little red cap (the world's wife)

x_emmzy_x

hey people i was wondering if you could help me...

i can't figure out what the themes are in little red cap :s-smilie:

any help would be greatly appreciated :smile:

Reply 1

stan912

The main ones i could think of are the rite of passage, the end of innocence, manipulation, sexual awakening and the reassertion of 'womanliness' :s-smilie:

hope these help :smile:

Reply 2

dreamqueen

3

I wrote on this poem as part of an essay entitled ‘Despite advancements in Feminism the Presentation of Women in Modern Literature does not suggest Genuine Female Liberation – Discuss'. Here's what I put:

In Little Red Cap, however, Duffy provides a different outcome. The imagery here serves to indicate the experiencing of life, as Jeffrey Wainwright deems it “transforming place and time. It involves the metamorphosis…from child to adult” . In relation to the presentation of women, then, this is the female experience of growing up and gaining understanding. This is suggested in the first stanza through the objectification of time – “childhood’s end”, which is extended through the semantic field of a journey. This introduces the theme underlying the poem’s imagery. As the rest of the poem progresses Duffy’s message plays on comparing and contrasting of overwhelming ‘masculine’ imagery and that which is more delicate and ‘feminine’. The former is dominated in the first half of the poem by the wolf, whom Duffy characterises through traditional intimidating lupine features, for example “thrashing fur” and “heavy matted paws”, as well as the inclusion of the fairy-tale cliché “what big ears he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!”. Phonologically too he initially dominates the poem, for example “wolfy drawl” and “breath of the wolf in my ear”. This presence is extended through the imagery of the environment with which he is associated – “deep into the woods, away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place”, “wolf’s lair, better beware” the emphasis here being on the depths of the wilds, the unknown, uncontrolled part of nature. Duffy makes this imagery appear even more threatening through its juxtaposition with phraseology of innocence and vulnerability, for example “murder clues. I lost both shoes” – both the semantics and the rhymes suggesting an ominous trail of loss, “I crawled in his wake” – deliberately submissive and “sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif” - playing on clichés of inexperience, the incomplete fragment of “never been” particularly suggestive through evasion of a definite act, which creates an impression of inexperience and uncertainty regarding even the nature of experience. However in the second half of the poem the semantic field is of the animated nature of life, for example “words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood”. The wolf, in contrast, becomes a one-dimensional constant – the repetitive listing linked also through rhyme at the end of the fifth stanza – “greying wolf howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out, season after season, same rhyme same reason” suggests a lack of growth on his part. This makes explicit the change in imagery but the shift in the mental state of the female is also evident through the imagery of the bird, which initially the female unquestioningly allows the wolf to consume – “flew, straight from my hands to his open mouth. One bite, dead”, but it is later seen that “birds are the uttered thought of trees”, suggesting an intellectual value in nature. It is interesting that in the final stanza Duffy juxtaposes the imagery of life with angry cold acts of destruction. The former is evident, for example, in the rhymes of “wept”, “leapt” and “slept”, which both phonologically and semantically reflect life at its fullest – the first two particularly indicating emotive binary oppositions of life. However the tripartite repetition of the emotionless declarative “I took an axe” suggests a cool and unfeeling destruction. Nevertheless the final imagery and phonology – “flowers, singing” is once again suggestive of life. The imagery of nature, then, shifts between being presented as overwhelming and threatening, something to revel in and something to be destroyed. Although such imagery is arguably not focused in its entirety on the presentation of women, it offers significant insight into the search for female liberation. Through the imagery of nature we see the process of growth of female awareness in relation to the world around her – first she conforms and worships masculine ideals, secondly she comes to the realisation that this is not sufficient and starts to value her own form of discovery, and finally she realises that this freedom of knowledge is hindered by the male and to kill him is a necessity for her ultimate freedom. It is arguable that this suggests genuine liberation because of the fact that the female is presented as having experienced the entirety of necessary experience; the awareness that she is oppressed and the emergence from this oppression wholly independent, yet, as the shifting imagery suggests, with an understanding of the complexities. For feminists such as Cixous it would seem that this emergence is indeed genuine liberation, escape from the male shadow ‘into oneself’. For liberal feminists, however, the issue remains of the extremities of this presentation of women. Even the symbolic killing of the wolf seems suggestive of a breakdown of societal structures rather than an ability to achieve liberation within them. However radical feminists would be strongly inclined to suggest that the latter is impossible, and it is this area of disagreement that provides the fundamental problem of considering the existence of genuine liberation in modern literature – whether any sort of balance can be struck between these two extremes or whether the existence of liberation can only ever depend on a personal perception.