Download Unit 3 Revision – critical opinions Rapture and

Remember to refer to 2 or 3 quotes from critics to
further your argument
Embed the critical quote and use it
to develop your own point
 The inequality of the relationship between Tess and
Alec is partly the fault of Tess who fails to represent
her own interests assertively, she is merely the
‘acquiescent complement to the male’ (Bloom) which
makes it difficult, as a modern reader, to fully
sympathise with her plight.
Frances Leviston on Rapture
 Gone is the sharp sense of history, the wry snap of
modern life, the distinct yet palatable feminism; all
those competing stories she delighted in telling have
dissolved, it seems, in the single most important story
of all, that of the human love affair.
 “ a combination of intimate and teasingly anonymous”
 There is a danger, in replicating love’s single-
mindedness, of replicating also the boredom felt by
those who do not share the rhapsodist’s feelings, and
Rapture accordingly can seem to beg too much
indulgence of the reader, relying on its rhythms and a
sense of recognition to carry it through
New Scotsman
 The danger in ‘Rapture’ is that the singularity of
the subject matter could become relentless, and
this danger is heightened by Duffy's recurrent use
of certain images: stone, moon, charm, star, heart,
gift, trees, bones. But actually, contrarily, the book
works cumulatively, and the poems take on the
strange power of charms, spells, incantations.
Optmistic or pessimistic ending?
 The final poem in the collection takes lines from
Robert Browning as its epigraph: "That's the wise
thrush; he sings each song twice over, / Lest you
should think he never could recapture / That first
fine careless rapture!" The quotation gives Duffy
both the title of her collection and the title for this
poem - "Over". The affair may be "over", but in her
verse she can sing it "over" and the effect is
uplifting and thrilling.
Rapture is sad, but not bleak
 Duffy is a very brave poet. Only pop songs are braver in
their use of repetition, and in "Finding the Words" she
succeeds in making an ordinary "I love you" into
something extraordinary.
 RAPTURE is brilliant, beautiful, and heart-aching.
 Her frank presentation of sexual contact through the
device of repetition articulates physical experience at a
visceral level
https://www.overdrive.com/media/107283
6/rapture
Rapture is a map of real love, in all its churning
complexity, showing us that a song can be made of
even the most painful episodes in our lives.
Duffy
 What’s the best poem ever written?
 Shakespeare’s sonnet, number 116
Duffy
Poetry is the music of being human
We find in poetry the echoes of our deepest feelings and
most serious moments.
Fairytale
 This naiveté carries over into the poems. They too find themselves







indebted to the timelessness and universality of fairytale.
There are occasional explicit references –the ‘Beast’s rose’ (in
‘Unloving’), the ‘goblin’
(in ‘Your Move’), the being lost in a forest (‘Forest’). And like the ‘three
wishes’ of fairytale there’s the three-word repetition which she leaves
like a footprint -a breadcrumb?
‘love, love, love’ (in ‘Write’),
‘reprieve, reprieve, reprieve’ (‘Spring’), ‘rhyming, rhyming, rhyming’
(‘Name’), ‘text, text, text’ (‘Text’), ‘gold,
gold, gold’ (‘Hour’)
and ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’ (‘Finding The Words’)
Why do you think Duffy chooses to draw on faiytale?
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
 Harold Bloom
 Tess sets out, not as any positive thing, containing all
purpose, but as the acquiescent complement to the male
 Tess never tries to alter, not to change anybody
 Alec sees her as the embodied fulfilment of his own desire
 It is not Angel’s fault that he cannot come to terms with
Tess’ history ‘It is the result of generations of ultra
Christian training’
 Sarah E Meier
 The sexual urges of males were seen as regrettable but
‘natural’
 Whereas ‘Purity is a defining characteristic of female
sexuality’
 In Tess, Hardy exposes this over-simplification of woman’s
sexual roles, and the hypocrisy of the prevalent sexual
double standard
Laura Claridge ‘A less than Pure Woman’
‘Victorian literature often appropriated the lushness of
nature to foreground sexual initiation’
‘in a slight distress she parted her lips and took it in’
Tess accedes to Alec’s wish that he feed her the
strawberry himself. P.47
;’it is precisely our sense that Tess chooses her sexual
initiation that makes this scene highly erotic’
Tess as figure of temptation
 ‘Tess as the Eve who rather too quickly yields to the
temptation of the snake in the grass’
 ‘Equally interesting is the conflation of identity
wherein Tess takes on snakelike characteristics’
 Angel approaches Tess as she is yawning ‘the red
interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake’s’ and
she then stretches her arm above her ‘coiled up cable
of hair’ p.217 ch.27
 Tess was more a passive victim of male aggression and
idealization than an active participant in her own
disastrous fate.’ (Kristen Brady 1986)
 ‘It has been suggested that the narrator derives an
almost sadistic pleasure from Tess’ suffering…’ (Kristen
Brady 1986)
Lim Jane
“a critic in Saturday Review, while identifying Tess as
the most true to life character in the novel, found the
other characters “stagy” or “farcical.” He objected to
what he saw as Hardy’s excessive concern with
descriptions of Tess’s appealing physical attributes and
deemed the story improbable”
“Tess is curiously ‘absent’ from most of the key
events in the novel; from the death of Prince, to the
strawberry scene, the night in the Chase, Angel’s
return and her capture at Stonehenge, she is
asleep or in a trance” – Kaja Silverman
By giving increased prominence to the villainy of both
Alec and Angel, Hardy was able to half suggest that
Tess was more a passive victim of male aggression and
idealisation than an active participant in her own
disastrous fate.” – Kristin Brady 1986