This poem, like many of the others in this section of the anthology, could be taken from Duffy’s volume The World’s Wife, a book which explicitly seeks to take the feminine position n a male world. It may come as a surprise to readers to learn than it in fact comes from an earlier volume, Mean Time, exploring some of the same themes. Miss Havisham, the character on which this poem is based, is a character in Dickens’s novel Great Expectations. In the novel, the narrator and hero, Pip, encounters the wealthy Miss Havisham when he is a child, and only later learns of her tragic history. Jilted on her wedding morning, she has remained in her wedding dress, exactly as at the moment she received the news of her bridegroom’s defection, and shut herself away from all light and society, growing old in the symbolic costume of youth. When Pip first sees her she is a figure of horror for him, but as he grows older and learns her story he gradually comes to feel sympathy and pity for her. Miss Havisham’s revenge on men is to bring up an orphaned girl, Estella, to hate and mistrust men, and use them for her advantage, but Estella herself marries a rich man who abuses and torments her, demonstrating the futility of Miss Havisham’s aims. The poem ‘Havisham’ creates a dramatic monologue for Miss Havisham, imagining the feelings behind the story, creating more violent and sexually explicit imaginings than Dickens.
The title of the poem is interesting, because it foregrounds the difference between Dicken’s day and our own. Miss Havisham is no longer defined by her marital status, but is simply ‘Havisham’. This emphasises that even though the woman has not become a ‘Mrs.’, she may feel that she has left behind her unmarried identity. Spurned at just that moment between marriage and non-marriage, she may feel that she is neither one kind of woman nor the other—a neuter, genderless figure, neither constrained by the modes of behaviour expected of a young virgin, nor given the acclaim of a successfully married woman.
The poem starts with a powerful antithesis: ‘beloved sweetheart bastard’. The combination of love and hate is something that is an abiding theme in the poem, the potent emotion of the jilted woman a confusing mixture of her passion for her fiancée, and her resentment of what he has done. There’s also a juxtaposition of formal Victorian language in the ‘beloved sweetheart’ and the more modern (for a woman) use of ‘bastard’. It sounds initially as though this is a direct address to the man, but it soon becomes clear that this is a classic dramatic monologue, the speaker explaining herself to the listening reader. The clipped sentences enact her rage: ‘Not a day…’ ‘Prayed for it..’ as though she is speaking through gritted teeth, filling the reader in on the bare points of her anger.
The first stanza is constructed in such a way that the lines emphasise her confused feelings, the line-breaks and caesuras enabling the individual phrases of each sentence to be read and combined in different ways. The slightly convoluted double negative ‘Not a day since then / I haven’t wished him dead’ for instance, seems to suggest her conflicted feelings, the line-break emphasizing the underlying regret (‘I haven’t wished him dead’) behind the violent assertion. The start of the next sentence ‘prayed for it’ then could be seen to apply to the preceding clause, and so on. The overall impression created is one of confusion and regret. The vivid image of ‘dark green pebbles for eyes’ suggests here her continuing hatred for her fiancée. Dark green implies jealousy (a reference to the ‘green-eyed monster’ of Othello) whereas ‘pebbles’ implies a stony hardness and coldness in her emotions. Her body here seems to become something made up of lifeless things that cannot be hurt emotionally, the ‘pebbles’ being echoes by the ‘ropes on the back of my hands’. In this description the 'ropes' are the veins on her hands, swollen by age, as though she feels that her physical deterioration is a direct result of her negative emotions. The ropy veins become the fantasized instrument of her revenge, something that she can use to ‘strangle’, the use of the verb here being almost reflexive—she could strangle someone else (presumably her fiancée) but she could also ‘strangle’ (that is, choke) in an intransitive sense. The image of strangling is interesting, given that Estella’s real mother is a murderess, who killed her lover through strangulation—in the novel, attention is drawn to her strong hands in a repeated image of feminine power and powerlessness.
The one word sentence, ‘Spinster’ that starts the second stanza seems to be especially emphatic—it is the judgement that Victorian society has passed on Miss Havisham. Whatever else she may do, her spinsterhood is a label that she cannot escape, one that marks her out as inadequate in some way. It is as though the speaker imagines the accusation from society and this makes her current situation more unpleasant. Her life is reduced to memory and the unpleasant consequences of her choice (something Dickens chooses not to emphasise). It’s typical of Duffy here to notice the detail of smell—after all, twenty-five years in the same dress has a practical effect. The use of cawing makes the woman sound animal-like, the caw reminiscent of a crow, a bird of ill-omen, black, symbolising death. The idea of a crow is unappealing—perhaps the use of ‘old crow’ to describe an unattractive old woman lurks here as well?—and as a bird that pecks over dead things it concisely represents the power of the past, as Yeats says ‘Dogs to their vomit, Crows to carrion’. The single, extended word ‘Nooooo’ sounds desperate and yet also helpless—there is nothing she can do, the insensible wall will not react to her cry, and the length of the ‘o’ sound creates a vividly onomatopoeic quality.
