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This bachelor thesis explores Carol Ann Duffy's poetry collections 'The World’s Wife' and 'Feminine Gospels', focusing on her realist and feminist perspectives. The study discusses Duffy's engagement with society, her use of satire and transposition, and the feminist message in selected poems.
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Critical Perspectives in Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife and Feminine Gospels
23 June 2017
Supervisor: Maria Kager Second reader: Simon Cook
Introduction Carol Ann Duffy is a poet and playwright who was born in Glasgow in 1955. On 1 May 2009, she became Poet Laureate of the UK – the first time a woman, a Scot, and an LGBTQ^1 person was rewarded this position. Her poetry has been described as “cheeky” and “subversive” ( The Times ); she has the “ability to pin down a lifetime in half a line” (Mendelson, n.p.). She has published many volumes of poetry, including collections for children. Two of her poetry books for adults are the focus of this thesis: The World’s Wife (1999), which rewrites various myths, fairy tales, and histories from a female perspective; and Feminine Gospels (2002), which contains some new, women-centred myths that draw on various archetypes and folk- tales. These two volumes are different from Duffy’s usual, realist work, because they focus on the fantastical. However, there is still a sense of realism and critical engagement with society in these poems; the critical point of view that Duffy presents being mainly a feminist one. To show this engagement with society, the (feminist) criticism will be discussed as well as the realist aspects of the texts, which serve to establish a link between the real world and the fantasy world where the stories are set. To do this, a framework of reference needs to be established first with regards to Duffy’s general style and subject, after which characteristics of The World’s Wife and Feminine Gospels in particular are discussed. 1.1 Duffy’s Realism and Feminism Duffy’s style can overall best be defined as realist. Reis asserts that Duffy is “continuing a markedly British tradition of social realism” (134) and compares her work to Philip Larkin’s. Larkin is a well-known realist poet and spearhead of the Movement, which advocated “ironic realism” (Harrison 2). Hulse locates Duffy’s work in between this ironic social realism and politically charged poetry (17). However, Duffy’s work differs from Larkin’s in the sense that (^1) LGBTQ stands for: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer.
the Movement was focused on white, middle-class men, whereas contemporary social realism
A central theme of the poem is the loss of the true identity of the speaker, who is being objectified in the most literal sense of the word. Georges “drains the colour” from her, which implies that he is taking something valuable away from her by painting her, or that it is emotionally draining to pose for him. The speaker feels as if she loses agency over her life – Georges “possesses [her] on canvas”. When she is shown the result, she says: “It does not look like me”. The artist is unable to capture her real essence, or he has changed her so she is pleasing to society. The realistic characterisation and the honest, satirical style of this poem are typical of Duffy’s work, as well as the choice of character and the feminist theme. 1.3 Feminism and Adaptation in The World’s Wife and Feminine Gospels When considering The World’s Wife and Feminine Gospels , these two volumes seem at first far removed from Duffy’s usual poetry, as they employ a fantastical mode of storytelling. However, Duffy still engages critically with contemporary society in them, as she does in most of her other work. The main critical perspective that is presented in both books is mostly a feminist one, although other viewpoints are offered in Feminine Gospels as well, such as an environmentalist one. The feminist message has also been noticed by critics: Michaelis and Rowland state that “ The World’s Wife is certainly committed to feminism” (25), and Rees- Jones argues that the poems in The World’s Wife are “probably the most feminist of her oeuvre” (29). A means to express her feminist message is adaptation, a key element of The World’s Wife and to a lesser extent of Feminine Gospels. It is exceptionally suited for feminist purposes as it is a means of engaging in a social or cultural critique (Hutcheon 94). The poems in The World’s Wife are all adaptations of existing narratives, mainly myths and fairy tales. This practice has been especially popular among feminist writers, as is shown for example by Sellers, who discusses various feminist adaptations by A.S. Byatt, Anne Rice, and
