This paper explores the shift in Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry from the exuberance of the love lyrics in Standing Female Nude to the rejection of masculinity in the satirical poems of The World’s Wife. Duffy’s early texts can be distinguished from the western tradition of the love lyric due to her engagement with amorous situations in the era of postmodernity. Her poems are littered with a postmodern lover’s sense of alienation in the urban cityscape. The amorous flâneur of critical theory might delight in the infinite erotic possibilities lurking in the crowd, but Duffy’s narrators respond to the metropolis as if it were a form of pornography, offering, but constantly delaying, fulfilment. Amorous commitment is celebrated, rather than postmodern romance, with its parasitic relationship to consumer culture. Surrealist influences inform these lyrics: bourgeois culture is potentially upset by the exuberant celebration of the amorous in the middle of office blocks, phone booths and train stations. Duffy’s knowledge of modern philosophy also instructs her conception of love: she follows Roland Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoreux in her post-structuralist investigation of stock phrases such as ‘I love you’. Romance in Duffy’s work is a duplicitous script in which a lover can be a hero as well as a ‘bastard’. ‘Bastard’, with its peculiarly gendered etymology, marks out the usurper of the idealist, amorous moment as an errant male. Apart from the texts depicting overt lesbian eroticism, masculinity, particularly in the early poems, functions as an unsettling force that exasperates the surrealist lover’s search for subversive jouissance. Indeed, the poetry gradually moves from frustration to rejection as the number of love poems decreases across her oeuvre, despite the ostensible elision of the masculine in the genderless narrators of many of the amorous texts. Compared to the fifteen or so love poems in Standing Female Nude, The Pamphlet contains two, one of which presents an allegory of men as pigs who would be less harmful if allowed to sizzle on a spit (‘Circe’). In The World’s Wife, with its relentless attack on different forms of negative masculinity, men are cradle snatchers, obnoxious poets, hunters, bad lovers, greedy capitalists, whingers, jealous, spiteful or boring husbands, obsessives, penis worshippers, emotionless strongmen, adulterers, Viagra-wielding sex pests, libertine princes, devils, apes and, again, pigs.

Love, like religion, might appear anti-ideological, since it creates a sense of collectivity which seems naturally anti-institutional. In contrast, it is my contention in this paper that sex, love, desire and eroticism are contingent, and that this dependency is reflected in cultural products such as poetry. Sasha Weitman has explored socioerotic life by listing its universal laws and rules, such as the romantic connotations of a log fire, but such signs are unstable. Most of her examples are clearly cultural stereotypes of western romance to be found in many Mills and Boon and Harlequin novels. They invite agency: such signs may be rejected or endorsed (or ironically endorsed) by amorous subjects, or regarded quizzically by cultures in which a handful of roses has no pre-ordained meaning. In the early love poems of Duffy in Standing Female Nude, amorous signs are reproduced from western culture, particularly from the English and French traditions of the love lyric. For example, in ‘This Shape’, roses, sheets, doves, blood, pearls, smoke, tongues, hearts, the sea, sleep, storms and stars are associated with amorous desire. In the later poem ‘Adultery’ from Mean Time, the amorous signs are markedly different. Strangers, dark glasses, new money, phones, a clock, cabs, lunch, restaurants, alcohol, and a gift of flowers are deployed to forge a postmodern version of the love lyric. All these signs are relatively new in the western tradition of the amorous poem. Traditional cultural signs include doves (Swinburne’s ‘The Leper’), birds in general (Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’), spring, summer and nature (Shakespeare’s sonnets), flowers (Robert Burns’s ‘A Red, Red Rose’), eyes (William Barnes’s ‘White an’ Blue’), fire (Sidney’s ‘Dear, why make you more of a dog than me?’) and storms (Wyatt’s ‘The Lover Compareth his State to a Ship in a Perilous Storm Tossed on the Sea’). Krafft-Ebing has written of more perverse amorous signs outside poetry, such as the nineteenth-century fetish of the handkerchief. According to this critic, gangs of giddy Victorian men cruised the streets in an attempt to steal the handkerchiefs of unassuming ladies. Such peculiar signs are not limited to Victorian history. During the Renaissance, even the lowly prune had the potential to function in love poetry as an amorous sign: in George Wither’s ‘A Love Sonnet’, the subversive lovers sneak off into a boat loaded with cream, cakes, and prunes; in Measure for Measure, they are associated with the transgressive space of the brothel. A brief cultural history of the prune demonstrates that it has descended from this lofty amorous height to a sign of coarseness. In the nineteenth century it was derided as a laxative; by the mid-twentieth century it was associated with a plebeian lifestyle. Ronald Searle’s account of schoolboy life in 1953 includes a chapter entitled ‘Nightmare: the Revolt of the Prunes’. Normally, the schoolmasters disappear from the canteen to devour the more aristocratic strawberry, whereas the boys are left to chew on the ‘tribe of savvage prunes who lived in a blak mass in the skool pantry’.

