plath deliberately uses many autobiographical elements in the poem. “Dying/is an art, like everything else. /I do it exceptionally well” exemplifies the suicidal attempts made by her and she takes it a point to make confessions through her poetry which she considers as a better option to enter into and depict wider themes and subjects. Susan Van Dyne highlights:
“Lady Lazarus” is one of the most Gothic of the lot. The poem means to give offense; it makes outrageous claims. One of these is the female persona's appropriation of the suffering of concentration camp inmates as a suitable analogy for the domestic tragedy of a failed marriage. This poem shows us Plath testing her authority, her myth-making capability, exercising a bold new voice that affronts and astonishes. Yet one of Lady Lazarus' strengths is her self-irony; she is as much aware of her excesses as her creator is in this description for a planned BBC broadcast: "The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is she has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman (396).
She parallels her miseries with that of the tortured Jews and surprisingly considers herself a Jew: “A sort of walking miracle, my skin/ Bright as a Nazi lampshade,/My right foot/A paperweight,/My face a featureless, fine/Jew linen.” “Lady Lazarus” is a poem of social censure with a strong moralistic tinge, and a work of art which exposes great methodical and logical facility. The frenzy is premeditated and operative. The poem delineates a psychosomatic journey that serves as an allegory that maintains a melancholic consciousness. Plath utilizes excellent rhetorical language and fixed vocabulary. There is a looming hatred toward men hidden in the words of Plath especially when she says, “I eat men like air.” She hints at hatred against men and declares that she has successfully defeated all her male enemies in her life. Both the poems, in diverse ways, highlight the predicament of women in the society.
