Context: Carol Ann Duffy and ‘Medusa’
Carol Ann Duffy (1955–)
Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow on 23 December 1955 to a Scottish father and Irish mother.
Raised Catholic, she spent her childhood in Staffordshire with her sister and four brothers. Her
mother would often invent fairytales for her, a common theme in Duffy’s writing (which often explores
and manipulates feminine archetypes). Always an avid reader, Duffy recalls reading Alice in
Wonderland aged seven and writing a poem to continue the story as she was sad that it had ended.
From an early age she knew she wanted to be a writer and found encouragement from an
inspirational teacher at her convent school.
She established her name with the collection Standing Female Nude in 1985 and since then has
become one of the nation’s best-known poets. Her poems have a wide appeal and frequently appear
in ‘The Nation’s Favourite…’ collections as well as on the National Curriculum. One of her bestknown poems, ‘Education for Leisure’, was withdrawn from AQA’s previous GCSE anthology when it
was feared that it might be seen as insensitive to victims of knife crime. Duffy is the author of many
books for adults and children and is also an acclaimed playwright and editor. She was awarded an
OBE in 1995, a CBE in 2001 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.
After being considered and passed over for the role under Tony Blair’s government, Duffy succeeded
Andrew Motion as the UK’s twentieth Poet Laureate on 1 May 2009, and is the first woman to hold
the post.
Duffy writes in everyday language, which gives her poems an outward accessibility that hides the
intricate technicalities and manipulation of language. Traditional poetic forms, such as the dramatic
monologue and sonnet form, are often transformed into modern, contemporary poems. She is known
for playing with words to explore the ways in which meaning and reality are constructed through
language. She writes of life and is not afraid to tackle the sadness or suffering that accompanies it,
exploring themes such as gender, contemporary culture, alienation and social inequality.
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‘Medusa’
‘Medusa’ comes from Duffy’s 1999 book The World’s Wife which imagines the voices of longsuffering, misunderstood or neglected women from history and mythology such as Mrs Darwin and
Mrs Midas.
A number of the poems in The World’s Wife relate to Greek mythology, and ‘Medusa’ is one of them.
However, Duffy is never concerned with strict historical or mythological accuracy: ‘Medusa’, for
example, is not necessarily about Medusa. It is more likely that the Greek myth is being used as a
loose metaphor for the predicament of the poem’s very modern speaker. Some knowledge of the
varied versions of the Medusa myth will, however, enrich a reading of Duffy’s poem.
The mythology
In Greek mythology Medusa was a gorgon – a sort of monster, but she was also a beautiful woman
whose hair was her most striking feature. The goddess Athena made Medusa a priestess of her
temple, but while Medusa was carrying out her duties in the temple she was either seduced or raped
by the god Poseidon. (Perhaps the two of them had different stories.) Medusa became pregnant.
Athena was jealous of Medusa’s beauty and outraged by her behaviour in the temple. To punish her,
Athena turned Medusa’s hair into snakes and made her appearance so frightening that if anyone
looked at her they turned to stone. (‘Petrified’ literally means ‘turned to stone’.) Athena was still not
satisfied and told Perseus to bring Medusa’s head to her. Athena gave Perseus a mirrored shield so
that he could see Medusa’s reflection and thus avoid being turned to stone. Perseus used his curved
sword to behead Medusa.
Bibliography
www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth104
guardian.co.uk/books/carol-ann-duffy
poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=11468
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