Phenomenal Woman: Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

“Pretty women”

The speaker of “Phenomenal Woman” distinguishes herself from a particular type of “pretty women,” whose prettiness symbolizes what the broader society considers the ideal form of femininity. The speaker makes this distinction in the poem’s opening lines (lines 1–4):

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.

In contrast to “pretty women,” the speaker doesn’t have the skinny body of a fashion model. She therefore doesn’t fit the expectations for what society considers an attractive woman. Even so, the speaker has an undeniable appeal. It’s precisely because the speaker is alluring despite having a body that defies conventional prettiness that the “pretty women” want to know her secret. As the speaker explains, however, these “pretty women” don’t believe her when she says her secret lies in her behavior rather than her physical appearance. The fact that the “pretty women” have a hard time understanding this alternative source of attractiveness shows how indoctrinated they are into their society’s expectations for female beauty. The speaker, by contrast, revels in her allure and the sense of power it brings. She especially revels in the power she has over the “pretty women” who might otherwise look down on her.

The Feminine Mystique

Twice in the poem the speaker references a certain secret and mysterious allure that draws the attention of women and men alike. The first reference appears in the opening line, where the speaker mentions that conventionally attractive women want to know the source of her inexplicable attractiveness: “Pretty women wonder where my secret lies” (line 1). The second reference comes later in the poem, after the speaker describes how men swarm around her. These men feel just as baffled by the speaker’s attractiveness as the “pretty women” do (lines 30–34):

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.

Neither the women nor the men seem to understand that the true source of the speaker’s beauty lies not in her physical form, but in the way she animates that form. What the women call her “secret” and what the men think of as her “inner mystery” are two ways of talking about the speaker’s feminine mystique. This mystique isn’t just about attractiveness. It’s also—and more deeply—symbolic of the power, strength, pride, and self-worth that the speaker derives from her own way of embodying femininity.

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