Session 4B: Angels and Demons
1st Global Conference
Friday 1st May 2009 – Sunday 3rd May 2009
Budapest, Hungary
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Carol Ann Duffy’s Female Myths or a Celebration of the Dark Shadows of the Soul
Patricia Tabarés Pérez
Universidad de Valladolid, Spain
Carol Ann Duffy (Glasgow 1955) is probably the most popular poet at the moment in the United Kingdom together with Simon Armitage. One of the most characteristic features of her already considerable extensive poetic work is the representation of female figures, commonly silenced by society, who find in her poetry a platform to speak out and be heard. Among these female voices, it is remarkable Duffy’s revision of female myths from Western history taken from fairy-tales, Greek mythology, the Bible, literature, science, cinema and music. This fact can be appreciated not only in her most popular feminist volumes such as The World’s Wife (1999) (TWW) and Feminine Gospels (2002) (FG). It occurs similarly in her juvenilia Fifth Last Song (1982) (FLS), and in works such as the very much acclaimed Standing Female Nude (1985) (SFN) and Mean Time (1993) (MT).
Duffy’s female myths are commonly women who have suffered physical, and much more regularly, psychological maltreatment by the men they loved. This is the reason for “Queen Herod” (TWW, 7) not wanting any boy making her baby girl suffer (“No man, I swore, will make her shed one tear”); “Pygmalion’s Bride” (TWW, 51) complaining about her lover’s abandonment of her after being sexually satisfied (“[I] began to moan, / got hot, got wild, / arched, coiled, writhed, / begged for his child, / and at the climax / screamed my head off – / all an act. And [I] haven’t seen him since. / Simply as that”); or Mrs Beast (TWW, 72) declaring that from then on she would be the dominant part in relationships (“Bring me the Beast for the night. / Bring me the wine-cellar key. / Let the less-loving one be me”).
What is these women’s reaction after being maltreated by their partners or, at least, after not being corresponded as they would have liked? The dark shadows of the human soul ascend to the surface of the poems and inundate the verses with violent jealousy, envy, hate, revulsion, and hysteria. Characters such the Devil’s Wife, Eurydice, Delilah, Mrs Faustus, Medusa or Aracne, just to cite but a few, are the myths (re-)visited by Duffy. These women celebrate the evil condition of human beings as the natural and justified reaction to their male partners’ abuses.
The aim of this paper is precisely to explore Duffy’s female voices’ dark shadows of the soul and the serious consequences of breaking a woman’s heart for the Scottish poet. These consequences rarely end up with the physical death of any of the male figures but with their psychological devastation through powerful and subliminal female weapons. Through Duffy’s poetic work, a feminine arsenal consisting of revenge, obsessive manipulation, and mental and emotional punishment can be admired. And, as it is very frequent in her poems, the evil condition of the femme fatale will always appear veiled by the intelligent and sharp needles of feminine irony.
Now Slips the Crimson Petal, Now the White – Monster/Angel Dichotomy in the Representation of Women in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White
Barbara Braid
Department of English and American Literature, Higher Education College Collegium Balticum, Szczecin, Poland
In Michel Faber’s novel published in 2002, The Crimson Petal and the White, Sugar and Agnes seem to represent the typical division in Victorian society: women can be either whores (monsters) or ladies (angels). However, the author of the novel presents and then subverts those binary oppositions in his construction of female characters. It seems that Sugar, the prostitute and William Rackham’s mistress, is the fallen angel, whereas Agnes, his delicate and beautiful wife – the ideal angel in the house.Still, Agnes is not as angelic as she seems to be at a first glance and the demonic Sugar starts to show her more emotional and more compassionate side. The labelling of Sugar and Agnes as angels or monsters is a result of William’s ‘male gaze, but it is not only William’s – the implied reader is seduced into the world of the novel. The female characters of the novel do not only escape William’s categorisation in terms of a Victorian female ideal, but they also break free from the world of the novel, and as a result, from the gaze of the reader as well.
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