topic sentences

Little Red cap

Through the subversion of a well-known fairy tale, Duffy conveys literary knowledge as a vessel to affirm identity in her poem Little Red Cap. Indeed, identity emerges from “childhood’s end”….

Queen Herrod

Duffy’s Queen Herod subverts the biblical slaughter of the innocents to portray maternal instinct as paradoxically nurturing and vicious; women fostering a quiet but fervent agenda against men. The “Three Queens”, illustrated as ornate…

Mrs Midas

In Mrs Midas, Duffy transposes the myth of King Midas to a contemporary middle-class marriage to illustrate the collective and pervasive consequences of rapacious male culture. Beginning with the prosaic “It was late September”…

Mrs Aesop

A sardonic and resentful complaint of a tiresome husband, Carol Anne Duffy’s poem, Mrs Aesop, serves as an expression of conjugal dissatisfaction engendering deeper implications of self-worth, legitimacy and satisfaction.

Mrs Darwin

Duffy confronts the overstated genius of men in her cutting poem, Mrs Darwin, illuminating the historically marginalised contributions of women. Employing a fictionalised diary form…

Mrs Sisyphus

In Mrs Sisyphus, Duffy blends mythology with contemporary domestic realism to scrutinise male pursuits of profession and performance, conveyed through the speaker’s scathing tone of disillusionment.

Mrs Faust

In the incisive dramatic monologue, Mrs Faust, Duffy depicts the wilful moral corruption of society as historically led and instigated by men.

Anne Hathaway

Duffy’s Anne Hathaway elides the body of memory with the physical body to rejoice in “lover’s words” which transcend formal, inflexible expectations of marriage

Medusa

Contesting her historic vilification, Duffy’s palimpsest of Medusa reveals the underlying vulnerability of the speaker concealed beneath her mythic guise of spite and indignation.

Circe

Through a subversion of patriarchal mythology, Duffy’s semantically rich poem Circe portrays vindictive misandry as a forceful rebuke of male exploitation.

Mrs Lazarus

A paradigm of grief, Duffy’s Mrs Lazarus captures the unspoken restraints of marriage implicit in the unconsoled emotional turmoil of the speaker.

Mrs Icarus

Transposing the mythological Greek tragedy, Duffy’s Mrs Icarus is a sardonic reprimand of male conceit, yet the mordant tone cannot obscure the limited autonomy of women within the binds of marriage.

Eurydice

Voicing the historically silent Eurydice, Duffy depicts the speaker's escape from the oppressive poetising of her husband

Voicing the historically silent Eurydice, Duffy’s poem urges a gendered audience of “Girls” to “forget” (or rather relearn) insular and unchecked narratives relayed by men.

The Kray Sisters

Capturing the zeitgeist of the 1960s, Duffy asserts formidable feminist agency in her duologue, The Kray Sisters; reimagining the infamous brothers, as avowedly female raconteurs.

Elvis’s Twin Sister

In Elvis’s Twin Sister, Duffy intermingles the sacred and the secular to evince an essential fluency and serenity that flourishes within feminine spheres.

Pope Joan

In Pope Joan, religious jargon and rigid ascendency characterise secular constructs as a perpetuation of male hegemony, yet its triadic structure in three-line stanzas presents a reimagined female loyalty to the Holy Trinity.

Penelope

The wait for her husband, salient in the Homeric account, is a mere introduction to the genuine narrative of Penelope, where Duffy reclaims the domestic task of sewing as an ekphrasis of identity and agency.

Demeter

A profoundly intimate poem of maternal love, Duffy’s, Demeter transforms the rigid and formally constraining sonnet form to capture the emotionally redemptive connection between women.

Intro

Carol Ann Duffy presents a chorus of defiant female voices who prevail as titular protagonists of their own accord in her poetry collection, The World’s Wife …

Duffy evokes an innately and exclusively feminine tenor to honour women’s experiences as profound and inherently valuable.

Conclusion

Through the fervent personal assertion of agency in…. and the inherent gynocritical focus of (), Duffy rejects the insular, androcentric historical narratives relayed by men to reclaim womens’ experiences as their own richly nuanced and integral cultural, historical and literary canon.