When Mrs Freud talks about the males various names she is not afraid to hold back or use delicate terms. Despite her disregard to what the audience think, she manages to not offend, and use no crudity. This modern day humour would be popular and provoke a smile from the reader.
Towards the end of the poem the pace begins to slow down. This is to show she is building up to her justification. She explains she actually has no problem with the male penis, ‘I’ve no axe to grind’, she claims; she just wants to make a point. Her point, which is also a criticism and a judgement is that ‘the average penis-not pretty’. She believes it does not inspire women, and does not like the power it gives men.
At the beginning of Mrs Rip Van Winkle, Duffy shows the female to be extremely upset and depressed. The first line states, ‘I sank like a stone’. She uses this metaphor because a stone is an inanimate object that will undoubtedly sink; it shows her pessimistic attitude towards life. This indicates that the female is not strong, and cannot cope. As the poem continues she becomes optimistic and changes her life, to become independent and strong. This shows an immense amount of power and strength. From depending on someone to living life on your own shows great courage. She begins by making aspirations, ‘I found hobbies for myself. Painting.’ She slowly builds self-esteem, and then broadens her horizons. ‘The Leaning Tower. The Pyramids. The Taj Mahal’. She experiences dreams she’s always wanted to make happen. She then states’ I made a little watercolour of them all’. The fact that it was written as a short sentence shows its importance. She had become proud of her life, which was a big step. Most importantly she had become proud all by herself, and that shows true strength and determination, especially considering how low she was to begin with.
Duffy presents Mrs Darwin as being very honest, blunt, and very a straightforward female. She does this through the short length of the poem, the humorous content and the straightforward presentation of the words. The poem is very clever and succinct, and shows that the female in this poem is very intelligent.
Mrs Darwin says to him, ‘Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of you’. This line is very ironic as it suggests that Mrs Darwin actually gave Darwin the groundwork and something to think about on the theory of evolution. We can see from this that Mrs Darwin has a certain strength that is not as prominent as Darwin’s. The saying ‘Behind every great man there’s a great women’ comes into mind.
Charles Darwin we know invented the theory of evolution, and was very involved and contained in his work. This suggests to us that Mrs Darwin may have been sometimes disregarded, for Darwin’s experiments. Although this poem is extremely short and contains mostly monosyllabic words we can see that Mrs Darwin is very capable of standing up for her beliefs, and is a strong women.
The three poems discussed all show the strength the females have, and how they achieved it or used it. The females all end feeling more substantial, proud and powerful. Each of the women’s individual strength came about from the male’s weakness.
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