Mass Construct in Barbie Doll by Marge Percy

Barbie Doll The Common Women Poems, III. Nadine, resting on her neighbors stoop By brim Piercy This girlchild was born as usual and presented fowls that did pee-pee and miniature GE stoves and irons and wee lipsticks the color of red candy. Then in the magic of puberty, a schoolfellow said You eat a enceinte banging nose and gamy legs. She was healthy, tested intelligent, possessed strong arms and back, abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity. She went to and fro apologizing. Everyvirtuoso saw a fat nose on thick legs. She was advised to admit coy, exhorted to hail on hearty, exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.Her good nature wore out like a fan belt. So she cut move out her nose and her legs and offered them up. In the casket dis goldbricked on satin she lay with the undertakers cosmetics painted on, a turned-up putty nose, dressed in a pink and white nightie. Doesnt she look pretty? everyone said. Consummation at last. To every woman a happy ending. Mass Constructs Th e Mass social organization or the matters which related to forcefulness relation and domination by Michel Foucault might be applied into the poem of Barbie Doll? by Marge Piercy. Clearly could be seen, the dupe from the poem be exactly a woman.While shes only a kid, the topic of Mass Construction is strongly applied into the theme and atmosphere of the poem. As Michel Foucault stated in his provide/ noesis, the stronger one person the bigger his position to influence the weaker opposites. For Michel Foucault it is through discourse (through intimacy) that we are created. If we are the sum of our experiences (the companionship we encounter), then those in control of our early life experiences have enormous violence. In an isolated family, a childs hit the hayledge depends upon just a few people. In a sense, those few people create the childs identity.From fountain and Knowledge, comes Discip eminence and Punish for the teensygirl. That these reorganizations of knowledge wer e also intertwined with new forms of power and domination. The littlegirl can non attempt to learn anything still what is communicated by them by her rescript. This is what the little girl had experienced in the poem. Not mentioning she is a little girl, it doubles the heaviness she should endure in order to get accepted by this Mass Construct cabaret. Thus, this one-sided standard to construct a woman theme might synergic with the Power/Knowledge as well as learn and Punish which both are coined by Michel Foucault.This tragic poem depicts the struggle of a little girl which encircled by the either-controlling nine. To control something, one side/ private definitely have power to execute it. It is in effect(p) by how the society constructed the girl who only knows the beauty of the doll which shes play with. While this is also could be seen as kids innocent activity, the idea of parents give their daughter a barbie doll might be interpreted as the act of power controlling. Parents, who are the closest part of society towards the kids inarguably, took the prototypical role in controlling the little girls.This girlchild was born as usual and presented dolls that did pee-pee and miniature GE stoves and irons and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy. What the parents and society knows are that girls should act as a girl by their only own point of view. And it has been done by presented her with the typical girls toy in a form of dolls. They are not only ordinary dolls in usual, notwithstanding the dolls were concluded with their house servant tools, and miniature GE stoves and irons. It has been shown implicitly on how society sees woman and how to treat one.And as a woman, one should shows the beauty by the line and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy. If not red, cherry candies are pink colored, the color which depicts the soft sides of the women. When it is correlated to the facts of Power/Knowledge by Foucault, this is the part where the bas ic knowledge of the society towards women is exactly the same with what the poem described. And because This girlchild was born as usual, she should acted as one. It is ironic when the reference point above connected to the very next lines on the same stanza.Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said You have a great big nose and fat legs. The breakdown of the littlegirl started here. The picture of dolls (Barbie doll) had deep-rooted since she was kid by their parents. The relationship amidst peers at school also played a great role to build an identity of one person. And those peers of the littlegirl also one of the societies which construct the girls self. Unconsciously, she should know by now what kind of girl which boys/students from these lines who represented society preferred are.This is how the image of Barbie doll became the unassailable mental picture of perfect woman craved within the girl. Her place as the minority who surrounded by the construction of society h as grown a guilty feeling inside the littlegirl. This might be caused by how she tried to show her good self as a woman so the society wanted to accept her existence. The strong proofs for this point are as mentioned on these lines She went to and fro apologizing. Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs. Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs. notation are kept repeating itself.This is the indication that the problems which the society looked down towards the girl are pretty consummate(a) because they cannot tolerate it. They are cannot bear the truth that this littlegirl are not quite woman enough on their sights. Those nose and legs are always the bold worst points for the society to accuse, and to show the littlegirl that woman should not have an appearance such hers. A line before that also draws the littlegirl submission against the society. A mere vindication are not enough because the false power which applied by society is a must(prenominal) rule for the littlegirl to obey .This all are caused by the position of littlegirl which make her cannot voice her heart. To prove that she is inferior against them who involve the knowledge to dominate every insight of the littlegirl. Thus, practicing the power relation towards the defenseless littlegirl. But the littlegirl are not a failure as her society has accused. The very first lines on second stanza, especially the line She was healthy, tested intelligent, possessed strong arms and back, are indicated that she has everything that gracious existence could muster.Every aspects of her life are the things that essential to actively blend into every mantle of society. She was tested intelligence, she might offer a helps for pedagogy people in the future, or possessed strong arms and back, to do some more harder plant to accomplish such as an athlete or adventurer. She could do almost anything in the near future because She was healthy. From those proofs alone, she is the one of human woman who could do a nything he would like. She has everything whether to be a socialist or liberalist individual with everything she has got.But again, due to the repetitive use of Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs, those all positive aspects of the littlegirl are concealed within. The construction which applied by the society has hazed away those irrefutable prospects of hers. The first line of third stanza started with the deceitful construction to construct not only their way of thinking but also how women should act in normal way. To show the fitness, beauty, without any indication of lacking things as a woman. Synergistically with the Power/Knowledge relation, the aspects of womans construction also could be applied with Foucaults Discipline and Punish.In his Discipline and Punish, however, the eighteenth-nineteenth century transformation of the human sciences was explicitly set in the context of practices of discipline, surveillance, and constraint, which made practical new kinds of knowledg e of human beings even as they created new forms of social control. consign, in his Power/Knowledge, directly stated that perhaps the most important transformation that Foucault described was in the scale and continuity of the exercise of power, which also involved much greater knowledge of detail.Foucault was interested in the difference between massive but infrequent exercises of destructive force (public executions, military occupations, the violent suppression of insurrections) and the uninterrupted constraints obligate in practices of discipline and training It was a question not of treating the body, en masse, wholesale, as if it were an indissociable unity, but of workings it retail, individually of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity an infinitesimal power over the active body. Other ways of exercising force can only coerce or destroy their target. Discipline and t raining can reconstruct it to produce new gestures, actions, habits and skills, and ultimately new kinds of people. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. It defined how one may have a hold over others bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, docile bodies. (Rouse, 2005) So that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Rouse opinion regarding the Power and Discipline which applied to the girl by the society breaks it down and and rearranges it Since the littlegirl presented a Barbie doll, at that time precisely, she had been constructed and her identity had been arranged. When the girl feels the bigger role of her peers at school, the big construction of society had stone-broke down her capacities as the girl who is capable in many departments as mentioned on the second stanza.Then the society reconstructed it many times as in the beginning of the third stanza. She was advised to play coy, exhorted to come on hearty, exercise, diet, smile and wheedle. Everything that the society gives to her is the methods in how the society tried to constructed her into the way they should see a woman. to play coy, exhorted to come on hearty, exercise, diet, smile and wheedle. To live in submission and acted under the rule of them to be a perfect woman. The tragic ends show the break-free of the littlegirl from the clutch of Mass Construction.Everything that she have to chose her own way of live has been manipulated, so to speak, constructed and rearranged. The way the girl ended her life is not the way for her having a choice in the end, but the act to show how the power of society are relentless and how little the choices for they who has under the oppression of it ha d had. BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Rouse, Joseph, Power/Knowledge (2005). Division I Faculty Publications. Paper 34. http//wesscholar. wesleyan. edu/div1facpubs/34