The prune clearly demonstrates that amorous signs are contingent. Mike Featherstone has argued that modern urban life requires a code of love, such as an exaggerated eyebrow or lingering chink of wineglasses as a possible prelude to sex. In Duffy’s poem ‘Adultery’, this code includes the errant hand on the thigh which ‘tilts the restaurant’. More specifically, the list of amorous signs in this text consists of fetish objects associated with the lover, which form an integral part of the erotic contemplation of the past. Although adultery is ultimately lambasted, there is still a narrative thrill evident in the recounting of amorous details. And although the tone overall is elegiac, the reader might relish in the paradoxical empowering of the woman through the affair. Her marriage breaks up; freed from possibly tyrannical (or plain boring) husbands, it is only fairly recently that western women have been allowed to talk about their own adultery openly. Only in the 1980s did the Dutch feminist magazine Opzij begin to publish women’s accounts of marital misdemeanours; this can be contrasted with the 1940s conception of the errant female in the film Brief Encounter, in which the outcast adulterer wanders around the city like the fallen woman of nineteenth-century fiction. The narrator of ‘Adultery’ appears as a kind of damaged, but all-knowing lover; hence the appeal in the first stanza for the innocent reader to wear dark glasses in the rain, and regard ‘what was unhurt/as though through a bruise’ if they ever find themselves in a similar situation. A double-time narrative presents love, in the form of the passionate affair, as an aesthetic experience both within, and outside, the text. Duffy operates in post-structuralist mode here by presenting adultery as a pre-ordained ‘script’. Three layers of text mix in the poem: the text of the elegy, the relationship recounted within ‘Adultery’, and the texts of affairs and marriage in general.

‘Adultery’ supports Henning Bech’s declaration that ‘Modern sexuality is essentially urban’. In the following section, I intend to demonstrate that such idealist theories of love in the city contrast with the amorous despair depicted in Duffy’s poems ‘I Remember Me’ and ‘Telephoning Home’. Jeffrey Weeks has celebrated the fragmentation of traditional amorous relationships, and the subsequent ‘becoming’ of an androgynous sexual citizen. Amorous somatic pleasure is theorised as anti-consumerist in time and space: it is mainly experienced during the evening or at the weekend, in the home or a hotel; hence the office affair functions as a potential site for transgressive sexual activity. Such idealism needs to be tempered within a negative dialectic in which love is dependent on, and supportive of, late capitalism: in this context, shenanigans over the photocopier can be regarded as the most conservative of amorous encounters. Late nineteenth-century employers provided the full weekend as an opportunity for excursions: within such patent constraints, the amorous then appears to flourish in the twentieth-century phenomenon of the ‘dirty weekend’. Like the concept of leisure time, the modern city tends to be depicted in amorous theory as an erotic marvel, in which sexual possibilities flourish in the crowd; Zigmunt Bauman refers to this as ‘free-floating eroticism’. In Stanley Kubrick’s recent film Eyes Wide Shut, the mass production of desire is paradoxically connected with the anonymity of the eighteenth-century ball. Tom Cruise’s dangerous sampling of the city’s erotic delights is chastened by his appearance at the masked-ball orgy later in the film. The unenlightened Cruise formulates the urban through the notion of existentialist choice; the flip side of this apparent freedom might be disappointment, infinite deferral, or, more seriously, harassment, and even rape. Cruise in the early part of the film mirrors idealist amorous theory in which the city functions as a pornographic text. All levels of pornography draw on supposedly transgressive sex in cash machine booths, cars, aeroplanes, and so on; hence the recent furore over a hard-core sex flick which was being filmed in the car park of a major airport. Such films exploit the postmodern telecity, in which the urban crowd mirrors the strangers seen daily on television. Constantly mixing fantasy and reality, amorous excitement is generated in the telecity by the mere ‘glance of someone in the crowd, or the glimpse of a face on an advertising poster’ (Featherstone). In contrast, when Theodor Adorno gazes at a model’s beautiful teeth in an advert, he can only think of the victim’s grimace in a torture chamber. Adorno’s response in Minima Moralia highlights the undialectical nature of many recent sociological accounts of the city. Eroticism passim cannot be positive; Bauman refers to its prevalence as leading to a ‘rapid emaciation of human relations’: sexual advances are now commonly detected in friendly conversations at work, and abuse in family photographs of children cavorting naked in paddling pools.

