Marge Piercy’s “A Work of Artifice” and “Barbie Doll”: How is the will of others imposed on the female bodily self in a patriarchal society?

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_21How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Feminism; Marge Piercy; A Work of Artifice; Barbie Doll; poem analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to reveal the plight of women in a patriarchal social environment and the confinement of men to their minds. From this, we can extend two questions: How do Marge Piercy reveal in her poems “A Work of Artifice” and “Barbie Doll” the suppression of women in a patriarchal society and how their plight, which is, blinded by the lies of men and losing their minds is created? In this paper, I will use my own analysis and collection and integration of relevant information to answer these questions. First, I will analyze the poem's literary techniques, its themes, and the imagery mentioned in it to explain how the author uses imagery to symbolize gender issues for both men and women. And second, we will explore the issue of gender equality and feminist attention, especially the inequality in gender status and marital relations metaphorically interpreted in the poems. Through this study, we can find that Marge Piercy reveals various inequalities between men and women through these two poems, the difference in social status, the restrictions in marriage, the definition of "woman" and "wife", and the two poems also reveal the views of the onlookers and the society's view of the "ideal" woman, whether physically or physiologically, or the way women's lives are judged.

Copyright

© 2022 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Tianran Wang
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/12/30
TI  - Marge Piercy’s “A Work of Artifice” and “Barbie Doll”: How is the will of others imposed on the female bodily self in a patriarchal society?
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 5th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 178
EP  - 187
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_21
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_21
ID  - Wang2022
ER  -