Journal of the Linguistic Association of Nigeria Volume 10 2007 (pp. 157-171)
The Critic, the Text and Context: Three Approaches to Carol Ann Duffy’s
“Psychopath”
Ismail Bala
Department of English and French, Bayero University, Kano,
[email protected]
08065380091, 08054903933
It is widely accepted by critics that the favourite poetic form within the oeuvre of Carol
Ann Duffy is the dramatic monologue. The preponderance of this form in Duffy’s poetry
could be linked with her equally well-known concern with language as a political
instrument and invariably with how language can be deployed for some subtle political
purposes. This paper sets out to explore briefly the relationship between poetic voice and
dramatic monologue, and to define the ways in which Duffy reworks and reinvents the
tradition of monologue. And this is done by looking at how three noted critics have read
“The Psychopath”, one of Duffy’s representative dramatic monologues from different
perspectives; ranging from Bakhtinian dialogic effect to the question of representation
and depiction of masculinity and patriarchy.
Introduction
There is, surprisingly, a sense of unanimity amongst critics that Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry
employs a variety of voices and forms to spectacular effect – apart from its seemingly
effortless ways of being accessible, sophisticated and thought provoking as well.1 Among
this plethora of forms which Duffy is famous and greatly acclaimed for is the dramatic
monologue, which is more or less an identifying `marker` of Duffy’s earlier collections of
poems.2 This in itself is nothing except for the way in which Duffy reworks the tradition
of monologue, reinventing it as a somewhat “new” genre that in her hands seeks to give
voice to `others` that have long been deprived and forgotten. Carol Ann Duffy deploys
dramatic monologue in a decidedly self-reflexive manner. This is not just to indicate how
language can, for instance colonised, but also, and more importantly, to show the extent
to which the idea of the self is linguistic, to undermine patriarchal structures of language
and representations of women and to highlight the complexity of identity among others.
And among the well-known and most discussed poems in Duffy’s burgeoning catalogue
of dramatic monologues is the poem, “Psychopath”. As will be discussed later on, there
are many obvious reasons to suggest why Duffy favours writing poems in different
voices, often giving voice to such characters as the eponymous psychopath. As she claims
Among the critics that discuss Duffy’s popularity and accessibility in relation to her use of different poetic
voices and techniques are Lesley Jeffries, “ Point of View and the Reader in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy” in
Contemporary Poems: Some Critical Approaches, eds. Jeffries, Lesley and Peter Sansom (Huddersfield: Smith
Doorstep, 2000), pp.54-68; Wỏjcik-Lesse, Elzbieta, “`Her Language is Simple`: The Poetry of Carol Ann
Duffy” in Poetry Now: Contemporary British and Irish Poetry in the Making, eds. Klein, Holger, Sabine
Coelsch-Foisner and Wolfgang Gortschacher (Tubingen: Stauffenburg, 1999), pp. 307-315, and Angelica
Michelis and Antony Rowland, “Introduction” in The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy: `Choosing Tough Words`,
eds. Michelis, Angelica and Antony Rowland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp.1-32.
1
2
Perhaps the most influential treatise on the dramatic monologue is Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of
Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (London: Penguin, 1974), which sets the
standard for other books in the field like that of Sinfield and Byron whose debt to Langbaum is obvious as they
themselves have acknowledged.
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in an interview, Duffy is not a “visual” poet in the mould of, say Ted Hughes or Craige
Raine; rather she is more interested in language and how people use it3.
This essay therefore will look at the way in which three different critics have each
read the poem as representative of Duffy’s monologues. These are Ian Gregson, Deryn
Rees-Jones and Antony Rowland.4 While Gregson is clearly concerned with the
Bakhtinian “dialogic effect” of voices rather than the addressees in Duffy’s poetry within
the larger critical perspective of post-modern and feminist theories; Rees-Jones is
interested in the question of representation, otherness, sexual difference and how these are
mediated via the dramatic monologue; and Rowland sets Duffy’s poetry against the
fiction of Ian McEwan and Brett Easton Ellis in order to compare how they depict
masculine desire and critique or celebrate patriarchy and male power.
Dramatic Monologue and Poetic Voice
In lyric poetry it is often assumed that poetic voice is synonymous with the voice of the
poet. A commonly held view is that an over-arching speaker, identified as “lyric I”
enables the poet to speak in an unmediated, pure, intimate language, probably as the
embodiment of poetry itself. This assumption, however, is only applicable to one form of
poetic voice. And even in a situation where the poem does appear to be showing the poet
as the generalized speaker, there is always the individual person lurking behind as well.
