interrogating iconized masculinity and english national identity in carol ann duffy’s poetry

미시연구

제18권 2호 (2012 가을): 197-220

Interrogating Iconized Masculinity and

English National Identity

in Carol Ann Duffy’s Poetry

Bo-mi Jeon

1. Introduction

In the prologue of her book Carol Ann Duffy, Deryn Rees-Jones adequately

characterizes Carol Ann Duffy’s works as “intelligent without being exclusive”

(4). Duffy’s double achievement of combining accessibility and authority is,

however, not only the result of her brilliant use of ordinary eloquence and her

ability of handling the high and the popular, humor and lyricism, and the

conventional forms and radical attitudes at the same time. It is, as several

scholars have also noted, rather the poet’s insightful understanding of quotidian

experience as a political reality that has completed her unique poetics (and

politics) of everyday. Through portraying the quasi-spontaneous moment of

daily harmony, her poetry provides the reader with an uncanny realization of

how false ideologies have been naturalized and institutionalized. Thus, while

Duffy situates various individuals in a rather ordinary time and space, her real

concern goes beyond the narrow circumstances. As if signaling her own

marginalized identity as a Scottish, female, and lesbian poet, her works mainly

reveal the inherent violence in the gendered power relationship. In this context,

this paper examines how the poet indirectly criticizes the publicly accepted

198 Bo-mi Jeon

ideas—especially that of masculinized constructions—of British nationality

through her brilliant use of irony and humor.

The cult of masculinity in the British national discourse is not a new story.

Yet the ideal images of English nationality and masculinity within the imperial

history cannot be disregarded concerning their persistent resonance in the

contemporary English culture. Particularly, the 1980s, when Duffy was about to

begin her career as a full-fledged poet, was the time during which Englishness

had been increasingly identified with the masculine. Facing the economic crisis

of the 1970s, Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s prime minister from 1979 to 1990,

strongly advocated a return to “Victorian values,” which included laissez-faire

free-market capitalism, individualism, belligerent nationalism, and even imperial

ideologies.1) Conjuring up the past glory of the 19th century British Empire,

Thatcher’s government offered images of British national masculinity that not

only had superior physical strength but was financially more competitive and

successful than the feminine ones. In addition, Duffy was well aware of the

certain role of the national media and educational curricula, whose language

was representatively used to spread these gendered national ideas. However,

what Duffy problematized was less the masculinized language itself than the

way it constructed the imagined nation reproducing too many marginalized

others.

In their analysis of Duffy’s poetry, many scholars tend to agree that a large

part of the poet’s project is to criticize her contemporary English society while

offering alternative voices through monologues spoken by marginalized people

such as women and immigrants. A few critics have studied the intersection of

English nationality and other identity categories in Duffy’s poetry. Linda

Kinnahan notes that Duffy’s criticism of national discourse is inextricably

1) Nigel Lawson, who served as Thatcher’s Chancellor of the from 1983 to 1989,

listed the Thatcherian ideals as: Free markets, financial discipline, firm control over

public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, ‘Victorian values’ (of the Samuel Smiles

self-help variety), privatization and a dash of populism (qtd. in Berlinski 115).

Interrogating Iconized Masculinity and English National Identity in Carol Ann Duffy’s Poetry 199

linked with her employing the conventional form (“Convention” 247-48;

“Rhetoric” 133). She argues that for Duffy, the use of traditional poetic devices

such as the lyrical self and the dramatic monologue works as a distinctive

rhetoric of the self. According to her, these conventions enable the poet to

investigate more complex vocabularies of contemporary England as she gives a

voice to the outsiders interconnected with different “discourses of national and

cultural identity” (“Immigration” 209). Angelica Michelis, in her essays about

gender and national identity, discusses how Duffy’s language of otherness,

alienation and displacement, or the language of the feminine, influences the

construction of national identity (“Me not know” 95-96; “A country” 69).

Hyun-Sook Huh also explores how Duffy called “the English” into question

during Thatcherian times. Regarding Duffy’s poetry as a translation of

contemporary England, Huh contends that in her poems, the voice of foreigners

and immigrants develops a troubled but conscious self that is able to articulate

their desire for individuality within the English society (“Translating” 112, 119;

“Monologues” 811-12).

Providing that the previous studies have mainly concentrated on the

possibility of “feminine” or “foreign” voices in Duffy’s poems, which can

participate in a broader national narrative, the scope of the present study is to

explore how the poet rather directly represents the vulnerability of the

overwhelmingly constructed English manhood in the last decades of the

twentieth century. It is probably Duffy’s keen eye for the absurdities evident in

ordinary lives and a deft poetic technique that have certainly qualified her to

capture the subtle moments when the structure of the national order opens up

its fissures and cracks. In particular, her skillful use of dramatic monologue

and a touch of comic relief to the serious issues significantly contribute to her

unique portrayal of everyday discourse. Where Duffy touches on a little part of

quotidian life, the ordinary experience no longer remain ordinary; the implicit

stereotypes about Britain’s national identity and masculinity ideals expose their

own crises, often with violent emptiness.

