19 pages • 38 minutes read
Marge PiercyA Work Of Artifice
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1970A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Mountainside and the Tall Tree
The mountainside on which the tree would have grown had it not been turned into a bonsai symbolizes the larger world. This world is filled with both opportunities and dangers. Allowed to grow in this world, the tree would have reached its full height, but may also have faced dangers, such as a fatal lightning strike. The mountainside is the tree’s natural habitat where the tree would have grown 80-feet tall without any specialized care.
Considering the poem’s extended metaphor of the bonsai tree as a woman, the tall tree represents women’s unrealized potential. Women are kept from realizing this potential on the pretext that the larger world is rough and filled with dangers (e.g., the lightning strike). However, the poem suggests the dangers and confinements of a crippled or brainwashed mind are far worse than other dangers. Not allowed to organically grow into her true self, a woman is instead stunted into a something pretty but immobile.
The Pot
The poem early mentions the “attractive pot” (Line 2); later, the gardener tells the little bonsai tree it is lucky to have a pot in which to grow. The pot is made attractive because it is a trap meant to trick the tree. It represents a cozy cage which the tree may find comforting at first, but in which it will ultimately be confined.
The pot is probably round in shape, like a wedding band. It symbolizes the seductive charm, as well as the inherent danger, of patriarchal institutions. Initially a circle of protection, the pot becomes the place in which the tree will be kept hostage. The tree or the woman will be indoctrinated to think it is lucky to have a pot, unlike trees left in the wild. Here, the pot also symbolizes the traditional home in which women are cornered into gender-bound roles. However, the truth is the tree in the pot is in as much—if not more—danger as the tree growing in the wild.
The Gardener
The gardener is identified as a “he.” In the poem’s context, he is a man who believes in traditional gender roles. But that’s not all. The man also upholds and promotes these roles, being in on the artifice against the bonsai tree (or the woman). In art and literature, a gardener has largely positive associations, symbolizing a protector, a creator, and sometimes a godlike figure. The world is the garden of such an entity. Subverting this traditional trope, in the poem the gardener is a sinister figure, who stunts the tree’s growth under the pretense of keeping it pretty and safe.
Piercy uses terms from gardening to describe the gardener’s twisted nature with the tree. He croons to it, symbolizing a father singing to a daughter or a husband to a wife, while simultaneously whittling it down. He tells the tree it is lucky to have a pot in which to grow, knowing full well the pot itself stunts the tree’s growth. As the poem zooms out of the setting of the bonsai tree in the last few lines, the gardener represents not just a particular father or husband, but the overarching oppressive nature of patriarchy as a whole.
Related Titles
By Marge Piercy
