OrpheusEurydice2.0103

Carol Ann Duffy, "Eurydice," in The World's Wife: poems, New York: Faber & Faber, pages 58-62.

Duffy’s collection gives voice to several silenced women from literature and myth. The World’s Wife is a collection of first-person poetic expressions named after the individual women coupled with well known men from our literary past. Duffy’s witty feminist critique introduces often unexpected nuance to stories we thought we knew already. Had we been wondering what Frau Freud thought about a phallocentric worldview or what Mrs Rip Van Winkel was doing with the time the long slumber afforded her. What changed with his awakening? And what was threatening to change with Orpheus’ bold katabasis. Eurydice’s self-interest had already found voice long before Duffy expressed it in 1999. Her Eurydice is no more decisive than Gluck’s or Ruhl’s. And the narrative nuance is hardly unprecedented, though still sharply original. Eurydice herself effects her return to the languid dead. Remorseless for the separation she made happen by entreating Orpheus’ vanity, Eurydice now delivers from the other side some useful advice to her peers.