Carol Ann Duffys Revision of Masculinist Representations of Female Ide

Carol Ann Duffys Revision of Masculinist Representations of Female IdentityCarol Ann Duffy is unrivalled of the freshest and bravest talents to emerge in British poetry any poetry for years, writes Eavan Boland (Duffy, 1994, cover). This courage is manifest in Duffys ability and desire to revise masculinist representations of effeminate identity and her engagement with feminine discourse, a concept which, as Sara mill points out has moved away from viewing women as simply an loaded group, as victims of male domination, and has tried to formulate ways of analysing power as it manifests itself and as it is resisted in the relations of everyday life. (p.78)It is these aspects of Duffys work that I invite to address here by examining the ways in which she subverts masculinist assumptions and discourses in the pursuance ways by giving contribution to previously marginalised or subdue figures, by re-presenting stereotypes and power relations, through comic reappropriation of myth and by re-writing the approved love poem.The problematic nature of representation itself, its subjectivity and unreliability, is a commutation concern of Duffys poetry. Much of her work is written in the form of melodramatic monologue which serves to demonstrate the fundamental inadequacy of language to re-present by undermining the readers expectations of traditionalistic discourses. By using characters voices rather than her own, Duffy identifies with the speaker and confers authority onto a voice which might otherwise be silent. The foregrounding of this voice becomes a fashion of demonstrating the failure of language to represent specific aspects of experience, particularly female experience. The monologue, by giving voice to the previously subjugated female ... ...t, New York. whole kit and boodle CitedDuffy, Carol Ann, Standing Female Nude (London Anvil, 1985)., Selling Manhattan (London Anvil, 1987)., The Other bucolic (London Anvil, 1990)., Selected Poems (London Pengu in, 1994)., The Worlds Wife (London Picador, 1999).Gregson, Ian, Carol Ann Duffy Monologue as Dialogue in coeval Poetry and Postmodernism Dialogue and Estrangement (Basingstoke MacMillan, 1996).Lacan, Jacques, The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious in David Lodge, (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory A Reader (London Longman, 1988).Mills, Sara, Discourse (London Routledge, 1997). extinguish Notes, shielder G2, 10 May 1999, p.3.Room, Adrian, (ed.), Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (London Cassel & Co, 2001).Viner, Katharine, Metre Maid, Guardian Weekend, 25 September 1999, pp.2026.