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start of focused extract analysis

Focusing more explicitly on ‘Mrs Faust,’ Duffy presents us a reimagining of the classical Faustian legend through the lens of Faust’s wife. In the original legend, Faust sells his soul for power, but Duffy shifts the focus to the woman who lived alongside this patriarchal bargain. Throughout the poem, Mrs Faust competes with her husband’s toxic masculinity who basically tried to reduce her to an accessory of his, countering his infidelities and global power trips with a performed boredom and empty lifestyle trends. It is only when Faust confesses to his pact that a volta occurs, transforming her boredom into a performance of dominance as a rebellion. 

however

However, to maintain this dominant mask, she also abandons her organic humanity, treating her body as a corporate transaction. Duffy highlights this through the visceral imagery of her illness: ‘I bought a kidney with my credit card, then I got well.’ This clipped, sequential syntax of bought, then got well, reduces the long, uncertain reality of illness and healing to a simple transaction, as if emotion itself has been edited out. The isolation of ‘with my credit card’ is telling, organ transplants are normally defined by scarcity and waiting, but her wealth lets her bypass that struggle entirely, replacing genuine healing and the struggles that come with it with the same cold, capitalist mechanisms that once repressed her. 

In addition

In addition, this consolidation of power is confirmed in the poem's image where Faust's death is met not with grief but a flippant "Oh, well." The asyndetic list that follows; his yacht, houses, jet and "loot," reduces a lifetime of ambition to a string of consumer items, dismissed with "et cet, et cet." Ending simply on "the lot, to me," as if she's sort of mocking him that she got everything in the end. Significantly, her casualness also suggests that the performance she once performed may have calcified into something real, or alternatively, that performance has simply become a permanent register.

Finally

Finally, the spitting alliteration of ‘clever, cunning callous bastard’ seals her victory. She in a way gets the last laugh by revealing that Faust ‘didn’t have a soul to sell.’ She out-manipulated both her husband and the devil, keeping the material rewards of the bargain without paying the spiritual price. Yet, the tragic irony of the global issue remains: to rebel against this patriarchal repression, she had to abandon her authentic self entirely, mimicking the exact callous nature of her oppressor to win the ultimate game of dominance.

Ultimately

Ultimately, across Duffy's body of work and Mrs Faust, Duffy shows that performing dominance is one way patriarchal repression can leave women to handle it, but that this path always comes at a cost, requiring some part of the self to be set aside. In this way, she reflects a pattern that mirrors reality that is quite unspoken of today. 

Start of Beyonce

Similarly though, Beyonce explores this same global issue across her hit short-film album ‘Lemonade.’ The album is built around her husband Jay-Z's infidelity, structured through the 5 stages of the grief cycle, where she envisions the death of her marriage like grief - except she complicates this by adding extra stages, reflecting how a woman's emotional reaction to betrayal is not linear but complex. Crucially, the patriarchal repression here is the expectation for women to silently absorb marital trauma and infidelity in order to preserve the appearance of a stable marriage. What is significant for this global issue is how the album begins with performance but ultimately ends with its collapse. 

Dont Hurt Yourself

"Don't Hurt Yourself" arrives early in the album, right as Beyoncé's grief sharpens into anger. This isn't a moment of weakness but one of reclamation, she meets betrayal with this unapologetic dominance. We hear this in her warning: "If you try this shit again, you gon' lose your wife." The line is blunt and commanding, Beyoncé speaking with the same authority patriarchal structures usually reserve for men. But to be heard on those terms, she has to set aside a more vulnerable way of holding power since the system only recognizes strength when it looks like force. Her rebellion is real and earned, but it still narrows her down to the one register patriarchy already validates.

All Night

Conversely, 'All Night' shows what that performance of dominance ultimately cost her. She returns to him, declaring: "our love was stronger than your pride," a clear shift from the blunt, threatening language of 'Don't Hurt Yourself' back to softness and feeling. This reveals that to perform such total anger and authority earlier in the album, she had to abandon her capacity for love and forgiveness, setting it aside so the anger could exist without competing for space. It is only once that performance is no longer needed that this abandoned part of her is finally allowed to resurface.

Focused extract of Sorry

Moving onto my focused extract, Sorry is a track centered around a direct confrontation of betrayal and refusal to apologize for choosing self-worth over suffering. Here, the patriarchal repression is the societal expectation that a betrayed woman should suffer quietly. Within the album, the song falls under the fourth chapter of Apathy, acting as a peak moment of performing dominance as a protective shield against this patriarchal betrayal. Throughout the track, the tex^t beautifully showcases how a woman might temporarily step away from her genuine grief and honesty, choosing instead to project a display of dominance and public apathy/indifference as a rebellion to these societal expectations.