Throughout the poem, language is under pressure, and Duffy uses spelling to indicate this, in l.6 as in the final line. The syntax in this second stanza reflects this, the semi-colons reflecting the heaping up of images, the repeated personal pronouns ‘her, myself’ suggesting an acute anxiety about the nature of the self and whether the experience is perceived in the first or third person. The dress is one of the few details in the poem which is taken directly from Dickens’ description, ‘yellowing’ emphasising its discolouration through the effects of time. The description of Havisham ‘trembling as I open the wardrobe’ implies how frozen she is in her moment of crisis—the projected change of clothes is too much to bear, she sees ‘the slewed mirror’, that is, the distorted impression of herself that she has created. Implicitly, in looking at herself in the mirror, the speaker fails to recognise herself. Perhaps the implication is that the aging process has distorted her, yet it is also her anger and grief that has destroyed her self-image. Her anger is directed at the person ‘who did this / to me’, but the line-break and the question both imply that the answer is not as simple as the opening line of the poem might imply.
This ageing is not seen as something natural, but as something imposed on the speaker from outside, something 'done' to her, and as such, done by somebody—the jilting bridegroom, perhaps, or ‘myself’, the line-break emphasising the possibility of this reading.
The disjunction between language and perception is emphasized again in the third stanza, with the synaesthetic blend of sight and sound in ‘puce curses’ emphasising the animalistic nature of ‘sounds not words’. The speaker has lost her ability to articulate her grief, and paradoxically regains it through dreams, becoming ‘fluent’ through sexual fantasy. This aspect of the relationship is something that Dickens’ Miss Havisham never articulates (her loss is seen primarily I social and emotional terms), and Duffy imagines the sexual frustration that she feels transformed into a powerful ability to take the sexual initiative. This transforms into an emasculating fantasy, the ‘fluent tongue’ moving down her lover’s body ‘till I suddenly bite awake’, implicitly castrating her unfaithful partner.
The oxymoron ‘Love’s hate’ straddles two verses, the enjambment emphasising the contrast between the two halves of the phrase, and the contrast between the different feelings of the speaker. Here, love itself is seen as a transient emotion which is simply something negative temporarily concealed behind the ‘white veil’ of the marriage service. The implication is that after the ceremony even this appearance of love will turn to hate.
.
The red balloon suggests passion (and perhaps blood?) and its bursting implies the shock of revelation of the wedding morning, as well as the emotional tension of the event. Here the normal celebratory associations of a balloon are transformed into shocking ones, the ‘bang’ isolated in a sentence of its own suggesting the slangy sexual undertone of the word. The wedding cake—something that is important in the original story, as Miss Havisham preserves it in her house, mouldering as she mourns her lost marriage—is here something that takes the place of the bridegroom, ‘stabbed’ in place of him rather than cut by them both.
The ‘male corpse’ emphasizes the ways in which the man has become a physical symbol alone—he is utterly depersonalized; only a body, not a character and the ‘long slow honeymoon’ combines both love and revenge; ‘long’ and ‘slow’ suggesting a combination of pleasure and torture. The final line returns to the Miss Havisham of Great expectations. In the novel, the character indicates her broken heart to Pip in a highly dramatic way, as though she is almost proud of the distinction of having a broken heart:
`Do you know what I touch here?' she said, laying her hands, one upon the other, on her left side.
`Yes, ma'am.' (It made me think of the young man.)
`What do I touch?'
`Your heart.'
`Broken!'
She uttered the word with an eager look, and with strong emphasis, and with a weird smile that had a kind of boast in it. Afterwards, she kept her hands there for a little while, and slowly took them away as if they were heavy.
Here, Duffy uses this moment to emphasise again how the apparent strength of the narrator—the power of her hate for men—masks only insecurity and an inverted dependence on men. Being so fixed on revenge, she implies, has ‘broken’ Miss Havisham in more ways than one. The speaker is unable to articulate the ways in which she has been broken, we can only infer it from what she does not say, from the fact that it is not ‘only the heart’. Not only the heart, she suggests, but the life, the mind is broken. The stammering final word picks up the alliteration of the start of the stanza, picks up the violence of the plosive ‘burst’, returning to the sound of the start of the poem, and in this way, enacting the circling around that the speaker embodies in herself, returning again and again to the source of her grief.
