Paying Close Attention to Language, Form and Structure, Explore How Duffy Challenges Traditional Ideas and Beliefs in “Little Red Cap"

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Paying close attention to language, form and structure, explore how Duffy challenges traditional ideas and beliefs in “Little Red Cap”. Little Red Cap is one of those poems which is based on a fairytale, as is others in the collection such as Mrs Beast, this one happening to be the traditional story of Little Red Ridding-Hood. Duffy’s version however has differences to the original fairytale. To start with Duffy uses imagery to create a very sexual feeling, as does other poems in the collection such as Mrs Beast and Queen Kong, which is very much unlike the original tale, where it had more of a simplistic meaning of good verses bad. This poem has the idea of women in poetry being dominated by the male tradition, where as the males are also objectified, similar in the case of Mrs Beast and Queen Kong. The title of the poem grabs the readers attention straight away and reminds you of Little Red Ridding-Hood. This sets the mind of readers to think about the story, meaning the reader can connect all of the similarities in the poem to the children’s traditional story for example, “What big eyes he had! What big teeth!” Where the central character is a version of Duffy herself, meeting a wolf, symbolically being an older, male poet that the teenage poet, Little Red Cap can learn from. Duffy starts off with the metaphor “At childhoods end” in the first stanza. This portrays that childhood is so powerful, it has been described as a physical place and also suggests the journey into adolescence. In the use of imagery, “Away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place” Duffy uses these words to make it realistic to the reader of what the wolf’s lair must have looked like, a place far away from the safe protected place of her home. In the first stanza it starts with a geographical location of where Duffy grew up. Throughout the poem Duffy uses imagery to portray to the

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