Marge Piercy's poem "A Work of Artifice" fascinates me. Writing about taking care of a bonsai tree, she seems to be writing about the plight of woman instead. Bonsai trees are a form of Japanese art. The purposes? Contemplation and ingenuity for the grower. Rather than growing gardens of bonsai trees, bonsai growers focus on developing one tree that mimics a full sized tree. In reading the poem, I felt that the bonsai tree was the woman, the gardener the man. Trapped by the confines of the concepts of beauty, women are bonsai trees, cultivated and controlled by men.

The "attractive pot" the author refers to symbolizes woman's outer shell. Her jewelry. Her clothes. Her hair. Though a woman may be beautiful, if her pot, her outer shell, is shabby, she too seems shabby. The bonsai tree, the author writes, "could have grown eighty feet tall on the side of a mountain till split by lightning." The bonsai had so much potential to become something great. Something huge. Something massive. In acquiring large size, the tree would have gained power, respect. The tree could have done great things; shaded an old man hiking up a mountain, housed a nest of birds. "But a gardener carefully pruned it." Suddenly, the tree's potential future crumbles. There is no hope for this tree, no hope for greatness. It's future? To be pruned by a gardener. If the tree is woman, the gardener must be man. Woman's fate is to be controlled by man. To be pruned, changed, morphed, into whatever the man wants her to. Like a tree, she is helpless to the man's pruning, cutting, chopping. She is dependent on the man for water, food, nourishment. The tree is only nine inches high. The gardener has pruned it well; it has lost its potential to be great, to be large. What could have been an eighty foot tall tree has now been confined, compressed into a meager nine inches. No wonder woman feels suffocated. The gardener convinces the tree that her situation now is better than what it would have been. He croons, "It is your nature/ to be small and cozy,/ domestic and weak,/ how lucky, little tree,/ to have a pot to grow in." The relationship between the tree and the gardener seems like that of a marriage. Dependent on each other, promised to each other, the man and the woman are tied together. There is no escape. The man convinces the woman she is lucky to be his wife, lucky to have a home, lucky to be a woman, to be subordinate to man. It is woman's nature, man says, to be subordinate to man. For the man to be the gardener, the woman the bonsai tree. Man knows that he must establish his power early. Piercy writes, "one must begin very early to dwarf their growth: the bound feet, the crippled brain, the hair in curlers" to describe man's power over woman. Her feet are bound, leaving her unable to walk properly, unable to escape. Her brain is crippled, derived of knowledge, derived of truth. She cannot think for herself. Her hair is in curlers; she is trapped by the confines of beauty, shackled to the person she must portray.

Woman is a bonsai tree, cultivated by man.