Challenges to Ekphrastic Poetry: Carol Ann Duffy’s “Standing Female Nude”

Abstract

Ekphrasis rests on the paragone between the sister arts, namely verbal and visual arts, the word and the image. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his Laocoön claims that the image is silent and fixed while the literary work is based on voice and action. W. J. T. Mitchell in his Picture Theory enlarges this binary opposition between the word and image in terms of gender roles: the female image versus the male word. The female image is objectified and gazed, while the male author/artist is the subject and the gazer. The poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “Standing Female Nude” challenges such binary oppositions by giving voice not to the male artist but to his female model, and by attributing the role of gazing to her. Hence, the aim of this article is to display how Duffy deconstructs the ekphrastic tradition in her poem in order to subvert the domineering relationship between the artist and his model.