Introduction

Carol Ann Duffys poems gave an enormous contribution to the rise of popularity of
dramatic monologue in contemporary British poetry. However, its origin dates from the
Victorian period, but we can still consider it as a new poetic form or even a genre. Although
many poets and writers gave their own definition of the term dramatic monologue, Alan
Sinfield, an English theorist, gave the broadest definition which describes it as a poem in the
first person spoken by someone who is indicated not to be the poet (Sinfield, 1977). As the
term indicates, it is a monologue, i.e. a person who speaks to the audience, is usually just one
voice that speaks to the audience, so there is no dialogue between people. We use the term
dramatic because it is closely connected with the theatre where we have a speaker and the
audience, but also because it has a dramatic effect on the audience. The voice in the poem is
not considered to be the poets voice. What happens is that he poet gives the voice to a
marginalised group of people who cannot express themselves in a regular way, but find their
way through lyrics. However, there are also theoreticians who think that there is a tendency
that poets voice is hidden behind the voice in the poem (2005: 82).
In the twentieth century the poet who is mostly associated with this poetic form is Britains
poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. She wrote considerable number of collections that contain
elements of dramatic monologues: Standing Female Nude (1985), Selling Manhattan (1987),
The Other Country (1990), Mean Time (1993), The Worlds Wife (1999). These collections
contain a variety of voices including male, female and even non-human characters. In her early
works mostly male voices dominate, but her bestselling collection The Worlds Wife consists of
only female characters and voices. Although spoken from a male perspective, monologues
presented through male voice are not always about masculinity. They are talking from a
perspective of criminals or people who are powerless and displaced. This idea to speak in
behalf of others is connected with the political situation of that time (Thatcherism years), but it
remained unclear why Duffy ventriloquized marginalised figures (Bertram, 2005:86).
Taking into account that dramatic monologue is a very broad topic to discuss this paper will
try to constrict its analysis only on the analytic review of specific poems written by Carol Ann

Duffy. Moreover, it will try to bring the term dramatic monologue closer to the reader
through the presentation of its examples found in the poems. Thus, the paper will try to find
out in which way Carol Ann Duffy actually uses dramatic monologue and give quotations that
show it. The poems which will be included in the analysis are Standing Female Nude,
Education for Leisure and Warming Her Pearls published in Carol Ann Duffys Selected
Poems (first published in 1994). These poems are already recognized by renowned critics as an
illustration of Duffys use of dramatic monologues, so this paper will try to find those elements
in each poem.

Dramatic monologue in Duffy's poems

Carol Ann Duffy is ventriloquizing through dramatic monologue and dialogic dramatization
of human interaction, mostly by using the present tense. Duffys poetry is speaking in the
voices of various characters, known as thrown voices (Dowson, 2011:180). This genre
harnesses readers consciousness of the conventions within which reading takes place; it uses
irony, disguise and play; it is preoccupied with identity, ideally suited for exploring the
relativity of perspectives and truths (Bertram, 2005:80). However, the characters in Duffys
poems are very familiar to us, we can even identify with most of them and they speak using
recognisable register. Through dramatic monologue Duffy manages to write form various
perspectives and explore a vast number of different voices and emotions because she does not
express it from her own perspective but from the perspective of thrown voices. This fact is
very important because Duffy wrote about themes different than those which were dominant in
the poetry tradition she started to write in. She did not consider herself as a woman, not
entirely, because she did not experience some things which, in her opinion, make her entirely
as a woman (like motherhood). That is the main reason why she rarely ventriloquized female
characters in her early collections. (Bertram, 2005:86).

Standing Female Nude

In her poem Standing Female Nude there are two voices, but the female one dominates. The
poem has a narrative form so there is a plot like in a story. Although we have two voices in this
poem, there is no reason why we should not consider this poem as a dramatic monologue.
There is no dialogue between these two people; the female voice dominates and the second
one, which is male, only gives a slight comment, they do not talk to each other. The speaker is
a young girl who is earning money working as a model. She stands, posing, six hours for only
a few franks and in that way she allows to be objectified by an artist:
Six hours like this for a few francs.
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Belly nipple arse in the window light,

he drains the colour from me....
(1994: 20)

