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Feminine Gospels: excludes men essay
Duffy's Feminine Gospel's excludes men
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Rukhsar YazminExamine the view that this collection ‘excludes men as subjects and makes no attempt to engage
them as readers’.
The Feminine Gospels is a collection that is presented to be about the universal female experience
and Duffy is seen to purposefully exclude men from many of her poems as a way to shed light solely
on these females and their journeys. Duffy is seen to give meaning and power to these experiences
by creating a sense of female solidarity, as many of her poems are often about the oppression of
patriarchy and the true nature of what it is like to be a woman in society today, as seen in poems like
The Long Queen or The Cord. However, it can’t be argued that the entire collection is unengaging
and dismissive of men, as there are several direct references to men and not only their part in the
oppression of women, as seen in Beautiful, but their role as human beings in our world.
The Long Queen is the first poem presented in the FG and presents Duffy’s ideals of sisterhood and
promotes a sense of cohesion between women, this immediately conveys a purposeful dismission of
men from the very start. Duffy presents TLQ to immediately exclude men from the female story in
the line of the first stanza, ‘The foreign prince, the heir to the Duke, the lord, the baronet, the count,
then taken Time for a husband’. The long listing conveys the numerous men that the Long Queen
has rejected, portraying that these men have little significance to her life and especially to her story.
Furthermore, the personification of ‘Time’ being her husband conveys the ideal of her choosing
eternity over a husband, and believing in the power of independence. This instantly excludes men
from the rest of the poem, especially as they are not mentioned again, in any form. Duffy is viewed
to have used the image of an independent, unwed Queen as a reference to Elizabeth I, who was
known as the ‘Virgin Queen’ for not marrying or having any heirs, which is representative of the Long
Queen who is symbolic of a patron saint and conveyed as the ‘mother’ of all women.
The Long Queen also excludes men and makes no attempt to engage them through the references to
the physical aspects of womanhood that no man could ever really comprehend or appreciate, as
seen in the ‘laws’ of the Long Queen. Duffy presents the key stages of womanhood through the
italics of ‘ Childhood’, ‘Blood’, ‘Tears’ and ‘Child Birth’. The motif of ‘Blood’ is conveyed in the line
‘royal red intent… when a girl first bled’ conveying menstruation, which is usually viewed as a sign of
womanhood and seen as a ‘coming of age’. Furthermore, Duffy conveys this ‘Blood’ as a ‘pain’ that is
‘no cause for complain’, conveying that society often dismiss women for period pains and invalidate
their suffering. Perhaps Duffy is using TLQ to presents not only the reality of the physical aspects of
becoming a woman, but also to exclude men from the narrative as a way to finally give these women
and their pain value, without the voices of patriarchy undermining it. This is seen in the reference of
‘tears’ being coined as ‘salt pearls, bright jewels’, which conveys the value of the suffering and is an
acknowledgement from Duffy to women and the pain they endure, especially as it is often a pain
that society choose to ignore. This is typical of Feminist literature as it often does touch upon the
reality of womanhood, and is often seen to shed light on female suffering rather than diminish it.
The Cord is an example of Duffy’s expression of a universal aspect of womanhood, which is being a
mother, and focuses directly on the bond between a mother and daughter, deliberately excluding
men from the conversation to only present the physical and emotional connection between a
mother and her daughter. Duffy’s first exclusion of men begins at the reference to the ‘cord’, as seen
in the first line ‘They cut the cord she was born with, and buried it under a tree in the heart of the
Great Forest’. The ‘cord’ is symbolic of the umbilical cord that connects a mother to her child after
birth, but is used in this poem as a extended metaphor to presents the everlasting connection
between a mother and her daughter. The use of the umbilical cord is used to segregate men as they
will never experience this form of connection to their child, it ultimately is giving great value to a
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