The World's Wife Poem Analysis

One of the poets read this semester is Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. This paper will focus on one of her collections called The World’s Wife. In The World’s Wife, Duffy uses Feminist Revisionism to give voice to new or lesser-known characters. This typically takes a mythological character and reinvents it and/or the source myth to make social commentary or create intrigue. In The World’s Wife, Duffy takes famous myths and fairytales and centers them around wives she created, or minor female characters that she further fleshes out. Throughout this collection her characters display the different stages of womanhood, from youth to empty-nest motherhood. By choosing these tales, she makes the reader question whether or not a woman can carry a plot without the shadow of a male protagonist. In order to frame Duffy’s poetry we look at gendered tropes often seen in modern culture. Tropes are a sort of stereotype often used in media and literature. Women are usually divided into the character archetypes of virgin, slut, mother, bitch, and crone (nearly all of these are seen in Duffy’s collection). Similar to those there are marriage tropes, or spouse tropes, that are frequently used …show more content…
Midas and Mrs. Faust. Now in the myth and the play there are no wives, if so then they are barely mentioned; the traditional protagonists and center of the tales are the men. To make a modern commentary, Duffy creates these female voices in these classics. She exploits the “behind every man there is a woman” trope to create new stories. By using women she makes them almost relatable: on sitcoms the wife is almost always exasperated by her troublesome, lazy husband. The sitcom wife is usually the pillar of the family who prevents the husband’s problematic personality from ruining the family, aka the overused plot. Duffy also writes most of these poems without typical ‘happy’ endings, with a few