Examine the view that in Feminine Gospels women are presented as lonely
individuals cut off from mainstream society.
Certainly, it can easily be argued that Duffy presents the recurring theme of female
loneliness throughout her collection ‘Feminine Gospels’. Several of her poems including
‘Sub’,‘The Diet’ and ‘Tall’ encompass a solo female persona, immediately establishing
female loneliness and the concept that these women are suffering alone.The fact that this
theme of loneliness appears in so many of Duffy’s poems suggests that this is a common
struggle faced by women. Duffy also explores the idea of women being cut off from
mainstream society consistently through the use of metaphors, such as ‘kept a little bird
inside a cage’, where in her poem ‘Beautiful’, Duffy uses this ‘bird inside a cage’ to
symbolise female isolation and entrapment. This idea is also explored in the poem ‘Sub’,
where Duffy exposes the lack of female representation in popular culture. However, it would
be inaccurate to state that Duffy’s female personas are exclusively presented as cut off, as
Duffy also suggests that women are both influenced and controlled by mainstream society
as well as being isolated from it.
The poem ‘Tall’ is a great example of where the female persona is a microcosm of isolated
women in the world, displaying the detrimental effects of a patriarchal society asserting its
control over women, for instance, being shunned away by that society. At the end of the fifth
stanza, the third-person point-of-view persona states that being taller is ‘colder, aloner’. This
grim homophone contrasts with the more optimistic and hopeful tone of the beginning (‘like a
christening gift’, ‘she whistled’), which shows she has grown with experience of her height
and now understands the downsides of being different as it excludes her from ‘mainstream
society’: typically society alienates itself from whoever is considered different and history
suggests that this is caused by a lack of understanding and familiarity, however in this poem
the personas exclusion may be suggestive of the patriarchy’s repression of female power
and success. The male personas in this poem portray this idea as they refuse to allow the
female subject to gain control or authority, seen in the metaphor ‘men on stilts’ which
suggests these men are a symbol of the patriarchy trying to regain dominance over her.
Duffy also portrays female isolation through surrealist imagery, “needed a turret...found
one...on the edge of town” here the persona has grown so tall that she is now forced to live
in a ‘turret’ and the fact that this is on the ‘edge of town’ is a metaphor for women being
marginalised by patriarchal society and emphasises how isolated she has become.
However, this idea that women are solely presented as isolated from mainstream society in
Feminine Gospels can be argued against. In ‘Beautiful’, Duffy focuses on four iconic women
in history: Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana (‘the camera loved
her’, ‘they filmed her famous, filmed her beautiful’, ‘you know her name’, ‘the whole town
came’, ‘how they loved her’, ‘the whole world swooned’). Indirect address in colloquial
phrasing, particularly in ‘you know her name’, clearly shows that the reader is assumed to
know who exactly these famous women are without the poem giving their names. Although
this phrase is only used in the stanzas featuring Princess Diana, none of the women’s
names are mentioned in the poem therefore the reader could infer that all these women
should be identifiable without giving away their names. This suggests just how well-known