other writers. A.S. Byatt writes a parody of the Medusa story (“Medusa’s Ankles”, published in The Matisse Stories , 1991) where Medusa is a female celebrity concerned about her thinning hair. Anne Rice writes Interview with the Vampire (1976) from the perspective of the vampire, in a response to Bram Stoker’s Dracula where the vampire does not have a voice and is presented as pure evil. Another famous female writer who has adapted classical myths is Margaret Atwood. In The Penelopiad ( 2005 ) she recounts what Odysseus’ wife Penelope was doing while her husband was away to fight in the Trojan War. Howells has called Atwood’s approach a “domestification of myth” (65), something that is mentioned by Braud when analysing The World’s Wife. Braud argues that Duffy gives her myths a sense of the mundane and domestic as well (201). A famous poet who has adapted fairy tales in Anne Sexton: in her book Transformations (1971) she rewrites 17 Grimm fairy tales in a raw, harsh way, using dark humour. Ostriker explains that this feminist interest in fairy tales and myths is because of the authority these narratives already carry in the public sphere which is “unavailable to someone who writes ‘merely’ of the private self” (72). Myths are an important part of the literary canon, and this literary status has often been denied to female writers. Adapting these stories lends a female writer’s work authority, while at the same time allowing her to be critical of the literary canon. Furthermore, myths and fairy tales are prime examples of patriarchal strongholds: the heroes are usually men and the women must either be “sexually wicked”, such as the witch Circe who tries to seduce Odysseus, or “virtuously passive”, such as Helen of Troy (71). Ostriker thus characterises feminist adaptations as “corrections” of the original canonical stories and their gender stereotypes (73). Joosen underlines the importance of feminist fairy tale rewritings in particular, as these tales often serve as a model for children on what behaviour is desirable. It is therefore important that female role models are presented in fiction. Adaptations are also important for an adult audience: “Fairy tale retellings try to make
puts the original stories in a less serious and more down-to-earth perspective. The heroes of myths and fairy tales are shown to be far from infallible and details of their heroic actions are changed, making them less supernatural and more human. In addition, Duffy often transposes the tales to modern times: sometimes fully, such as in “Mrs Faust” ( The World’s Wife ), and sometimes only by adding a few contemporary references, such as in “Eurydice” or “Mrs Beast” ( The World’s Wife ). This establishes another link between fantasy world and contemporary society. Although Carol Ann Duffy adopts a fantastical mode of storytelling in The World’s Wife and Feminine Gospels , she still critically engages with contemporary society. The critical viewpoint she carries out in these two works is mainly a feminist one, which is aided by adaptation. The link between the real world and the fantasy worlds Duffy creates and adapts is established by adding realist elements. An analysis of “Mrs Beast” ( The World’s Wife ), “Work” ( Feminine Gospels ), and “History” ( Feminine Gospels ) will focus on the critical message the poem contains, and on how this critical message is linked to contemporary society using realism, in order to prove Duffy’s prevailing critical engagement.
The World’s Wife was published in 1999 and contains adaptations based on myths, fairy tales, and well-known historical figures. Each poem is centred on one female character that only plays a marginal role or no role at all in the original story; they have all traditionally never been given a voice. Examples of existing characters whose voice Duffy has reimagined include Eurydice, Little Red Cap, and Medusa; other characters she has invented, such as Mrs Teresias, Sisyphus’ wife, Darwin’s wife, Queen Kong, Elvis’ sister, and Mrs Faust. This chapter focuses on “Mrs Beast”, an adaptation of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast by French novelist Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1756). This poem is an excellent example of Duffy’s mode of adaptation and it has a broad focus: not only Beauty and the Beast is referenced, but many other female characters as well, both fictional and historical. This chapter shows that Duffy engages in a critique of society, by analysing the feminist message of the poem, as well as realist aspects of the text that bridge the gap between the fantasy world and the real world. “Mrs Beast” is set after the wedding of Beauty and the Beast, which is final scene in the original story. Duffy’s version of Beauty, Mrs Beast, tells the story of her marriage to the Beast, as well as how they first met: Myself, I came to the House of the Beast No longer a girl, knowing my own mind, My own gold stashed in the bank, My own black horse at the gates Ready to carry me off at one wrong word, One false move, one dirty look. (72)
