Duffy's Eurydice in Comparison to Austen's Emma

Carol Ann Duffy takes a twist on an old classic in her poem Eurydice, showing the perspective of the myth through the eyes of Eurydice herself. Eurydice is fearless, honest, and independent; this is a stark contrast to the way the females act in Jane Austen’s Emma. While Duffy uses a carefully constructed dramatic monologue to show the power that one woman possesses, Austen uses her character Emma to portray women at the beginning of the 20th century for how she sees them; fake, suppressed, and desperately in need of a wealthy man to walk them down the aisle. Eurydice tells the tale of a young, dead woman, and the lengths that a certain god by the name Orpheus would go to in order to have her as his bride. The only problem with this “love story” is the fact that Eurydice wants nothing to do with Orpheus, and much rather stay put in the Underworld, even going as far as to say that the Underworld is “the one place you’d think a girl would be safe/ from the kind of a man/ who follows her round writing poems,/ hovers about while she reads them,/[and] calls her His Muse” (Duffy). Eurydice’s want for solitude shows how empowered she believes she can be without being somebody’s wife, regardless of whether or not the man that wants to wed her is a god and could give her all the material desires she could ever dream of. Eurydice’s view of happiness is much different than the women pictured in Austen’s Emma. The ladies in this novel are bent on finding a husband, snagging a higher social status, and letting the love hopefully follow after that. When Emma’s friend Harriet is asked to wed a man by the name Mr. Martin, Emma urges Harriet to refuse his offer, claiming that the Martin’s are “course” and “unpolished”, therefore not worth Harriet’s time (Austen 20). Emma’s whole goal is to match people together in order for them to be married, and her as well as the other women in the novel are impressed and delighted when a man of valuable societal status attempts to court them. While small gestures of courtship are something to be admired in Emma, Eurydice finds them to be frustrating and bothersome. Eurydice would rather stay in the Underworld than “follow him back to our life -/Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife -/ to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes,/octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets,/elegies, limericks, villanelles, histories, myths…” (Duffy). Eurydice does not desire to be doted on and followed around, being whispered to about sweet nothings. This would come as quite a surprise to the girls in Emma. Lastly, Emma and her friends are much different from Eurydice when it comes to their view of men of higher power as a whole. While Emma finds it tolerable to have miniscule squabbles with men of high society, she would never dream to go out of her way to insult them or pass cruel judgments on them. This is due to the fact that while Emma is by far the most outspoken of the women in Highbury, she pales in comparison to Eurydice’s belief of equality to men. Eurydice mocks Orpheus, claiming that “we've all, let's be honest,/ been bored half to death by a man/who fucks like he's writing a book./ And, given my time all over again,/ I know that I'd rather write for myself” (Duffy).