"Toys"

“Toys” by Roland Barthes

The audience for this essay could be anyone from toy-makers to parents to anyone who would be willing to listen and take up this position. There is also a slight against the French Bourgeois so it is probably intended for a political audience as well.

There is a mix of appeals as rhetorical appeals tend to blend together. There is a logos appeal in that he presents the facts of the toys. How the toys are imitations of real life and how when you want to introduce a child to something you let them play with it. The pathos appeal comes through when he talks about how the children are being stifled into a workers position in society and their creativity and individuality is being stifled by the imitative toys. The pathos appeal also comes out in his section about metal and plastic versus wood. He talks about how cold and temporal metal and plastic are and how manufactured the process in making it is. But the wooden toys they have a natural warmth and they bring you close to nature and nurture which is what people want to associate with children. The ethos is in his diction. He uses scholarly diction which establishes trust with the audience as we assume people who use the proper terminology for things actually know what they are talking about. He never actually mentions himself.

Part of me thinks that this is not an essay about French Bourgeois toys at all but allegorical essay about how they treat their citizens and their ruling style. They stifle creativity and style by keeping people in a box mentality, minting them through toys, school and job positions.