Aesthetics of erotic teeth form symptoms of a process in which eroticism is deployed by mass culture as kind of terror. Duffy’s ‘I Remember Me’ thus proves to be a committed work of art in its late-Modernist attempt to separate the erotic from the city, and its rejoinder to amorous identity as fickle flexibility rather than an on-going process. ‘Despair stares out from the tube-trains at itself/running on the platform for the closing door’: the metrical break instigated by the internal rhyme (Despair/stares), and the echo of vowel sounds (platform/for) stresses the hermetic nature of modern urban life. Being ‘safe’ on the tube is considered dialectically with the process of running desperately for the train; Duffy’s poem mirrors Adorno’s detection of ‘an impression of terror’ when watching people run in the streets. Lovers also pass in the rain and do not know you ‘when you speak’ in ‘I Remember Me’: the neurosis explored in the surreal dream reflects the urbanity of strangers in which the amorous object can easily revert to the seemingly autonomous flâneur. Urban love in this poem is depicted as a kind of enforced onanism with the alienated self. Late capitalist society is based on the fantasy of individual autonomy in a world of strangers. In Philip Larkin’s poetry, this proves exciting, as the faces of strangers start ‘The whole shooting-match off’ in ‘Wild Oats’. But this co-exists with a paradoxical desire for security, a tension explored throughout Larkin’s work. Strangers pervade Duffy’s work too. The word appears in ‘Telephoning Home’, in which ‘The stranger waiting outside [the phone box] stares/through the glass that isn’t there’, and in other texts such as ‘Plainsong’, ‘Saying Something’ and ‘Mrs Skinner, North Street’. Postmodern love mirrors economic exchange by emphasising short-term amorous contracts between strangers, and the intensity of the affair (as in ‘Adultery’). Consumer culture as a whole proves hostile to amorous commitment. Orgasm mirrors the sound investment package as the ultimate stake, which Viagra seeks to democratise. This can be demonstrated through a recent newspaper article from The Times entitled ‘Sex Drug Turns Aged Tycoon into Errant Stud’, in which a 63 year-old woman sued Viagra for two million dollars on grounds that their relationship broke up after his sexual potency was restored. There is a direct link here to Duffy’s poem ‘Mrs Rip Van Winkle’ in which an elderly woman enjoys artistic pursuits until the husband returns, ‘rattling Viagra’. Duffy produces elegies which attempt to thwart the increasing capitulation of sex to a form of capital, and hard-core pornography’s celebration of sex as an encounter with strangers. Against urban alienation, she presents the supposed authenticity of the lover’s discourse. Duffy attempts, and self-consciously fails, to produce a transcendent love poetry that might be anti-urban. In ‘Telephoning Home’, a phone conversation with the amorous object takes place in the alienating space of a train station; it ends with the declaration that ‘This is me speaking’. Duffy has been pigeonholed as a poet of the dramatic monologue, whereas here ventriloquism is renounced to give way to a supposedly unmitigated exposure of the amorous self. ‘Telephoning Home’ was published in the 1987 collection Selling Manhattan; by The Other Country (1990) she has rejected anti-urban idealism and surrealism in favour of an investigation of love as discourse.