Subsequently, when the poet appears to be speaking in his/her own voice, he/she is
still speaking, first and foremost as a poet, with poetic language, and not just speaking in
a rather private or casual manner. There is, then, always a deferred further point of
reference in the poem even when the poet’s audience is, as often, implied and implicated
in the poetic utterance. In addition to the speaking person, there is also the presence of the
person spoken to. Any response or its expectation arising out of that person being spoken
to may be seen as an implicit point of view, which is noticed more or less within a given
poem. Some lyric poems make this doubling up of voice more discernible and obvious to
their discourse. And such poems embedded into their textual structure the “factuality” of
an audience, or even of somebody being spoken to: an addressee; thereby making the
poem anything but a pure, unmediated lyric voice—more of a dialogue, a debate or a
persuasive explanation. Therefore, a “lyric I” that comes to the fore as single poetic voice
may in reality represent or imply a variety of voices, a multiplicity of point of views5.
Rather than being a single, purely personalized voice, poetic voice is complex and
staged managed with a set of multifarious representations, different positions and
viewpoints, for a number of poetic ends. Furthermore, it also involves poetic diction,
which can determine a poem’s speaker either in the position of author or of some
3
For more see Vicci Bentley, “Tell It Like It Is: Interview with Carol Ann Duffy”, Magma, 3, (1994), pp.17-24.
Ian Gregson, “Carol Ann Duffy: Monologue as Dialogue”, Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism:
Dialogue and Estrangement (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996) pp.97-107, Deryn Rees-Jones, Carol Ann Duffy,
2nd ed (Plymouth: Northcote House, 2001), especially pp. 17-29, and Antony Rowland, “Patriarchy, Male Power
and the Psychopath in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy” in Posting the Male: Masculinities in Postwar and
Contemporary British Literature, eds. Lea, Daniel and Berthold Schoene (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 125139.
4
For an excellent discussion of poetic voice and lyric address see, William Waters, Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric
Address, (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2003).
5
Bala: Three Approaches to Carol Ann Duffy’s “Psychopath”
159
character that may be portrayed as other speakers in the poem; in say the form of
reported/represented speech.
The complex nature of poetic voice is most discernible in such poems that are quite
obviously spoken through a speaker who is not the poet. And in such a poem the speaker
is particularly defined or portrayed as a construct: a character shown as if speaking to an
imagined addressee. This form of poem is called dramatic monologue.
Alan Sinfield offers a broader definition of the mode as “simply a poem in the first
person spoken by, or almost entirely by, someone who is indicated not to be the poet”6.
As is often the case, dramatic monologue is a mode associated with Robert Browning
whose deft, skilful handling of it lays bare its “dramatic irony” (which is frequently based
on the speaker’s unintended revelation of more than what he/she intends). Dramatic
monologue avails the poet the opportunity to explore disparate and different perspectives,
and as Vicki Bertram would want us to believe even those outside the immediate
experience of human purview7. The mode allows poets (like Duffy) the subversive space
within which to challenge and revise the status quo by affording voices to those that are
marginalised and deprived of one. A monologue further provides a form of disguise; for a
poet can take on the mask of different faces, different bodies and nonetheless different
voices. With the mode a poet can also cross-genderly peer into different shades of
emotions without necessarily doing so from, say, a decidedly woman’s stance or even
woman’s voice. Sinfield underlines what he calls the “teasingly paradoxical” position of
dramatic monologue, arguing that readers are forced by the convincing authenticity of the
speaker and at the same time are alert to the poet’s directing influence behind the voice.
This compels us as readers to experience “a divided consciousness… [while] we are
obliged to posit simultaneously the speaking “I” and the poet’s “I””8. As such the mode
often unfolds provocatively between first and third person narration, which is seen as
nothing more than a literary feint by Sinfield: “Dramatic monologue feigns because it
pretends to be something other than what it is: an invented speaker masquerades in the
first person which customarily signals the poet’s voice”9. And this further avails a space
for a temporary concealment: for the poet can concurrently hide behind the voice and
make the reader aware of his/her presence behind the apparently distant voice.
Ian Gregson: Monologue Vs Dialogue
Ian Gregson tries to situate Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry as basically one long dramatic
monologue, albeit with necessary stylistic and thematic differences from here and there.
For Gregson, Duffy’s dramatic monologue is the sole aim of the process of giving voice
to marginalised and common people in her poetry. This is linked with Duffy’s experience
as a dramatist (as opposed to playwright), which deepens her appropriation of
contemporary speech, its rhythms and demotic idioms, which also calls for her use of an
openly “unpoetic” register in her poetry.10 Here, Gregson is perhaps right to link Duffy’s
6
Alan Sinfield, Dramatic Monologue (London: Methuen, 1977), p.8.
7
Vicki Bertram, Gendering Poetry: Contemporary Women and Men Poets (London: Pandora, 2005), p.79-104.
8
Sinfield, P.32.
9
Sinfield, P. 25.
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use of dramatic monologue with giving voice to the voiceless in poetry. For instance, the
much talked about poem and the subject of this essay, “Psychopath”, conflates such
disparate things as sex, mindless violence, cruelty and excrement. The conflation may
suggest that what is being portrayed in the poem is beyond the question of literary taste,
or giving the voiceless a voice, or an exploration of common people’s life normally
`uncommon` in much contemporary poetry; and even beyond the voice of the eponymous
psychopath.
