Blog 11: Feminine Gospels

After nearly a month off with work commitments, the blog returns with another focus on an A Level text: Carol Ann Duffy’s The Feminine Gospels.

With all of these blog posts, I’ll be highlighting three important things to consider to elevate your exam responses.

Key Character

‘The Woman Who Shopped’. Exploring the idea of the oppression of women (see next section), this poem is all about the extent to which a loss of identity for women is encoded in the fabric of an inherently patriarchal society, through ideas like marriage and a focus on appearances. The asyndetic structure of ‘wanted a wedding, a wedding dress, groom,/

married him, wanted a honeymoon, went on one’ adds to this frenetic sense of loss: the female narrator does not have time to breathe, she is so wrapped up (pun intended) in the expectations of society.

Key Theme

Oppression of women. First published in 2002, Feminine Gospels came shortly after Duffy’s collection The World’s Wife (1999), which reimagined key stories from history and mythology through the eyes of (often despairing!) female partners: King Midas’s exasperated wife, for example. In your A Level answers you need to be aware of this generic (AQA Assessment Objective 4) and historical (AQA AO3) context, as well as the ideas of feminist criticism (AQA AO5) on which Duffy relies heavily.

Key Quotation

‘The sky was unwrapping itself, ripping itself into shreds.’ From ’The Woman Who Shopped’, this is the first line of the last stanza. The violence of the language here — ‘ripping’, ‘shreds’ — underlines Duffy’s anger at this situation; moreover, there is a comment here on what the forces of consumerism do: they cause people to damage themselves. In this way, Duffy’s poem ends not only as a condemnation of the masculine oppression of women, but a far more general censure of the violences enacted by modernity on all people, of all genders.

📌 If you want more of this focus on character, theme, language, and context to prepare you for your exams, get in touch.