200 Bo-mi Jeon

2. Over-determined English Culture and

Its Oddly Insecure Masculinity

Duffy’s poetry is a continuous attempt to configure images of the English

nation embedded in everyday discourse. She especially observes how her

contemporary society identifies its desire with male desire, normalizing national

ideals through public institutions such as the media, print capitalism, and public

schools. More often than not, Englishness has been described with gendered

characteristics including power, competitiveness, wealth, assertiveness, and

ambition, even as the subject of English citizenship has been supposed to be

white, Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking male. Furthermore, these gendered notions

of Englishness are most likely shaped at the intersection where the conservative

value system of the contemporary government and a secret desire shared by

many English people to retain their former imperial glory meet. Duffy’s

personal response to this phenomenon is, however, not amicable. While

criticizing that this “successful” nation-building was always based on exclusion

and selection criteria, she makes sharp comments on the fundamental

contradictions and instability inherent in the construction of the unified English

self. One thing to note is that Duffy’s dramatic monologue here allows the

poet to render her criticism possible without mentioning her own beliefs, since

the first-person narrative voice dramatically exhibits the symptoms “of anxieties

about claiming any kind of subject position” (Rees-Jones 17).2)

In “Translating the English 1989,” the readers encounter a typical male

2) Here, subject position refers to a discursive voice (or persona) in the poem,

which, in W estern literary tradition, is usually assumed to be singular, unchanging, and

authoritative. However, Rees-Jones suggests Duffy’s use of monologues destabilizes this

internal coherence of the self, thereby keeping a critical distance from the persona who

speaks (50).


travel guide who proudly boasts of the dynamicity of the English culture. The

opening of the poem is full of masculine confidence: “Welcome to my

country!” (72). Starting with a brief introduction of the country’s famous

national newspaper and weather, the self-assertive voice continues to build an

imposing image of nationhood by giving an account of England’s inspired male

authors, Wordsworth and Shakespeare. Throughout the poem, the speaker

continuously stresses the authenticity of the national culture, saying that there

will be “much excitement” surrounding something genuinely English. “A tour

of our wonderful capital city is not to be missed,” he pronounces. The collage

of multiple references such as “the Princess Di,” “football hooligan,” “Charles

Dickens,” and “Terry Wogan” (a famous show host) also works as a series of

cultural codes that appears to have shaped the collective identity of the English

“we.” In many cases, these references, along with the man’s exaggerated tone,

contain flashy and ostentatious features, sometimes reminding the reader of

another superlative list of England’s canonical male poets in “The Laughter of

Stafford Girl’s High”: “John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Nicholas

Rowe, Laurence Eusden, Colley Cibber, William Whitehead” (237).

However, the speaker in the poem finally divulges the fragility of his

seemingly coherent national image as the pastiche of his conceited language

reveals its hidden cruelty and violence:

Many thrills and high interest rates for own good. Muggers.

Much lead in petrol. Filth. Rule Britannia and child abuse.

Electronic tagging, Boss, ten pints and plenty rape. Queen Mum.

Channel Tunnel. You get here fast no problem to my country

my country my country welcome welcome welcome. (72)

By allowing the speaker to express freely his masculine desire for grandiose

Englishness, Duffy watches for the unguarded point at which the speaker

cannot but disclose the most undesirable aspects within the English national

discourse. In fact, it is also plausible to say there is a presence of another

202 Bo-mi Jeon

voice that, in a very sneaky and indifferent manner, infiltrates into, and thus

intervenes in, the narrative of the monologue.3) This second voice deliberately

adds a plain social fact such as “muggers” and “filth” after each reference the

speaker provides, and by doing so, it indirectly remarks upon the

contradictoriness of the egocentric English self. “High interest rates,” which

may have helped Thatcherian Britain achieve financial glory simultaneously

resulted in an increase in crime rates, and the economic efficacy of leaded

petrol ultimately resulted in a deleterious effect on the English environment.

The speaker then points out that “high interest rates,” which may have helped

Thatcherian Britain achieve the financial glory, cannot be thought apart from

the increase in crime rates, and the economic efficacy of leaded petrol always

has something to do with the detrimental effect on the natural environment.