But as Gregson shows the supposedly single voice in “Psychopath” is not, after all,
the only voice. The poet’s penchant for shock in the poem is a tactic that does just that.
Just as the juxtapositions, particularly the phrase “dull canal” presupposes another poetic
voice speaking at the same time with that of the eponymous psychopath:
A town like this would kill me. A gypsy read my palm.
She saw fame. I could be anything with my looks,
my luck, my brains. I bought a guitar and blew a smoke ring
at the moon. Elvis nothing. I’m not that type, she said.
Too late. I eased her down by the dull canal
and talked sexy. Useless. She stared at the goldfish, silent.
I grabbed the plastic bag. She cried as it gasped and wriggled
on the grass and here we are. A dog craps by a lamp post.11
The speaker here sheds of his mask and reveals himself in a manner more reminiscent of
villains than in a real situation.12 The language of the poem, as it were, then suggests
Duffy’s voice as much as it suggests that of the psychopath. Accordingly, the poem works
not merely through the authenticity of its appropriation (or what Gregson calls mimicry)
but more through a parodistic framework. And parody according to Mikhail Bakhtin is
invariably where, as in Duffy’s poem:
two languages are crossed with each other, as well as two styles, two linguistic
points of view, and in the final analysis two speaking subjects …every parody is
an intentional dialogized hybrid. Within it, languages and styles actively
illuminate one another.13
As such parody questions the process of representation just as the psychopath too tries to
do the same by setting (so to say) different languages against each other; since it invokes
suspicions about the obvious distortions in the representation of the speaker. And the
overall image in the poem shows this suspicion in the recurring portrayal of the
psychopath’s picture:
10
Carol Ann Duffy has written two plays, which were staged at the Liverpool Playhouse, in addition to
adaptations of popular children’s stories for the theatre, such as Grimm Tales (London: Faber, 1996), More
Grimm Tales (London: Faber, 1997), `Rumpelstiltskin` and Other Grimm Tales (London: Faber, 1999).
“Psychopath” in Selling Manhattan (London: Anvil, 1987, original italics), pp. 28-29. All references are to
this.
11
12
According to Gregson the characters in the poem are much more closer to those of Robert Browning, arguably
the most influential writer of monologues than anything else; see Gregson, p.97.
13
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans., Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p.76.
Bala: Three Approaches to Carol Ann Duffy’s “Psychopath”
161
I run my metal comb through the D. A. and pose
my reflection between dummies in the window at Burton’s.
Afterward, the speaker asserts, “let me make myself crystal” without the expected “clear”
which is markedly absent here. This distortion is, as Gregson argues, because the speaker
is imbricated and locuted in a poem, hence in a medium vulnerable to such distortion.
Therefore, the speaker is transformed into a different, disturbed image of himself as he
says in the end of the poem:
My reflection sucks a sour Woodbine and buys me a drink. Here’s
looking at you. Deep down I’m talented.
As we read the poem we notice the subtle shifts involving the psychopath watching his
own transformation. These shifts are significant since they remind us about the vexed
question of seeing and interpretation. As such, when in the poem there is the suggestion
of lack of reflection there arises too a new level of difficulty of seeing (through a glass).
“The dull canal” where the psychopath drowns his victims then underscores the difficulty
if not the impossibility of knowing the depth of his motives.14 Furthermore, the middle
section of the poem as Gregson says starts with a pointer: that the capability to reflect and
by extension to represent is hindered by the nature of the psychopath himself and
probably by his language, “my breath wipes me from the looking glass”. In a way this is
the psychopath replying back to the poet, perhaps querying her for opting to speak
through him as if in a form of ventriloquism. And the allusion to “dummies” in the
second line of the first stanza further highlights the level to which the psychopath is a
`simple copy` and as such suggests a powerful link between “Psychopath” and Duffy’s
other poem “The Dummy” in which the eponym speaks back to a ventriloquist in
sarcastic tone:
Balancing me with your hand up my back, listening
to the voice you gave me croaking for truths, you keep
me at it. Your lips don’t move, but your eyes look
desperate as hell. Ask me something difficult.
May be we could sing together? Just teach me
the right words, I learn fast. Don’t stare like that.
I’ll start where you leave off. I can’t tell you
anything if you don’t throw me a cue line. We’re dying
a death right here. Can you dance? No. I don’t suppose
you’d be doing this if you could dance. Right? Why do you
keep me in that black box? I can ask questions too,
you know. I can see that worries you. Tough.
So funny things happen to everyone on the way to most places.
According to Neil Roberts, the phrase “dull canal” is actually an allusion to T. S. Eliot, not surprising since
Duffy claimed in an interview that Eliot was her favourite poet. For more on the influence of Eliot on Duffy’s
poetry see Neil Roberts, “Duffy, Eliot and Impersonality”, in The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy: `Choosing Tough
Words`, eds. Michelis, Angelica and Antony Rowland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp.3346.
