Female Sexuality, Desire and Writing as Reflected in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy

This study attempts to explore the heterogeneity of desires and sexualities as reflected in Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry. I show (a) how she simultaneously depicts both lesbian and heterosexual desires and (b) also addresses their problematic aspects. I argue that (c) female subjectivities are constructed both through wives’ monologues about their male partners as in heterosexual marriages and through men’s reflection upon women in male-voiced monologues as well. But I also (d) examine poems where the expression of desire in language and—not the sexed subjects—is her principal aim. Yet in the light of my previous exposition on female subjectivities, I refuse to reduce her various sexual positions to mere linguistic constructs. Finally I demonstrate (e) how her equal employment of ‘soft’ and ‘tough’ words veers from any systematic development of a pure ‘common’ female language.


Introduction
The most important theme in Duffy's poetry to have received academic attention recently is her treatment of sexuality and desire and the relation they bear to her practice of writing. Both issues feature prominently throughout all her volumes albeit revealing a number of dimensions. Whereas the earlier volumes like Selling Manhattan (1987) and Mean Time (1993) contain several powerful monologues where men reflect upon their relationships with-or desire for-women, the massively popular The World 's Wife (1999) is devoutly attentive to women's desire, dissatisfaction, anger resulting from their frustrated partnership with men. This acerbic feminist voice is softened and, as we will see, depersonalized in the stunning love-lyrics of Rapture (2005) and in some poems of The Bees (2011). As the poetic emphasis shifts from articulation of certain specific sexuality to that of desires which are mostly disembodied and free-floating I devote the concluding part of the first section to the analysis of how desire is written or inscribed. Yet towards the end of the article, I do propose a way to conceptualize desire in terms of the sexual positions I identify in the first section i.e. not without its political implication. Following I first categorize her poems as per their representation of lesbian and heterosexual desires and the attendant formulation of female subjectivities. In the second section, I explore the relation between language/writing and desire and further examine the possibility of development in Duffy's poetry of a uniquely feminine language that supposedly embodies the female subjectivity. Imagination and portrayal of desires undergo changes throughout her career of writing. She powerfully represents both lesbian and straight relations. To begin with, lesbianism is represented in a number of ways, both implicitly and explicitly, but in her earlier collections, without ever missing the subversive potential that undercuts such forms of female mutuality. SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH e-ISSN: 2582-3574 p-ISSN: 2582-4406 VOL. 8, ISSUE 7, JULY 2020 www.ijellh.com 107 Thus, in 'Oppenheim's Cup and Saucer' two women 'stir' themselves 'far from the laughter of men', by drinking 'the sweet hot liquid' and talking 'dirty' and by undressing (Collected Poems,henceforth CP,48). In line with Paul Verlaine's homoerotic poems, her poem 'Girlfriends' creates an environment fit for a closet where two women 'slept in a single bed'.
Lesbian passion magisterially saturates the 'evening of amber', 'the pink shadows' and 'the sultry air' (CP,165). The maid in 'Warming Her Pearls' dreams about her mistress and dreams through her mirror how 'my red lips parted'. The maid and the mistress are not at loggerheads with each other but one promotes the other's cause. The maid-speaker desires recognition from her mistress as she imagines that she (the mistress) should sense her maid's 'faint, persistent scent/beneath her French perfume' even during her dance with tall men. The mistress's pearls become a badge of her identity, her sole occupation and obsession since 'all night I (the maid) feel their absence and I burn' (CP,120). The question of justice or equality remains unresolved or even uncontested because of the maid's visionary reciprocation of her courtship to the mistress. The speaker in 'Before You Were Mine' envisions her partner under the tree and speculates about her past relationship (probably heterosexual) that perhaps incorporated 'those high-heeled red-shoes' now reduced to 'relics': 'That glamorous love lasts/where you sparkle and waltz and laugh before you were mine' (CP,187 Teacher' in Other Poems the girl-student sympathizes with the school-mistress who taught poetry by Keats and Yeats and is now dead. Women teach male writing to women. But underlying is their mutual attraction.
