Carol Ann Duffys Revision of Masculinist Representations of Female Ide

sing Ann Duffys Revision of Masculinist Representations of Fe manful IdentityCarol Ann Duffy is one of the freshest and bravest talents to emerge in British poetry any poetry for years, writes Eavan Boland (Duffy, 1994, cover). This courage is manifest in Duffys ability and desire to revise masculinist representations of female identity and her elaborateness with feminine discourse, a concept which, as Sara Mills points out has locomote away from viewing women as simply an oppressed group, as victims of male domination, and has tried to formulate ways of analysing military unit as it manifests itself and as it is resisted in the relations of everyday life. (p.78)It is these aspects of Duffys work that I wish to address here(predicate) by examining the ways in which she subverts masculinist assumptions and discourses in the following ways by giving juncture to previously marginalised or silenced figures, by re-presenting stereotypes and power relations, through comic reappropri ation of myth and by re-writing the canonical love poem.The disputable nature of representation itself, its subjectivity and unreliability, is a central concern of Duffys poetry. ofttimes of her work is written in the form of dramatic monologue which serves to process the fundamental inadequacy of talking to to re-present by undermining the readers expectations of traditional discourses. By victimization characters voices rather than her own, Duffy identifies with the speaker and confers authority onto a voice which might other than be silent. The foregrounding of this voice becomes a means of demonstrating the failure of language to represent specific aspects of experience, particularly female experience. The monologue, by giving voice to the previously subjugated female ... ...t, New York. Works CitedDuffy, Carol Ann, stand up Female Nude (London Anvil, 1985)., Selling Manhattan (London Anvil, 1987)., The Other Country (London Anvil, 1990)., Selected Poems (London Penguin, 1 994)., The Worlds Wife (London Picador, 1999).Gregson, Ian, Carol Ann Duffy Monologue as converse in Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism Dialogue and Estrangement (Basingstoke MacMillan, 1996).Lacan, Jacques, The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious in David Lodge, (ed.), Modern review and Theory A Reader (London Longman, 1988).Mills, Sara, Discourse (London Routledge, 1997).Pass Notes, Guardian G2, 10 May 1999, p.3.Room, Adrian, (ed.), Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (London Cassel & Co, 2001).Viner, Katharine, Metre Maid, Guardian Weekend, 25 folk 1999, pp.2026.