The World’s Wife

When I studied The World’s Wife in my AS-Level English Literature class, I fell so in love with the collection that I am perpetually shocked to hear people say that they dislike Carol Ann Duffy, in particular this collection. These people are invariably male, such as my brother, who in a recent exchange claimed he hated Duffy and that all she does in The World’s Wife is man-bash.

This got me to thinking, why do I like the collection so much? Why does it make me smile and even laugh aloud: is it just because I’m a woman? Why does it annoy him: is it just because he’s a man? I like to think not, that Duffy has more to offer than uncrafted hyper-feminist abuse.

Take ‘Mrs Midas’. You have to be super-grumpy to ignore the fantastic imagery Duffy brings to this myth, such as her description of their dinner: ‘For starters, corn on the cob. // Within seconds he was spitting out the teeth of the rich.’ (p. 11). In addition to being striking, concrete, and precise – all the markers of a great image – it’s also hilarious.

Beyond this, she employs word play which makes the poems come alive and almost perform themselves in your head, with ‘Look, we all have wishes; granted. // But who has wishes granted?’ as a prime example of this (p. 12). Her careful use of punctuation gives lines such as this a colloquial pacing and intonation, sparing the poems from the electric chair of modern verse: being too “poetic”.

Her humour and meticulous attention to detail are not the only refreshing things Duffy brings to these reworkings. She also injects humanity into them, with lines like ‘I miss most, // even now, his hands, his warm hands on my skin’, which make it especially difficult for me to see how you could misunderstand the women of these poems (p. 13). It is lines such as this which prevent the pieces from being onedimensional, from being simply anti-man poems.

So come on boys: did you enjoy The World’s Wife? If you didn’t enjoy it, can you at least acknowledge that its craft and creativity are too brilliant to be dismissed simply as an attack on your gender? And if not, why not? I’m very curious to know…

Duffy, Carol Ann, The World’s Wife (London: Pan Macmillan, 2000)