“[the Beast’s] erection, / size of a mule’s – best” and that “stripped of his muslin shirt / and his corduroys, he steamed in his pelt, / ugly as sin” (73). Where men have traditionally been using women for sex, in Duffy’s poem it is the other way around. Mrs Beast calls for her husband whenever she wants: “Bring me the Beast for the night” (75). While the Beast adores her – “he knew he was blessed” (72) – Mrs Beast states: “Let the less-loving one be me” (75). The voice of Mrs Beast is also clearly satirical: “The pig in my bed / was invited ” (73), and she often uses colloquial, straight-forward language to address her audience: “look, love, I should know, / they’re bastards when they’re Princes”; “a Prince, a pretty boy” (72); “the drop-dead gorgeous bride of the Bearded Lesbian”; “a head-to-head between Frau Yellow Dwarf and Bearded’s Bride / was over the biggest pot I’d seen in my puff” (74). However, “Mrs Beast” is not simply an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast. It incorporates more famous female characters, such as the Little Mermaid, Cleopatra, and Marilyn Monroe. This allows Duffy to provide a broader critical perspective on fairy tales, both fictional and historical, and transform them into more realistic stories. The first two lines of the poem immediately set the tone: “These myths going around, these legends, fairy tales / I’ll put them straight” (72). In Duffy’s universe, perfect happy endings do not exist. There seem to be two options: if a woman is tough and independent, she can make a decent life for herself; if she makes the mistake of giving up her whole life to marry a pretty, charming prince, she will end up dead. This is what happens to the Little Mermaid, who: [...] slit Her shining, silver tail in two, rubbed salt Into that stinking wound, got up and walked In agony, in fishnet tights, stood up and smiled, waltzed, All for a Prince, a pretty boy, a charming one, Who’d dump her in the end, chuck her, throw her overboard. (72)
The realistic and explicit description of the Little Mermaid mutilating herself for a man is a powerful part of Duffy’s feminist message. Mrs Beast and her companions, who include the Woman Who Married a Minotaur, Goldilocks, the Bride of the Bearded Lesbian, and Frau Yellow Dwarf, are examples of successful women: “all of us beautiful and rich” (73). They are described as a “hard school, tough as fuck” – and they need to be, considering their unconventional choice of partner (although Goldilocks does not marry in her fairy tale, but she is fearless enough to steal food from bears). The group of women regularly play poker together; on these nights, “the Beast kept out of sight”. This once again marks a reversal of gender roles: traditionally, it would be the husband having the poker nights with his friends while his wife kept her distance. The game, appropriately enough, is won with the Queen of Clubs and the Queen of Spades. The poker game is used as a metaphor for the agency that Mrs Beast and her friends have, but the women in traditional stories lack: But behind each player stood a line of ghosts unable to win. Eve. Ashputtel. Marilyn Monroe. Rapunzel slashing wildly at her hair. Bessie Smith unloved and down and out. (74) As the use of “a line” indicates, there are many more women who met an unhappy end and plenty of examples are given. The Little Mermaid is abandoned and thrown overboard by her prince; the faiths of Ashputtel (Cinderella’s original name), Snow White, and Rapunzel are not recounted in detail, but it is made clear they are all dead because they are described as part of the ghosts who were unable to win. Historical figures like Marilyn Monroe, Bessie Smith, the wives of Henry VIII and Bluebeard, and Princess Diana are also mentioned, all of whom met tragic and premature ends. Princess Diana and Bessie Smith died in car crashes while their lovers were driving; Marilyn Monroe overdosed on drugs; and Henry VIII and
Feminine Gospels was published in 2002, the next volume of poetry Duffy wrote after The World’s Wife. It is similar to its predecessor in certain aspects: it contains references to myths and other well-known characters as well, although the poems are not adaptations. The poem “Beautiful”, for example, incorporates the stories of Helen of Troy and Cleopatra and places them side by side with the lives of Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana to show the toll that beauty and fame take. On the other hand, “The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High” is mostly a realistic poem about contemporary life, except for the strange giggling disease that strikes the high school where the poem is set. However, Duffy mostly writes about women who personify aspects of (female) life. “The Long Queen” is the goddess of the female lifespan, from childhood to childbirth. She lives alone on a deserted island and has married Time to become immortal. In “The Woman Who Shopped”, a woman who is addicted to shopping turns into a department store – a metaphor for how shopping has taken over her whole life. The fantastical element is thus still clearly present in this volume. Because Feminine Gospels is more diverse than The World’s Wife in terms of subject matter and approach, two poems are discussed in this chapter to give a better overview of the volume. “Work” and “History” are not adaptations; instead, personification is a key element of these poems. The critical perspective Duffy offers in these poems is not just a feminist one, but also concerns the environment and history. The analysis of this chapter will focus on this, as well as the realist aspects of the text. 3.1 “Work” “Work” presents an allegory of Mother Earth, who is literally a working, single mother in this poem. It starts out on a small scale, when the mother only has one child:
