Dave,

I realize your post is to Alison but I'd like to comment. You're right that the Branagh Hamlet is interesting, for any number of reasons. Surely it's possible to talk about the performances at more length,etc. But the film is also interesting because Elsinore is recast in the 19th century Hapsburg empire, which really has nothing to do with Hamlet as it was written or nothing to do with any contemporary reality. It seems to me that the Duffy poem, whatever its merits, is using a similar strategy of relocation, for it seems to me that the poem is not really meant to be a historical vignette, a poem to give us a realistic scene of the Edwardian servant class, but only uses that as a kind of setting or staging for an expression of a contemporary passion (which the dedication and the closure which moves the 'location' of the poem to within the speaker bracket.) Or as Boland says, the erotic as a drama of expression.

However this isn't to say that I find the poem warrants an intense involvement. It seems to me that it eschews its own possibilities of complexity, just as formally, it seems content with the suggestion, rather than the rigor, of form. Duffy gives us an unexpected pairing, but she leaves the worn out mode of romantic objectification intact.
A more interesting poem, one that might blow up the form, would have undone that gaze as well. I am reminded of Louise Gluck's faulting of contemporary poems of mental disorder for having no disorder within them.

It is true certainly that poetry has often been the province of a particular class of males, but I think to suggest that obviation of the working class male is comparable to the erasure of women is to mistake a hangnail for a missing foot. All one has to do is look at any anthology prior to the last thirty years, to see that women are as rare as any extinct species, the only difficulty being that they were not extinct but only required to be, for purposes of literary reproduction.

>what seems to be the latest issue is the question
>of 'female desire'. Well, we all have desire, whether male or female, I
>can't see that the gender of origin is somehow morally superior, myself I
>incline to the 'Past reason hunted, past reason hated' school of thought, I
>hate the fact that I have used others as objects at times in my life,
>although of course the argument against would be biological necessity, i.e.
>people have to fuck in order to reproduce the species.

Well, this is so aggravating, and as the mother of three children, let me say that this idea of "past reason hunted, past reason hated" school of thought, which mistakes various forms of human disorder and all the ways in which men make women uncomfortable for the biological necessity that drives salmon and elk, is not the way one gets children. All this leads to is the headache with which your paragraph begins.

No one has argued, much less Alison in the post to which you reply, that female desire is morally superior, much less in its origin. We were talking about poetry, and in Western literature, there are an infinite number of poems that express male desire, in which the woman is objectified, sentimentalized, idealized, etc. as fish may be baked smoked grilled fried, etc.  There are very few poems, because of the erasure of women, of female desire, in which the woman is the subject rather than the object. For instance, the Eavan Boland book, Object Lessons, which I first mentioned is greatly preoccupied with the difficulty faced by the woman poet who must somehow become the subject of the poem wherein she has always been the object. What does woman want? as Freud said, and it is this issue of female desire which is new to poetry. It's impossible to talk about  the Duffy poem without considering the issue of  female desire, both as the subjecting gaze of the work, and the subject !
that the poem is 'about.'

Best,

Rebecca

www.thedrunkenboat.com

>
>Which oddly enough brings me to Shakespeare: while watching Hamlet last
>night I forgot the presence of the author, a crucial point, I wasn't
>thinking 'this is a great poet' but rather 'this is great poetry' it didn't
>matter who it was by, not what gender nor class etc jus
>Back to the Duffy poem, I am old enough to have talked to people who were
>servants in Edwardian times, and I can aver that they did not have the
>attitudes portrayed in her poem, they hated what they had to do. One of the
>moot points that is lurking in this debate is the Condition of England in
>1914, sentimentalists like Larkin or Hartley depict it as a Golden Age, the
>reality was that the country was on the verge of Civil War and only the
>outbreak of WWI stopped that. Even the schoolkids were going on strike. the
>counterpoint is to say that Duffy's poem is 'contemporary', as you do, but
>then one has to ask what is it contemporary about? And why does it have all
>the trappings of realism?
>
>
>All the Best
>
>
>Dave
>
>
>
>David Bircumshaw
>
>Leicester, England
>
>Home Page
>
>A Chide's Alphabet
>
>Painting Without Numbers
>
>http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Monday, January 06, 2003 10:27 PM
>Subject: Re: "form" (Commanders of the British Empire)
>
>
>At 7:22 PM +0000 1/6/03, david.bircumshaw wrote:
>>Where I do have problems is the suggestion that Duffy's poem is not
>>connected to issues of class, I can't see how anyone can look at a poem
>>which is ostensibly in the 'voice' of an Edwardian/Victorian servant and
>not
>>register the issue of class.
>
>Hi Dave - I wasn't saying that it wasn't connected to class at all: I
>was saying that to claim the poem is unthinkingly restating class
>stereotypes is to ignore the issue of female desire working within
>the poem: which is after all what the poem is "about".  It seems to
>me impossible to talk about that poem without taking that into
>account: and yet your analysis scarcely mentions it, except
>dismissively as a tawdry fantasy; nor does it explore the
>implications of its presence, which is intended to destabilise the
>class assumptions implicit in the poem, as well as the hierachies of
>language it plays with.  (Btw, if the poem doesn't use the language
>of the times, doesn't that suggest that it's a contemporary poem
>making a metaphor?)
>
>Your erasure of the presence of that desire is precisely what the
>poem is arguing _against_; it's an erasure which has been hallowed by
>centuries of Western art, which instates the possessiveness and
>ownership of the male eye and the passive nature of the female
>(nature, property &c) as exploitable owned object.   I'm saying that
>the class thing is much more complex in the poem than you're
>suggesting, not that it's not there.  Hierachies work along many
>vectors, not just one: a routine removal of the female as perceiving
>subject, or the sentimentalisation of the female, are deeply embedded
>habits in our literary canons.  But all this has been talked about so
>much as to make me yawn saying it, and all that talk sometimes seems
>to make no difference to actual behaviours: the same erasures occur
>again and again.  The latest one to ignite my ire is Michel
>Houllebecq's Atomised, which I think is a total fraud of a book (but
>you have to read the whole thing to find that out).  But that's an
>aside.
>
>I quite agree there are much more successful literary workings of
>these ideas than this poem, which as Liz says, doesn't really bear
>the weight of these discussions very well.  I too have problems with
>its language... in the end, I don't think it's especially
>interesting.  But it's only fair to discuss it on its own terms, to
>see what it _is_ in fact doing.
>
>Best
>
>A
>--
>
>
>
>Alison Croggon
>Home page
>http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
>
>Masthead Online
>http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
>