Whether intended or not, the juxtaposition of clashing words such as “Rule

Britannia” and “child abuse,” and “Queen Mum” and “plenty rape” also

significantly reflects the poet’s tacit intervention to exhibit the lack of unity

among English subjects. Here, the poem tells of the superior male power,

which once ruled the great British Empire, still existing in the domestic area,

maltreating weaker ones including its children.4) The position of the Queen’s

mother as a symbol of royal dignity also becomes more or less ambiguous

facing the commonly practiced violence in English society.5) In this sense, the

3) Reese-Jones also notes that Duffy’s dramatic monologues often include “a slippage

between the voice of the monologist and the voice of another presence which interferes

or seeps into the narrative” (46).

4) As Kinnahan rightly notes, patriotism represented in this poem is consist of the

most unpleasant discourses―economic disparity, m isogyny, colonization and child abuse

―which are ironically proven to be “intersect and even interdependent” each other

(“Look For” 255).

5) “Queen mum” is the name adopted by the press to describe Elizabeth Sr., Queen

Elizabeth the Queen Mother(1900-2002). Throughout her life, she had been enduringly

beloved by England and unlike other members of the royal family, she rarely mocked

by the tabloids. She personified an ideal (grand) mother figure who had not only


repetition of “my country” and “welcome” is no more than a resonance of

hollow language exhibiting the speaker’s obsession with unity and unfragmented

wholeness for the English national self.

“Poet for Our Times” even more openly shows Duffy’s skeptical attitude

toward the construction of stable Englishness that the contemporary English

society aims at. As an extension of “Translating the English 1989,” Duffy’s

peculiar use of dramatic monologue in this poem leads to a revelation of the

speaker’s real character, a representative of Thatcherian English identity. The

monologue in this poem is spoken by a reporter from Britain’s best-selling

national newspaper The Sun, who regards himself as a talented, influential

figure in the national narrative. In the first stanza, he, introducing his

occupation of writing headlines, expresses how much he is proud of the “knack

[he was] born with” (74).

Obviously, the speaker’s self-esteem cannot be separated from his own

achieved masculinity. It seems that this newspaper reporter’s main interest is

solely how to prove his ability to convey the masculine quality of the English

identity in a certain manly style. He declares all he has to do is “Just [to]

bang the words down like they’re screaming Fire!” while comparing his simple

headlines to “punchy” haiku poetry. What is more, from the speaker’s extensive

use of slang for men like “Squire,” “mate,” or “GENTS,” the reader can

conclude that the targeted newspaper readership as well as the listener of his

monologue is exclusively limited to a specific group of English men.

Nevertheless, although the speaker seems to possess a certain degree of

public authority, and his articles and headlines certainly handle some prominent

national issues, his position as “a sort of poet / for our times” appears not

quite acceptable to the audience (74). It is shown that what he regards as

national is too violent and his language too ugly to be either poetic or formal.

wisdom to carry out tradition but also courage with which she could remain in London

during the World W ar Ⅱ (O’Reilly 336-37).

204 Bo-mi Jeon

For instance, in his headlines, the choice of vulgar terms like “EYETIE” and

“FROG”, each referring to Italians and the French, indicates more than enough

England’s prejudice and offensive racial stereotypes. Likewise, women are

merely reduced to the sexual body parts in a rather obscene way: their

“GIGANTIC” breasts on “PAGE 3” are only meant to please gentlemen’s eyes.

Here, the monologue gives an uncanny effect as the poet blurts out what has

been secretly agreed as a desired national identity by her contemporaries. As

the voice of this public writer grows more exaggerative in nature, readers are

compelled to face an uncomfortable reality as their everyday experiences of

institutional discourses and national events become even more perceivable, as

well as objectifiable.

In this way, the last stanza becomes the locus where Duffy puts her

criticism of the empty national discourse into perspective:

And, yet, I have a dream ― make that a scotch, ta ―

that kids will know my headlines off by heart.

IMMIGRANTS FLOOD IN CLAIMS HEATHROW W ATCHER.

GREEN PARTY WOMAN IS A NIGHTCLUB TART.

The poems of the decades . . . Stuff’ em! Gotcha!

The instant tits and bottom line of art. (75)

Again, the speaker’s aggressive language refers to his inability to see

Englishness in anything but the most conventional, biased, and sensational

terms. As the phrase “IMMIGRANTS FLOOD IN” suggests, his mention of

foreigners is already related to threatening forces from outside, while he

continues to rudely dishonor a leftwing female politician by labeling her “A

NIGHTCLUB TART,” slang for prostitute. “Stuff ’em,” and “Gotcha!” similarly

demonstrate the jingoistic and destructive nature inherent in his language.6) As

6) Gotcha is a famous front-page headline from The Sun in 1982 when the General

Belgrano, an Argentine ship, was sunk in the Falklands W ar by a British submarine

(Berlinski 174-75). This clearly summed up the jingoistic fervor in England around the war.


such, the way Duffy lets this public man of excessive machismo betray his

linguistic coarseness and violent character, in fact reinforces the audience’s

suspicion that the public nationality they have believed legitimate may be

grounded upon something valueless. In this context, the last line of the poem

is necessarily suggestive as another voice suddenly breaks in; his art, which

has led him to success at the top of the national newspaper, now only ranks

“at the bottom” of artistic authority, merely fulfilling the “instant” male desire

for women’s breasts and buttocks (75).

