ipl-logo

Carol Ann Duffy's Feminism And Dramatic Monologue

1383 Words6 Pages

Duffy’s Feminism and Dramatic Monologues: A Study of Some Poems from The World’s Wife. Yasser K. R. Aman, Minia University, Egypt.

Abstract This research aims at investigating Carol Ann Duffy’s representation of feminist issues by recalling historical, religious and mythological figures using the dramatic monologue. Duffy subverts feminine archetypes through a series of dramatic monologues in her volume The World’s Wife whose structure is based on an eclectic mixture of influences that build up intertextual and metatextual webs reflected in themes of love, as well as the loss of love, sexist oppression, sadness and loneliness, and many others. Be it noted that The World’s Wife shows difficulties, set by a patriarchal society, in the way of women as well as men. Duffy’s simple language is traced back to Wordsworth, while her use of the dramatic monologue reminiscent of Browning and T. S. Eliot. To express female desiderata, Duffy has revisited …show more content…

Midas that holds intertextual semantic relations based on world text theory with Ovid’s king Midas’ story from Metamorphoses, and Delilah and Salome. Other gender-bending figures, illustrated not by cross-dressing but by cross identification, appear like Mrs. Darwin, Mrs. Aesop, Mrs. Sisyphus, and Mrs. Faust.
Keywords: Feminism, dramatic monologue, Duffy, poetry.

Introduction Feminism: Body and Gender Throughout history accepted ideas about women’s bodies have yielded a social construction of these bodies. Be it noted that “the body is a concept, and so is hardly intelligible unless it is read in relation to whatever else supports it and surrounds it” (Riley 222). Long ago, women’s bodies were considered

Show More
Related
1809 Words | 8 Pages

The different key features also plays an important role for example the tone that is being formed by the lyrical voice that can be seen as a nephew or niece. This specific poem is also seen as an exposition of what Judith Butler will call a ‘gender trouble’ and it consist of an ABBA rhyming pattern that makes the reading of the poem better to understand. The poem emphasizes feminist, gender and queer theories that explains the life of the past and modern women and how they are made to see the world they are supposed to live in. The main theories that will be discussed in this poem will be described while analyzing the poem and this will make the poem and the theories clear to the reader. Different principals of the Feminist Theory.

Read More
713 Words | 3 Pages

The author, Alice Dreger, wants to know why we let our anatomy decide how our future is going to be. In the future, as science continues to become better, are we still going to continue to look at anatomy? Would we ever confess that a democracy that was built on anatomy might be collapsing? Alice Dreger argues that individuals who have bodies that challenge norms such as conjoined twins and those who have atypical sex threaten the social categories we have developed in our society. We have two categories: male and female.

Read More
615 Words | 3 Pages

The prejudice that the author brings forward strongly is the notion of feminism. The author’s main purpose of writing this novel is to examine the role of women played around

Read More
1006 Words | 5 Pages

Authors, especially female authors, have long used their writing to emphasize and analyze the feminist issues that characterize society, both in the past and the present. Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Susan Glaspell wrote narratives that best examined feminist movements through the unreliable minds of their characters. In all three stories, “The Story of an Hour”, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, and “A Jury of Her Peers”, the authors use characterization, symbolism, and foreshadowing to describe the characters’ apparent psychosis or unreasonable behavior to shed light on the social issues that characterized the late 19th century and early 20th century. Penning many stories that demonstrate her opinions on the social issues of the era,

Read More
1702 Words | 7 Pages

“Society indirectly limits many individuals freedom to enjoy life by promoting physical expectations they fail to meet” (Solomon, et al). But we can terminate this expectation, so that no woman would ever have to second guess her body

Read More
1730 Words | 7 Pages

Throughout his “Divine Comedy,” Dante Alighieri encounters with two women, who are antithetical to one another in terms of their roles in the context of love. These two women; Francesca di Rimini and Beatrice, have similar emotional experiences since both have relationships outside marriage; yet, they have different roles when Dante explores the notion of love. The reader meets the first woman, Francesca, in Inferno, while meets the second, Beatrice, in Paradiso. In other words, one of them is being punished, whereas the other woman holds divine position. Thus, the female characters within the poem represents two distinct roles of women: either as a pure and holy being, or as a sinful entity.

