First, while this is a poem that some women may find inspiring, others may not. The poem received a substantial amount of publicity from Oprah Winfrey, a popular television personality, whose work tends to emphasize "inspiration" in the sense of an uplifting positive outlook on life, slickly marketed.
The aspect of the poem that some women find inspirational is the narrator's assertion that although she is not conventionally pretty, men still are attracted to her due to a combination of personal magnetism and a sort of visceral appeal and physical voluptuousness. As many women in the western world feel under pressure to conform to media standards equating self-worth and beauty with thinness and the traditional image of the fashion model, some women may find it inspiring that the narrator of the poem proclaims her confidence even to the point of suggesting that she evokes jealousy from "pretty women," as in the lines:
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size ...
It's in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips ...
Although some women find this pushback against unrealistic expectations of body shape and size inspiring, there is a somewhat less inspiring side in that the poem's narrator does not challenge the notion that a women's worth lies in her sexual attractiveness and that a woman's self-valuation should be based on a sort of competition with other women to be stared at more by men as a sexual object. In that sense, this poem seems to fit well with the ethos of Oprah Winfrey's magazine O that serves as a platform advertising and selling beauty products, marketed to audiences of all skin colors and body types.
Personally, I would find a poem that located the value of women in their intellect, skills, and character far more inspiring than one that suggests that what makes a woman "phenomenal" is men staring at her as they would a piece of pornography.
Monday, August 15, 2016
How is the poem "Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou a source of inspiration to women?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
There are a plethora of rules that Jonas and the other citizens must follow. Again, page numbers will vary given the edition of the book tha...
-
The poem contrasts the nighttime, imaginative world of a child with his daytime, prosaic world. In the first stanza, the child, on going to ...
-
The given two points of the exponential function are (2,24) and (3,144). To determine the exponential function y=ab^x plug-in the given x an...
-
The play Duchess of Malfi is named after the character and real life historical tragic figure of Duchess of Malfi who was the regent of the ...
-
The only example of simile in "The Lottery"—and a particularly weak one at that—is when Mrs. Hutchinson taps Mrs. Delacroix on the...
-
Hello! This expression is already a sum of two numbers, sin(32) and sin(54). Probably you want or express it as a product, or as an expressi...
-
Macbeth is reflecting on the Weird Sisters' prophecy and its astonishing accuracy. The witches were totally correct in predicting that M...
No comments:
Post a Comment