A subtle but no less intense anxiety of English subjecthood is also observed

in “Head of English.” Set in a typical secondary school in England, the poem

offers an interesting moment where the head of English, who aligns himself

with the canonical male poetic tradition, encounters a poet of the new

generation. The teacher’s imperative language that comprises a list of ‘do’s and

‘don’t’s, and his emphasis on traditional conventions of English poetry—for

example, assonance and rhyme—present the speaker more visible as a central

figure in an authoritative school institution. In this sense, the teacher’s

observable rudeness toward this young, free-verse poet can be interpreted as an

expression of his masculine arrogance and disregard for the “illegitimate”

culture-shifting: “Remember the lesson on assonance, for not all poems, sadly,

rhyme these days. Still. Never mind” (9). After all, it’s rather a materialistic

reason—that the school is paying him forty pounds—that stands behind his

accepting this “less authentic” English poet. In the third stanza, his personal

offense at other cultures comes into view more clearly:

Those of you with English Second Language,

see me after break. We’re fortunate

to have this person in our midst.

Season of mists and so on and so forth.

I’ve written quite a bit of poetry myself,

am doing Kipling with the Lower Fourth. (9)

206 Bo-mi Jeon

The teacher’s use of the term “English Second Language” makes rather

impersonal and disrespectful reference to children from other linguistic

backgrounds. While Keats’s verse (“season of mists”) quoted by the speaker is

marked as his own cultural self-affirmation, his mentioning of teaching Kipling,

who was not just a master of traditional poetic form but a champion of British

imperialism and an opponent of multicultural society, further highlights the

teacher’s biased view on cultural diversity.

Yet, despite these entire attempts to distinguish his canonical self from

peripheral cultures, the poem uncovers an intense cultural anxiety underlying

this forceful self-image. Duffy’s technique of dramatic monologue once more

maximizes an effective objectification of the speaker’s nuanced psychological

change. By saying that he does not want “winds of change,” a famous phrase

made by a former prime minister, Harold Macmillan, when the African

colonies tried to break away from the British Empire, the teacher unconsciously

expresses his fear about the new poet who might change the pupil’s view on

what really constitutes the English. This kind of nervousness perceptibly echoes

Duffy’s own view on the non-essential and fluid quality of national identity.

Thus when the teacher challenges the poet, saying “convince us that there’s

something we don’t know” in a somewhat exaggerated tone, the reader may

notice that there is “something” about English and English literature that he

has tried to conceal from his pupils (9). The teacher’s verbal defense

mechanism of avoidance continues to the end of the poem as he hurries to

rush off (“Unfortunately / I have to dash”) from the room after dispersing the

girls (10). Now, there is an obvious relief in his voice that he “fortunately”

does not have to talk about the “outside view” of the poet any more (10).

3. (Un)victimized Individuals in the Formation

of the English National Identity


In preceding poems, Duffy casts doubt on the coherence or stability of the

public national narrative. In other poems, on the other hand, she also tries to

gain access to the English identities woven into people’s imaginative private

lives so as to depict the myriad and dynamic ways in which the English

national identity is produced. While keeping in mind that the personal

experiences of national identity nonetheless cannot be totally disconnected from

the influence of the public experience, she captures quite a number of

individuals who are, either consciously or unconsciously, forced by the

stereotypical and conservative notion of Englishness. One interesting point is

that Duffy seems to regard both insiders and outsiders of the mainstream

English society as victims of oppression and marginalization by the national

discourse. Still, it must be also noted that even though these victims encounter

an inescapable national (un)reality, whether they are contained by it or not

depends upon their own capacity to see through the fabricated tale of the

national subject.

For Duffy, the identity of a progressive and virile nation cannot be an

absolute reality since it has always been constructed by juxtaposing English

characters against its randomly designated inferior “other.” Yet in many cases,

this institutionalized male English character manifests its pervasive power in the

form of personal or communal violence. So when the little girl in “Originally”

tells of the memory of “big boys” who ate worms and shouted obscene words,

England is mirrored as a hostile, masculine world (69). Englishness with a

more exclusive and racialized definition again appears in “Foreign,” where a

sympathetic persona witnesses the actual experience of seeing racist graffiti:

“you saw a name for yourself sprayed in red against a brick wall” (58). Here,

what is good and what is English are always formed against the “hate name”

of otherness, and the phrase “Red like blood” with the capital “R” adds the

violent nature of England’s nationalist ideas of the time. To the alienated

groups who cannot participate in this collective fantasy of the English nation,

England itself becomes “the other country.” In this country, one cannot but

208 Bo-mi Jeon

desire an alternative space, as in “In Your Mind.”