Duffy’s surrealist poems in Standing Female Nude mark the high point of the continuum of love poetry in terms of their sheer idealism. In contrast, the anti-love poem ‘Psychopath’ forms its nadir; this text deserves extended analysis due to its depiction of hysterical masculinity as the negation of the amorous. Conceptions of hegemonic masculinity can be derided through extreme examples, as in John McLeod’s reading of the misfits who pepper Ian McEwan’s fiction as evidence of contemporary male neuroses. In contrast, clichés contained within normative male discourses of desire, when mixed together, produce the psychotic in Duffy’s poem. Instances of the infantilising of women in popular culture and parlance cohere to produce a kind of legitimated discourse of paedophilia. The psychopath’s lust for young girls is articulated through homosocial desire: sexual fulfilment at all costs is stressed by the figures of the uncle, ‘pop’, King and ‘Jack the Lad’. However, hegemonic masculinity, as I stress in Signs of Masculinity, is a chimera. Deryn Rees-Jones argues that the psychopath demonstrates an ‘extreme gullibility to patriarchal constructs’; the emphasis is on diversity as opposed to the fantasy of male hegemony. Elvis’s exploitation of the sexualised image of the country boy vies with James Dean’s dangerously neurotic persona, and Marlon Brando’s leather-jacketed machismo. Even these references in the poem are jaded mirrors of fantasy, since the popular identities of the film stars are sieved from the multiple subjectivities performed across their work. The ensuing psychotic masculinity in Duffy’s poem is close to the model of hysterical masculinity outlined by Lynne Segal. She analyses a picture of Humphrey Bogart, in which ships, boats and sportswear surround the actor in order to coerce the viewer into an understanding that they are witnessing a real man in all his macho splendour. The impossibility of anyone mastering all the gendered pursuits renders the depiction absurd. By attempting to perform simultaneously the contradictory representations of masculinity in 1950s popular culture, the young man in Duffy’s poem becomes hysterical, and then, in the final stage of this process of alienation, psychotic.

As in Ian McEwan’s work, popular lyrics are explored for the male violence they legitimate. In First Love, Last Rites, McEwan deploys Elvis’s espoused desire to be his lover’s teddy bear in order to explore incest. Neil Roberts has referred to the intertexts of ‘Psychopath’ as instantly recognisable. In a sense, he is right, as the cultural references are decidedly postmodern, but would today’s teenagers recognise the ‘D.A.’ as the duck’s-arse hairstyle beloved of teddy boys? It can be argued too that the intertexts appear more complex when their narratives are unpacked to reveal disturbing subtexts. ‘[C]hicken licken’ refers to a popular nursery tale in which Foxy Loxy convinces Turkey Lurky, Cocky Locky, Henny Penny, Goosey Lucy and the chicken in question that he should lead them to the king to tell him that the sky is falling down. Instead, he takes them to his den, and eats them all. If this story is read in terms of ‘Psychopath’ (and vice versa), then the young man becomes the errant fox, leading the girl into the canal tunnel (a perverted ‘tunnel of love’). Conversely, the fox in the tale represents the possibility of child abuse and murder. The narrative of Duffy’s poem at this point is exactly the same as McEwan’s short story ‘Butterflies’ from First Love, Last Rites, in which the narrator convinces the girl to enter the tunnel after promising her the sight of exotic Lepidoptera. As with the legitimisation of incest through Elvis in ‘Homemade’, ‘Awopbopaloobop alopbimbam’ at the end of the poem emphasises the psychopath’s manipulation of popular culture to initiate his crime. Little Richard’s energetic piano antics and seemingly nonsensical lyrics are deployed by Duffy to suggest the expression of heterosexist desire through violence. The psychopath is presented as trapped by discourse: the various mirrors in the poem reflect the multiple instances of popular desire which produce his psychotic self.

