Social and historical context: Carol Ann Duffy
Context: Carol Ann Duffy and ‘Medusa’
Carol Ann Duffy (1955–)
Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow on 23 December 1955 to a Scottish father and Irish mother. Raised Catholic, she spent her childhood in Staffordshire with her sister and four brothers. Her mother would often invent fairytales for her, a common theme in Duffy’s writing (which often explores and manipulates feminine archetypes). Always an avid reader, Duffy recalls reading Alice in Wonderland aged seven and writing a poem to continue the story as she was sad that it had ended. From an early age she knew she wanted to be a writer and found encouragement from an inspirational teacher at her convent school.
She established her name with the collection Standing Female Nude in 1985 and since then has become one of the nation’s best-known poets. Her poems have a wide appeal and frequently appear in ‘The Nation’s Favourite…’ collections as well as on the National Curriculum. One of her best-known poems, ‘Education for Leisure’, was withdrawn from AQA’s previous GCSE anthology when it was feared that it might be seen as insensitive to victims of knife crime. Duffy is the author of many books for adults and children and is also an acclaimed playwright and editor. She was awarded an OBE in 1995, a CBE in 2001 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.
After being considered and passed over for the role under Tony Blair’s government, Duffy succeeded Andrew Motion as the UK’s twentieth Poet Laureate on 1 May 2009, and is the first woman to hold the post.
Duffy writes in everyday language, which gives her poems an outward accessibility that hides the intricate technicalities and manipulation of language. Traditional poetic forms, such as the dramatic monologue and sonnet form, are often transformed into modern, contemporary poems. She is known for playing with words to explore the ways in which meaning and reality are constructed through language. She writes of life and is not afraid to tackle the sadness or suffering that accompanies it, exploring themes such as gender, contemporary culture, alienation and social inequality.
‘Medusa’
‘Medusa’ comes from Duffy’s 1999 book The World’s Wife which imagines the voices of long-suffering, misunderstood or neglected women from history and mythology such as Mrs Darwin and Mrs Midas.
A number of the poems in The World’s Wife relate to Greek mythology, and ‘Medusa’ is one of them. However, Duffy is never concerned with strict historical or mythological accuracy: ‘Medusa’, for example, is not necessarily about Medusa. It is more likely that the Greek myth is being used as a loose metaphor for the predicament of the poem’s very modern speaker. Some knowledge of the varied versions of the Medusa myth will, however, enrich a reading of Duffy’s poem.
The mythology
In Greek mythology Medusa was a gorgon – a sort of monster, but she was also a beautiful woman whose hair was her most striking feature. The goddess Athena made Medusa a priestess of her temple, but while Medusa was carrying out her duties in the temple she was either seduced or raped by the god Poseidon. (Perhaps the two of them had different stories.) Medusa became pregnant. Athena was jealous of Medusa’s beauty and outraged by her behaviour in the temple. To punish her, Athena turned Medusa’s hair into snakes and made her appearance so frightening that if anyone looked at her they turned to stone. (‘Petrified’ literally means ‘turned to stone’.) Athena was still not satisfied and told Perseus to bring Medusa’s head to her. Athena gave Perseus a mirrored shield so that he could see Medusa’s reflection and thus avoid being turned to stone. Perseus used his curved sword to behead Medusa.
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Bibliography
authors/?p=auth104
guardian.co.uk/books/carol-ann-duffy
poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=11468
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