In the opening stanza, the speaker, having difficulties in her life in England,

imagines herself travelling to another place in the middle of work. In this

place, whether “anticipated of half-remembered,” one’s language can be freely

articulated without being “muffled,” and one does not have to suffer from the

harsh reality comparable to a bleak English autumn (101). Instead of viewing

the outside reality, the speaker conjures up a series of imaginary moments in

which people are not yet obsessed with scientific progress or selfish

individualism, but a sense of idyllic freedom can be detected:

Then suddenly you are lost but not lost, dawdling

on the blue bridge, watching six swans vanish

under your feet. The certainty of a place turns on the lights

all over town, turns up the scent on the air. For a moment

you are there, in the other country, knowing its name.

And then a desk. A newspaper. A window. English rain. (101)

Despite the relative abstractness of the imaginary place, it is remarkable to note

that the speaker gradually gets the feeling of certainty about what she

imagines. It is a kind of immediacy of life, which makes her presence valued

much more than before, but as the second person pronoun “you” suggests, this

immediacy does not mean the speaker takes her past memory and imagination

as something controllable; neither does it mean that she indulges in escapist

fantasies. By calling her other self in an imaginary space “you,” the speaker

instead informs the reader that she is able to put some distance between her

questionable present reality and the imaginary place, while she can also lead

her everyday life at a conscious level. The other country within her

imagination, to some extent, is playing a role not only as a refuge, but also as

a half-political place where the speaker can glimpse her own creative

subjectivity.7) Thus, although the vision cannot be sustained for long, and the

speaker’s helplessness and frustration within the inescapable reality is to be


continued, the conclusion cannot be always regarded as too pessimistic. As the

last line’s four fragmented sentences indicate, the indifferently listed nouns

clearly contrast the tender, organic images of her imagined country,

emphasizing the uncertainty of the present Englishness. The ephemeral and

momentary nature of the given materials, “a desk,” “a newspaper,” and

“English rain,” further implies the illusory and fleeting quality of the reality of

the English nation. Yet it is the speaker’s critical imagination that, by

stemming defeat, finally enables her to confront and overcome the cold reality.

If the speaker in “In Your Mind” is able to position and reposition her

flexible subjectivity to deal with the imposing national reality, the male

monologist in “The Captain of the 1964: Top of the Form Team” is, in

contrast, a character who is stuck between two images of Englishness: one as

the embodiment of a heroic past, and another as an insipid, vapid routine of

the English middle class. Even though the speaker is a man who has

experienced what it is like to be a legitimate member of the English and still

thinks of himself within the boundary of Englishness, he at all times fixes his

personal reality on the nostalgic past, thus understanding his identity in

idealized, even deluded ways.

As the first stanza directly presents, the persona’s “fizzing hopes”, like the

popularity of the Beatles as well as the optimistic mood in the mid-1960s,

reached their peak. The first three stanzas contain a great deal of memories to

describe the young speaker’s successful past. Certainly, he was a boy on a roll.

He gradually developed his own masculine image as he contrasted himself with

“convent girls” and mimicked Mick Jagger, a vocalist of Rolling Stones, as a

male role model. In school, his academic achievement as a model English

middle-class boy was again conspicuous. Well adjusting himself in an

established national curriculum for geography (“the Nile rises in April;” “I

7) This kind of subjectivity corresponds to the idea of Michelis’s Otherness that

“inhabits an identity as a constantly present alterity” without allowing “closure or

certainty” (“Me Not Know” 96).

210 Bo-mi Jeon

knew the capitals”), zoology (“hummingbird’s song”), and English history (“the

Kings and Queens, the dates”), he feels great self-confidence in his ability to

give correct answers in class (105). Above all, after his participating in a TV

quiz show, he even integrates his personal past into England’s national

narrative:

Dave Dee Dozy...Try me. Come on. My mother kept my

mascot Gonk

on the TV set for a year. And the photograph. I look

so brainy you’d think I’d just had a bath. The blazer.

The badge. The tie. The first chord of A Hard Day’s Night

loud in my head. I ran to the Spinney in my prize shoes,

up Churchill W ay, up Nelson Drive, over pink pavements

that girls chalked on, in a blue evening, and I stamped

the pawprints of badgers and skunks in the mud. My country. (105)

Here, the “mascot Gonk” seems rather similar to a trophy than a toy, and

the photograph, a medal. The shabbily dressed speaker with his badge brings

up the image of a full-dressed general in his uniform. In this way, his

nostalgic ideal of a personal (and national) past is overwhelmingly masculine.