14
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Come on. You can do getter than that, can’t you?15
Both eponyms (the psychopath and the dummy) are, in a way, quintessence case of
Freudian realm of the unconscious: dark symbols of what Jane Thomas calls “dark
repository of repressions and socially taboo desires which constantly irrupts into our
conscious existence in the forms of dreams, fantasies and ‘Freudian slips’” 16. What this
suggests further is that both poems show Duffy’s desire to give voice to those who are
more or less always spoken and represented. Insignificant though this may be, it is indeed
a political statement. Conversely, it can be argued, (as Gregson appears to believe) that
even a psychopath has aesthetic taste, and therefore has the right to be represented
apropos to that taste and right.
The hint in the poem of the poet’s voice is a way of raising, as it were, to the level
to which the psychopath is even mimicked and caricatured, particularly because the
reader’s sense of author (as implied in the poem) as a feminist is bound to invoke feelings
that the psychopathic voice speaks contrary to the poet’s beliefs. À la Mikhail Bakhtin,
Gregson thinks that it is this feeling of the dialogic in the poem that turns it into such an
uncomfortable if not depressing experience to read. Bakhtin calls such experience a
“hybrid construction” or:
an utterance that belongs, by its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional
markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two
utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two “languages”, two semantic and
axiological belief systems.17
If “Psychopath” is an unusual poem in Duffy’s oeuvre it is as a result of the gulf that
exists between the belief system it exposes as Gregson appears to be hinting.
Deryn Rees-Jones: A Masquerade of Masculinity
Like Gregson, Rees-Jones too sees the concern for the need and expediency of knowing
who we are and getting a way to tell ourselves that too as central in Duffy’s poetry. As
Rees-Jones views it, dramatic monologue affords Duffy an opportunity to question the
ways and manners in which women especially are represented via which the difficulty of
knowing the self through otherness can also be addressed. Essentially, the dramatic
monologue (as in “Psychopath”) presents a possibility of bringing to the fore the poet’s
self, while at the same time denying the very process of revealing the poet’s self; or, as
Rees-Jones puts it, “masking presence”. After all, it is often assumed that it is not the poet
“The Dummy” from Selling Manhattan (London: Anvil, 1987 p. 20, original italics; however in the text of the
same poem published in Duffy’s New Selected Poems: 1984-2004 [London: Picador, 2004, p.34] the italics are
gone). Apart from the obvious ventriloquist’s dummy that is given a voice here, the poem can be read, according
to Jane Thomas in her article, “`The Intolerable Wrestle with Words`: The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy”, Bete
Noire, 6, (1988), p.79, as an instance of a “mental breakdown” in which desperate, competing parts of a
personality battle against each other. On the other hand, she argues, any one who has an inkling of Freud’s
conception of the unconscious might regard the poem as a “metaphor for that dark repository of repression and
socially taboo desires which constantly irrupts into our conscious existence in the forms of dreams, fantasies and
`Freudian slips`”.
15
Jane Thomas, “‘The Intolerable Wrestle with Words’: The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy”, Bete Noire, 6, (1988),
pp.78-88.
16
17
Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p.304.
Bala: Three Approaches to Carol Ann Duffy’s “Psychopath”
163
(Duffy) who is actually speaking; rather it is the character being portrayed (the
psychopath). Despite being a style (a genre) of writing that seeks to blur and disturb the
relationship between the poet and the poem’s persona, or the speaking voice, the lyrical
“I” of the poem (as indeed in any other dramatic monologue) exhibits a state of selfhood
that is not only overdetermined and therefore objectified, but also characteristic of
anxieties about claiming any kind of subject position. The dramatic monologue is a means
of de-stabilising oneself from a subject position. Rees-Jones, unlike Gregson, therefore
considers “Psychopath” a poem poised to construct a persona through memory and
fragmentary languages: cliché, nursery rhyme and popular songs are juxtaposed through
“fragments of remembered languages” against the psychopath’s childhood and sexual
experience in a flashback mode. Due to the psychopath’s lack of sensitivity and what
Rees-Jones regards as gullibility, she suggests that the character could be linked to
patriarchal constructs of masculinity that Duffy opposes as a writer (though not as an outand-out feminist). For Rees-Jones the traumatic experiences of the psychopath’s
childhood, his father who leaves upon finding his wife with the Rent man, and his sexual
escapade at the tender age of twelve become imbedded with the images of the girl the
psychopath later seduces. She goes on to quote the relevant portion of the poem to
support the proposition thus:
Dirty Alice flicked my dick out when I was twelve.
She jeered. I nicked a quid and took her to the spinney.
I remember the wasps, the sun blazing as I pulled
her knickers down. I touched her and I went hard,
but she grabbed my hand and used that, moaning…
she told me her name on the towpath, holding the fish
in a small sack of water. We walked away from the lights.
She’d come too far with me now. She looked back, once.