Read More
415 Words | 2 Pages

Through characterization and vilification, Joyce Carol Oates emphasizes both the wickedness and vulnerability of her female characters. Although Oates’s writing is predominantly seen as feministic or through a feminist lens, Oates says she is "very sympathetic with most of the aims of feminism, but cannot write feminist literature because it is too narrow, too limited” (Chell). While Oates may not directly say she writes feministic literature, the topics she writes about include the recognition of the difficulties specific to a female writer according to Chell. In many of her novels, her writing can actually be seen as both feminist and antifeminist due to her use of diction and characterization.

Read More
1014 Words | 5 Pages

The play “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell is largely based on stereotypes. The most prevalent one explores the difference between gender roles. Glaspell exerts the repression of women in the 1900s. During that time, women were highly looked down upon by men, and were only seen as the housekeepers and child bearers. This example is displayed throughout the play with the men, however, the women in this play prove that the stereotypes of gender roles held against them are completely wrong, which is shown through the characters, set design, and symbolism.

Read More
2199 Words | 9 Pages

She has been brainwashed by the patriarchal society of her time to worship the man, her husband, and perform her duties and daily rituals as a means to please him. Welter outlines several characteristics that constitute the perfect or true woman; however, the most crucial and detrimental so-called “virtues” exhibited by Gilman`s the narrator are her submissiveness and domesticity. Although the artistic narrator clearly has her own desires to be free and write as she pleases, her desire to satisfy the patriarchal construct of the household by attending

Read More
1025 Words | 5 Pages

Perrault, a 17th century French author, wrote about women as damsels in distress in his fairy tales, while Atwood, a 20th and 21st century Canadian author, offers a more realistic and modern approach in her writing. Sharon Wilson, author of the essay “Margaret Atwood and the Fairy Tale: Postmodern Revisioning In Recent Texts”, calls Atwood’s use of fairy tales to talk about current issues in society as “meta-fairy tales”. Atwood’s “meta-fairy tales” offer insight on gender politics in a current patriarchal society. Instead of using generic conventions to tell her story, like Perrault does, Atwood uses them and then dismantles them in order to show the reader the problems within the genre like she does in her poem.

Read More
766 Words | 4 Pages

Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam makes many valid points about women’s identities in marriage. Mariam’s choices throughout the play reflect her understanding of the fact that in the world she lives there is no space for a chaste, honest, independent woman. The standards that a woman of the time are impossible and Mariam’s attempts to grapple with them are doomed to fail. After experiencing the freedom of self expression afforded to her after she believes her husband has died she is unwilling to re-enter the position of a subordinate.

Read More
957 Words | 4 Pages

Women’s Body The Figuration of the female body is well described in both Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El-Saadawi and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Both novels show that the women bodies are not their own and controlled by others which it turned into an object in order to survive. In this paper, I would like to argue how the objectification of the female bodies in both novels resulted in their oppression and sufferings. Moreover, what is the definition of the figuration of a body to both Offred and Firdaus? And is there a way out to survive this tragedy in both novels?

Read More
1360 Words | 6 Pages

Feminist Criticism allows to understand the meaning and importance of literature when relating to the male-female power

Read More
1000 Words | 4 Pages

Feminist literary criticism’s primary argument is that female characters have always been presented from a male’s viewpoint. According to Connell, in most literary works, female characters often play minor roles which emphasize their domestic roles, subservience and physical beauty while males are always the protagonists who are strong, heroic and dominant (qtd. in Woloshyn et al.150). This means that the women are perceived as weak and are supposed to be under the control of men. Gill and Sellers say that feminist literary criticism’s approach involves identifying with female characters in order to challenge any male centred outlook.

Read More
826 Words | 4 Pages

This novel is also autobiographical. Throughout history, women have been locked in a struggle to free themselves from the borderline that separates and differentiate themselves from men. In many circles, it is agreed that the battleground for this struggle and fight exists in literature. In a

Read More

More about Carol Ann Duffy's Feminism And Dramatic Monologue

Related Topics

Open Document