encounters reality in school as others make fun of her. The lessons of childhood are repeated in adulthood--be coy, exercise, diet, smile, and so on. It is only when she has done all these things and perhaps died from it that she is called pretty by mourners looking at her in her casket. The irony is that she fights to live up to an ideal of health and life and achieves a complement for it when she is dead. The Barbie Doll is what this young woman wanted to be and what society told her she had to be, and because of this she was never happy as she was and was hounded to death by her doubts about herself.
The subject matter of this poem is a clandestine affair,
...