Running with excitement, he metaphorically follows the path of conventional

heroic figures such as Churchill and Nelson, and all of his glorious experience

is summed up in one significant word, “my country.” In his sense of history,

girls’ business does not count. Their traces represented by chalk lines seem

much fragile and hazy than the powerful “pawprints” his shoes stamp.

Nevertheless, the last stanza of the poem shows the ultimate failure of his

nostalgia. As a typical dramatic monologist, he unconsciously exposes his own

tactics of self-delusion in disguising his particular feelings of loss.8) It is quite

8) It has been defined that one essential feature of dramatic monologue is the

speaker’s unintentional revelation of her or his temperament or character (Abrams 70;

Shaw 442).


obvious that the speaker’s obssessiveness about his heroic past serves no real

purpose other than to provide him an empty consolation. His state of loss is

most clearly observed from the meaningless questions he continuously asks

people around him. Likewise, his discontent with the present, routinized reality

is also indirectly represented by his description of his family, “stale wife” and

“my thick kids.” For him, the past never exists as the past, but his entire life

is equated with the memory of his heyday, being the captain of his Top of the

Form team. This might be Duffy’s implicit criticism of the Thatcherian

government’s anachronistic philosophy that aims to return to the leading

position of the British Empire.9) Yet in the most profound sense, he is a man

of half-victim, half-accomplice, trapped in a publicly fantasized masculinity as

his mirrored image of self, partly recalling Althusser’s conception of subjected

subject, signifies no less the speaker’s condition of being governed than his

individual agency.

4. The Politics of Laughter in

“The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High”

In “The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High,” Duffy adopts a subversive gesture

of laughter in an attempt to develop a further critical stance toward the

9) In his study of Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism, Stuart Hall has described its

ideological project as a form of “regressive modernization”:

[Thatcherism’s ideological] reworking of these different repertoires of “Englishness”

constantly repositions both individual subjects and “the people” as a whole . . .

contesting space in terms of shifting social, sexual, and ethnic identities, against the

background of a crisis of national identity and culture precipitated by the unresolved

psychic trauma of the “end of empire.” Culturally, the project of Thatcherism is defined

as a form of “regressive modernization”—the attempt to “educate” and discipline the

society into a particularly regressive version of modernity by, paradoxically, dragging

backwards through an equally regressive version of the past. (2)

212 Bo-mi Jeon

man-made public narratives and their conservative national values. As the title

of the poem intimates, the laughter here exists as a counterculture against the

dominant language upon which the English national culture, here represented as

a public school, was founded. In Duffy’s detailed representation of a typical

English school, it seems clear that she tries to question what kind of rational

and legal authority this modern state institution relies on, and how firmly its

authority is established. Still, rather than to express unqualified doubt on the

idea of public education itself, her main concern is to go beyond the often

serious but hollow rhetoric of the English institution so that she can give a

hilarious insight into what it is to be English in her own time.

Duffy opens up the poem with skillfully arranged lists of kings and queens

of England, the canonical writers, and geographical facts. At this point, she

successfully demonstrates the exclusive and inflexible nature of the English

national curriculum, which has long been dictated by a heterosexual, patriarchal

order. For example, the rivers of England listed in Ms. Dunn’s class

suggestively show the way English nationality is geographically, and thus

rationally, defined: “Brathay, Coquet, Crake, Dee, Don, Goyt, / Rothay, Tyne,

Swale, Tees, Wear, Wharfe…” (234). Listed in alphabetical order, the names of

the rivers here metaphorically work as a fixed geographical demarcation that

defines English national territory and sovereignty. It is more like a codified

norm, which by learning schoolchildren can join in the construction of the

national discourse. Then, there is a sudden burst of laughter that interrupts and

erodes the petrified discourse within the school curriculum. The unstoppable

mirth spreads so quickly that it sweeps through the entire school in less than

an hour. Where the girlish hilarity and giggling has passed by, all the national

values and the glorified past have also faded away. The Beaufort scale of wind

speed, which has been used to fulfill the English Royal Navy’s imperialistic

purposes, and the list of Poet Laureates are no exception. Every classroom is

almost emptied by the sheer glee of unrestricted laughter.

Whereas the pure, irrational laughter is offered as a strategy to release the


controlling mechanism of rationality in the patriarchal culture, it also creates

distance from the context of nationalist sentiment in this ordinary English

school. In the poem, Duffy seems to suggest that the power of laughter lies in

its ability to translate everything into nonsense as it draws out the inherent

absurdness of situations, even those that are supposed to be meaningful and

serious within the national scheme. As such, in the scene of the Monday

morning assembly, a splash of laughter begins to disrupt the most solemn and

patriotic moment in which the Head of the school sings the British national

anthem:

. . . Doctor Bream,

determined and blind, started the morning’s hymn. I vow

to thee my country. . . A flushed Miss Fife started to play.

