Transcending the Bounds of Temporality and Spatiality: Mythical Retelling of Femininity in Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife

Abstract

Poetry, despite the side-liningfaced due to the profusion of the novel, has made a comeback marking its genuine presence with its ability to combine the imaginative and the creative to project the real. Contemporary poetry, pluralistic, experimental and diverse in form encompassing the nature culture and history of the world has been drawing intense thematic and theoretical attention to itself. Myths play an important role in literature especially in expressing modernist tendencies as done by the twentieth century poet T S Eliot. Similarly, the former Poet Laureate of Britain, Carol Ann Duffy, has subverted myths to bridge the gap between the traumatic experiences of mythical women and the contemporary ones. The paper Transcending the Bounds of Temporality and Spatiality: Mythical Retelling of Femininity in Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife intends to portray how Carol Ann Duffy projects the problems of women through parading female characters from history, mythology and fairy tales. The technique of mythical subversion has helped her to dismantle the popular notions associated with women (self-sacrificing and self-effacing). The paper thus examines in detail, using the elements of myth criticism, the poems in The World’s Wife to find out the different facets of women presented by Duffy using mythical subversion.