Barbie Doll

In Marge Piercy's poem "Barbie Doll" she talks about an issue that is very real today, and that is the pressure  for girls to look a curtain way. Piercy does this by using irony throughout the poem. One place where Piercy uses irony is "Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said: You have a great big nose and fat legs."(Piercy line 5-6) This is ironic because the sentence starts of with "magic" which is normally used in fairy tales to make every thing seem happy. But when one of her classmates said "You have a great big nose and fat legs," the word "magic" is flipped upside down. Another place where Piercy uses irony is when the girlchild had cut off her legs and nose and was laying in her casket and Piercy writes "Consummation at last. To every woman a happy ending."(24-25) This is very ironic because this quote is saying that for every woman in the world the most important thing is to be seen as pretty. I think that irony is useful in this poem because it allows Piercy to put a negative underlying tone on the poem even though there are no specific negative words are sections.