The eponymous psychopath’s conception and no less his projection of (his) self is in
itself, according to Rees-Jones, “a masquerade of masculinity”. This could be because of
the references made by the psychopath to heroes of some Hollywood films; which means
he may be projecting himself in the heroes’ own images. These heroes referred to by the
psychopath include James Dean, Marlon Brando, Elvis and Humphrey Bogart.
Like Gregson, Rees-Jones too sees the persona as imagined and constructed as selfreflexive; his ability to articulate that self-reflexivity becomes an inherent part of the
irony hinted at in the very act of writing the dramatic monologue itself. In titling the
poem “Psychopath”, Carol Ann Duffy, as Rees-Jones wants us to believe, gives us a
character: a character for whom there is no expectation that readers make any kind of
moral judgement. For it has already been stated (or `implied`) at the beginning that the
poem is nothing more than a mere monologue of a character; a textual figure who is (or
appears to be) raving mad. What this signifies is that a judgement has since been assumed
and passed. But this judgement is simultaneously both a prosecution and an acquittal.
Interestingly, Duffy too seems to lean on Rees-Jones’ proposition about the “Psychopath”
and its supposed reworking of dramatic monologue when she declares in an interview:
[Y]ou asked about giving voice for others. Clearly on one level, that is the case—
but there is an initial, and often quite powerful, empathy or identification, which
has to occur, does occur, before one would bother at all. I come from a working-
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class background which, in many areas, was inarticulate. Not politically, but on
those levels where one speaks of the personal, the feelings, the private inner life.
What I mean is that language was often perceived as embarrassing or dangerous.
The dramatic monologues I’ve written … are, yes, objective; but closer to me as
the writer than would appear.18
Antony Rowland: The Patriarch and the Psychopath
Unlike both Ian Gregson and Deryn Rees-Jones, Rowland’s approach to “Psychopath” is
through the concept of patriarchy. Given the fact that various `schools` of feminism have
been debating the use and application of the term since the 1960s, critiquing the concept
of patriarchy is not seen as an essentially polemical practice in gender studies. Within the
critical space of patriarchy, Rowland chooses to concentrate on the perspective of Duffy
as a lesbian poet who writes about patriarchy. Accordingly, the obvious question then is,
when writing about patriarchy from a feminist (lesbian) perspective, is there an agenda to
be fulfilled?19
As a quintessential dramatic monologue, “Psychopath” swiftly shows a chasm
between the narrator and the poet, but the poet (or the narrative voice) is, indeed, just as
much a construct as the narrator. The poem seems to highlight dialectic between
patriarchy (or what Rowland deceptively calls “male power”) as a whole, and isolated,
particularised male subjects. As such, Rowland sets out to unpack the idea of patriarchy,
asking along the way how the poem might easily be vulnerable to a critique of recent
discussion of the term (patriarchy), especially in queer theory.
A romantic (lesbian) poet, Duffy rarely reveals herself as such in her poetry, and is
ever resistant to such reductively `restrictive` labelling by sexuality, especially when
applied to the poet- figure. She also reveals no obvious interest in queer theory.
Nevertheless, she questions the dominant discourse of patriarchy in her work.
Simultaneously, Duffy is cognisant of the fact that the binarism inherent in the
man/woman opposition in the form of victimisation is inadequate in interpreting recent
history. Therefore, characters such as the psychopath are represented openly and
complexly, as obvious as victims of patriarchy as the women they maltreat and abuse.
And, in order to re-clarify Duffy’s ethical position (or probably its absence), Rowland
contrasts her poetry with the fiction of Ian McEwan and Bret Easton Ellis. In remarkably
different ways these two contemporary novelists have all called critical `castigation` upon
themselves for their portrayal of both powerful and weak men as victims of pre-set (or as
Rowland puts it “pre-ordained”) gender roles. But this does not mean Duffy considers
men as savagely and structurally damaged by patriarchal dominance as women. 20 Duffy
likes the figures of her dramatic monologue to be characters caught in, but fiercely
resisting, discourses that are far more complex and complicated than the abstractedness of
seemingly omniscient patriarchy.
18
Interview with Jane Stabler, Verse, 8:2 (Summer 1991), p.127.
Judith Halberstam has set these two terms against each other in her investigation of the “femme lesbians” and
“stone butches” in the 1970s. For more, see Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press,
1998), especially p.122.
19
20
In the same vein, Susan Faludi seems to be suggesting in her book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man
(London: Vintage, 2000) that contemporary (American) men are portrayed as the victims of absent or
`inadequate` fathers who pointed to the stars in 1950s and, fraudulently promised the world to their sons.