From this monologue we can also learn the details of the lives of the painter and the model.
They are both very poor and belong to a marginalised group of people in their society. The
lines:
Maybe. He is concerned with volume, space
I with the next meal...
show the reader that she does not pose to him for pleasure; she is forced to do it because she
does not have a choice. In the poem there are a lot of sexual connotations which give a
negative picture of women in that period.
Maybe. He is concerned with volume, space.
I with the next meal. You're getting thin,
Madame, this is not good. My breasts hang
slightly low, the studio is cold. In the tea-leaves
I can see the Queen of England gazing
on my shape. Magnificent, she murmurs,
moving on. It makes me laugh. His name
is Georges. They tell me he's a genius.
There are times he does not concentrate
and stiffens for my warmth.
He possesses me on canvas as he dips the brush
repeatedly into the paint. Little man,
you've not the money for the arts I sell.
Both poor, we make our living how we can.
The word madame was sometimes associated with prostitutes; they were once called like
that. She belittles him as a man by saying that he cannot afford the art she sells (her body), he
can only possess her on canvas. Dipping the brush into the paint also describes sexual
intercourse between two people. The painter treats her as an object, she is voiceless, and he
wants her in a physical way. Linda Kinnahan wrote in her essay that to the artist, her body is a
site conflating commodification and desire (1996: 258). There are two pictures in this poem,
a real human being, and its representation on the canvas. In both ways this woman is
objectified, firstly by the painter, but also artistic representation objectifies the woman just as
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patriarchal economic structures objectify her as a commodity to be bought, sold, possessed

(Acheson and Huk, 1996: 258). She tries to imagine how she will look when the Queen of
England comes to see her representation in the museum. She sees irony in this situation. The
Queen represents a tradition, convention, everything she is not. It is expected from Queen to
praise every work she sees, including her shape in the museum. The womans monologue is
in a way a critique of Art. The art does what she does, sells its body (paintings) to survive
but the society criticizes her way of making money, while at the same time it celebrates art. In
the end we see that the model cannot identify herself with the painting. She is not satisfied
with her representation or she just does not understand the Cubist art:
Twelve francs and get my shawl. It does not look like
me

Education for Leisure

Education for Leisure is also one of Duffys poems where the form of dramatic monologue
is visible. Where in the poem Standing Female Nude the monologue is told by a female voice,
in Education for Leisure the gender of the speaker is not revealed. This poem is a monologue
of an anonymous person who is very violent and destructive. The main reason for his/her
condition is boredom and being ignored. The speaker decides to take power over its life and to
make some changes. Also, he/she decides to kill something because he/she wants to make
his/her life more interesting and dramatic. The speaker says anything which implies that
he/she is not bothered about who or what he/she is going to kill because there is no particular
reason for killing, just pleasure. The speaker wants to play God, to have control over things
because he/she does not want to be ignored anymore. He/she desperately wants attention. Even
the description of ordinary things like an ordinary day expresses boredom.
Today I am going to kill something. Anything.
I have had enough of being ignored and today
I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,
a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets.
(1994: 11)
The colour grey indicates something dull, uninteresting or unattractive. In fact, the speaker
describes his/her emotions and mood not just an ordinary day. The tone, voice and diction of
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the speaker in dramatic monologue typically disclose the psychology and motives of his or her
character at significant moment or crisis, as enacted in the text of the poem (Dowson,
2011:180). The speaker starts to fulfil his desire to kill with a fly and he/she says that they did
that at school:
I squash a fly against the window with my thumb.
We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in
another language and now the fly is in another language.
I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.
The speaker mentions Shakespeare in a negative context because they have different points of
view or maybe it is some kind of revenge because he/she was ignored at school and he/she
could not express his/her creativity and intelligence. He/she does not understand Shakespeare
and because of that he/she considers him to be in another language (in another world). As
Dowson states, another language represents a world of death, silence, violent extinction and
Duffys nameless school-leaver has not been educated for leisure but for insensitivity
(2011:181). In the final verse he/she tries to convince us that he/she is a very talented person
and that he/she does not need Shakespeare or any other kind of education to become a genius
and somebody important. He/she considers himself/herself too talented and too intelligent and
that he/she could be anything at all, with half the chance, without effort:
I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half
the chance. But today I am going to change the world.
Somethings world. The cat avoids me. The cat
knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself.
The speaker says that the cat avoids him/her because it knows he/she is a genius and he/she
can do everything he/she wants. But the truth is that the cat avoids him/her because it can feel
that he/she has bad intentions. He/she expresses his/her power through violence, and the only
way he/she can change the world is to destroy it. The speaker thinks that he/she should get
some kind of prize for his/her deeds, for killing those animals so he/she calls a radio station.
He/she considers himself a celebrity; a famous person and that people should be pleased to
have a contact with him/her. But again people ignore him/her, he cuts me off. This was
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crucial for him/her. This evoked something more serious. It is a transition between killing
animals and human beings.
There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio
and tell the man hes talking to a superstar.
He cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.
The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.
The speaker thinks that killing animals did not help him/her; he/she did not get attention from
other people so he/she decides to go further by killing people. The last words I touch your
arm connect the speaker and the reader. It indicates that the first human victim is the reader.
So, we feel like we are directly connected with the speaker. This verse is very dramatic and it
is the first time in the poem when the speaker gets attention, the readers attention. Dowson
says that Duffy wants to throw the voice of a badly educated, discarded and disadvantaged
criminal upon the public stage of poetic communication in order to represent our disjointed
time in which the social has been sacrificed to selfish aggression and anti-social self-assertion
(2011, 181). This dramatic monologue is a criticism of the society. We can connect it with the
time when the poem is written (in 1980s when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister).
People thought that in schools there was too much time for leisure and very little for education
so the title can be considered ironic.
Warming Her Pearls
The speaker in the third poem, Warming Her Pearls, is female - a maid whose job is to warm
pearls for her mistress. This poem Duffy dedicated to Judith Radstone who told her the
interesting story about maids and their mistresses pearls. The maids increased the pearls
luster by warming them beneath their clothes (2011: 190). In maids monologue there is a
hidden desire and lust towards her mistress. There are many examples of class distinction in
this poem: maid vs. mistress, Yellow room (considered an aristocratic rest room) vs. attic
room.
Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress
bids me wear them, warm them, until evening
when I'll brush her hair. At six, I place them
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round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,

resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk
or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself
whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering
each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope.
She's beautiful. I dream about her
in my attic bed; picture her dancing
with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent
beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.
(1994: 60)

The maid covets the life, yet perhaps also the attention and affection, of the mistress
(Dowson,2011:191). Many erotical imaginations are present in the lines of the poem:
Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see
her every movement in my head.... Undressing,
taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching
for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way
she always does.... And I lie here awake,
knowing the pearls are cooling even now
in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night
I feel their absence and I burn.

The maids whole life is connected with her mistress. The word rope in a line Slack on my
neck, her rope is allusion to a death penalty by hanging for people who possess pearls
illegally. On the other hand, it can be also interpreted as a weak relationship between the maid
and her mistress because the rope is slack; their relationship is not tight enough. The feeling of
absence of pearls can be also considered as absence of the mistresss body. Besides the lust for
the mistress, through this dramatic monologue the maid expresses her lust and desire for her
way of life, for her luxury. Like many Duffys poem, this one also represents a strike to social
class dissimilarity between people. The voice in the poem Warming Her Pearls is thrown to a
woman who belongs to a marginalized group of people and who tries to fulfill her desires in
order to become more appreciated in her society. Warming Her Pearls works by finding a
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new line, a prosaic measure, a sophistic sublimation and a taught rope of images and objects
through which to imagine the hidden life of a female servant ( Dowson, 2011:192).

Conclusion

As it was previously mentioned, during the 1980s and 1990s, Duffys collections of poetry
questioned how the individual is imagined within economic, nationalist, and socially
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Conservative discourses arising during the ascendancy of the New Right and Thatcherism.
Consequently, many of her poems of this period identify and challenge a public rhetoric of
selfhood advancing the values of authentic, autonomous, and unified subjectivity, coexisting with
traditional values of social life. (Alderman and Blanton, 2009: 195). Using this specific form of
writing, dramatic monologue, Carol Ann Duffy tries to give a voice to the voiceless people.
When we talk about voiceless people we do not think literary, but on a group of people who
became invisible, small and underestimated due to political and social situation in that time.
Dramatic monologue is the only way to give those people a chance to express themselves in a
way they choose because in the dialogue with other people their voice is not the one that
dominates. Duffy does not select people according to their wealth, education, personality. In her
poems we can find people who are well educated and those who do not have education at all.
Also she gives voice to criminals, prostitutes but also to poor and miserable people.
The poems analyzed in the second section of this paper are a concrete evidence of the above
mentioned characteristics of Duffys poetry. Hopefully, through the analysis of the three chosen
poems, this paper has managed to fulfil the goals set in the introduction. In other words, it has
managed to show how Duffy uses dramatic monologues and what its purpose is. Also, the
provided examples and quotations should have both showed the purpose of dramatic monologue
but also helped its understanding.

Bibliography
Acheon J., Huk R. (1996): Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism. State
University of New York Press

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Alderman N., Blanton C.D. (2009): A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Bertram V. (2005): Gendering Poetry: Contemporary Women and Men Poets. Pandora
Dowson J. (2011): Twentieth-Century British and Irish Womens Poetry. Cambridge University
Press
Duffy C.A. (1994): Selected Poems. Penguin Books
Sinfield A. (1977): Dramatic Monologue. Mauthen

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