A Gynocritical Reading of Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife

Abstract

Carol Ann Duffy is an award-winning Scottish poet who mainly talks about women in her poetry. Her poetry also engages such topics as gender and oppression, expressing them in familiar, conversational language that made her work accessible to a variety of readers. The collection where her feministic approach becomes clearer is The World's Wife (1999), where she destabilizes myth and history by giving women their own voice. In this piece of writing, she destabilizes the phallocentric tradition of writing. In this particular poetry collection, she gives voice to the overlooked female figures. In this particular poetry collection, Duffy uses the original story lines, but the messages are changed. In Duffy’s version the portrayal of women is quite different. In the original version, women were stereotypically described as always being weak, ignorant and incapable. Duffy’s version is totally contrary to the original one. The purpose of this paper is to subject select poems of Carol Ann Duffy to a gynocritical study and to present a fascinating glimpse of the feminist perspectives.