I’ve decided to use Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of
poems entitled ‘The World’s Wife’ for my text transformation and the poems
which I want to focus on are ‘Mrs Darwin’, ‘Anne Hathaway’ and ‘Mrs Icarus’. I
feel that these three poems really stood out to me more than the others. Both
‘Mrs Darwin’ and ‘Mrs Icarus’ are really simple in their form and content yet
they undermine the male voice which has been somewhat strong for many years. ‘Anne
Hathaway’ takes a different approach in that the character, William
Shakespeare’s wife, uses her husband’s famous poet form, a sonnet, which can be
interpreted in many ways. All three of these poems undermine the women’s famous
husbands and in some cases allows you to see things from a different
perspective.
‘Mrs Darwin’ is written from the perspective of the
wife of Charles Darwin who is famous for his evolution theory. The poem is
composed of 3 lines in which Duffy seeks to quickly and easily undermine in
effect all of Darwin’s work. The poem implies that it was Mrs Darwin who gave
her husband the idea of evolution and that we evolve from monkeys when she says
‘something about that chimpanzee over there reminds me of you’. She makes such
an innocent comment about how her husband resembles a monkey and yet it ended
up in Darwin becoming famous for saying that all species evolve from another.
Also, the comment could be interpreted as Mrs Darwin insulting her husband by
saying that he and the nearby chimpanzee look very similar to each other. Both
interpretations of the comment undermine the authority and importance of the
male figure, in this case Charles Darwin. The first interpretation undermines
the idea that evolution was something that Darwin came up with himself after
many years of studying different species and actually he got the idea from his
wife who at that time wouldn’t have had much respect and authority because she
was a woman. It also undermines her husband because Darwin is a man known for
his intelligence and yet here is his wife calling him a chimpanzee. It shows
that even though we now celebrate Darwin’s intellect he was still susceptible
to a few insults from his wife and so his cleverness is undermined here. It
gives his wife more power over him because no one else could insult him in such
a way. However, when Mrs Darwin refers to her husband she calls him ‘Him’ with
a capital letter. This infers that she sees her husband as God and so in effect
keeps her in her place even though she could’ve just given her husband an idea
which would change the way people think for centuries after.
‘Mrs Icarus’ is similar to ‘Mrs Darwin’ in that it
seeks to undermine her husband’s authority. Icarus is a Greek character who
flew too near to the sun with wings made out of wax and so therefore they
melted and he fell to his death. Mrs Icarus calls her husband a ‘pillock’ which
goes against the general consensus at the time that it was the man in the
relationship who was the clever, intelligent one. The use of the adjectives
‘total, utter, absolute’ shows that even though Icarus is a man he is still
open to insults from his wife- something which we saw in ‘Mrs Darwin’. This
again shows that it’s in fact the women who hold all the power even though they
were often treated like second class citizens. With these poems Duffy is
challenging the belief and acceptance that women stay in the background and
aren’t able to speak up to their husbands if they feel that they need to. Both
the wives of Darwin and Icarus are seen to insult them in these poems which add
a sense of humour. Even though Duffy wrote these poems in 1999 she was
challenging something which at the time in which her poems are set were
accepted by everyone and were never challenged. Within these two poems in
particular she is giving the female characters a voice which they may never
have actually had. An interesting point from all three poems is that the males
who the women are referring to don’t have a voice at all. This is unusual as at
the time periods in which the poems are all set the male voice is always the
dominant one however Duffy has effectively reversed the roles to allow for the
female voice to shine through and become more powerful.
‘Anne Hathaway’ is a bit more interesting as Duffy
looks deeper into the relationship that Shakespeare and his wife had. The poem
is written in sonnet form which is Shakespeare’s trademark style and yet his
‘wife’ is using it as a way of showing her dissatisfaction at being married to
the famous bard. People probably thought it was amazing to be married to a man
who wrote great love stories however ‘Anne Hathaway’ gives an insight into what
it was actually like. She comes second to her husband with his first love being
his writing. Even in their bed she felt like she was second best ‘The bed we loved
in was a spinning world of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas’. To
me this seems as if instead of being with his wife Shakespeare would rather
write his plays and poems in bed. The bed has become all the places in which
his writings are set and yet his wife is unhappy because she gets no love from
her husband. This poem is a ‘blazon’ as it is showing what it was really like
to live with the man who was and still is so famous for his love stories. Even
when Shakespeare gave his wife attention she still feels like she is competing
with ‘a verb dancing in the centre of a noun’. What we can infer from this line
in particular is that Shakespeare would always have his work on his mind and
it’s as if he looked for inspiration in anything regardless of what he was
doing or who we was with. Thee fact that their marital bed was the ‘second best
bed’ and that the ‘guests dozed on’ the best bed shows that Shakespeare gave
more importance to his work and he always gave more attention and care to the
‘guests’ who I have interpreted as the characters which he writes about.
What I like about these poems, especially 'Mrs Darwin' and 'Mrs Icarus' is that they are so simple in their form and yet really effective. We see a shift in power towards the women in the relationship and also see the men in a different light. What I really love about 'Anne Hathaway' is that Duffy uses a sonnet as a way of expressing Shakespeare's wife's dissatisfaction at being married to the bard and it undermines him. This idea of undermining the male character is something which all the poems in the series share, not just the three that I have chosen.