Havisham - Duffy Flashcards
“Havisham”
~ no ‘miss’ makes title feel blunt, suggest poem will follow on to be blunt.
~ impersonal - prepares reader for bitter character.
~ rejects ‘miss’ - showing hurt.
~ empowers character - takes away social stigma attached to miss.
“Beloved sweetheart bastard”
~ tone: opening words suggest love but then turn to anger. Bastard finishes sentence showing hate is the dominant emotion.
~ curse is startling and creates shock.
~ short sentence: sharp, harsh - like her.
~ oxymoron: contradiction of love and hate suggest confusion about the nature of love.
~ no punctuation: as if all feelings are one - she feels these emotions at the same time and can’t separate love from hate.
~ angry, emotive, confused - unstable.
~ repeated b and d sounds plosives, like words are being spat out - emphasises anger.
“Not a day since then I haven’t wished him dead.”
~ tone: ‘not’ creates negative tone.
~ obsession and strength of feeling revealed through her persistent longing for his death.
~ initially seems addressed to him, but changes to talking about him - places emphasis on her feeling rather than him, brings us closer to her.
~ ‘dead’ reveals intensity of her hatred and violent feelings.
~ monosyllabic: change from polysyllabic opening to hard monosyllabic - reveals mood becoming more aggressive.
“Prayed for it so hard”
~ ‘prayed’ and ‘hard’ emphasises obsessive nature - yearning to make him suffer.
~ contradiction: expectation of praying for something good, startling contrast.
“I’ve dark green pebbles for eyes”
~ metaphor: “pebbles” sensory image to reveal - hardness in her feelings, eyes stone cold, prayed so much with her eyes shut they have shrunk and become hard.
~ eyes represent hardened feelings.
~ “dark” - connotations of evil - thoughts of her revenge. “Green” - envy/ sickness, she is sick of being alone, sick of her sad life. “Eyes” - she sees everything through this envious image reveals her distorted vision of life.
“Ropes on the back of my hands”
~ metaphor: “ropes” show how she has prayed with her hands together. Tension has caused sinews and veins swollen bye age and pressure to be as thick as rope.
~ she is bound by her problems, her sadness, she is not free.
~ intense anger.
~ connotations - rope carries the illusion of hanging or strangling which reminds us of how bitter she feels and the threat she puts on his life.
~ personal tone and intimacy still apparent through personal pronoun ‘my’
“I could strangle with”
~ extends image of ropes continues in ‘strangle’ suggesting her lengthy hatred which could kill.
~ simple statement: reflecting the certainty of her hatred, even to the point of murder - adds to her wish of revenge.
~ fantasises revenge - doubt in her ability to murder emphasised thought the use of “could” not “will”
“Spinster”
~ one word gives extra force to the statement.
~ makes it stand out, as if spat out angrily.
~ negative connotations - being old maid, unwanted.
~ one word sums her up, as if there’s nothing more to say about her, it defines her.
“I shrink and remember”
~ she is an image of decay and clinging to the past.
~ aware of her own smell, she never changes out of her wedding dress.
~ sums up her life - festering and memories.
“Whole days in bed”
~ tone: hopelessness, depression.
~ “whole” suggests the extent of her suffering while “days” is plural, revealing the repeated action and “bed” implies her feeling of illness (mental).
~ suggests lack of light (hope) in her life as she ideas under her bed sheets.
~ no meaning shows her bitterness.
~ what else does she have to do?
“Cawing nooooo at the wall”
~ “cawing” associated with birds, she’s dehumanising herself.
~ suffering suggests through noooo, she is howling in pain.
~ “oooo” reveals prolonged calling out - animalistic.
~ even her language is under pressure and breaking down.
~ expresses pain to the wall shows that she has no one to express her feelings to - isolation.
“The dress yellowing”
~ no sense of joy in the dress being a wedding dress - it is only mentioned as a dress, not a wedding dress.
~ age and sense of time passing is suggested through discolouration of the dress “yellowing” with age.
“Trembling if I open the wardrobe”
~ “if” suggests she doesn’t do it regularly.
~ “trembling” - fragile with age and fear, maybe also anger, she cannot look at what she has become.
~ shocked, disturbed and angry at what she has become.
“The slewed mirror, full-length”
~ “slewed” means a twisted angle - suggest that she has a distorted and defective image of herself.
~ symbolism - “mirror” reveals truth - reflection of what she has become.
~ “full-length” - observing herself fully, her life, her sense of self.
~ also suggests a morbid fascination with herself, inspecting herself.
“Her, myself, who did this/ to me?”
~ rhetorical question: asks “who did this” we know it is the grief of rejection that has caused her suffering.
~ unable to recognise herself evident through change from first person to third person.
~ “her” suggest detachment from the image, trying to separate herself from what she has become, then accepts it is “myself”.
~ enjambment - doesn’t want to recognise herself - “me” forced onto next line, distancing, alienating effect.
~ what has happened is not natural but has been “done” to her - offensive and against her wishes.
