The poem Warming Her Pearls by Carol Anne Duffy presents a complicated discourse on the nature of female desire and the forms that it is forced to take in the world. This discourse works primarily by focusing on the ambiguities of the female position. By focusing on these ambiguities, and on the ways in which desire is seen as demarcated into specific areas, it is possible to the poem as being feminist. This paper will present a reading of the poem from this perspective and, in doing so, will demonstrate how it expresses a clear, although subtle, feminist discourse.
In order to do this, it is first necessary to understand precisely what is meant by the term feminism and how it is possible to apply the term to a reading of something such as a poem or a work of art. I understand the word to refer to a work or a theoretical text that seeks to draw explicit attention to the ways in which female people are compromised in society and how society treats women as fundamentally unequal citizens. This definition can include the class position of women and the way in which their roles can be seen as socially conditioned. As well as this, it can be seen to refer to ways in which the female subject is herself created and her desires and the ways in which to realise them are demarcated and policed by specific modes of behaviour in society. Carol Anne Duffy is a poet who can be seen to apply herself to both of these aspects of feminism. As a political subject she was born to a working class family in the north of England and has experienced class based discrimination for much of her life. As well this, she is also an openly homo-sexual woman and, as such, has an inherent understanding of the stigma that can be seen to affect any woman whose desire does not take a socially sanctioned form. Both of these aspects of her experience and her world view can be seen to be combined in Warming Her Pearls.
Use your promo and get a custom paper on
"Warming Her Pearls as a Feminist Poem".
The poem is written the perspective of a servant who tells of warming the pearls that will be worn by her mistress. Throughout the poem this is positioned as both an act of deep intimacy and as an act of alienated labour. The contradiction between these two can easily serve as a way to understand the poem’s feminist content. The first stanza of the poem combines both of these directly; ‘Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress / bids me wear them, warm then until evening / I’ll brush her hair. At six, I them / round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her’. (2006, p. 40). This stanza in a register of delicacy and intimacy. In particular, Duffy makes use of almost exclusively monosyllabic words in order to suggest the quiet care with which the servant treats her work and therefore the intimacy with which she considers the woman for whom she works. This view is then accentuated in the second stanza in which the speaker describes their own body heat passing into the pears in a way that suggests a deep physical closeness felt by the speaker: ‘She fans herself / whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering / each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope’ (ibid). From the register of the poem it is clear that this takes on an overtly sexual nature.
This register of intimacy is maintained as the speaker of the poem pictures her mistress dancing with men and engaging in social practices that would be expected of her as a female in her position. Despite this potential to become over-awed by her position, however, the speaker imagines that her own scent will remain on the warm pearls in way that will puzzle the men who dance. Duffy’s speaker imagines therefore that, although her mistress is destined to behave according to fixed set of social behaviours and practices, she will nonetheless be able to remain in some way on her and a part of her life.
The satisfaction that emerges from this capacity to remain on the her mistress is one aspect of the poem’s feminist content. It is clear that the speakers’ desire for her mistress is sexual, but that this is a desire that cannot be expressed in the social circumstances in which she finds herself. Not only is she of a lower class to her mistress but she is also, like Duffy, a member of society that stigmatises homo-sexual desire. Because of this, the poem can be seen as explicitly feminist because it makes perfectly the ways in which desire is mediated and controlled by an individual’s social position. The second aspect of its feminist content can be taken to lie in the fact, regardless of the impossibility of actualising this desire, the speaker nonetheless views it as containing a serious power, even if this power is only to confuse the men around her mistress. The poem therefore draws attention to way in which female desire is prohibited, but also suggests that this desire may nonetheless be able to overcome these prohibitions, regardless of their strength and severity.
The final stanzas of the poem draw direct attention to this, as well as meditating on the ways in which this desire can itself be seen to be cyclical and to renew itself regardless of the impossibility of its realisation. Duffy imagines her speaker lying in bed, thinking of her mistress and ‘knowing the pearls are cooling even now / in the room where my mistress sleeps’ (ibid). The speaker’s focus on the pearls in this example itself a way for her to enter imaginatively into her mistress’s room and, in doing so, maintain an intimacy with her. However, the final image is complex as the speaker appears to direct her cathexis towards the pearls rather towards the mistress. The poem ends with the line; ‘All night / I feel their absence and I burn’ (ibid). Rather than representing confusion, however, the poem ends by drawing attention to the way in which the speaker’s desire is made possible and also prohibited by her class position. Rather than simply banning her from the possibility of interaction with her mistress, the speaker’s role as a maid also directly involves her in her life in a manner that allows her to develop her own desire. However, this same structure that grants her intimacy also directly prevents her taking this desire any further. As such, once again, the poem’s feminism can be seen to derive from an ambiguity. In this case, the ambiguity relies on a conception of class and social position as it is mediated by gender. This class both determines the female condition and also provides the potential means for its overcoming.
In conclusion, this paper has described Warming Her Pearls as a poem that works via the development of a series of ambiguities and contradictions between class, gender and desire. The poem’s feminist content can be seen to derive from its ability to show how these structures can imprison women but also how they can also possess the means for their own overcoming. This is the essential message of the poem and the most effective way in which it can be read as a feminist work.
