Professional Documents
Culture Documents
arol Ann Duffy is one of the freshest and bravest talents to emerge in British
poetry any poetry for years', writes Eavan Boland (Duffy, 1994, cover). This
courage is manifest in Duffys ability and desire to revise masculinist representations
of female identity and her engagement with feminine discourse, a concept which, as
Sara Mills points out:
in which the male body is so volubly expressed in language and literature whilst the
female body remains silenced and concealed. The suggestion that Frau Freud devises
vagina envy before her husband has even thought about penis envy, and the
presentation of Mrs Darwin as the real founder of the Theory of Evolution, comically
undermine and re-appropriate received notions of a male dominated history and
tradition. The use of comedy restructures received ideas of gender relations by
transferring authority to, and demonstrating the power of, the female voice.
identity but she has had to prostitute herself to do so. In her poem, Duffy rejects the
literary tradition of Pygmalion, as portrayed by Ovid and George Bernard Shaw
amongst others, and mocks their assumptions about female identity. By giving the
woman agency and deriding the man as a lustful fool, she re-writes the myth and represents the female figure within it.
does Carol Ann Duffy fit the bill? Well, she's young-ish, was
born in Glasgow to left wing parents and brought up in the
Gorbals, is highly regarded, brilliant at readings, a feminist,
combines wit with bleak realism, and has been described as 'the
characteristic poet of the 80s and 90s'.
So what's the obstacle? She's a lesbian. (10 May)
Whether or not Duffy's sexuality influenced the appointment, it is certainly something
that informs her work. Her love poems, for example, are frequently concerned with
the inability of language to accurately express emotions and homosexual
relationships. Deryn Rees-Jones states:
Highly regarded for her many love poems, Duffy has, however,
spoken of the difficulties of working in a genre that, perhaps
more than any, depends traditionally on a division of power
between lover and beloved, male and female. [] She refigures
heterocentric representations of desire both to affirm and
problematize identity, throwing into question ideas of sameness
and difference in the relationship of the lover and the beloved,
and the inadequacies of language to articulate the nature of that
experience. (p.30)
The difficulty of forging a language that can express any love is compounded by her
efforts to express female homosexuality in her poetry: she has no literary tradition to
look to, only a predominantly masculine discourse of heterosexual love. She has to
'refigure heterocentric representations of desire' to fit in with her own notion of desire.
In 'Words, Wide Night', from The Other Country (1990), she writes:
By foregrounding the act of writing, Duffy draws attention to the failure of words to
inscribe emotion; they themselves are representations. She closes the poem with: 'For
I am in love with you and this/is what it is like or what it is like in words.' There is a
clear distinction made between the 'real' emotion and its representative. The poem
also suggests the failure of the traditional love poem, she asserts one thing, 'this is
pleasurable', but is not sure if that is the correct way of presenting love within the
traditional, masculine precepts. 'Oppenheim's Cup and Saucer', from Duffy's first full
collection Standing Female Nude (1985), attempts to include lesbian love within this
tradition and does so by employing an intertextual reference to Oppenheim's famous
surrealist work, Dejeuner en fourrurei[1]; a fur covered cup, saucer and spoon. Duffy,
like Oppenheim, plays on the image of women and undermines it by juxtaposing the
domestic with the erotic, the surreal with the ordinary; the domestic image of the cup
is subverted by the fur's implication of pubic hair (Rees-Jones, p.32). The cup,
representing the female genitalia, becomes an important symbol of the rejection of
masculinist imagery; it is no longer a tool of the kitchen, the cup implies female
sexuality and power. Having invoked Oppenheim in the title, the first stanza initiates
the relationship between the lovers in the poem but also indicates a dialogue between
poet and artist, a collusion of intent and a dismissal of artistic patriarchy:
Notes
[1] Oppenheim, Meret, 'Dejeuner en Fourrure' (1936), Museum of Modern Art, New
York.
Works Cited
Duffy, Carol Ann, Standing Female Nude (London: Anvil, 1985).
, Selling Manhattan (London: Anvil, 1987).
, The Other Country (London: Anvil, 1990).
, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1994).
, The Worlds Wife (London: Picador, 1999).
Gregson, Ian, 'Carol Ann Duffy: Monologue as Dialogue' in
Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism: Dialogue and
Estrangement (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1996).
Lacan, Jacques, 'The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious' in
David Lodge, (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader
(London: Longman, 1988).
Mills, Sara, Discourse (London: Routledge, 1997).
Pass Notes, Guardian G2, 10 May 1999, p.3.
Room, Adrian, (ed.), Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
(London: Cassel & Co, 2001).
Viner, Katharine, 'Metre Maid', Guardian Weekend, 25 September
1999, pp.20-26.