How far do you agree that Larkin and Duffy are alike in depicting personal relationships as “rarely simple”.
Larkin and Duffy are both different in the way in which they write their poems, due to their different backgrounds. Larkin was born in 1942 and therefore has an old fashioned way of thinking, whereas Duffy was born in 1955 and faced problems involving discrimination for qualities such as her gender and sexuality which aided her in her writing as it gave her a “strong feminist edge” as said by The Poetry Foundation. Similarly both poets share the same opinion on personal relationships as they portray a more negative outlook on love, however, in some poems Duffy has a more positive view adding to the complexity of their poems.
Duffy’s “Havisham”, is written in four unrhymed stanzas although does not follow all the conventions of rhyme or metre. However, while this can often produce a more natural, realistic speech pattern, in this case it has the opposite effect which emphasises the lack of order and structure to her thoughts. The speaker in this poem is Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. Duffy here adopts the persona of a widow to reveal the tale of a woman who remembers her dead husband with no hint of sorrow as she was jilted by him. Miss Havisham spends the rest of her life decaying in her wedding dress amid the remains of her wedding breakfast, grooming her niece to exact revenge on all men.
Duffy has said that she titled the poem “Havisham” rather than Miss Havisham to separate the character from Dickens version. The title may also be interpreted as her being somewhere between a Miss and a Mrs, so she is not actually either and has lost her role in life. In giving a voice to Miss Havisham. Duffy clearly exposes the terrible, corrosive effects of such an experience on the human mind. She has prayed for his death ever since he left her and her eyes have become “dark green pebbles”. Green, is the colour of envy and jealousy and therefore the pebble imagery suggests that her soul is now cold. Duffy uses the word “Spinster” like an insult and is deliberately isolated in a sentence on its own to emphasise Miss Havisham's own feelings of isolation in a society in which women were often defined by their marital status. Miss Havisham is in her wedding dress as the wedding dress decays on her year after year she is left only to stink and remember the pain inflicted on her by her lover’s rejection.The yellowing dress imitates her emotional turmoil and, like the green Duffy exploits the negative associations of the colour with decay. She presents Miss Havisham as the victim after what was done to her and she is determined to exact revenge yet it is ironic as she is on a quest and lust for vengeance but it is utterly self destructive and only magnifies her pain. In the last stanza Miss Havisham says to “give me a male corpse for a long slow honeymoon.” The necrophilia in this line highlights the complexity of Duffy’s writing.
