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What Is The Theme Of Little Red Cap Poem

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Headstrong heroines, degraded males, dysfunctional relationships, twisted manipulations – these are all distinct aspects of romantic relationships Carol Ann Duffy explores in ‘Little Red Cap’ and ‘Mrs. Beast’. In both poems, Duffy’s female characters are more romantically and sexually sovereign and potent which stands in opposition to the traditional domineering males in relationships. She illustrates this through allusion and an uncompromising tone of narration. The poem, ‘Little Red cap’, which is drawn from the story of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ , explores the relationship of a teenage girl and an older man, who takes his form in the symbol of a wolf. However, in opposition to the original story, the girl kills the wolf all by herself, …show more content…

This is epitomized by her use of colloquial language. In ‘Little Red-Cap’, the speaker is bold and resolute in her seduction of the wolf. From the line, ‘I made quite sure he spotted me’, it can be seen that the speaker is autonomous in her pursue of the wolf, which is different from the conventional male courtship figure, displaying that the speaker is more confident and audacious in her romantic relationship. Duffy may also use the colloquial language to juxtapose with different imageries to express the transition in the female speaker. From the line, ‘my stockings ripper to shreds…I lost both shoes’, internal rhyme is used to link up colloquial items like ‘murder clues’ with ‘shreds’, ‘red’ and ‘clues’, ‘shoes’, this develops a childlike imagery, as childish items are being shed along her journey into the woods, which may illustrate the speaker’s sacrifice of innocence for sexual maturity and experiences. It may also link with how in the original French version of the story, there is often a long account of how Red Cap discards her clothings before climbing into bed with the wolf, which has clear associations with seduction and rape. Nursery rhyme is immediately used in the next line, ‘but got there…better beware’, to intensify the sense of warning and danger, as in real life, adults uses …show more content…

Beast’, Duffy uses a bold and intransigent narration to characterize the masculine and independent feature of the female speaker. In the line, ‘They’re bastards when they’re Prince/What you want to do is find yourself a prince’, it illustrate the speaker’s distrust in the princes-heroic males figures, and her desire to exercise control in her relationship, which may foreshadow on how she is the dominant figure in her romantic and sexual relationship with the beast. The pronouns‘I’ and ‘my’ are repeatedly used in her narration to place emphasizes on her autonomy in both her romantic and sexual relationship. This is exhibited in descriptions like , ‘Myself, I came to the House of the Beast/No longer a girl , knowing my own mind’, the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘my’ magnifies the her autonomy and superiority as she emphasize on her individual presence in pursue of the beast. As the eponymous title would suggest that, the narrator is the real ‘Beast’ who wishes only to accumulate her ‘own gold’, ‘better sex’ and husband to ‘kiss my glove’, all of these diction shows that the speaker is financially, sexually and domestically independent, which shows that in her relationship with the beast, she is more romantically and sexually superior. In the narrator’s description of her sexual intimacy with the beast, mostly short sentences are used to express her instruction for the beast, further illustrating her sexual superiority. ‘Do this.Harder’ is one of her list of

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