Bala: Three Approaches to Carol Ann Duffy’s “Psychopath”
165
For Rowland, then, “Psychopath” is both a love poem and an anti-love poem. Since
men and masculinity in Duffy’s poem signify both the “initiation and dissipation” of the
lyric, from the love poems in her first mature collection, Standing Female Nude, to the
outright rejection of masculinity in the satires collected in The World’s Wife.21 Amorous
(or romantic) lyricism in Duffy’s work is made up of deceptive texts in which male lovers
are shown to be heroes or “bastards”. Her poems, particularly the early ones, depict
openly lesbian eroticism; masculinity and function as a kind of an unbalancing weight
that frustrates the lovers’ search for “subversive jouissance”(p.13). Certainly, the poems
slowly move from outer frustration to complete rejection as the number of love poems
decreases within Duffy’s oeuvre.
Patriarchal or what Rowland tags “hegemonic masculinity” can be rejected through
literary and cultural archetypes such as the psychopath figure in the poem. For instance,
John McLeod sees the misfits who fill Ian McEwan’s fiction as evidence of the enormous
pressure of male roles.22 It is open to argument that normative male discourses in
McEwan’s fiction are as significant to the dismantling of this hegemony as the alternative
instances of incest, erotomania, transvestitism, etc. Hence McEwan’s First Love, Last
Rites opens with a narrator whistling the lyrics of Elvis’ “Teddy Bear” having just slept
with his sister.23 As such, Rowland argues that if the said cuddly toy is imagined as an
amorous subject, then the object is most likely to be an underage child. The lyric,
therefore, can be read as approving, if not legitimating the infantilization of women in
discours amoreux. Duffy’s poetry has an obvious affinity with McEwan’s fiction, since
clichés used within male discourses create the psychotic in “Psychopath”. And instances
of the infantilization of women not in abstract patriarchy, but more particularly in popular
culture and parlance, converge to produce a legalisation of child abuse in Duffy’s poem.
The psychopath’s lust for underage girls is expressed through homosocial desire.
The need for sexual fulfilment in any circumstance is emphasised by the uncle, pop king
and Jack the Lad. Nevertheless, this notion of homogenised amorous subjects needs some
kind of modification. Unlike Deryn Rees-Jones who argues that the psychopath shows an
extreme gullibility to patriarchal construct, Rowland is of the view that the concern in the
poem is on diversity as opposed to any fantasy of male hegemony. Elvis’ appropriation of
the sexualised image of a stereotypical “country boy” competes with James Dean’s
dangerously neurotic persona, and Marlon Brandon’s leather-jacketed machismo. These
references, then, are clichéd signs of fantasy, since the (well-known) identities of the film
stars are tapped from the varied subjectivities performed across their work. Even the
ensuing psychotic masculinity in “Psychopath” (pre) figures the hysterical men outlined
by Lynne Segal in Slow Motion.24 Segal reads a picture of Humphrey Bogart in which a
medley of things (ships, boats and sportswear) surround the actor in order to coerce and
no less convince the viewer to an understanding that they are witnessing a real star in all
his machismic grandeur.25 According to Segal, however, the impossibility of anyone
Carol Ann Duffy, Standing Female Nude (London: Anvil, 1985) and The World’s Wife (London: Picador,
1999).
21
John McLeod, “Men Against Masculinity: The Fiction of Ian McEwan” in Signs of Masculinity, eds. Liggins,
Emma, Antony Rowland and Eriks Uskalis (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 218-245.
22
23
Ian McEwan, First Love, Last Rites (London: Picador, 1976), p.9.
24
Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinity, Changing Men (London: Virago, 1990).
25
Lynne Segal, Slow Motion, p. 89.
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Bala: Three Approaches to Carol Ann Duffy’s “Psychopath”
mastering all the gendered pursuit renders the depiction absurd. The corollary is that by
trying to act simultaneously the contradictory representations of masculinity in 1950s
popular culture, the persona (the so-called young man) in Duffy’s poem becomes
hysterical, and, in the last stage of this process of alienation, simply becomes psychotic.
Ian Gregson argues elsewhere (as we have seen above) that in Duffy’s poetry men
are often portrayed as personifications of a patriarchal idea.26 This assertion prompts
Rowland to ask questions about Duffy’s poem: is the psychopath a symptom of
patriarchy? Or is he so alienated from sites of male power that he symbolises a peripheral
voice in modern culture? Does Duffy openly criticise the actions/inactions of the
psychopath in the manner of the “double-voiced” dramatic monologue? Or does the notso-invisible persona result in a suspension of critical judgement? As with the justification
of incest through Elvis’ lyrics in McEwan’s “Homemade”, “Awopbopaloobop
alopbimbam” at the end of “Psychopath” emphasises, in particular, the persona’s
manipulation and appropriation of love songs, rather than as an abstract patriarchal
construct, to endorse (or even to legalise) his crime.27 Hence, the psychopath is presented
as caught by discourse: the many mirrors in the poem highlight the many instances of
popular desire, which catalyse his psychotic self. Nonetheless, whereas Duffy’s character
likes the various heterosexist lyrics that are served up for his entertainment, and is
depicted as a psychopath through repetitive incidents of child abuse and murder in
various towns, McEwan’s character in “Butterflies” is alienated by, rather than colluding
with, homosocial desire. Ergo, his moment of happiness when he catches a stone thrown
by some boys playing football. At the tail end of the story it is hinted that he would not
have slipped the girl into the canal if he had joined the boys, become “one of them, in a
team” and gone out to drink with them.28
Duffy’s psychopath stays in his homosocial ties, and confidently drinks in a bar at
the end of the poem. This is in contradiction to McEwan’s who presents dominant
discourses of masculinity as exerting a marginalizing effect on certain heterosexual men
as well as on women; since a man without a wife, children, or job or friends is
transformed, complicatedly, into someone capable of child abuse and murder. Probably,
Rowland posits, “Psychopath” functions as a critique of McEwan’s “Butterflies”. Duffy
may possibly be re-appropriating McEwan’s story to suggest that the sympathy elicited
for the child killer due to the detached narrative vitiates the possibility that this character
is a potential psychopath; a symptom of male power. The two narratives (Duffy’s and
McEwan’s) are so similar that it is difficult not to assume a one-to-one relationship
between the short story published in 1976 and the poem that is published in 1987.
