Feminine Gospels

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The final image of this section focuses on ‘little bird inside a cage’, representing the trap that beauty is. Helen’s whole life was marred by the prosecution of men, trapped due to her physical features. The final image of a ‘cage’ symbolizes this oppression, Helen’s life is destroyed due to her beauty. Another point of context is the use of ‘A Room of One’s Own’. This is making reference to Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name, in which the female identity is similarly explored. This novel is concerned with identity and place, making a good match for Duffy’s ‘ The Map Woman’. The reference to ‘light’ is normally a positive association. Yet, for Monroe, even the most positive things are subverted. Duffy uses ‘under the lights’ to display how exposed Monroe was. Especially surrounding the rumored affair with President Kenedy, the world blamed her instead of the wildly powerful man who manipulated her.

Another technique that Duffy uses throughout Beautiful is a caesura. Following or preceding important phrases within the poem, Duffy uses caesura. This caesura creates a slight metrical pause within the line. This pause then places emphasis on what comes before or after the caesura. In doing this, Duffy can focus the poem on key ideas without disrupting the rhythm of reading. In many places, this caesura appears incredibly blunt, such as ‘Beauty is fame.’, emphasizing the harshness of this statement. Duffy likes to take a familiar psychological reality and extend it as an outrageous metaphor. In "The Map Woman", for instance, an A-to-Z street map of the town in which a woman has grown up is tattooed over the skin of her whole body. Wherever she goes, and whatever she becomes, that geography remains an indelible pattern she cannot escape; until, that is, almost accidentally, she hits on the remedy. She decides to return to the real town that haunts her. In the intervening years, the place she remembers has become almost unrecognisable under newly built arcades and shopping malls. Bewildered by these changes, she retreats to her hotel room. There, she sloughs her skin like a snake. In the last verse, Duffy escapes from the metaphor to close the poem with a resonance that recalls some of Larkin's memorable conclusions: Carol Ann Duffy splits ‘The Map-Woman‘ into thirteen stanzas. Each of these measures a regular 10 lines. The incredibly stable form of the poem could reflect the content of a map, both relying on structure and logic. Although there is not a continuous rhyme scheme, there are moments of rhyme. Some of these are internal, which propel the meter of the poem onward, leading to moments of climax within the narrative. Rhyme is also used to connect key ideas, the final two lines relying on a couplet of ‘bone’ and ‘home’ to display the inescapable nature of identity. The poems near the end of the book - which are closer to prayers or love poems - have that kind of intensity in abundance, particularly those that lament the dead, and tease the living with the hope that after allThe world this creature inhabits is apocalyptic, with the old alone and vulnerable to thieves in the night: The Long Queen‘ by Carol Ann Duffy elevates the status of women by focusing on one of the most influential rulers in history. Duffy begins by focusing on the principle of marrying ‘Time’ instead of an actual husband, and Elizabeth focuses on ruling successfully instead of marriage and romance. Duffy then moves through the type of people that Queen Elizabeth rules over, focusing on the blinding quality of being a woman, everyone encompassed within her reign. Duffy explores how the Queen’s ‘laws’: supporting all women, dispelling the fear and shame around periods, ensuring that emotions are shown, and safe childbirth. The final stanza suggests that Queen Elizabeth would have given up everything to extend the voice of women, championing females across her ‘time’ and long into the future. The Long Queen‘ begins Duffy’s anthology, ‘Feminine Gospels’, and touches on several key themes of the anthology: the position of women in society, feminine power, and female voices all being referenced within the poem. Yet, the most important theme of all when discussing ‘ The Long Queen‘ would be history, with Duffy using this figure to begin the tradition of historic women. Good poems to analyze in discussion with ‘ The Long Queen‘ in regards to history would be the poems History, Sub, and Beautiful. Sub begins with the personal pronoun ‘I’, instantly focusing the poem on Duffy’s own experiences, placing the feminine perspective at the forefront of the narrative. Yet, even with her excellent performance in the football match, she was only permitted on within ‘extra time’, signalling how even as she reconquers history for women, she is only permitted lesser roles. Duffy introduces a character who helps Helen, her female ‘maid’. This woman ‘loved her most’, loving her for herself instead of her beauty. Indeed, she would not ‘describe/one aspect of her face’, protecting Helen of Troy. Instead of furthering the iconic legend of Helen, she remains faithful, the only friendly character of this section is a female. This could be a mechanism through which Duffy suggests that women always support women, especially in retaliation to the male gaze.

One could argue there is a slight reference to Desdemona from Othello, ‘a handkerchief she’d dropped once’. This reference bears relevance as Desdemona is murdered by Othello due to his male rage, unable to believe his loyal wife. Bala, Ismail. "Woman-To-Woman: Displacement, Sexuality and Gender in Carol Ann Duffy's Poetry". Linguistic Association of Nigeria, vol 4, no. 2, 2011, Accessed 29 Apr 2018. The oxymoronic ‘Tough beauty’ displays Cleopatra’s character perfectly. She is at once beautiful and impactful. She uses her beauty to gain leverage, being able to outsmart the men in her way. Anything that Caesar does, Cleopatra does the same or better, ‘matched him glass for glass’. Duffy dismantles the notion that women cannot perform equally to men, Cleopatra doing so despite being subjugated for her feminine beauty. This is further suggested by ‘she rolled’, Cleopatra being the active participant in lines. Cleopatra ‘reached and pulled him down’, controlling Caesar with her intelligence and beauty.These final three stanzas explore the mystery of Helen, the perusers unsure of where she escaped. The use of ‘dusk’, ‘moon’, and ‘smuggled’ play into the semantics of secrecy, Helen slipping away from her followers’ grasps. Yet, even in this act, the male gaze focuses on how ‘her dress/clung to her form’. Duffy suggests that at all times the male gaze sexualizes women.

Yet, Cleopatra is able to leverage her beauty to get what she wants, Duffy presents the woman’s power. The fact she reduces ‘Caesar’ to ‘gibbering’ displays the control she has. We know this is a sexual power by the location, ‘in bed’. Duffy suggests that Cleopatra gains power by accepting her beauty and using it to manipulate and control men. Not all the fantasies carry the same charge. "Work" takes a single mum, working her fingers to the bone to fill her larder, and develops her problem through a rhetoric of absurdity that leaves her at the heart of the capitalist internet trying to feed a planet. Sometimes the gritty details make a familiar point surprising. An anorexic shrivels like Alice until she is blown away as a seed, to nestle at length in the stomach of a gloriously self-indulgent eater. She has become literally that thin woman notoriously found inside every fat one, except in this version, she has no wish to get out . Firstly, Duffy begins this section with a premonition by the end, ‘dead’. The caesura following this word adds emphasis, creating an unsettling moment of pause. Diana, apart from her fantastic activism and philanthropy, is also known for how badly she was treated by the press. Her death came in a car crash while fleeing from the press, perhaps signaling ‘dead’ as her final resting state.

Though nothing is known of Helen’s death, the other three — significantly — died gruesomely; Cleopatra used a poisenous snake to bite and kill her; Marilyn Munroe committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping tablets, and Diana died in a car crash pursued by the press seeking photographs. The one word title is a loaded adjective, which carries different associations in the mind of each reader. The irony is that the lives of the beautiful women, explored in the poem, were difficult, contrasting tragically to their physical loveliness.