"A Work of Artifice," by the American poet Marge Piercy, is a bitterly ironic denunciation of the ways in which a sexist world oppresses women. The poem revolves around a cute little bonsai tree, kept in an "attractive pot" by an attentive gardener who perpetually "whittles back" its branches to keep it "nine inches tall" (though it could have been an eighty-foot behemoth in its natural environment). As he prunes, the gardener tells the tree a lie: it's the tree's "nature," he informs it, to be "small and cozy, / domestic and weak." This, the speaker observes, is precisely what a male-dominated society does to women. Patriarchy, the poem implies, strips women of their powers, all the while telling them that it's only natural for them to be small and weak. Piercy first published this poem in 1970 as a broadside (a flyer, a kind of publication meant to be easily distributed). That form of publication reveals that this is a poem with a clear political purpose, a document from the second wave of American feminism.
The miniaturized tree in its pretty pot could have grown soaringly tall in its natural habitat, only stopping when struck by lightning. Instead, a gardener has meticulously cut the tree back; it's only nine inches tall. Every day, as the gardener prunes this tiny tree, he soothingly tells it that it was always meant to be a tiny, sweet, feeble, indoor sort of plant—and that it's lucky that it grows in such a nice pot. If you want to stunt a living creature's growth, the speaker says, you have to start early: binding feet, limiting thought, curling hair to produce the kind of soft hands that you love touching.
Through the symbolic image of a gardener pruning a bonsai tree, “A Work of Artifice” suggests that a patriarchal, male-dominated society oppresses women first by restricting their power, then by convincing them they never had that power to begin with. The poem kicks off with a description of a tree that could have grown to be “eighty feet tall” if it were left in its natural habitat on the “side of a mountain.” Instead, a gardener has “carefully pruned” it so that it is only “nine inches tall” and can live indoors in an “attractive pot.”
The gardener keeps the tree in this stunted condition in two ways: by “whittl[ing] back its branches,” and by telling the tree that its artificial tininess is in fact its natural state. “It is your nature,” he tells it, “to be small and cozy / domestic and weak.” The irony of these words is plain! The tree still has so much wild natural energy that the gardener has to cut it back “every day”; he’s trying to make the tree believe that it’s small to make his job easier. He even tells the tree that it’s “lucky” he’s provided it this nice pot to live in, falsely implying that it wouldn’t make it a day without him.
The bonsai’s predicament, the speaker observes, is precisely the condition in which women the world over find themselves. Through beauty standards from hair curlers to foot-binding, through restrictions that stunt women’s “brains,” and through just-so stories about women’s inherent “weak[ness]” and domesticity, a male-dominated culture represses women’s energy and potential, keeping them trapped in limited lives. This sharply ironic poem (first published in 1970 as a broadside, a one-sheet poem to be distributed like a flyer) calls on women to realize that their power is much, much greater than they’ve been told.
The bonsai tree ...
... nine inches high.
The first lines of “A Work of Artifice” describe the alternative life a “bonsai tree” could have led in the wild. (A bonsai tree is a miniature ornamental tree grown in a way that prevents it from reaching a normal size.) Left to its own devices, the speaker says, this tree might have gotten to be “eighty feet tall,” growing out of the “side of a mountain” and ending its life dramatically (and glamorously) “split by lightning,” as if being struck down by the gods. In this life, the tree would have been mighty, energetic, and grand; the idea that it would die in a lightning strike suggests that it might have risen high above everything around it on its mountainside perch. This is not, however, the life this tree has had. Instead, it sits in an “attractive pot.” A gardener has “carefully pruned it” and managed its growth, keeping it eternally “nine inches high.”
The poem’s shape mirrors this sense of restrained energy and potential. Written in free verse (without a regular meter or a rhyme scheme), “A Work of Artifice” uses enjambments to prune back the description of the tree in lines 1-5:
The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
This description of how big the tree could have gotten is one big sentence restrained by line breaks, so that even the longest line is a mere six words long. When the speaker eventually describes how big the tree is now, they do so in one clipped-off end-stopped line: “It is nine inches high.”
This bonsai tree—with its huge, energetic potential “pruned” into something tiny, reserved, and “attractive”—will become Marge Piercy’s symbol for the life of a woman in a patriarchal society. Stereotypical femininity, the poem will suggest, is a “work of artifice” imposed on women by an oppressive male-dominated world.
Every day as ...
... to grow in.
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Get LitCharts A+With living creatures ...
... love to touch.
In “A Work of Artifice," a stunted bonsai tree symbolizes oppressed women. The gardener who stunts that treen, meanwhile, symbolizes the male-dominated culture that holds women back.
The poem’s bonsai tree, the speaker observes, would have grown to be “eighty feet tall” in the wild; it’s full of power and energy. The tree has been denied the chance to use those qualities to the full, however. That's because a “gardener” has instead put the tree in an “attractive pot” and carefully “pruned” it, “whittl[ing] back the branches” so that it can never grow beyond “nine inches tall.” He tells the tree that it's its "nature / to be small and cozy, / domestic and weak."
