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Mrs Beast Poem

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Writers consistently use poetry as a lens through which they scrutinize and delineate society. The poet, Carol Ann Duffy, uses her anthology, “The World’s Wife” to portray her strong feminist views. Within this collection Duffy gives a voice to female Biblical, historical, mythical and fictional figures, whose voices have previously not been heard. A famous feminist author, Simone de Beauvoir, once said, "Representation of the world is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth". Mrs Beast upholds the feminist literary tradition of re-writing literature to include these missing female perspectives, with Duffy's clear intention encapsulated in the line ‘These myths going round… …show more content…

Mrs Beast is the penultimate poem of the collection. It helps to sum up Duffy’s aim of The World’s Wife: to highlight the female voice by looking at human history. The entire poem is a retelling of the fable of ‘The Beauty and the Beast’ by Jean-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont. Beauty sees past the Beast's outward appearance, bringing the feminist rejection of objectification to the fore. However, Beaumont's portrayal of Beauty as a submissive, obedient daughter to her father and servant to the Beast is anything but feminist. Duffy re-works the tale to explore her thoughts about feminism and feminist …show more content…

Mrs Beast introduces herself by asking the reader to ‘stare into my face’ and ‘gaze into my eyes’ to admire the similarity of her appearance with a list of revered, beautiful and influential women throughout history. Yet, she ends the line with ‘think again’. These are all the women who have suffered from male oppression in the past. Helen's ‘face that launched a thousand ships’, was used by men to start wars; Garbo was dominated by a male-orientated Hollywood, and Cleopatra and Juliet gave their lives to their beloved. These were all beautiful women, whose downfalls were caused indirectly by the actions of the men in their lives. Mrs Beast rejects any wish to be associated with them, reflecting Duffy's rejection of society's pre-occupation with victimized women and keeping them silenced. She is implying that although she is as beautiful as these women, she is not like them at all and will not befall the same

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