history

• "Bones in a bed, not a tooth in her head, half dead"

  • This represents both history and age; both belong to the past and both have a terrible reality
  • History is dead and ugly, and similarly the old woman is a liminal space between death and life.
• Duffy presents a female perspective of history, an abstract concept personified as an old woman who is ignored by those have written history, to show how women have always been present, though held back or involved as shadowy figures behind the men, usually ignored. Significantly it is the women who suffer most from many catclysmic historical events.
• Duffy’s old woman is ill and decrepit, having endured mistreatment during life and yet subsequently still ignored in old age. Duffy subverts the cliches of a beautiful young woman or the dignified old lady. Her concept of history — and of treatment of women — is presented in terms of the brutal reality of suffering.
• "She’d seen them ease him down from the Cross, his mother gaspingfor breath, as though his death was a difficult birth"

  • Reference to the crucifixion of Jesus, but through the eyes of his mother, Mary. Duffy portrays women as active participants in history.
  • Simile - cyclical birth-death represents the endless repetition of history if people refuse to learn from it
• "Bannockburn, Passchendaele, Babi Yar, Vietnam."

  • Plosives, asyndetic list of wars through history
  • She was only a witness, unable to prevent or support or stop them
• "martyrs burned at the stake, the murderers hung by the neck"

  • Juxtaposition of "martyrs" and "murderers" - death does not discriminate
  • Reference to Joan of Arc
  • Abusive attitudes that lead to the death of women throughout history
• "fresh graffiti sprayed on her door, shit wrapped in a newspaper posted onto the floor"

  • Represents the reality of society's treatment towards old women
  • Allegorically, it could represent the witnessing of history that is ignored and disregarded. It is only "graffiti" and "shit" that remains of her experiences