Blog Post 13

A Work of Artifice by Marge Piercy; is a beautiful little poem on the qualities that relating to holding someone back from there full potential in order to appease someone else. The poem begins with a bonsai tree, a bonsai tree is a decorative plant often given as a gift that holds great value. This plant if left in the wild could grow "eighty feet tall" just as the poem describes. But it never reaches that point, its cut and pruned to be exactly what the gardener wants, "small and cozy, domestic and weak;" The writer is using this story as an analogy for women who are made to be exactly what a man wants, regardless of their own wants. Marge furthers this idea when she talks about how "to dwarf their growth" by using terms like "bound feet" and "hair in curlers" to relate with the bonsai tree in having to live a life chosen for them by others. This is a wonderful poem speaking about the oppression of women and the forceful and proper role they play in Asian cultures.