All earthly things above. . .The rest of the staff joined in-

entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love,

the love that asks no questions, the love that stands the test . . .

But the girls were hysterical, watching the Head,

Queen Canute, singing against the tide of their mirth . . . . (243)

Doctor Bream, the Headmistress, is apparently an authoritative figure who

already possesses some characteristics of patriarchal masculinity. She, reminding

the readers of Margaret Thatcher, thoroughly pursues the norms and standards

that have been traditionally prescribed by the ideology of traditional institutions.

When confronting the unmanageable burst of laughter, her masculinist notion of

women’s role in English society is at once expressed, “how they could hope to

grow to be the finest of England’s daughters and mothers and wives after this

morning’s Assembly’s abysmal affair?” (241).

Later, even the teachers join in girly merriment and eventually discover their

true selves, which they find do not fit the qualifications for teaching

Englishness. At first, they are described as “the woman teachers of England”

214 Bo-mi Jeon

who easily become frustrated and anxious about the overwhelming laughter that

has shaken the entire school (239). Yet, as time passes, the teachers, if

unconsciously, begin to illuminate both the oppressiveness and the fissures in

totality within this national institution. The case of Miss Batt particularly

provides the reader with one of the most radical moments:

. . . Miss Batt,

vacantly staring down as her class wrote out a list

of the monarchs of England ― Egbert, Ethelwulf, Ethelbald,

Ethelbert, Ethelred, Alfred, Edward, Athelstan, Edmund,

Eadred, Eadwig, Edgar. . . noticed the snowball, huge and alone

on the hockey pitch, startlingly white in the pencilly grey

of the light, and thought of desire, of piano scales slowing,

slowing, breasts. She moaned aloud, forgetful of where

she was. Francesca Eve echoed the moan. The class roared. (242)

The scene become quite humorous as Ms. Batt, looking out through the

window at the winter snow, associates the big white snowballs with the breasts

of her secret female lover and moans aloud with desire. This brought additional

shared laughter to the site. At this point, the poet invites the reader to take a

step back and enjoy the obscene fantasy of a school teacher. Yet it is still

more striking to see how the poet parallels Miss Batt’s homosexual desire with

the names of the English monarchs, the defender of patriarchal hierarchy and

heterosexual legitimacy. By interrupting the flow of the list of the Kings and

Queens of England, Miss Batt and her expressing of the taboo same-sex desire

in public becomes a threat to the authority of the English monarch, as well as

the patriarchal ordering they represent. Considerably, one might also argue that

here the poet has created a moment in which even the reader is complicit in a

plot against the monarchy as they “laugh.”

Notwithstanding its penetrating theme of subverting the naturalized power,

the overall mood of the poem is nevertheless hilarious. According to the poet’s


delicate descriptions, the sound of the girls’ laughter is “liquid,” “flowering,” or

“bird-like” than coercive and aggressive. Due to the joyful mood it creates,

laughter is even thought to be “on the curriculum” (247). In this way, the

idealized model of national identity and the public institution that consolidates

so-called Englishness again reveal their own instability, exposing that they are

not able to tolerate even the “weightless” weight of laughter. Likewise, the

closing of the school in the later scenes evidently indicates that sometimes the

most illogical and unpredictable means of self-expression—probably including

artistic ones—can in fact collapse old national doxa.

5. Conclusion

In a broad sense, Duffy’s whole work is an implied protest against the

nation’s abstract totality that both obscures violence—class division, sexual/racial

discrimination, and even imperial nationalism—and justifies other unjust political

realities. Duffy has learned that the English nation has been represented as a

unified ideal but in it, there are too many different lifestyles and interests to

standardize. To the poet, this often masculinized national ideal is no more than

a concealed conflict and displacement which has already started to fester. Her

criticism of the normative national ideology, however, appeared by lightly

adding humor to a particular scene rather than by directly attacking the

government or a certain ruling figure. Notably, laughter is something that is

neither cruel nor harsh; it is, if anything, an social expression of “the point of

view of the whole world,” as Mikhail Bakhtin says (12), creating distances

from the well-hidden familiar moments of our lives and then teasing the

official statement forced by the national government.10) After carefully

10) Bakhtin regards the culture of carnival laughter as one of the most radical forms

of dialogue. The ambivalence it creates is marked by the suspension of ordinary

hierarchy, while also signifying the symbolic destruction of the official authority:

216 Bo-mi Jeon

endowing a concrete voice to the deep-rooted narrative of the dominant

Englishness, she waits until this casual, unintended voice inadvertently utters

the potential violence behind the daily discursive practices, which no longer

makes it possible to conceal the accustomed suppressions and restraints.