Female homosexuality is also imagined in the relationships between mothers and daughters. Mothers or maternal elements surface in the poems in ways that foreground the intimate relationships women share with each other. Luce Irigary points out the connection between motherhood and female homosexuality: 'Given that the first body with which [women] are involved, the first love with which they have to do, is a maternal love, is a female body, women are always-unless they renounce their desire-in a certain archaic and primary relationship to what is called homosexuality' (quoted in Holmlund,291). Several Duffy poems depict such homosexual inclination to the maternal body. And they also suggest parallel positions-through writing, an issue we discuss in the later section-of the mother and the daughter. In 'The Way My Mother Speaks' the homesick female narrator is distanced from her mother. Her present condition, though unstated how it is, is both 'happy and sad' (CP,176), an indefinite state that vaguely reminds her of the initiatory erotic adventure in her childhood. Perhaps she remembers the moment since when the distancing started with the mother i.e., through her sexual initiation with a man, something that threatened to demolish the daughter's maternal inheritance. Now, in another country, after sex has matured, the daughter relocates herself in her mother's shoe-'in love with the way my mother speaks.' Thus away from the mother the daughter develops deep desire for the maternal body. This desire is also rewarded in the little red-cap's retrieval of her grandmother's bones. In the way the red-cap kills her wolf-male-partner and ends heterosexual rivalry and returns home, traces the genealogy of homosexual affection that underlies the grandmother-mother-daughter firms is conceptualized as homosocial matrix, a kind of political sex-war raged against men, they could be viewed as radical lesbians too. Also it is the sisters-and they identify with Vita and Violet-who are central to other women's admiration.
As I already stated in the aim of my essay, I will also show the problem with the adoption of lesbianism as a political ally. In the personal world of "Mr. Tiresias" lesbianism is shown as a reaction to male homosociality, rather than out of explicit sympathy for other women. Plus, male homosexuality is subjected to a wry and critical gaze from the wife's Broom's characterization of these poems as 'a woman's fantasy of a particular kind of male subjectivity' (Broom,89 Duffy's early understanding of men's psyche empowers her later crude version of feminisms as reflected in the wives' monologues. We see that sympathy is not completely withdraw the representations of men but they are completely silenced. After such literal and fiercely feminist condemnation it is difficult to expect any positive or benign note in heterosexual love poetry. And apparently her Rapture does not disabuse us of any of the distressful consequence of heterosexuality as hinted at above. First, the first-person-speaker is disembodied--of indefinite sex-and the nature or practicality of actual relation is ambiguous or merely imaginary. And second, as Margaret Reynolds points out in her review, as a poem-circle written in traditional veins, desire ends sadly, without fulfillment (Reynolds, 2005). A woman ends unhappily, trapped in her body. www.ijellh.com 117

II
As I have discussed the role of language in the articulation desire I now focus on the language in which it is inscribed. However, my aim is to study not just the language of desire in abstraction but also in connection with my earlier exposition on sexualities, to examine the relation between sexuality and the language that addresses issues related to those sexualities.
In 'Demeter' Duffy herself classifies two types of words she employs in her poetry: 'tough words' as hard as 'granite, flint, to break the ice' and words 'softened and warmed' like 'the blue sky smiling'. If these are the two modes in which she writes, what relation do they bear to the issues we discussed previously? I suggest that we can find traces of a feminine language where semiotic elements are present along with a strong and symbolic dimension in her composition.
In such conceptualization of her language I am visibly drawing on the notion of female writing-or the female/maternal components in writing-as theorized by different feminists. While in psychoanalysis, as formulated by Lacan, language is the province of the paternal law, a realm of the univocal symbolic, an order that forecloses the maternal, feminists like Kristeva point out the limitation of such a formulation. Kristeva argues that poetic language incorporates the maternal somatic elements in that it allows the free play of the semiotic drives which release the heterogeneous force of signification in language and which therefore, cannot be colonized by the symbolic. Yet the two modalities, she arguesthe semiotic and the symbolic-are always co-existent and inseparable in the signifying process. All types of discourse (including poetry) are 'necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both' (Kristeva,93). I want to apply this insight into her poetry ii .
