Poetry Blog # 3

Ava Gardner Reincarnated as a Magnolia is a poem that displays a tragic flaw in human nature. The tragic flaw can be seen in two different ways. One is the speaker’s tragic flaw of being too beautiful; the other is the society’s quick judgment of beauty.

After reading this poem, I felt a bit bad for the speaker, Ava Gardner, for being beautiful, which is kind of ironic because I envy beautiful women and are sometimes jealous of them. I felt as if Atwood is trying to send a message that beauty is judged too quickly on the outside and that it can be destructive to both the society and beautiful women, which is why Atwood criticizes both the men and the women who get jealous in the poem. Beauty is a tragic flaw in so many ways. It causes temptations and low self esteems for the “other” people. It causes loneliness and bitterness to the beautiful ones. This “flaw” (which people don’t view beauty as) leads people to their fall, like how the speaker ended up in her “fall” by the end of the poem. I think Atwood is trying to tell us to see “the beauty beyond the beauty”, and that we should all be criticized for only seeing what’s on the surface. As I read this powerfully written poem, this message stuck out. It was interesting because it was from a beautiful woman’s perspective. We usually hear quotes like “don’t judge a person by how they look” and we used it for people who aren’t “beautiful and thin” so that everybody will be treated equally. But in this poem’s case, the message is in a beautiful woman’s point of view. I love that Atwood wrote the poem in this way because it makes the readers ponder about this issue in a different perspective.