Duffy’s choice of amorous subject in this modern ode is unsettling, as opposed to the relatively straightforward choice of marginal voices in her other dramatic monologues. In what sense is a psychopath an ‘other’? Is Duffy, as in most of the monologues, attempting to mimic an alterior voice in order to evoke sympathy for the represented figure? As a female poet, a subtext of revulsion is expected, rather than the danger of complicity if the author were male. Neil Roberts has written cogently of the semi-invisibility of the Duffy persona in her monologues; here, she appears practically occluded. This has augmented the prominence of ‘Psychopath’ within her oeuvre: in the McAllister interview, Duffy claims that ‘if a male poet had written [the poem] no-one would have noticed it’. The narration is disturbingly seductive: as opposed to Eliot’s representations of the masses in part two of The Waste Land, who are both tedious and miraculous in their discussion of abortion and constancy, Duffy’s narrator cannot be rejected as the proletarian stereotype of the harmless, but slightly dim, barfly gossip. Hence, when the barman calls ‘Time’, the psychopath enjoys the company of a Ruth Ellis look-alike. Ellis, a night-club ‘hostess’ (polite parlance for ‘prostitute’ in the 1950s) famously murdered her cad of an aristocratic boyfriend, and was hung in 1955. Like the modern cultural sign of the psychopath, she was turned by the judiciary and media into a sensational figure. At her trial, her defence lawyer insisted that her hair was dyed blonde again before her court appearance in an attempt to invoke the jury’s sympathy (the action had the opposite effect). Is the poem’s uncertain conclusion that Ruth Ellis and the psychopath are both victims created by, and only by, society? Agency appears to be lacking in the construction of identity here. Blaming society at the expense of the helpless individual mirrors some of less sophisticated rhetoric of far Left parties such as the SWP in the 1980s.

Duffy’s rejection of poetic visibility in ‘Psychopath’ simultaneously entertains a possible moral vacuum, a criticism levelled at other postmodernist writers such as McEwan and Bret Easton Ellis. Bateman in American Psycho is presented as a Butleresque figure of no pre-discursive identity, a postmodern product of trash culture. Bateman and Duffy’s narrators are often caught staring into mirrors; in ‘Psychopath’ the possibility remains that the narrator has been looking into a mirror for the duration of two stanzas. The ‘self but not quite self’ of their reflections reflects the postmodern sensibility that the body looking was never a unified self anyway, and that the latter is a projection of the world both inside and outside the bedchamber. Both characters ultimately slip into regarding themselves à la Rimbaud in the third, rather than first, person. Duffy’s narrator even sees himself in terms of an outraged tabloid reader of his crime: it is a ‘right-well knackered outragement’ that the girl (not him) has ruined her prospects in life. A danger exists in American Psycho and ‘Psychopath’ that the reader is nudged into the absurd position of blaming postmodernity for the death of a young girl, several women and dogs, a few men and a rat. Stable nuclear families in particular in McEwan and Easton Ellis, as well as the abstract concept of society, produce the horrors of Bateman, and the narrator of ‘Butterflies’. In American Psycho, the nuclear family is absent until Bateman hints that he was neglected by an aloof, aristocratic father whom he has been trying to impress through his various torture tactics. In ‘Butterflies’, the Oedipal narrative centres around a mother who lords it over the weak narrator until she dies, leaving him inadequate to orient himself in modern society; her infantilism of him as a teenager is transformed into his desire for young girls. In contrast, the disintegration of the traditional family unit in Duffy’s poem leads partly to the boy’s future moral demise, along with his early introduction to sex with Dirty Alice, the equivalent of McEwan’s Zulu Lulu in ‘Homemade’. Sandwiches form a fetish in stanza six for the young psychopath’s desire for his mother: positioned near her thigh, he focuses on them when he finds her in the clutches of the Rent Man.

Works Cited

Carol Ann Duffy, Standing Female Nude (London: Anvil, 1985)

Carol Ann Duffy, Selling Manhattan (London: Anvil, 1987)

Carol Ann Duffy, The Other Country (London: Anvil, 1990)

Carol Ann Duffy, Mean Time (London: Anvil, 1993)

Carol Ann Duffy, The Pamphlet (London: Anvil, 1997)

Andrew McAllister, ‘An Interview with Carol Ann Duffy’, Bête Noire 6

(Winter 1988)

Deryn Rees- Jones, Carol Ann Duffy (Plymouth: Northcote House,

1999)

Ed. Antony Rowland (with Emma Liggins & Eriks Uskalis), Signs of

Masculinity (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998)

Ed. Mike Featherstone, Love and Eroticism (London: Sage, 1998)