The World’s Wife. What can you say?
This post is really just my musings and new impressions of the second of Duffy’s poetry collections in our reading que. I fully expect most of them to change and evolve as we continue to discuss this.
-While Standing Female Nude’s collection of poems are threaded together loosely in a theme, The World’s Wife has an extremely prominent theme. I feel this prominence makes The World’s Wife different from Standing Female Nude already.
-I don’t know the answer to this yet, but what is the point of hearing these ‘wives’s’ voices? I haven’t studied too deeply into this, but this all feels a little…primitive to me. A collective voice of all these unsung female counterparts to these male personages seem to be saying “hey, this guy you’ve heard about? *takes a swig from a wine bottle* Well let me tell you about him, biggest jerk you’ll ever meet” What are we suppose to take from this? That all these well-known male personages are scum? Is this an intentional feminist poetry collection? It just feels so one-sided and inhumane.
-Okay so now to completely contradict that last statement, I actually did really like the Mrs. Quasimodo poem, because I was touched by the irony. Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of my all-time favorite movies. If you cut out that crappy sequel all-together and just picture sweet and pure Quasimodo finding a lady friend as ugly and deformed as he, wouldn’t that just warm your heart? This poem had no purity in it. Lust is lust. Beauty isn’t in the eye of the beholder. Quasimodo, even though he should hold more empathy for the broken things, does the carnal and sees himself above it. That brought this predicament out into the real world where I think we see this problem more. I don’t want to put beauty on a scale, but it’s the ugly guy cheating on his wife with younger, gorgeous women that are way out of his league. I think this collection is suppose to illustrate these real-world relationship connections that I found in Mrs. Quasimodo, but I haven’t found them yet.
Quasimodo the womanizer
Image courtesy of giphy.com
