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The Vigin Memo, White Writing, Anon - Coggle Diagram
The Vigin Memo
Is Duffy questioning whether faith and feminism are compatible? Should we challenge the arguably repressive authority of religion on women's lives? OR is Duffy just using the religious context to show that women being excluded is a transgenerational issue?
Non-Existent Voice
(1) "(text illegible)", "(untranslatable)" - disposable, dismissed, marginalised female voice and experience
(2) anaphora, "Maybe" insinuates women's passivity and reluctance to be assertive and demanding. The neglect of this logical and reasonable proposition furthers this sense of frustration and injustice
(3) The Virgin Memo - Biblical allusions suggest that this is a perennial problem for women, evident from humanity's origin
Anon
(1) Intertextual allusions to Hamlet, "kept her skull on a shelf in a room" and "Much Ado about Nothing", "hey nonny hey nonny hey nonny no" - bemoans the lack of recognition of female participation/contribution to literature
- "how she passed on her pen like a baton" - lost voices of women historically now culminate in mordern writers BUT the conditional tense, "If" suggests this has not yet been achieved in modern society
The Long Queen
(3) Presents suffering ("Blood", "Tears") as fundamental to the female experience irrespective of changing social circumstances
Unfulfilled/Stifled Potential
(1) use of the anaphora "maybe" insinuates women's passivity - history of not being assertive or demanding enough to realise their potential - perhaps out of fear that this insistence would be construed as an affront to male power/dominance
Anon
(1) Short, clipped sentences
(1) Repetition of "maybe"
Tall
- "bigger than any man"
- "He turned and fled like a boy"
Opposite is seen in Loud:
- "Not any more. Now she could roar."
- "She howled until every noise in the world sang in the spit of her tongue." - do we need to focus our attention on our own circumstances as we do others?
Anonymity/Unnamed
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Anon
- "She"
- "A girl"
- "A woman"
Yet in spite of this conspicuous anonymity, there is a more implicit unity and cohesion between women
For example, (1) "maybe a nurse, a nanny, maybe a nun", alliteration unifies these different women and walks of life
(2) The variance of the stanza length, but the certain interruption of "Anon" suggests that society's indifference to women is prevalent in numerous aspects of their life, not just literature.
(1) The Long Queen: "Spinsters, hags, matrons, wet nurses, witches, widows, wives"
White Writing
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White Writing makes use of lots of transitory imagery, "your soul a flame", "traced with a stick where we walk on the sand.", "words on the wind". This ephermerality is juxtaposed by the unchanging nature of women's circumstances explored in literature.
Anon
"for a life in the sun" - cliché metaphor which denotes how we justify our resignation to conform to the status quo. Suggests that we loose our identity and individuality by submitting ourselves to domesticity and motherhood.
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