Some poems consciously attempt to effectuate the semiotic function of the language.
It is not to suggest that these poems are being more semiotic over others since no text, as 'signifying practice', Kristeva argues, can merely be a transcription of the semiotic. Yet some SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH e-ISSN: 2582-3574 p-ISSN: 2582-4406 VOL. 8, ISSUE 7, JULY 2020 www.ijellh.com 118 of her poems specifically depict the poetic quest for the semiotic elements which is 'indifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine, [a] space underlying the written' (Kristeva,97). 'The Little Red-Cap' precisely recapitulates the whole process. The little red-cap rescues the female tradition of writing by hacking the ravenous male wolf-poet. Duffy satirizes the unchanging patriarchal tradition of writing poetry as the wolf's 'howls (of) the same old song at the moon, year in, year out.' Such outworn mechanism of writing even kills the 'white dove' which as Milton invoked her, once operated as the living spirit of poetry and the young poet-narrator once sought after. Now the white bird having been murdered she has to hack open the wolf from 'scrotum to throat' in order to renew the source of maternal (CP, 229).
Jeannette Winterson suggests that the retrieval of grandma's glistening white bone is the metaphor of the recovery of female language or of the female semiotic particles of the language since '(the) skeleton of language is female. Deeper, it seems, than our mother tongue' (Winterson, 2015). The poem 'River' from The Other Country opens: 'At the turn of the river the language changes, /a different babble, even a different name/for the same river' (CP, 175). The line 7 ends with a 'woman' who responds to a bird. This is near the bay where 'the meanings of things' vanish. The 'babble' is what Mallarme said-and Kristeva quotes him--'The Mystery of the Language'. Meaning vanishes where the 'signifying practice' of the text takes a turn for 'drifting-into-nonsense', a phrase I am not using pejoratively but to suggest the purely feminine or semiotic elements which ends the 'signiying practice' itself (Kristeva,104). In 'The Way My Mother Speaks', the same discharge of feminine libidinal drives begins in another country when memory carries her back to the 'green erotic pond'. If the relationship involves movement forward to England the inclination is still for the mother who stands on the other side of the pond, in the native country. It seems the way the mother 'speaks'-and the daughter understands-is something only women understand, words that issue from female genitalia, words that blur boundaries among women. In 'Invisible Ink' she acknowledges the 'first draft of the (poetic) gift' to be anonymous which is, as Woolf says, is the signature of a woman writing. This first text is, she says, 'texted from heart to lips' in a way the semiotic is characterized as a 'space underlying writing' or as a 'precondition of the symbolic' (Kristeva,103). If the twig symbolizes the pen, the sap she alternately dips and sips is the maternal fluid that remains all along as 'invisible ink' or as she says by the end of the poem, 'fluent, glittery stream' (CP,454). And finally, to return to the characteristic poem with which we started our discussion, the heartbroken Demeter's 'tough words' dilutes as Persephone arrives with 'all spring's flowers/to her mother's house' (CP, 300). Pointing to the correspondence between femininity and soft words Michelis and Rowland write: 'The mother is choosing tough words just as Duffy chooses tough words to affirm a world in which identity politics still matters.' But through the soft language ('the small shy mouth of a new moon') the 'hopeful image of new femininity' is restored (Michelis and Rowland,28).
The influence of the semiotic cannot be dissociated from the question of the female tradition of writing. Betsy Erkkila sees in the Demeter-Persephone myth the female poets' internal 'kinship' in the domain of patriarchal poetic tradition in contrast to the more antagonist relation among their male counterparts: 'Like Persephone in the Underworld, the female poet in the patriarchal world frequently experiences a sense of separation from her matrilineal heritage; she seeks release and renewal through reunion with her matrilineal sources' (Erkkila,544;emphasis added). This 'renewal' of the lineage is possible through a 'common' female language that binds together a common female tradition of writing. driven to an ecstasy of loathing yourself:/banging your ugly head against a wall,/gaping in the mirror at your heavy dugs,/your thighs of lard,/your mottled upper arms;/thumping at your belly--/look at it--/your wobbling gut' (TWW, 39). As we see she does not end up silent, suicidal by submitting herself to feminine self-effacement, but hoarsely revels in the loathing figure she possesses. What such tough injunctions in poems after poems do is that they solidify the identity of the wives although not in self-defeating gestures. Their assertive language of self-justification contains and internalizes 'semiotic motility'. Such language has symbolic function in the concretization of the identity of 'women'.
