Wives, love and animals: themes in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich and Carol Ann Duffy

Abstract

This paper discusses firstly, the  poetical space of celebrated American poet Adrienne Rich who died in March 2012, at the age of 82. The analysis focuses on Rich’s complex  figurations of female subjectivity as well as on her nuanced positions in relation to the public role of the poet today. Rich’s attention to the political dimension did not exclude intimate reflections on personal relationships and on their modalities. In this respect her poetry is close to another important lesbian author, the poet laureate Coral Ann Duffy. In The World’s Wife (1999), Carol Ann Duffy presents thirty sketches of famed men from both history and mythology by their wives. Each wife extols or criticizes her own husband in a combination of sarcasm and sentimentalism, with peaks of  extreme bitterness and self-pity. Such singular and irreverent feminine versions show a series of references to the animal world. As a matter of fact, Duffy creates a downright vast and varied bestiary, which focuses on the problematic association between the female and the animal body. The aim of this essay is to explore the multiple possibilities of representation and placement of the human body in the space, through the lenses of ecocriticism and posthumanism.