"Barbie Doll's" Irony

The English would be boring and even more unbearable if some beautiful person had not decided to include sarcasm, come-backs, jokes, and of course irony. What would life be without the beauty of irony? I don't even want to think about how deprived literature would be without irony; how dull, plain, unexciting, unsurprising, etc. English would be. Irony adds a level of artistry, it expresses a message with more expressive and emotional meaning. I think that irony also gives the author the ability to stretch their main themes in ways making the reader really concentrate to decipher what the author really means, what they are thinking.

In Marge Piercy's poem "Barbie Doll" she expertly has us expecting a stereotypical poem about a perfect girl, one with blond hair, blue eyes, etc. However, her character ironically is described as the opposite, "healthy, tested intelligent," with "strong arms and back." Already, Piercy slaps us across our faces, upset at how quick we are to assume what makes a perfect girl. This type of irony is called verbal irony where the author tells us one thing but means something else behind it. Another type of irony uses in the poem is reversal irony where something happens and the opposite happens. In the poem the Barbie Doll cuts her "fat nose and fat legs" off and kills herself, and only after that does her community praise her on her beauty. Piercy shows us women go to extreme ends just to get the satisfaction of being accepted as beautiful or pretty, and ironically some go as far as death for that compliment, never to experience their own true beauty, and only to die trying to obtain the fake fantasy of beauty society commercializes.