Deconstructing Biblical Narratives: A Feminist Intertextual Reading of Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife

Abstract

Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife provides a modernize twist to famous myths, historical and biblical narratives retold from the perspective of the spouses of the heroic personalities. This research borrows the concept of Deconstruction by Jacques Derrida which details a philosophical approach that decentralizes traditional meanings of texts or history to deny what is considered absolute truth. This is exactly what Carol Ann Duffy does in her poetry as she goes back to interrogate the lessons that were held as absolute truth in religious myths and fairy tales which aimed at subjecting women. While other critics have looked into religion as a tool of marginalization in Duffy’s poetry, this research focuses on the idea of binary oppositions of masculinity and femininity in religion by investigating the reason why the society is male dominated and the feminine voices are silenced so as to reconstruct the female in the feminine perspective through the theory feminism and intertextuality. This research attempts to uncover issues of marginalization and deconstruct subversive binaries that present women in unflattering ways. Deconstruction questions these binaries by rejecting the idea of a hierarchical order. Derrida’s deconstruction is therefore reliable in exploring the various binaries evident in the Religious myths and fairy tales that Duffy explores in The World’s Wife.

Key Words: Feminism, intertextuality, Deconstruction, Marginalization.