Feminist retellings in Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘The World’s Wife’

Abstract

This research will examine Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry collection ‘The World’s Wife’ through feminist theory. It will analyse the myriad of poems that retell stories of famous characters and figures in media and history and will discuss how they function as feminist retellings. Duffy is highly praised by feminists because of her work that emphasises the woman as a central character. Her feminist revisionist poems in The World’s Wife especially do so, as the universality of the broad selection of characters that she writes about explores many different facets of the female perspective in life, love and many other aspects that were never fully explored before the feminist movement gained traction. The figures in her poetry are not all the same, as they juxtapose each other, representing the differing values and personalities of the female character. Female identity is shown as being ever-changing and evolving instead of a static and silent character that the patriarchy has created as an ideal in society. This dissertation is divided into an introduction, three chapters that analyse her poetry in detail, and a conclusion. The introduction will focus on the feminist movement and works such as Hélène Cixous’ ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ and Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’. It will also focus on the poet herself and her life and sequence of work that led up to the release of her collection The World’s Wife. The first chapter will focus on style with a focus on the several poetic techniques she utilizes in the collection. The second on female identity, its erasure, and how it is rebuilt. The third on several facets of relationships, sexuality and liberation of women.