Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife

Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife

‘The World’s Wife is a callous feminist attack on men’.

How far do you agree with this idea?

Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife is a collection of poems mainly based around legend, myth and fairytale.
All of these poems feature male characters or references to them.

Little Red Cap, the first poem featured in the collection uses the story of Little Red Riding Hood to portray men as wolves

‘In his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw’.

She implies that men are dangerous and violent.

‘The wolf, I knew would lead me deep into the woods, away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place’.

‘One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said.’

Also, Duffy implies the manipulative nature of men.
’Lesson one that night, breath of the wolf in my car, was the love poem’.

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The poem indicates Duffy’s view that men are weak and easy to tempt with prospects of pleasures of the flesh.
’I made quite sure he spotted me, sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink’.

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This poem depicts in various derogatory terms, indicating an attack on men in general.

Thetis, the next poem to be found in the collection, looks at men from a different perspective. Whereas Little Red Cap portrays men as weak and pathetic, Thetis shows how men can be overpowering and possessive.
Throughout the poem, the woman is trying to escape from the man.
She changes herself into many different animals in order to flee from him, but it is all in vain.
’I shrank myself to the size of a bird in the hand of a man.
Sweet, sweet was the small song that I sang, till I felt the squeeze of his fist’.

This presents the reader with a very powerful, masculine image, portraying men as dominating and consuming.
’Mermaid, me, big fish, eel, dolphin, over the waves the fisherman came with his hook, his line and his sinker’.

However much she tries, the woman cannot escape the man in her life’.

Mrs Tiresias, a poem explaining the sex change of the narrator’s husband could be seen as one of the most sexist poems in the collection.
In the poem, Duffy mocks men, ridiculing them for showing weakness.
In particular, lines 43-46, describing the man, very distressed at starting his period, ridicule men for not being able to cope with such trivial things that women have to cope with all the time.
At the end of the poem the narrator spites the man by introducing him to her lover, a female.
This is Duffy being derisive towards men, gaining the last laugh, for when the man leaves the narrator to become a woman; she gets him back in the most ironic and spiteful way possible.

Queen Herod is a blatant attack on men, the entire poem being centred around the killing of men to protect the Queen’s innocent daughter.
She orders each mother’s son to be killed so her daughter will not get her heart broken.
Duffy uses various derogatory terms to refer to men including:

‘Adulterer, Bigamist, the Wolf, the Rip, the Rake, the Rat, the heartbreaker, the Ladykiller’.

This poem accuses men of being malicious and selfish towards women and implies that women are always right in these assumptions.

Mrs Faust is certainly very critical of men.
In this poem, Duffy projects men as greedy:

‘He wanted more’

adulterous:

‘Then take his lust to Soho in cab’

and frivolous:

‘Faust was Cardinal, Pope, knew more than God, flew faster than the speed of sounds around the globe, lunched; walked on the moon, golfed, hole in one; lit a fat Havana on the sun’.

I can agree that feminism is a strong theme in The World’s Wife; however, there are exceptions to this.

Anne Hathaway is not ridiculing men in anyway it is merely celebrating love.
The poem is made up of the reflections of Anne Hathaway (William Shakespeare’s wife) about their life together.
She reminisces about the way he touched and spoke to her:

‘A verb, dancing in the centre of a noun’ and how she still remembers their romance and passion.

I conclude that, although The World’s Wife could be viewed as quite sexist, a closer examination of the content of the collection, for example the inclusion of Anne Hathaway contradicts the statement that the collection is a ‘callous feminist attack on men’.