However, despite the possibility of the poem’s functioning as a kind of a feminist
criticism of McEwan’s work, Duffy’s persona is not completely appropriate, it is less
apposite to McEwan’s narrator: the psychopath drinks alone, wallowing in self-implicated
exile due to his criminal behaviour. In addition, his false bravado stirs the reader, as in
26
Ian Gregson, The Male Image: Representations of Masculinity in Postwar Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1999),
p.159.
According to Neil Roberts in his chapter, “Carol Ann Duffy: Outsideness and Nostalgia” in Narrative and
Voice in Postwar Poetry (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1999), p. 194, “Awopbopaloobop alopbimbam” is the
refrain of Little Richard’s “Tutti frutti”.
27
28
McEwan, First Love, Last Rites, p.74.
Bala: Three Approaches to Carol Ann Duffy’s “Psychopath”
167
Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, to the possibility that the depicted action is the
product of a psychotic fantasy.29
Duffy’s choice of amorous subject in the poem which is seen by Rowland as equally
as much a dramatic monologue as a “modern ode” is unsettling in relation to the fairly
straightforward choice of marginal subjects in her other dramatic monologues. Is there,
then, a sense in which the psychopath is an `other`? And as in most of her dramatic
monologues, is Duffy attempting to mimic an interior voice in order to elicit sympathy for
the psychotic figure? For the narrative ordering of the poem is apposite with dramatic
monologue’s tendency to evoke sympathy from the reader for the narrator, no matter how
despicable that character might be. At the end Rowland asks: is the poem’s uncertain
conclusion, then, that the psychopath is a victim created by, and only by, patriarchal
society? The possibility looms large that Duffy is critiquing (or better still satirising) the
kind of excuses presented in order to endorse child abuse and murder. Appropriately, this
would still dovetail with the idea of "feigning” in the dramatic monologue since, as it
were, Duffy might be pretending that the poem is not a launch-pad for her own opinions
with the help of a narrative cast in an ironic mode.30 The psychology of the Oedipal
mother figure in stanza six, the absent father, the psychopath’s distraught for sex, couple
with the sexual demands meted by Dirty Alice seem largely inadequate to explain the
psychopath’s behaviour. Perhaps Duffy wanted these to be read as the weak and appalling
disclaimers of a guilty murderer: the cunning repetition of “she is in the canal” would
strengthen a reading that emphasises the self-recriminations of the persona. In the 1988
interview, Duffy states that her psychotic persona is indeed “true… for that kind of
character”.31 This means that for most part, what Rowland calls “the search for the holy
grail” of authorial intention is often misguided guesswork. Duffy’s comment above
comes against the claims Alan Sinfield makes for the dramatic monologue: its
antinaturalistic portrayal of character.32 Certainly, Duffy’s “Psychopath” appears to share
a close semblance with the naturalistic dramatic monologues of Robert Browning than
with those of say T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound with their multifarious voices and absence of a
stable narrator, as well as a much more `prominent` authorial figure. Rather than Duffy’s
wish for authenticity referring to a `real` man, maybe the `truth` might refer to the
construction of the character through discourse. And this would, perhaps, explain the
anonymous title: the poem regurgitates typologies of the psychopath in order to
emphasise his fictionality, his artificiality.
Conclusion
In the last analysis what emerges from the foregoing, varying as they are coming from
diverse critics each considering the same poem from different perspectives, is that
“Psychopath” much more than any of Duffy’s dramatic monologue is the one that bears
29
Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho (London: Picador, 1991).
Alan Sinfield in Dramatic Monologue (London: Methuen, 1977, p. 25) uses the term “feigning” which is
borrowed from Kate Hamburger, according to Glennis Byron in her own book with similar title, Dramatic
Monologue (London: Routledge, 2003, p.147), to denote the effect of a first-person narration. The “I” who
writes does so within the convention of ordinary language, addresses someone; and does not exploit those
signals by which we normally identify fiction, such as access to the thoughts of others. Therefore, the firstperson narration is a feigned reality statement.