This, the poem suggests, is precisely what a society designed and ruled by men tells women about their natures, their lives, and their capabilities. The gardener simultaneously restricts the tree’s capacity to grow and tells the tree that it never could have grown; his assault on the tree’s powers is both physical and psychological.
To stunt the growth of a “living creature[],” the speaker says, one has to start early with a program of "bound feet" and "hair in curlers." These two very different beauty standards nonetheless work together to symbolically suggest all the different demands a patriarchy makes of women's bodies—demands that the speaker feels drain the energy and possibility from women's lives.
A male-dominated society, the speaker observes, refuses to accept women's bodies in their natural state. Women are meant to be attractive to men, and being attractive always seems to mean spending a lot of time and energy changing themselves. Whether making themselves beautiful means having their feet broken into a more “pleasing” shape or wearing curlers in their hair for hours every night, at least one part of the result is the same: women are artificially reshaping themselves to suit someone else's ideal (and not using their energy for their own purposes).
Such demands, the speaker suggests, are all ways in which a patriarchal culture hampers women's ability to think and act for themselves, a kind of "pruning" just like what the gardener does to the bonsai tree.
The “hands” in the poem’s closing lines quietly symbolize agency and power—an agency and power that a patriarchal society denies to women with its demands for quiet, “cozy,” “domestic” prettiness and obedience.
There are two sets of hands implied in the poem’s closing lines: “the hands you / love to touch,” and the hands that are doing the touching. One set of hands here is acting on the other set of hands, which just sit there passively, waiting to be stroked.
This image encapsulates the gender dynamic that this poem attacks. A sexist world insists that women should be merely decorative, spending their time making sure they’re desirable. Their hands—which they might use to perform all sorts of impressive feats—are reduced to pretty, passive objects for men to enjoy.
The hands in this poem thus represent the power to act and to change the world. The poem’s speaker seems to urge women to look at their own hands, asking what they might be able to do with them beyond getting a manicure.
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A tree that has been pruned and cultivated so that it only grows to a miniature height. Bonsai is a traditional Japanese art form.
“A Work of Artifice” is an allegory: the gardener's pruning of the bonsai tree symbolizes patriarchal oppression of women. The poem's form on the page also mirrors a careful, frustrating, and repressive process of restraint. Its 24 lines of free verse (poetry without a regular rhyme scheme or meter) are all “carefully pruned,” just like the manicured bonsai tree the poem uses as a symbol of oppressed women. The very longest line (fittingly, line 3, which describes how the tree “could have been eighty feet tall” if it weren’t restrained) is a mere six words long; most of the poem is written in lines of just three or four words.
This choice has a double effect. The clipped, careful lines reflect what a male-dominated society does to the women the “dwarf” bonsai tree represents: holding them back, restraining their growth, frustrating their energies. But they also suggest a massive energy ready to burst out of these bonds. The poem is built from just five sentences broken into many lines—a choice that suggests there’s plenty of power coiled up and waiting to unfurl in all the women who have been held back by societal sexism.
The poem is written in free verse, so it doesn’t use a regular meter. Instead, the speaker uses enjambments to cut the poem’s short lines to roughly equal lengths, much as the oppressive gardener cuts back the bonsai tree. Take a look at the way lines 1-5 flow, for example:
The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
This is one long sentence doled out a few words at a time; like the “bonsai tree” it describes, the language here feels clipped and restrained—not by aggressive "prun[ing]," but by line breaks.
The small irregularities in line length also mimic a bonsai tree. Ranging from three to six words long, the lines feel contained and regimented, but not precisely uniform. There’s room for something a little organic in this kind of growth, the poem’s shape implies—but that doesn’t mean that the tree (or the repressed and frustrated women it represents) have room to grow as wild and strong as they could.
This free verse poem doesn’t use a rhyme scheme. Rather than making a political point in harmonious, musical verse (as, for instance, Christina Rossetti did in her sonnet “In an Artist’s Studio” or Thomas Hardy did in his arch poem “The Ruined Maid”), Piercy instead delivers this poem in a clipped, straight-ahead voice heavy with icy irony. There’s no melody here, whether thoughtful or sarcastically lively: just a slow, deliberate description of a slow, deliberate process of oppression.
The lack of rhyme here also suits the poem's central symbol of the bonsai tree. Bonsai (the practice of pruning and shaping trees to keep them at a miniature scale) is a traditional Japanese art form, and the kinds of Japanese verse most familiar to Western audiences (such as haiku and senryu) are also unrhymed.
The poem’s speaker doesn’t reveal anything directly about who they are. The reader nevertheless gets the impression that the speaker is a person enraged by the way in which society stunts women’s natural energies. In the larger context of Marge Piercy’s feminist poetry, readers might reasonably take this speaker as a voice for Piercy herself.
