Feminist Sundays: "Girls, forget what you've read. It happened like this -"

For this week's Feminist Sunday, we thought we'd share one of our favorite poems with you: Carol Ann Duffy's Eurydice. But first a few words on the remarkable volume this poem is part of: The World's Wife. The World's Wife relies on a simple but effective idea: it takes familiar stories of male heroes, from history or fiction, and retells them from the perspective of a female counterpart. The refashioned narratives range from Greek mythology to Freud's biography, and from Grimms' Fairy Tales to Hollywood blockbusters. In most cases, the woman whose voice we hear is the wife or mistress of the hero (hence the book's title), but there are a few stories retold from the point of view of a sister, and a couple that break the mold entirely, by relating two female perspectives and mentioning a man only indirectly (Demeter), or by exploring a gender-swapped version of the original narrative (like in the awesome Queen Kong).
 

You can easily see why we'd love this book. Our favorite stories are in there - and getting a new twist on them is always nice - but there is more to it than that. Giving a voice to a neglected female character, making her front and center and letting her give her take on the hero, is more than an addition to the original story - it's a vindication. And what is awesome about it is that we don't simply get the same old stories told by a different narrator. Duffy engages with these narratives by bringing women's experiences and women's concerns to the table, making us aware of the patriarchal conventions that underlay the originals. In most cases, getting her side of the story doesn't complete the story, it changes it altogether (in poignant, funny, raunchy ways).

One of the most satisfactory aspects of this book is the subversion of the idea that the hero's love interest is awestruck by him and happy to be part of his story. This is the central point in Eurydice, the poem we have unanimously settled on as our favorite. We've always suspected that if the muse talked back, what she'd say wouldn't be particularly kind to the poet. And it isn't. It's funny (a lot of poems in this volume are), it's biting, it's not without its beautiful moments despite this ("Please let me stay./ But already the light had saddened from purple to grey.") - it's, in a word, perfect and you should all read it below.