30
Andrew McAllister, “Carol Ann Duffy Interview: An Interview with Andrew McAllister”, Bete Noire, 6,
(1988), p.70.
31
32
Alan Sinfield, Dramatic Monologue, p.65.
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Bala: Three Approaches to Carol Ann Duffy’s “Psychopath”
the touch of `outsideness` with verve and brevity. As Neil Roberts would say, the title
seems to suggest a privileged interiority. Simultaneously, the word “psychopath” is a
mark, fixed from the outside and vitiating the possibility of the psychopath to speak from
within. One thing that appears to have linked the three approaches discussed above is the
fact that the poem as much as the psychopath draw attention to their own artificiality. And
as such, it pre-empts any charge by the brilliant use of mirror imagery that alludes to the
persona’s narcissism and the extent to which the poem disturbs the psychopath’s image of
himself as it represents him. This apparent ambiguity arises because to poets like Duffy,
poetry always strives on ambiguity: from the way it associates disparate things and
arrives at meaning, coupled with its penchant for defamiliarising what is known. With
poems like “Psychopath” poetry has the ability, indeed the power, to reconceive the world
in all its ambiguous manifestation in contrastingly ordered ways.
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Appendix
Psychopath
I run my metal comb through the D.A. and pose
my reflection between dummies in the window at Burton’s.
Lamp light. Jimmy Dean. All over town, ducking and diving,
my shoes scud sparks against the night. She is in the canal.
Let me make myself crystal. With a good-looking girl crackling
in four petticoats, you feel like a king. She rode past me
on a wooden horse, laughing, and the air sang Johnny,
Remember Me. I turned the world faster, flash.
I don’t talk much. I swing up beside them and do it
with my eyes. Brando. She was clean. I could smell her.
I thought, Here we go, old son. The fairground spun round us
and she blushed like candyfloss. You can woo them
with goldfish and coconuts, whispers in the Tunnel of Love.
When I zip up the leather, I’m in a new skin, I touch it
and love myself, sighing Some little lady’s going to get lucky
tonight. My breath wipes me from the looking-glass.
We move from place to place. We leave on the last morning
with the scent of local girls on our fingers. They wear
our lovebites on their necks. I know what women want,
a handrail to Venus. She said Please and Thank you
to the toffee-apple, teddy-bear. I thought I was on, no error.
She squealed on the dodgems, clinging to my leather sleeve.
I took a swig of whisky from the flask and frenched it
down her throat. No, she said, Don’t, like they always do.
Dirty Alice flicked my dick out when I was twelve.
She jeered. I nicked a quid and took her to the spinney.
I remember the wasps, the sun blazing as I pulled
her knickers down, I touched her and I went hard,
but she grabbed my hand and used that, moaning...
She told me her name on the towpath, holding the fish
in a small sack of water. We walked away from the lights.
She’d come too far with me now. She looked back, once.
A town like this would kill me. A gypsy read my palm.
She saw fame. I could be anything with my looks,
my luck, my brains. I bought a guitar and blew a smoke ring
at the moon. Elvis nothing. I’m not that type, she said.
Too late. I eased her down by the dull canal
and talked sexy. Useless. She stared at the goldfish, silent.
I grabbed the plastic bag. She cried as it gasped and wriggled
on the grass and here we are. A dog craps by a lamp post.
Bala: Three Approaches to Carol Ann Duffy’s “Psychopath”
Mama, straight up, I hope you rot in hell. The old man
sloped off, sharpish. I saw her through the kitchen window.
The sky slammed down on my school cap, chicken licken.
Lady, Sweetheart, Princess I say now, but I never stay.
My sandwiches were near her thigh, then the Rent Man
lit her cigarette and I ran, ran. ..She is in the canal.
These streets are quiet, as if the town has held its breath
to watch the Wheel go round above the dreary homes.
No. don’t. Imagine. One thump did it, then I was on her,
giving her everything I had. Jack the Lad, Ladies’ Man.
Easier to say Yes. Easier to stay a child, wide-eyed
at the top of the helter-skelter. You get one chance in this life
and if you screw it you’re done for, uncle, no mistake.
She lost a tooth. I picked her up, dead slim, and slid her in.
A girl like that should have a paid-up solitaire and high hopes,
but she asked for it. A right-well knackered outragement.
My reflection sucks a sour Woodbine and buys me a drink.
Here’s
looking at you. Deep down I’m talented. She found out. Don’t
mess
with me, angel, I’m no nutter. Over in the corner, a dead ringer
for Ruth Ellis smears a farewell kiss on the lip of a gin-and-lime.
The barman calls Time. Bang in the centre of my skull,
there’s a strange coolness. I could almost fly. Tomorrow
will find me elsewhere, with a loss of memory. Drink up son,
the world’s your fucking oyster. Awopbopaloobop alopbimbam.
171