Virgins memo
Cards (6)
- Duffy’s ‘The Virgin’s Memo’ shows Mary’s ignored advice to Jesus, highlighting the long history of disregarding female voices.
- structureconstructed an alphabetized list of things that Jesus/God should change. Yet, reading this from the modern age, we know none of these things has stopped existing, therefore she was ignored. Duffy uses this fictional account to showcase the voicelessness of women, Duffy uses the A—>Z structure and one stanza to emphasize how easily Mary has made it for Jesus. Yet, even after all of this planning and structure, she was still not listened to.
- Title‘Virgin’ Mary writing this note, using biblical allegory to craft her poem. Yet, by using ‘memo’, Duffy attaches a sense of lacking importance to the poem, demands or suggestions being disempowered
- lines 1-8begins with the modal verb ‘maybe’, polite. Perhaps Duffy is tapping into the idea that women are taught to be polite and passive, assonance of ‘a’, both starting the ABC structure of the poem and also giving a sense of cohesion to the opening. could also be linked to the young age of Jesus, Mary wrote this ABCwishing to eradicate ‘cancer/or diarrhea/or tinnitus’, different forms of physical afflictions. It seems that Duffy presents Mary as wanting a better world for everyone,
- 12-19The connection of the expletive with the image of a ‘snake’ bears connotations of the Garden of Eden and original sin. It seems that Duffy is satirizing the bible, pointing out how inherently sexist the story which places the whole of sin on women’s backs is. Duffy’s use of ‘shite’ could be her own interpretation of the biblical passage, laughing at the sexism of the bible.
- 20-26The poem finishes with an ellipsis, emblematic of how this endemic of ignoring female opinions has continued long into the future. The two proceeding images, ‘text illegible’ and ‘untranslatable’ are repeated from earlier in the poem, further undermining the importance of the female voice. The poem has 26 lines, one for each letter of the alphabet.