2019 Year 12 IB Extended Essays

Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Little Red Hood’ and ‘Tea’, which explore unbalanced, misogynistic relationships and devoted love. Despite the vast differences in time periods, both poets achieve -on occasion- similar outlooks on sex, gender, and love.

John Donne

The Flea

‘The Flea’ is John Donne’s notoriously tongue-in-cheek, sexually evocative poem about a man attempting to seduce a woman through the literal use of a flea. Made up of three, nine-line stanzas which follow an ‘aabbccddd’ rhyme, throughout this poem, any conversation between the two characters is solely conveyed through the voice of the male narrator. Donne prevents the woman in this conversation from having a voice in what is happening, even though this would typically be such a conversation that would have much ‘back and forth’. One possible interpretation of this ‘voiceless’ woman is that Donne is commenting, on the patriarchal culture of his time thereby mocking the difference in attitude that the two genders must adhere to with regard to sex. The poem begins by asking the woman to “Mark this flea” which has taken blood from both parties. The narrator points out that she has ‘denied’ him something which the flea has not refrained from enjoying, this referring to the intimate union of their bodily fluids, blood in this case. This occurrence, he argues, “cannot be said/A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead”; if this joining of two people is not wrong, then how can the act of sex be considered evil or undesirable? The speaker goes so far as to point out that the flea is able to ‘enjoy’ this from pleasure the woman “before he woo”, the implication being that the loss of virginity is not so drastic as the conversations of

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