2019 Year 12 IB Extended Essays

struggling with fully expressing himself as the mocking tone throughout the poem demonstrates.

Carol Ann Duffy

Little Red Cap

‘Little Red Cap’ is Duffy’s opening poem for her collection ‘The World’s Wife’, however, it happens to be the only one of these poems which ‘self inserts’ her own story within it. The scene is immediately set through the opening words, ‘At childhood’s end’. Opening to a remorseful setting, the poem descends to a darker theme, where Duffy’s story is told through the traditional storyboarding of Little Red Ridin Hood, where she falls in love at the age of 16 with a man 23 years her senior, drawing on her own experience of growing up in Stafford, a market town in the north Midlands of England (Welford 2016); with vulgar undertones which lead to her own realisation of abuse and her fight against it. ‘Little Red Cap’ opens Duffy’s appearance as Donne’s antithesis by creating female speakers with the silencing of the male. ‘Little Red Cap’ immediately dives into the themes of sex, however, unlike ‘The Flea’ that conveys a mocking a humorous tone, ‘Little Red Cap’ takes the more serious side of repercussions towards sex in quite animalistic imagery, “Wolfy drawl”, “matted paws” etc., turning the predator of a man into a wolf, imagery of white doves representing innocence. As sex throughout this poem is portrayed through a abysmal light, the narrator in ‘Little Red Cap’ can be related to the unspoken woman within ‘The Flea’. This is where the difference in time begins to show. Although Donne was indeed taking

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