The speaker’s description of a gardener talking to the bonsai tree he’s pruning back—he tells it its nature is to be "small and cozy, / domestic and weak”—is an angry critique of a certain kind of male attitude toward women, and indeed a cultural attitude toward women. The gardener’s condescension masks the fact that it is he who is forcing the tree to be a cute little houseplant in an “attractive pot” rather than the eighty-foot behemoth it might have become in the wild. The speaker’s attitude toward such insidious forms of repression is clear: she’s furious, though her language is never less than icy and controlled.
Outraged with a world that stunts women, the speaker also seems to be warning women of the ways in which a patriarchal, male-dominated culture might try to “dwarf” them. She cautions, for instance, against oppressive, painful, and labor-intensive beauty standards (“bound feet,” “hair in curlers”), efforts to control and reshape the body that are ultimately meant to produce restricted, hampered “brain[s].”
There’s no one clear setting in this poem: its story criticizes a whole male-dominated world. While the speaker’s vision of a bonsai gardener touches on a traditional Japanese practice of growing miniature trees, and her mention of “bound feet” alludes to a traditional (and now mercifully extinct) Chinese practice of breaking women’s feet to reshape them into tiny, pointed “lotus feet,” the poem doesn’t have a specifically Asian setting. The idea here, rather, is that women face sexist oppression the world over.
The poem's images of stunting and reshaping are part of a general critique of the way that patriarchy “cripple[s] brain[s],” cutting off women’s energy and stopping them from reaching the heights they could in a different world. “Bound feet,” “hair in curlers,” and sexist ideals of “domestic” coziness, the poem suggests, are all facets of the same repressive culture. Women everywhere are taught (or forced) to be humble and decorative—and to abandon or deny their inherent energy and strength.
Piercy wrote this poem in 1970, and it might be read as a voice from the midst of the second-wave feminist movement in America. Piercy played a vocal part in second-wave feminism as a writer and an activist. She first published this poem as a broadside, a single sheet of paper meant to be distributed like a flyer; this is a work with a clear political purpose, grounded in a time of protest.
Marge Piercy (1936-present) is an American poet and novelist from Detroit, Michigan. Piercy, who always felt at odds with society’s narrow expectations for women of her generation, became deeply involved in the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. Many of her works reflect her convictions. She first published “A Work of Artifice,” for instance, as a broadside in 1970 (that is, a one-sheet poem intended to be distributed like a flyer); this is a poem with a marked political purpose.
Asked about the role of feminism in her life and work, Piercy replied:
Why am I a feminist? I was born a woman. I can’t imagine not identifying strongly as a woman and not wanting things to be better and safer and more fun and less dangerous for myself and other women.
Piercy began her poetic career in a time when writers were making bold new experiments in form and producing forthright political works. Some of her contemporaries include the Confessionalist poet Sylvia Plath, the memoirist Maya Angelou, the feminist journalists Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, and the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. While politically iconoclastic, Piercy deeply values poetic tradition and heritage, describing herself as a distinctly American poet in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. As she says on her website: “Everything truly American since is a descendent of theirs.” She was also influenced by English Romantic poets like Keats, Coleridge, and Byron and by the modernist poet T. S. Eliot.
This poem comes out of the heart of the second wave of feminism—that is, the resurgence of feminist energy that followed the initial Suffragist push for women’s voting rights in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The American branch of second-wave feminism sprung up in the 1960s, partly in reaction to the cultural conservatism of the 1950s. During World War II (which ran from 1939 to 1945), American women had had the chance to do work they’d never had before, taking jobs vacated by soldiers. (Think of the famous poster of Rosie the Riveter: a patriotic image of a woman helping to build military airplanes.) In the 1950s, a socially conservative backlash against these kinds of changes demanded that women get out of the workplace and back into the home, where they were meant to live the kind of “small and cozy” domestic lives this poem’s insidious “gardener” represents as ideal and natural.
But women began to rebel against these restraints—and against a culture that defined their worth by how much they appealed to male sensibilities. This poem’s link between “curled hair” and “crippled brains” makes a point that became important to the feminist thinkers of this era: that narrow beauty standards were part of women’s oppression, labor-intensive (and indeed “Artific[ial]”) demands that trained women to think of themselves as strictly decorative and subordinate.
Second-wave feminists fought for—and won—a wide range of new rights for women, including the 1963 Equal Pay Act (which mandated that women and men must be paid the same amount for the same jobs) and the 1965 Supreme Court decision Griswold vs. Connecticut (which required that women should have free access to contraception). But some of the advances they sought—like the adoption of the wide-ranging Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment that would codify the equal treatment of men and women—remain ongoing feminist struggles.
More on Piercy — Learn about Piercy's life and work in this short Poetry Foundation biography.
The Poem as a Broadside — See an image of the poem as it was originally published: as a broadside, a one-sheet flyer meant to be easily distributed. This is a form that reflects the poem's political purpose.
Piercy's Website — Visit Piercy's personal website to learn more about her work.
The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
An Interview with Piercy — Watch an interview with Piercy in which she discusses the politics of her art (among other topics).