To feed one, she worked from home, took in washing, ironing, sewing. One small mouth, a soup-filled spoon, life was a dream. (21) Duffy describes a stage of domestic bliss here, where the mother has just given birth to her first child and can easily provide for it by doing light work from home. However, as the poem progresses, her offspring multiplies rapidly: one child becomes two, two becomes ten, ten becomes fifty, until there are thousands of them. The mother needs to work harder and harder to feed all her children. In the final stanza, her efforts have grown so big that she has become the earth: “She fed / the world, wept rain, scattered the teeth in her head / for grain, swam her tongue in the river to spawn” (22). The poem also incorporates mankind’s technological and industrial developments: in the second stanza, the mother still works on the land; by the fourth stanza the Industrial Revolution has taken place and she works in a factory; in the seventh stanza, TV and Internet have taken over. These developments, however, are not necessarily presented as progress, but more as desperate measures taken to sustain the ever-growing human population. The mother is dehumanised in the process. This poem is an example of how Duffy combines myth and realism. On the one hand, she presents the reader with an allegory of Mother Earth, a figure present in countless folk- tales, myths and pagan religions; on the other hand, she gives a voice to the hard-working single mother who is trying to provide for her children. The allegory and the realistic portrait reinforce each other: the use of Mother Earth allows Duffy to enlarge and dramatize the day- to-day struggles of a human mother. Her life is not easy, which is conveyed by the varied use of verbs, like “she toiled, sweated, went / on the night shift, schlepped ” and “to feed four, / she grafted harder, second job in the alehouse” (21, italics mine); “there was no stopping her. She slogged / day and night at Internet shopping” (22, italics mine).
food, put in / a 90-hour work week” (22). All her efforts are a temporary solution, as they only allow her offspring to swell again: she feeds “more, more” but it leads to a population that multiplies. In the end, it causes the mother’s own demise: she “sickened, died, lay in a grave”. She has literally “worked, to the bone, / her fingers twenty-four seven”. The message is clear: humans are wearing out the earth, essentially killing their own mother. By making the earth an actual person (the working mother), Duffy invokes more sympathy in her readers for the dying earth. This shows how realism and fantasy combine to offer a critical perspective of contemporary society. 3.2 “History” “History” is similar to “Work” in terms of content: this time, the main character of the poem is an old, sick woman, and the thing that is personified is not the earth, but history. History is described as bones in a bed, not a tooth in her head, half dead, shuffled and limped downstairs in the rag of her nightdress, smelling of pee. (28) She is alone in her house and although she puts on a coat, she only uses it to sleep in – she does not go anywhere. Duffy’s analogies are concise and vivid: the reader can imagine the earth as a hard-working mother and history as an old, tired and lonely woman who has seen too much. The realist aspect of this poem manifests itself in the mundane details: History smells of pee, drinks tea, and snores. This transforms History from an abstract concept into a living, breathing person, which ensures that the reader can sympathise with her.
Duffy uses “History” to criticise the attitude people have towards history. In the first line, History wakes up: “She woke up old at last, alone” (28), and she wakes up again at the end of the sixth stanza: “She woke again, / cold, in the dark, / in the empty house” (29). This pattern of sleeping and waking shows how history is a cycle that repeats itself. More support for this cyclicity is found in the fifth stanza, which mentions several wars from different eras in one breath. By summing them up like this, Duffy shows that all wars are essentially the same: [She] witnessed the wars, the bloody crusades, knew them by date and by name, Bannockburn, Passchendaele, Babi Yar, Vietnam. (29) Various other historical events are also mentioned: the fall of Rome, Hitler’s dictatorship, the rise of Christianity. However, all these appear in History’s dreams. This can be seen as a metaphor: humans tend to regard the past as a bad dream and they do not learn from it: after all, history repeats itself all the time, Duffy implies. The message of negligence is enforced in the seventh stanza: Bricks through the window now, thieves in the night. When they rang on her bell there was nobody there; fresh graffiti sprayed on her door, shit wrapped in a newspaper posted onto her floor. (29) The fact that History’s house is being vandalised might suggest that humans do not take history seriously and have little respect for it. Because Duffy’s history is a woman, this neglect and disrespect can also specifically refer to the treatment of women in history. Since the 1970s the concept of Herstory – as a
