Mrs Midas (DP IB English A: Language and Literature: HL): Revision Note

Theme 

Quotation

Analysis and interpretation

Exclusion of the female perspective

‘I’d just poured a glass of wine, begun/to unwind, while the vegetables cooked. The kitchen/filled with the smell of itself, relaxed, its steamy breath/

gently blanching the windows. So I opened one,/

then with my fingers wiped the other’s glass like a brow’

• The poem opens with a conversational tone in the domestic sphere:

  • This choice in itself is a reflection of the deeper purpose of the poem and the collection

  • Both are often deemed not suitable for ‘high art’

  • Duffy challenges this male perspective and elevates the domestic to a space of dynamics worthy of exploration

• The assonance in ‘wine’, ‘unwind’ and ‘while’; ‘kitchen’, ‘filled’ and ‘itself’; ‘gently’ and ‘breath’ gives a sense of a calm space that the speaker is at one with

• The personification of the kitchen gives it soul:

  • The speaker’s tender caress of the kitchen window strengthens the sense of her in a loving relationship with this space 

‘He was standing under the pear tree snapping a twig.’

• The structure makes this line stand out in stark contrast to the previous enjambment-filled lines

• The harsh onomatopoeic sound of ‘snapping’ and the connotation of casual breaking introduce a harshness to the stanza

‘I served up the meal. For starters, corn on the cob./

Within seconds he was spitting out the teeth of the rich.’

• Again, the juxtaposition of the domestic with the material is jarring and surreal:

  • The conversational detailing of the meal and the image of the husband ‘spitting’ it out make him seem especially rude

  • The black humour in the scene belies the seriousness of the fact that he thoughtlessly pursued wealth with no consideration of the consequences

‘a fragrant, bone-dry white from Italy, then watched/

as he picked up the glass, goblet, golden chalice, drank.’

• The poem includes hints at middle-class comforts tainted:

  • The wine is described with detailed care

  • The description of it as ‘bone-dry’ foreshadows death

• The alliteration and asyndeton in ‘glass, goblet, golden chalice’ emphasise the object and its material:

  • The connotations of the words elevate it to symbolic, as they are associated with royalty and the church

  • These are traditional seats of male power and wealth

‘Look, we all have wishes; granted./ But who has wishes granted? Him.’

• The conversational tone and pun on ‘granted’ make the poem feel flirty and conversational

• The rhetorical question includes the reader in the reflection

• The parataxis of ‘Him.’ as the short answer to the question suggests the male is more likely to get what he wants than a woman is:

  • The capitalisation could suggest the speaker is referring to a wider, societal ‘him’, that is, the men in power 

‘the kiss that would turn my lips to a work of art.’

• This is an example of the poem working as an extended metaphor for push back against the objectification of women:

  • The kiss would literally turn her to gold in the myth

  • Metaphorically, his selfish love turns her into an object

‘I dreamt I bore/his child, its perfect ore limbs, its little tongue/like a precious latch, its amber eyes/

holding their pupils like flies. My dream milk/burned in my breasts.’

• This stanza comes before the volta of the speaker forcing her husband out of the home, so it has central importance to our understanding of the speaker’s experiences

• The irony of ‘perfect’ in describing the inhuman baby, paired with the masculine pronoun ‘his’ suggests skewed and contrasting perspectives on what perfection is:

  • For the materialistic man, the untarnished gold is perfection

• But the simile of the baby as a latch suggests this kind of striving for artificial perfection is an entrapping burden for the mother

• The images of the flies in amber and the burning breast milk further create a sense of the natural becoming static and infected as a consequence of the domineering male perspective on what is valuable

‘What gets me now is not the idiocy or greed/ but lack of thought for me. Pure selfishness.’

• The colloquial phrasing of ‘what gets me now’ contrasts with the clarity of the thought conveyed with the parataxis in ‘Pure selfishness’

• These lines are the clear expression of the female perspective

• Linked to the rest of the poem, the original myth and the wider collection, these lines suggest the danger of excluding the female perspective:

  • Duffy prompts the reader to reflect on what is lost when we do so  

Theme 

Quotation

Analysis and interpretation

Dangers of materialism

‘He sat in that chair like a king on a burnished throne./The look on his face was strange, wild, vain.’

• The husband is initially delighted with his power, suggesting the intoxicating hold the promise of wealth has on individuals:

  • The tricolon of adjectives makes him seem almost manic

  • The simile links wealth to power

‘What in the name of God is going on? He started to laugh.’

• The colloquial diction of the speaker makes her seem grounded and normal

• Her shock is juxtaposed with his laughter, making him seem careless

‘Do you know about gold?

It feeds no one; aurum, soft, untarnishable; slakes

no thirst.’

• The hypophora  makes it seem like the speaker is teaching us:

  • The Latin word ‘aurum’ adds to this by making her seem knowledgeable on the topic

  • The sibilance makes the words flow softly in contrast to the real texture of gold

  • This makes it seem dangerous, as if it can trick the user by its beauty 

‘And who, when it comes to the crunch, can live/with a heart of gold? ’

• The rhetorical question seems directed at society as much as at the individual reader

• The pun plays with the usually positive connotation of a heart of gold to turn it into a metaphor for cold-hearted greed

‘But now I feared his honeyed embrace…One day, a hare hung from a larch,/a beautiful lemon mistake.’

• Throughout the poem, Duffy plays with words that mean shades of gold to overturn a positive connotation into one imbued with ominous threat:

  • The ‘honeyed embrace’ becomes life-threatening

  • The alliteration of ‘hare hung’ brings a sense of lifeless weight

  • The oxymoron of a ‘beautiful…mistake’ reminds the reader of the danger of only looking at the surface for value

‘And then his footprints,/

glistening next to the river’s path. He was thin,/delirious; hearing, he said, the music of Pan/from the woods. Listen. That was the last straw.’

• The husband’s obsession with wealth has resulted in him starving in the woods with only his delirious fantasies for company

• The speaker describes the situation almost matter-of-factly:

  • It is as if this is the inevitable conclusion of unthinking, selfish materialism

‘I miss most,/even now, his hands, his warm hands on my skin, his touch.’

• The final line seems to be an appeal for us not to forgo our humanity in the face of greed:

  • The parallel structure of ‘his hands, his warm hands…his touch’ emphasises the human aspect of Mr Midas before greed consumed him

‘Mrs Sisyphus’

‘Little Red Cap’

‘Pygmalion’s Bride’

• The speaker uses sarcasm and disdain to highlight the emptiness of male power

• Her voice centres the narrative on her perspective

• She powerfully overthrows embedded myths around ambition and work ethics

• Duffy explores female sexuality and the power necessary to navigate patriarchal norms and desires

• The speaker powerfully overthrows the metaphorical wolf-man to reclaim independence and agency

• Here, Duffy examines the power of the speaker to manipulate male desire for passivity

• The speaker refuses to be an object

• In overthrowing this role, she reclaims her independence