Is The Worlds Wife is Feminist Propaganda?

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I do not agree that the collection, The Worlds Wife, is “nothing but

feminist propaganda”. I must agree that there are a lot of poems

within the collection that are feminist in some way or another but

there are also others that don’t really show a feeling of feminist

propaganda at all. ‘Propaganda’ means “Information given to show

something or someone in a biased way” and ‘Feminist’ means “Women are

better than men and so can do everything better than they can” and

therefore ‘Feminist Propaganda’ means “the spread of information about

how women are greater than men”. This collection does show the

empowerment of women throughout the selected poems because of the

switch from famous male characters to their female counterparts.

“Mrs Quasimodo”, “Queen Herod”, “The Kray Sisters” and “Little Red

Cap” are feminist poems because in all of these poems the women become

better off by the end of the poem and show that men are useless.

However poems like “Mrs Faust”, “Anne Hathaway”, “Mrs Midas” and “The

Devil’s Wife” are not seen to be so strongly linked in with “feminist

propaganda”, true they are opposites of their famous male counterparts

but they do not seem to have messages of feminism within them.

“Mrs Quasimodo” is seen to have a very feminist view built into it,

Duffy has used Mrs Quasimodo to show feminist views but also uses her

to show her feelings about social presence such as betrayal within

marriage; this view of social presence is however seen to be more

important than the view of feminism. In the poem “Mrs Quasimodo”

Duffy uses the bells as an aide to show the feminist views, like when

Mrs Quasimodo is drawn to the bells but not by the man who rings them:

“He swung an epithalamium for me”, “We ha...

... middle of paper ...

...d to Gold and so he has to

move out into a caravan. This poem is not about female superiority at

all; it is just about how the man does something reckless and doesn’t

think about the consequences.

“The Devil’s Wife” is about the moors murders. This poem defiantly

doesn’t support the theory that The Worlds Wife is nothing but

feminist propaganda. There is a strong mirror image of the actual

events that occurred. Duffy wouldn’t say that what Mira Hindley did

was good in any way, shape or form. This is purely about what

happened in the moors murders and the result of it, the title itself

shows that The Devils Wife is evil in itself.

This proves that The Worlds Wife isn’t just a collection of feminist

propaganda, it does have other levels too, and it is just that this

view of feminism is very strong within the poems and so people just

focus of this view.

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