As we have identified the two distinctive styles in which Duffy addresses the female subjectivities two questions can be raised. First, is her language of poetry underpinned by any aim to develop a common female language, one that shares the experience of suffering with other women (poets)? Adrienne Rich cites the newly-liberated women's attempt to 'find language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into' in her essay 'When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision.' Such a language, she argues, helps women-poets to 'tap' and 'explore' 'the victimization and the anger experienced by women' (Rich 1972: 25).
In the completely different tradition of French Feminist tradition, Irigary proposes the possibility of such a 'New' female language. 'When Our (women's) Lips Speak Together', as Irigary characterizes women's language as issuing out of their two embracing lips, it will become 'inexhaustible' because '[It] knows neither want nor plenty. Since we give each other all, with nothing held back, nothing hoarded, our exchanges are without terms, without end.
How can I say it? The language we know is so limited'. Like Rich, she dwells on the importance of a common language because 'if we don't find our body's language, it will have too few gestures to accompany our story. We shall tire of the same ones, and leave our desires unexpressed, unrealized…we shall remain paralyzed, deprived of our movements' (Irigary,. Does Duffy's poetry propose any such thing? Own (Rich 1972: 20). By simultaneously voicing wives' desire and attacking men's shortcomings, this volume promotes a robust form of feminism which does not 'translate' women's place, as Showalter wrote in a review essay, 'into the crude topography of hole and bulge' (cited in Erkkila,542). Thus the emphasis on exclusively female language is, I believe, still less than on the possibility of a 'feminine' way of conceptualization. So the last two distinct styles of feminist writing and also the range of female subjectivities she addresses show that Duffy's language is more heterogeneous than the narrowness implied in the word 'common' iv .
But the problem moves on. So my second question is: if her language constitutes multiple discourses of female subjectivities as I have just shown, what is the extent of the power of language in the articulations of different sexualities (which are mostly female and lesbians)? Language has played an important role the inscription of desire. Should sexualities too be seen as mere 'written' in language? Jane Thomas extends the power of language to its farthest limit when she assesses her poetry: 'in her later collections Duffy becomes increasingly skeptical of a notion of truth existing outside, beyond or before language'. And since she 'is committed to exposing and exploiting the creative potential of language…it has the power to reconstitute the world in differently meaningful ways' (Thomas,140,135). In asserting the power of language in the proposed 'reconstitution' of reality she chimes with www.ijellh.com 123 the 'new compromising alternative' possibility is 'equally unstable' as Thomas phrases Butler, we must see such poems as merely caricature and politically neutralized. If these positions are mere linguistic constructs, the possibility to empower various marginalized sexualities (e.g., wives, lesbians) and to address the problems and contradictions these positions engage with, will be found superfluous. Moreover, I find problem with Thomas's investment in 'the creative potential of language' to 'reconstitute the world'. Peter Digeser points out the problem inherent in the 'pure performative fluidity' proposed by Butler (to whom Thomas is indebted) that the performative act becomes unsuccessful without certain 'constative' elements v . By attacking the constantive elements of the sexed body i.e., the various 'truths' that support the difference of the sexes, Butler deconstructs the 'performative character of the sexed body'. Yet the prerequisite of successful parodic subversion is certain basis constitutive of one's gender. In parody the confusion must be created 'over whether the gesture is constituting one's gender or expressing it' (Digeser: 1994, 666-7). Equally, when Thomas proposes the possibility of 'reconstituting' the world based on linguistic play, we must ask what the poet wishes to reconstruct. Secretive girl-lovers, discontented heterosexual women, argumentative wives reconstitute a poetic tradition which usually privileges men vi .