WORDS, WORDS WERE TRULY ALIVE ON THE TONGUE, IN THE HEAD
WARM, BEATING, FRANTIC, WINGED; MUSIC AND BLOOD
Carol Ann Duffy with Adrian Henri
Carol Ann Duffy’s 1999 anthology, The World’s Wife, marks a gripping departure from the earlier status quo of male-prescribed narratives and societal expectations in fairy tales, myths and historical events. Saturated with a tinge of British social realism, Duffy tactfully imposes her critical interventions in the hackneyed homogeneity of the literary world, though she extends far beyond the linguistics of gender discourse by unashamedly setting each poem in a contemporary idiom. From illuminating the disregarded status of Lazarus’ wife, to subverting Little Red Cap’s pitifully prescribed gullibility, Duffy’s radical reinterpretations place these women in the limelight for once.
Bet Mrs. Midas never turned to gold. Renowned British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife amalgamates cultural paradoxes as she shines a light on the overshadowed women of history - women who are tender yet tenacious, lyrical yet humoristic, and above all, fall victim to prevailing patriarchal strictures yet conceive an inner tenacity to subvert it. Through archiving a personal history, Duffy eloquently - and rather cathartically - provides a ventriloquised voice to the women behind the scenes and subtly integrates memoirs of personal, yet collectively encountered experiences. Perhaps what remains the most arresting to readers in The World’s Wife is its all-too-familiar essence materialized from its lingering traces of social realism; the Lazaruses no longer exist in a biblical realm as we encounter the colloquial depiction of Mrs. Lazarus’s turbulent emotional ups-and-downs, and Little Red Cap’s folklore veneer disintegrates as we witness parts of ourselves manifest through her premature sexual awakening. These women - the girl next door, the streetwise lolita, the domestic alpha - aren’t your locally televised Jane Doe; they exist as archetypes in contemporary society, although Duffy does much more than to merely fuel these pigeonholed-identities by examining the intricacy of it all.
Exemplifying the personal and political significance of each narrative, Duffy’s Little Red Cap acts as both an intimate anecdote and an ideologically-loaded reinterpretation of the Brothers Grimm’s classic folktale from 1905. As a universally integral narrative in our childhoods, a politicized Little Red Cap (1905) substantiates the current patriarchal status-quo, riddled with man-made norms of femininity and a fueled image of hypermasculinity - because who better to depict girlhood than two old cisgender men seeking to avert their stereotypical narrative from being politicized? The reappropriation of this original folklore, being Duffy’s own mouthpiece, is imbued with a personal reminiscence of a dramatic yet nonchalant transition to womanhood - her first relationship at age 16, with Liverpudlian poet Adrien Henri, 23 years her senior. This begging to believed - girlhood - is implicitly validated through Duffy’s subversion of the prescribed roles for Little Red Cap and the wolf. Substantiating this is an underlying tone of tenacity prevalent throughout the entirety of the poem, as Duffy assumes an intentionally subordinate voice, ironically capitalising on this thetic norm of frail femininity in order to dismantle the norm itself. This acute awareness of the events to come is intricately conveyed through Duffy’s linguistic devices:
It was there that I first clapped my eyes on the wolf 6
In line 6, Duffy implicitly reinforces the antipodal roles assigned to her and Henri; her assumption of concealed authority is linguistically exemplified through “clapped” - sonorous and plosive, the auditory element of the verb alludes to a physical acquisition of the wolf’s [Henri] attention. Not solely is Red Cap’s [Duffy] predatorial character self-prescribed, but the puppeteer of this ostensibly spontaneous series of events is Red Cap herself. Here, Duffy goes beyond exploring the intricate narratives of the “women behind the scenes” - she is the woman behind the scenes, the puppeteer whose delicate wordplay delivers a carefully curated show.
Red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears. 9
He had! What big eyes he had! What teeth! 10
Here, Duffy deliberately employs a tone reminiscent of our childhood bedtime stories - wide-eyed, guileless, repetitious. However, once placed into context, these unelaborated descriptions of the wolf are unanticipatedly rife with wit - perhaps even patronization. And of course it’s political - to recast the folklore in a way that engenders a shift in the power dynamic, especially to assign authority to Red Cap, given her ostensibly subordinate status, is to hum a tender tune to put the patriarchy to sleep.
But we should be reminded that this is not merely Duffy’s mouthpiece. The full-force immersion into a self-initiated departure from childhood holds a contemporary truth - the ritualistic tendencies of budding young girls, sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, to inhabit a invigorating vision of manmade sexual attractivity - because what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf? Note ‘manmade’ - this wide-eyed desire is not an inherent trait, but more so a performative act constructed through ideological forces, lest we forget the coercive forces of heteronormativity and commodity domination in our age. Little Red Cap is a ventriloquised narrative for us all; perhaps not a rumination about “childhood’s end”, or a nostalgic longing for the relinquished naivete of girlhood, but a climactic engrossment into the whirlwind we hastily label ‘adolescence’:
Howls the same song at the moon, year in, year out 35
Season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe 36
To a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon 37
To see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf 38
As he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw 39
The glistening, virgin white of my grandmother's bones 40
I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up 41
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone 42
Beyond a mere narrative, Little Red Cap culminates in an implicit personal victory; however, this feminized “instinct” to possess a hypersexualised exterior is one that, contrary to Duffy’s account of a consequential ‘triumph’, does not always bear fruit.
Perhaps we should not label this a ‘triumph’, but an ostensibly celebratory wave-goodbye to the dewy-eyed fawn, the prey, that has now metamorphosed into a doe, the protector. Little Red Cap’s final stanzas (lines 36-37) emanate a quality of adultish complacency - not solely does a linguistic approach allude to the humdrum cyclicality of adulthood, but the ballad-like, full rhyming of this dramatic monologue pinpoints the solemn adieu to the initial stanzas’ unpremeditated, buoyant half-rhymes. The rambly demeanor is replaced with a desensitization to what we once saw as vivid stimuli; the yearning to truly feel is fruitless, as Red Cap’s futile axe-thrusts fail to harness any sense of vitality. Nonetheless, this futility is overturned by Duffy’s own axe-thrust - one that hits a little too close to home.
Perhaps what keeps us going are these fleeting moments whence this vitality unanticipatedly resurfaces. The axe spontaneously plunges into life and a rustle of leaves reveals the dewy-eyed fawn chastely emerging from behind the vast foliage once again.