In Duffy’s poetry, laughter not only works as a useful stylistic device that

gives pleasure to the reader but sometimes even functions as an agency as it

leads us to doubt what has been believed to be a solid reality. It aims at

social change by giving the reader a chance not to deal with the serious too

seriously. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the poet merely overlooks the

important relationship between the nation and individual identities. One must

understand her attempt in terms of searching for other possibilities to maintain

a more dialogical and flexible relationship between the two. In other words, the

new English identity she is eager to express in her poetry mainly involves a

relaxing type of humanistic sentiment that, like laughter, allows for tolerance

and generosity, detached from the stiffness and conservatism of the traditional

Englishness.

(Yonsei Univ.)

Rabelais tore off the sacred symbolic robes of number and uncrowned them. He

profaned them. But this is not a nihilistic act: it is a gay carnivalesque gesture that

regenerates the numbers and renews them(463).


Works Cited

허 숙. ｢ 국 번역하기: 캐롤 안 더피의 시｣ [“Translating England”]

ꡔ 미시연구ꡕ 8.1 (2002): 99-121.

______. ｢소외된 자의 독백—캐롤 안 더피 시의 복화술사 화자｣[“Monologues

of the Alienated”] ꡔ 어 문학ꡕ 51.4 (2005): 809-35.

Abrams, M. H. Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed. Boston: Heinle & Heinle,

1999.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. H. Iswolsky. Bloomington:

Indiana UP, 1984.

Berlinski, Claire. There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.

New York: Basic Books, 2008.

Duffy, Carol Ann. New Selected Poems, 1984-2004. London: Picador, 2011.

Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the

Left. London: Verso, 1988.

Kinnahan, Linda A. “Look for the Doing Words: Carol Ann Duffy and

Questions of Convention.” Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in

Theory and Criticism. Ed. James Acheson and Romana Huk. SUNY P,

1996: 245-68.

______. “‘Now I Am Alien’: Immigration and the Discourse of Nation in the

Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy.” Contemporary Women’s Poetry. Ed.

Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones. Macmillan P, 2000: 208-25.

______. “The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and Economics: A Poetics of Public

Discourse in Carol Ann Duffy.” Lyric Interventions: Feminism,

Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse. Iowa City: U of

Iowa P, 2004. 132-79.

Michelis, Angelica. “A Country of One’s Own? Gender and National Identity

in Contemporary Women’s Poetry.” European Journal of English Studies

6.1 (2002): 61-69.

218 Bo-mi Jeon

______. “‘Me not Know What These People Mean’: Gender and National

Identity in Carol Ann Duffy’s Poetry.” The Poetry of Carol Ann

Duffy: ‘Choosing Tough Words’. Ed. Angelica Michelis and Antony

Rowland. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003: 77-98.

______, and Antony Rowland. “Introduction.” The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy:

‘Choosing Tough Words’. Ed. Angelica Michelis and Antony Rowland.

Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003: 1-32.

O’Reilly, Andrea, ed. “Elizabeth, Queen Mother.” Encyclopedia of Motherhood.

1st vol. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2010. 336-38

Rees-Jones, Deryn. Carol Ann Duffy. Plymouth: Northcote House, 2002.

Shaw, W. David. “Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the

Dramatic Monologue.” ELH 66.2 (1999): 439-60.


Interrogating Iconized Masculinity and

English National Identity

in Carol Ann Duffy’s Poetry

Abstract Bo-mi Jeon (Yonsei Univ.)

This paper attempts to investigate the dynamic relationship between English

nationality and masculinity represented in Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry, arguing

that Duffy’s unique portrayal of everyday discourses reveals the often-violent

emptiness of implicit stereotypes about Britain’s national identity and

masculinity ideals. One of Duffy’s main concerns in her poetry was the

construction of England’s nationality during the 1980s, when Thatcher’s

government brought a number of economic and political changes. At the time

of drastic social change, what the national discourse offered was a powerful

vision of a strong England that pursued the most masculine and heroic virtues.

However, Duffy was rather skeptical toward the public attempt to make a

coherent English identity since she observed the fundamental contradictions and

instability inherent in the construction of Englishness vis-à-vis heroic

masculinity. While keenly observing how the hegemonic English nationality was

being developed within everyday discourse, she shrewdly creates a social satire,

utilizing the chance to criticize the publicly accepted gendered prescriptions of

Englishness. Here, the poet’s use of laughter as a key element of her social

criticism is worthy of attention since its universal and ambivalent character

allows the readers to gain instant access to the counterculture.

Key words: English nationality, Thatcherian England, masculinity, everyday

politics, subversive laughter

220 Bo-mi Jeon

논문투고일: 2012년 09월 24일

심사완료일: 2012년 11월 02일

게재확정일: 2012년 11월 02일

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interrogating iconized masculinity and english national identity in carol ann duffy’s poetry

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