Not a Potted Plant

In the poem 'A woman is not a potted plant plant' the author; Alice Walker is pointing out the contrasts between a woman and natural objects, one of which is a potted plant. The image of a potted plant is confined to a small ceramic circle and rooted in one place where they have to be taken care of and cannot exist by themselves. The woman may appear to be just a decorative piece in the house, but Walker is trying to emphasize that a woman is more than just that.

The first stanza of the poem points out how a woman is typically tied to her household duties “her roots bound to the confines of her house”, this line assimilates the image of a potted plant and creates a vivid picture of a confined small clay circle being rooted in one place where without the roots a plant could not live. Just as the roots provide the plant with nourishment and water, a woman provides the household with the necessities in order to live. The woman is not stuck to her home and household duties, meaning she does not have to be the only one to clean the home, care for the children, do the laundry, and so forth. In the second stanza Walker says that a woman's "leaves” are not "trimmed to the contours of her sex”. She is saying that her physical shape does not have to be any certain way for her to be a beautiful woman.

Walker continues by using the word espaliered to represent the training of a woman that may shape a woman, from, “her race”, to, “her man”, elements that may give you a closer glimpse to how a woman came about, but a woman does not have to conform to a man's expectations nor society's expectations. The first three stanzas are introduced with the same statement "a woman is not a potted plant", thus three is the magic number for remembering and the emphasis on hearing that statement the third time one envisions a potted throughout the poem. The statement in the forth stanza that a woman