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The World's Wife Carol Ann Duffy Analysis

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The World’s Wife is a collection of poems written by Carol Ann Duffy in 1999. It consists of feminist retelling various stories, fairy tales, and greek mythologies, rewritten with feminist views where the women are the focus of the story. These recreations, all of which are dramatic monologues, are meant to bring forth the importance of the women who, in the original stories, are overshadowed by the men. Queen Herod is derived from the biblical story of King Herod, who ordered a mass killing of all first born boys under the age of two years, in fear that one them was meant to be the saviour of mankind and therefore was going to rob him of his thrown in the future. In Duffy’s version of the story, it was Queen Herod rather than King Herod who ordered the killings. Her justification for her actions was that one of those infant boys was going to break the heart of her newborn daughter. With this plot change, the women in the story were portrayed as authoritative, thus empowering them. As in the rest of the poems in this collection, the main social group represented in Queen Herod is women. In this poem, Duffy characterizes the three queens as “wise” and “fierce”, traits which are generally used to describe men. In contrast, she then uses “drunken” to describe King Herod, which only emphasizes the representation of the queens’ traits. The king and the infant boy act as foil characters to the queen and her daughter. Through alliteration, the infant boy is described as an

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